Three Russian Tales of the Eighteenth Century: "The Comely Cook," "Vanka Kain," and "Poor Liza" ed. by David Gasperetti (review)

The three short fictions collected here were all written toward the end of the century and hence beyond the usual Scriblerian purview. The story "Poor Liza" is, however, one of the best brief works inspired by Sterne's sentimentalism; the other two novels exhibit the reach of early eighteenth-century fiction into Russia well into the nineteenth century.

Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), the author of "Poor Liza" (1793), was immediately recognized in Russia as an imitator of Sterne, both because of his first work, Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791), a sentimental journey, and because he published his own critical high praise of Sterne: "O incomparable Sterne! … At what learned university were you taught to feel so tenderly?" Mr. Gasperetti's translation of "Poor Liza" is the first I have read, and as an imitation of Sterne it is excellent (I am unable to evaluate its excellence in relation to the original). Almost a "backstory" to the mournful Maria in both Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey, it tells of the seduction of a peasant girl Liza (and almost certainly Karamzin had access to Sterne's letters to Eliza and the invented collection of her responses), her abandonment, her discovery that he has married another, and her suicide. Karamzin's sentimentalism is straightforward (unlike Sterne's) but very effective. He captures especially the use of dashes, pauses, apostrophes, exclamation points, and above all, tears, to convey emotion-laden scenes; and he interjects his narrative voice most opportunely: "My heart is bleeding at this moment. … I gaze toward heaven, and a tear rolls down my face. Oh! Why did I not write a novel instead of this melancholy history."

One would have hoped that Karamzin's specific relationship to Sterne would have been noted by Mr. Gasperetti, but he opts instead for a generalized discussion, where Sterne is listed among many others, from Richardson to Macpherson, Rousseau to Goethe. While it is obvious that Sentimentalism swept the continent, in the instance of "Poor Liza" the direct relationship to Sterne needed to be emphasized. In addition, the division of literary history into a "rationalist, objective view of the world that served as the touchstone of the Neoclassical movement" being replaced by a "cult of feelings" where "emotion now takes precedence over reason" seems rather naïve and dated.

Also damaging to this edition is Mr. Gasperetti's fixation on Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, perhaps natural for a Russian scholar but developing into a nervous tic, both in the introduction and in the annotations. Put simply, Mikhail Chulkov's "The Comely Cook" (1770) is the story of a young widow who manages to rise in society by means of her cunning, her amorality, and her sexual freedom; the subtitle is frank: "The Adventures of a Debauched Woman." Without doubt, it does have a small element of Bakhtin's carnivalesque in it, but only insofar as one would find the same at work in the fictions of Behn, Manley, Haywood, and Defoe—limiting myself to the English tradition. Surely the assertion that the novel is invested "with the ethos of the carnival" which "insinuates itself into virtually every step his heroine Martona takes" is an exaggeration; and the argument is not helped by "carnivalesque rhythm," a plot like a "carnival Ferris wheel," a "carnivalesque heroine" and the "mutability of the carnival," all in the same paragraph. To be sure, as Mr. Gasperetti notes, Martona does not have the social complexity of Moll, but that probably suggests more about Chulkov's limitations as an author (as clearly outlined by Mr. Gasperetti) than his engagement with the politics of carnival; put another way, Martona's story is Fanny Hill's, although under a stricter censorship.

Similarly, Matvei Komarov's "Vanka Kain" (1779) is based on a historical figure, a thief and murderer in Moscow who eventually turned into a government...