How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks by Irina Reyfman (review)

Irina Reyfman's How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks is an insightful new entry into the ongoing scholarly dis course about literary culture and professionalization in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia, building on the work of scholars such as Iurii Lotman, William Mills Todd III, and others. Reyfman's study of the rela tion ship between writers and state service mixes literary and historical analysis, examining not just writers' biographies and texts, but also the com mon institutional context that shaped literary careers of the period, the Table of Ranks. How Russia Learned to Write problematizes and under mines canonical views of texts and writers' lives by demonstrating that much of what we know about Russian writers' relationships to state service is interpretation, and Reyfman provides thought-provoking alter na tive readings.

The writing is clear and refined, and Reyfman's discussion of a topic often perceived as tedious—state service—is riveting. The first chapter broadly treats a group of late eighteenth-century writers, among them Sumarokov, Derzhavin, and Karamzin, while subsequent chapters focus on nineteenth-century writers: Pushkin, Gogol', Dostoevskii, and military poets. Detailed biography and close readings of texts constitute the bulk of the study, but they serve as a base for discussion of broader topics in literary history, including the development of the book market and the literary profession, institutions of literature (literary societies, for example), and the system of artistic patronage.

Exploring the mutual relationship between service and writing, Reyfman resists the temptation to draw overarching conclusions, but rather charts individual writers' differing attitudes towards state service. Sumarokov, for example, saw his writing career as an equivalent service to his military career, and even argued that "managing the theater and writing plays and poems . . . qualifies him for military rank" (24) and "directly call[ed] his relations with the Muses 'service'" (28). Reyfman argues that Sumarokov's attachment to his service career and desire for advancement were not simply financial, and that he "needed a rank to confirm the significance of his writing activities, in both the eyes of the public and his own" (28). In contrast to Sumarokov's symbiotic writing and service, the same chapter discusses Bolotov and Rzhevskii; both eighteenth-century writers, Bolotov retired from service to write, while Rzhevskii gave up writing to advance his service career. Reyfman connects these diverse experiences to the difficulty mediating private and professional life that many writers took as a theme during this period, although relatively few eighteenth-century authors wrote about service specifically.

Pushkin is a writer who devotes considerable space to the problems of mediating private and professional life. Reyfman's study tentatively fills in several gaps in the poet's well-documented biography, and calls for a reexamination of two largely accepted interpretations of Pushkin's service career: that from 1817 to 1824 he was not serious about his duties, and that he was punished with exile in the south for writing anti-government poetry (47). Building on Maria Maiofis's recent study of Arzamas and Russian Foreign Minister Count Kapodistria's modernization project, Reyfman asserts that the documentation of Pushkin's service career during this period was possibly destroyed (48), but traces scant details in surviv ing letters from the period that suggest an alternative interpretation: namely, that Pushkin was serious about his duties, and his so-called exile was a temporary reassignment arranged by Kapodistria and willingly undertaken by the poet (49). While Reyfman discusses several works by Pushkin, among them "The Shot," "The Stationmaster," and The Captain's Daughter, this new understanding of Pushkin's career also calls for a new inter pre ta tion of his works in this fresh context (as Reyfman asserts).

Reyfman's treatment of Gogol' offers a nuanced reading of his Petersburg prose and The Inspector General that identifies a tension between Gogol''s...