City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya (review)

Nora Seligman Favorov, Hilde Hoogenboom, and Columbia University Press are to be commended for bringing us this delightful novel from 1860s Russia. Sofia Khvoshchinskaya's powers of observation, her light touch, ironic tone, and representations of down-to-earth human goodness are reminiscent of Jane Austen. Favorov's translation adroitly captures the sparkling humor and sophisticated irony of the original, and Hoogenboom's erudite introduction, providing biographical detail on the author and an extensive bibliography, firmly sets the novel in its historical and literary context.

Sofia Khvoshchinskaya (1824-1865), who published under the masculine pen name Iv. Vesenev, was the middle sister in a trio that has been considered a Russian counterpart to the Brontës. Her elder sister Nadezhda (1822-1889) was famous and sought-after in the second half of the nineteenth century as the author V. Krestovsky, and the less well-known Praskovia (1828-1916) printed her works also under a pseudonym, albeit as the feminine S. Zimarova. All three Khvoshchinskaya sisters contributed to the major journals of the time and were accomplished artists, who spent most of their life in the provincial capital of Ryazan. Before her death at the age of forty-one, Sofia instructed Nadezhda not to write about her or republish her work, which is why she has remained relatively unknown. Nadezhda's story of a young woman's quest for independence, The Boarding-School Girl (Pansīonerka, 1861), was published in an English translation by Karen Rosneck in 2000. The very different City Folk and Country Folk (Gorodskie i derevenskie, 1862) is a welcome addition to the still sparse list of translated works by nineteenth-century Russian women. It significantly adds to our idea of the diversity of their writing styles and world views, and it provides a new and refreshing perspective on the provincial Russia we know from Ivan Turgenev's novels such as Fathers and Sons (1867; Ottsy i deti, 1862), written almost simultaneously to City Folk and Country Folk.

Khvoshchinskaya's novel radically breaks with several traditions prevalent in male-authored Russian literature and reinterprets a few others. First, the central character is not a man, nor even an exceptional young woman, but Nastasya Ivanovna Chulkova, a fifty-five-year-old widow and a small-time landowner. Second, although Nastasya has a seventeen-year-old daughter, Olenka, there is no romance plot to speak of in the novel. Third, Olenka, unlike a typical Russian heroine, is an average high-spirited girl—not a romantic dreamer and voracious reader, like Alexander Pushkin's Tatyana in Eugene Onegin (1936; Evgeniĭ Onegin, 1833), or an idealist looking for ways to make a difference in the world, in the mold of Turgenev's Elena Stakhova in On the Eve (1895; Nakanune, 1859). Olenka dislikes reading and studying; she is thoroughly average, intellectually speaking. At the same time, she is observant and quick to discover the ridiculous side of characters and situations. What is more, she does not let others order her and her mother around. One wonders if the author meant her as a polemical response to Pushkin's Olga, Tatyana's sister.

The novel introduces Khvoshchinskaya's satirical take on the superfluous man, a perennial Russian literary archetype found in the novels of such authors as Alexander Herzen and Turgenev, who invariably considers himself far superior to all of the surrounding "undeveloped" Russians. In City Folk and Country Folk, Mr. Ovcharov, who graduated from Moscow University and regularly travels to Europe, thinks of himself as a progressive intellectual and is eager to share his ideas with supposedly backward provincials and readers in the capitals alike (he sends his stream-of-consciousness notes to journals, and they sometimes get published). In a typical plot, the superfluous man arrives in the provinces where, in the process of spreading his novel ideas and enlightening the "natives," he manages to attract a young woman...