When I was in my twenties I read Crime and Punishment by Fydor Dostoyevsky and I have been a fan of 19th century Russian literature ever since. I went on to read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and I am now pleased to add City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya (1863) to my list. It's a well written novel about Russian life in the 1860's and the translator, Nora Seligman Favorov, does a fine job in making this book accessible. City Folk and Country Folk is also a rarity, a 19th century Russian novel by a female author.
And so when City Folk and Country Folk begins it is the summer of 1862 the year after the emancipation of the serfs, a momentous event in Russian history. The novel centers around Nastasya Ivanovna Chulkova and her 17 year old daughter Olenka. Mother and daughter own a modest estate in the country that they manage quite well. Nastasya and Olenka are hard working and unpretentious.
But then into their lives arrives Anna Ilinishna, Nastasya's cousin who moves in with them and does nothing but complain. There is also their neighbor Erast Sergeyevich, who has returned home after years of spending and partying abroad and finally we have Katerina Petrovna, a wealthy society woman who is determined to marry off Nastasya's daughter Olenka regardless of what Olenka thinks about the matter.
These three, Anna Ilinishna, Erast Sergeyevich and Katrina Petrovna are the city folk. They have lived a good part of their lives in Moscow, have traveled to Paris and London and they look down on Nastasya and Olenka's country ways. But as Prof Hilde Hoogenboom writes in the introduction to this novel
"The comedy turns on the fact that everyone depends on Nastasya's well-run estate, traditional Russian hospitality and Christian virtue for shelter, food, loans and kindness. Although they are all poor and indebted, they are so blinded by their relative noble wealth and status that none of them feels any gratitude toward Nastasya. Nor does she feel deserving of thanks".
Her daughter, though, sees things differently and as Prof. Hoogenboom points out, Olenka is a different sort of young heroine than one is used to encountering in 19th century Russian novels. Olenka is pretty but not a great beauty. She is intelligent but not an intellectual. She doesn't read much and that's particularly true of the articles that Erast Sergeyevich has been submitting to journals about his thoughts on the new Russia and how it is up to the nobles like himself to show the peasants the way forward. Erast presses Olenka to read his writings and she is pretty much openly laughing at him.
In many ways Olenka represents the new Russia. She is unimpressed with class and sees through hypocrisy and she is furious at the way their snobbish neighbors treat both her and her mother. A minor crisis arrives at the end of the novel which answers the question will Nastasya take her daughter's advise and finally stand up to Anna, Erast and Katrina who have been making her life miserable.
I enjoyed City Folk and Country Folk and it has been receiving critical praise including a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. As for the author, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya came from a family of literary sisters (Sofia, Nadezhda and Praskovia) and they have been compared to the Brontes although the Brontes to be fair are without equal. But Sofia Khvoshchinskaya has talent and critics have pointed out that her style resembles Jane Austen and I can see the resemblance.
Sofia and her sisters published under male pseudonyms and Sofia left instructions that her work not be republished. She died young. Another talented 19th century author lost to TB. She was hard on herself as a writer, as she once said "never does one see the faults of one's pen so well as when one sees it leaving a bookstore". That's both funny and kind of sad. But today Sofia Khvoshchinskaya is finally being republished and hopefully a new voice is being added to the study of Russian literature.
City Folk and Country Folk fulfills my final category for the 2021 Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic in translation.
Well what do you know, my library actually has a copy of this one.! Yay. It's sad that Khvoshchinskaya died so young; I'm glad her writing is finally being republished. Russian literature needs a female voice among it's long list of classic male authors. :)
ReplyDeleteHi Lark I am glad your library has a copy. Its an interesting book and tells you alot about life in the Russian provinces in the 1860's. It is sad she died at 41 and TB must have been the terror of the 19th century because if this many great writers got came down with TB I can only imagine how many people in general across the world died from it.
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