South African Literature's Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation by Jeanne-Marie Jackson (review)

In the twenty-nine page first chapter of her book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson diligently provides reasons for the claim in her title of a core similarity between Russian and South African literatures. The justification she advances includes the similarities in the tumultuously bloody political circumstances under which the literatures of both countries emerged into prominence. In the case of Russia, a failed assassination attempt on the reigning Tsar led to a vicious retaliation on the organizers who consisted of members of the liberal aristocracy and leaders of the serfs. For long the group had in vain tried through constitutional means to institute liberal governance beginning with the liberation of the serfs who constituted 40% of Russia's population and who had been in bondage for centuries to the aristocracy. In the attempt to hold on to power, the Tsar unleashed a vicious reign of terror involving mass imprisonment, public hanging, and executions by firing squad. The Tsar's reign of terror, however, only helped to fire up the determination of the liberal camp to pursue their goal which they finally achieved when serfdom was abolished in 1861.

A century later, South African literature similarly came into prominence under similar circumstances by addressing, displaying, and recording the realities constituting the history of the confrontation between the apartheid machinery of suppression and the determined resistance of the anti-apartheid coalition of the black majority under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), liberal white South Africans, and supports from all over the world. As the apartheid regime heightened the brutality of its forces, so did the anti-apartheid coalition which reenforced its attacks and defeated the apartheid regime.

Thus, just as Russia trailed behind Europe in social reforms, so did South Africa lag behind the rest of Africa in the process of decolonization. Jackson identifies these parallels as major sources of South African writers' long-standing interest in Russian literature, an interest that has led to South African writers and critics reflecting their fascination or indebtedness to Russian literary culture in various ways, including echoing Russian works either in agreeing thematic and stylistic imitations or through critical rewrites in literary adaptations. This echo is not limited to fictional works but resonates in critical theory as well. Jackson does not neglect to also mention Soviet Russia's intellectual and government responses to South African writers' and literary scholars' interest in Russian literary culture. She identifies, for example, Soviet government's invitations of South African writers for cultural tours of the Soviet Union as well as the Soviet government's support for the ANC in the latter's military efforts to defeat apartheid.

Beginning with Chapter 2 of her work, Jackson delves into a second equally important aspect of her study. This involves review of the critical and theoretical concepts with which literary scholars have evaluated works of South African writers. In the process, Jackson commences a close discussion of the nature of realism as it emerged, matured, and incrementally manifested its criteria in the views of various distinguished literary scholars from the nineteenth century to our time. The review leads Jackson to the conviction that "realism's seeming displacement can catalyze a more robust reading of local tensions that shape the novel's evolution through the world" (81). Jackson, however, does not sanction the current trends in evaluating South African literature outside of the realist conception by consigning it to one or other of the newer critical theories such as "post-colonial," "global," "transnational," and so on. Her explorative comparative discussion of Nadine Gordimer and Miriam Tlali is meant to reveal their novels as examples of indigenously grown South African realist fiction, which in addition shares identified affinities with the works of Russian authors like Turgenev and Chernyshevsky.

The subject of analysis in Chapter 3 is the fascination of Coetzee and Van Niekerk for Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's animal stories...