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 more illuminating, lucid, and lively—even entertaining—than a detailed study of the Russian state service, and its complex interrelationship with issues of authorship, has any right to be. Reyfman's work situates over a century of Russian writers, from Sumarokov to Fet, within a context unfamiliar to most twenty-first-century readers: the service hierarchy, governed by the Table of Ranks. For two centuries, from its establishment under Peter I in 1722 until the revolution of 1917, the Table of Ranks organized the three spheres of state service (civil, military, and court) into fourteen classes. During that time, most literature in Russia was produced by members of the nobility who, until 1762, were legally required to serve the state; even after the abolition of compulsory service, most nobles continued to participate, in order to derive the social and financial status conferred by rank. Noble writers were not exempt from the system of state service—indeed, the competition between state and literary careers delayed the professionalization of letters in the Russian context until the 1830s, which in turn discouraged writers from abandoning the service in pursuit of their authorial ambitions. As a result, Russian authors of the 18th and 19th centuries developed a range of strategies—corresponding to their various means, circumstances, and temperaments—for balancing their obligations to state and muse.

Reyfman's work chronicles the endeavors of Russian writers to reconcile these two identities, addressing such questions as: how did service affect their self-image as writers, and how did their writing affect their position within the state hierarchy? How did they combine their public careers and literary activities, and how did this double life manifest in their literary works? Her study examines the lives and literary output of over twenty authors, focusing particular attention on Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. Her method is to reconstruct the service biography of each author before turning attention to his literary works, in order to analyze the representation of service, rank, and status. Reyfman records the attitudes and output of these writers, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century with Sumarokov, considered by some to be Russia's first professional writer, and ending in the late-nineteenth century, by which time authors were largely free to fashion their identities and fictions independent of state service. Even then, however, the Table of Ranks continued to exert a powerful force over the lives and works of those writers who did serve. As Reyfman writes, "it begins with Sumarokov's anxiety over his service rank and ends with Fet's almost insane obsession with it" (187).

As the importance of a service career diminished over the course of the nineteenth century, the relationship between state obligations and literary aspirations evolved, along with textual representations of state service. Descriptions of service in literary works reflected the insecurities of individual writers as well as a more general progression: while eighteenth-century authors largely ignored the topic in their works, by the early decades of the following century writers were engaging with it enthusiastically and personally, developing it into an indispensable literary theme by mid-century: "from a fact of life state service changed into a topic of biographical significance and then into a literary topos" (17). Writers' efforts to negotiate the imperatives of their service career and literary ambitions were complicated by such phenomena as the patronage system, limited readership, and a cultural aversion to the notion of writing for profit. Reyfman provides a broad and thorough introduction to the development of the literary profession, with literacy rates, educational reforms, and the growth and commercialization of the book market emerging as major themes. Her study builds on the earlier work of scholars like William Mills Todd III and Yuri Lotman, marking a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on...