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This week Katya Jordan sat down with Anna Berman to talk about her new book, The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880, published by Oxford University Press in 2022 in the UK and 2023 in North America.
KJ: First off, congratulations on your new book! Can you tell me why you chose to pursue the topic of the family novel? And what inspired you to examine not one novelistic tradition, but two?
AB: This is a great question. The idea for this project came as I was finishing my PhD dissertation on siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The conclusion stepped back from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s treatment of siblings to put them in a larger literary context and to show how what they were doing was unique. In comparing their works with English novels, I’d written a sentence basically saying that when Elizabeth and Jane Bennet love each other (Pride and Prejudice), this is only a reflection of their own relationship, whereas when Alyosha Karamazov reaches out to Ivan with love, this really is making a broader statement about the possibility of universal brotherhood. And then I realized this was a terrible example because I was comparing two sisters with two brothers, and I should really swap out the Bennets for an English brother pair… and then I got stuck. I couldn’t think of a single English novel that featured a significant pair of brothers.
Years later, I can now say there actually are a handful of English novels—almost none of them canonical—that do feature brothers. However, when compared with the Russian tradition I was starting from, where The Brothers Karamazov has significant brothers, as do Anna Karenina, Fathers and Children, The Golovlyovs, etc., the absence of brothers in England is really striking. So this got me thinking about the two traditions in opposition and looking for a reason for their different treatment of siblings. And that ultimately broadened into an interest in the plotlines each nation constructed for the family.
My other big inspiration was Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748-1818 (2004). Perry is looking at a different century and is only focused on England, but the way she uses family history and shifting kinship structures to explain dominant plot patterns was a powerful model for me. Her book got me looking to family history for my answer to why family plots were so different in Russia and England.
KJ: Your comparative analysis serves as an antidote to what you call “national myopia” that has beset literary studies, especially in the realm of genre analysis. Can you explain what you mean by “myopia”? Is the problem deeper than a mere focus on any one particular national literary culture?
AB: One of the problems I hope my book addresses is that so many standard theories of “the novel” have been written by scholars who were basing their ideas solely or primarily on the English novel. Yet the theories make universalizing claims about the novel as a genre. One of my big goals was to show how these theories are actually limited and culturally specific. In that sense, I use the Russian novel as a challenge to the theories. But going beyond that, I wanted to explain the reason for the theories’ shortcomings by revealing the links between theories of narrative form and family form. Many theories assume that family line and story line are running in tandem, and that the family basically shapes the way plot is structured. So having a different family structure will necessarily change the structure of plot… but there is no accounting for that in the theory.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that while many scholars of Russian literature read scholarship on English literature and draw on it in their work, the same is not true in reverse. I can’t think of a book I’ve read on Eliot or Gaskell or Dickens that makes any reference to the excellent scholarship that has been done on similar themes in Russian texts. So by writing a book that is 50/50 Russian and English, I hoped that I could get English scholars to take note of the Russian example and to see what looking comparatively might have to teach them.
KJ: As you are looking across cultural boundaries, what are your reasons for choosing the years 1800-1880 as your focus?
AB: The date range was determined by the novels themselves. On the English side, I begin with Edgeworth and Austen, who were both important in shaping the family novel genre. And, as I note in the introduction, I actually start a bit later in Russia because the real “rise of the novel” came later than in England. Many scholars credit Evgenii Onegin as being Russia’s first family novel, so it is my starting point on the Russian side. As to the end date of 1880, for Russia this marks the end of the main Russian realist novels, with the publication of Dostoevsky’s last novel (Tolstoy had given up novels at this point… though he does eventually write one more in 1899). And on the English side, it was a good point to stop because there are a number of changes to marriage law and we get a shift to late Victorian fiction with a new set of writers and rather different themes.
KJ: Setting aside the well-known novels that are obvious choices, such as Eugene Onegin, how did you select the one hundred plus novels for your analysis?
AB: I was trying for a balance, so I read canonical texts and also second- and third-tier novels, and I tried to cover a range of styles and political/social outlooks. I was also careful to read both male and female authors in each tradition (especially important for the Russian side, where the women writers are often overlooked). In terms of how I found the novels, there were a range of sources that led me to them. Some of the Russian ones I got to from reading reviews in the thick journals and looking for works with family themes. Some of the novels I saw mentioned in secondary literature, some were recommended by other scholars when I told them about the project. For a few of the more obscure English ones, Gillian Beer gets all the credit for bringing them to my attention. The list built up gradually. And the point when I decided I had read enough to make my claims was when each new novel I read affirmed the patterns I had already established, or if I could explain the reason it broke with these patterns using the arguments the book had already developed.
KJ: In the “Introduction” you explain that the family structure can be examined in relation to two axes: diachronic (or vertical) and synchronic (or lateral). You also mention that you learned of this model from a seminar given by Juliet Mitchell at Princeton in 2011. Is she the author of this approach? And can you explain to those who haven’t read your book yet what these axes represent in your analysis?
AB: To my knowledge, Juliet Mitchell is really the one who first formulated the family in these terms, using a vertical and lateral axis. After my book came out, she published Fratriarchy, which lays out her case for the importance of the oft-overlooked lateral axis. I wish the book had been published sooner so I could have cited it. The basic idea is that the family exists on two axes: a generational one that is moving through time (child, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.) and a lateral one that includes family in the present, moving from close kin like siblings, to first-cousins, second-cousins, and outward to more and more distant kin. Both of these axes are present in all families, but Mitchell—as a psychoanalyst—noticed that the vertical was always the focus (just think of the Oedipus complex). The goal of her recent work has been to draw more attention to the lateral axis and the importance of siblings and peers. I do not follow a psychoanalytic approach like Mitchell’s, but her formulation of the family on these two axes was hugely influential for me.
KJ: This is very interesting. So if you were to summarize the key differences between English and Russian conceptions of the family/family novel using Juliet Mitchell’s framework as a starting point, what would they be?
AB: My basic argument is that the more individualist English placed primary value on the vertical, while the more communal Russians emphasized the lateral. Or, to elaborate slightly, the English had a linear model of family that focused on genealogy, origins, and descent, while the Russians were much more interested in all the family in the here-and-now. They were not concerned with amassing wealth and with its vertical transmission. Rather than focusing all value on an heir, family name, or title, they dispersed wealth and attention in a more egalitarian model. This fundamental difference shaped the way authors in the two nations plotted consanguineal relations, courtship/marriage, and alternative kinship constructions (these three types of kinship became the three sections of the book).
KJ: In practical terms, then, how is Mrs. Bennet with her five daughters early in the century different from Mme. Scherbatsky with her three daughters later in the same century? And IS each Russian family unhappy in its own way?
AB: Sisters are actually fairly similar in the two traditions, aside from the fact that many fewer female characters in Russian novels happily wed. So I suppose it makes sense that while Kitty may end up with an excellent husband (albeit one who is still suicidal after marrying the love of his life and having a beautiful baby boy), Dolly ends up in a very unhappy marriage. One thing that is typical in this example is that Dolly and her family end up spending a great deal of time living with the Levins. We find Oblonskys and Levins together at the end of the novel in a larger, extended kinship structure. Many Russian novels end with family configurations that go beyond the nuclear model and include extended, blended, or chosen kin. By contrast, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet both end up with fabulous husbands and live separately on their husbands’ estates and presumably will produce the much-desired male heirs needed to continue these family lines. So they end up in a traditional, bounded nuclear model that is focused on linear progression through time, rather than lateral sprawl in the present, as we see in the Russian example.
And to your second point, I love this question, “is each Russian family unhappy in its own way?” Well, they certainly are less happy overall. The Russian novel largely accepts that the “traditional Russian family” is a broken and backward institution in need of reform (the idea evokes images of patriarchal tyranny, wife beatings, parental oppression, etc…). But this means that the novels are more open to exploring alternatives. So maybe the answer is actually that when Russian families are happy, it is in their own way, and not by following the classic, idealized English family model enshrined in so many Victorian texts.
KJ: Since our audience is specifically interested in Dostoevsky, can you tell us how your model applies to Dostoevsky’s work? In your book, you analyse all five of his major novels in one way or another, as well as his shorter works. Overall, does he follow a similar model as other Russian novelists? And did his approach change in any way over time?
AB: Thank you for this question! One of the big things I wanted to do with Dostoevsky, actually, was to contextualize him and to show that some of the things we like to think of as uniquely his, were actually being done by LOTS of authors at the time. This applies particularly to what he calls the “accidental family.” So many Dostoevsky scholars have written about the way Dostoevsky saw the family in breakdown and how he was creating a “new” model that involved various blends of blood and legal or chosen kin. Yes, Dostoevsky definitely does do this, but most writers were actually depicting families like this. Traditional, nuclear families were more the exception than the norm.
KJ: So if I may summarize the premise of your whole book in one inadequate sentence, the Russian writers were depicting the Russian reality as they saw it, which was vastly different from the situation in England, and thus they created a different literary model. Yet they did it while also to some extent being aware of the English model. I hope this makes our blog readers want to find out from your book exactly how they did it. Thank you very much for this interview.
Dr Katya Jordan is an Associate Professor in the Department of German and Russian at Brigham Young University. She is a member-at-large on the Executive Board of the North American Dostoevsky Society and a Regional Coordinator of the International Dostoevsky Society.
Dr Anna A. Berman is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, Slavonic Section at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College. She is the author of Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (2015) and The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880 (2023) and editor of Tolstoy in Context (2023). An interview about her first book appeared on Bloggers Karamazov in 2017.
Bloggers Karamazov 