Beyond Tolstoy: New translation revives a forgotten Russian novel
Lovers of 19th-century Russian literature have likely never heard the name Avdotya Panaeva, even though she traveled in the same literary circles as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Born in 1819 and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Panaeva ran a literary journal with the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, but she was also a published novelist.
She was just 27 when she wrote “The Talnikov Family,” published in 1848. Inspired by Panaeva’s own upbringing in a chaotic household, it paints a detailed picture of a violent household in St. Petersburg as recounted from childhood memories.
Previously available only to readers of the Russian language, “The Talnikov Family” is now available in English, thanks to the translation work of Fiona Bell, a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The novel was just released by Columbia University Press.
“Panaeva rejected the waning aesthetics of Romanticism and instead depicted social life in all its grittiness, embracing a growing interest in so-called ‘naturalism’ in literature,” Bell writes in the introduction. “For Panaeva, no detail is too small: the children’s ill-fitting clothes, the pies and pates meant for guests only, and the incessant squeaking of cockroaches.”
A scholar of Russian literature, and part of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Bell sat down to talk with Yale News about the novel, its contribution to modern scholarship, and the value of introducing readers to a broader view of Russian literature from this period. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
How did you come across this novel?
Fiona Bell: I was in coursework for my Ph.D., and we had a session on Nikolai Nekrasov, who is a relatively famous 19th-century Russian poet. Panaeva always gets mentioned in biographies of him because they were in a partnership for about 15 years, and they were also coworkers. I got curious about her, and started reading her memoirs, which she published at the end of her life. She had worked as an editor for all these famous writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Turgenev and she wrote about what they would talk about when they got together. She had this wonderful personal quality and an eye for detail. I came to love her voice.
The novel’s story is told from the perspective of a young girl, Natasha, as remembered when she is much older. She observes a home in which nobody around her is happy, including herself much of the time. Her parents are neglectful and cruel. Her unmarried aunts are embittered. Her grandparents don’t like each other. Her governess withholds food as punishment. There isn’t really a plot so much as it’s this observation of a miserable, abusive household.
Bell: I’ve thought about it as the poetics of atmosphere, especially a violent atmosphere. To someone like Natasha in that position, I think it’s the repetition, the oppressive repetition of violence more than any individual event itself. The abuse in this household doesn’t have just one subject and one object. Everyone is the victim, but also everyone is the abuser. It’s violence as atmosphere rather than violence as event. The novel isn’t very plot heavy. In fact, there can’t be a plot because it’s the repetition of the same acts and behaviors every day. It’s a very provocative description of an atmosphere through attention to detail.
When it first came out, the novel was officially censored. Why was that?
Bell: The year is really important. Censorship of literature in the Russian Empire was always pretty strict, but 1848 was a year when lots of revolutions and revolts broke out in Europe. The Russian government, through the censors and other organs, tightened up. The problem with “The Talnikov Family” was its anti-parental-rights message. You can see that Panaeva’s trying to undercut that a bit through the framing. By introducing the novel as the notes of a recently deceased woman, she suggests ironically that domestic violence is a problem of another era.
What do you mean by anti-parental-rights? The right to hit a child?
Bell: Yes, she has this moment close to the beginning where she remembers being a child and seeing her brother get hit. And she says, basically, I didn’t know then that parents had total control over their children, that they had the right to do anything they wanted to them. I think of that as an interesting moment — she remembers being so young that she didn’t yet know that it was socially acceptable for parents to beat their children. Then she has this long interim period of knowing, okay, this is sanctioned, and this is how the household is and no one’s going to stop it. Then, in writing the novel, she’s describing these practices in order to criticize them.
The important critic Vissarion Belinsky, who knew Panaeva and her husband through the publishing circles she was in, read the novel before it was published and really liked it. He said, this is an important issue, and no one has talked about it yet in Russian literature.
Natasha rejects or makes fun of some feminine practices of the time, like putting on thick layers of makeup. Would you say Panaeva was a feminist?
Bell: At the time that she was writing, what they called the “woman question” was raging in Russia and in her circles. “The Talnikov Family” spotlights Panaeva’s skepticism about what following the gender and sexuality playbook can offer a woman in her period. She characterizes Natasha as someone who has this estranged view on these different social mores, many of which are gendered. If you remember the chapter about the ball that everyone’s really excited about attending as a courtship ritual, she just makes fun of it at every level.
When Natasha is a teenager, a nobleman proposes to her and the novel ends on her wedding day. We are left to wonder if she went on to a better life.
Bell: I read that as very bittersweet. Everything that Panaeva has set up before this moment leads us to think: How could this be a deliverance? Something that has really stuck with me throughout the project is that this is a story about a collective, mostly of children. It’s not the story of Natasha. It’s a story about all the children and the adults in the household. In the novel’s very last scene, she’s getting into the carriage to go get married, and she looks back and sees all these people from the household looking at her from the window. I think it’s important that it ends with Natasha looking not ahead or anywhere else or even inward. It ends with the collective, as well.
What is the novel’s relevance today?
Bell: There are two tracks of relevance, as I see it. First, for anyone who’s interested in Russian literature from this period. Even before more attention turned to Russian imperialism with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was this dissatisfaction with just rereading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, repeatedly. It’s a really limited view of that period in Russia in terms of class, in terms of gender. To me, it’s important to read more widely in the 19th century. That’s easy to do as a scholar or as someone who reads Russian. But translation is a huge way that we make a broader view of the Russian classics available to the public.
The other thing is, as a scholar of gender and sexuality studies, I’ve been really interested in seeing a bigger conversation grow around critiques of the family in the past few years. There are a lot of ways in which the family as a legal entity can lead to violence. Lots of contemporary queer theorists, like Sophie Lewis and M.E. O’Brien, are thinking about broader senses of kinship, building social networks beyond biological relationships and the nuclear family. I think these arguments would have interested Panaeva. And I think that Panaeva would interest any scholars and activists who criticize children’s oppression in our time, too.