Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative by WilliamM. Todd, IIIReview by: Robert ReidThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), pp. 608-609Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4210099 .

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6o8 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Todd, William M. III. Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, I 986. viii + 265 pp. Notes. Index. ? I 6.95.

THIS original and scholarly work is based on the thesis that early nineteenth- century Russian culture adopted oral communication as a model for writing and literary production. The development of Russian literature is thus closely bound up with the spread of a sophisticated vernacular and its encroachment upon rival linguistic areas such as church and chancellery. The source and focus of this cultured medium was the salon and Todd regards the complex conventions of the salon, its conversations, readings, and polemics, as well as its social etiquette, as contributing to an ideology of polite society which writers of the period inevitably reflected in their works.

The second half of the study is devoted to a reappraisal of the three great novels of the age in the light of the foregoing: Onegin, Pechorin, and Chichikov all embody the chameleon-like characteristics of the ironically named honnete homme of polite society, forced in the interests of social survival to become an adroit player of roles. Parts of each novel certainly benefit from being seen as, in effect, examples of salonization: Tat'iana as society hostess, the ball in Dead Souls and most of 'Princess Mary'. The limits of this approach cannot be ignored however: the analysis of the three novels takes place in hermetic isolation from other works by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol', necessarily so since so many of these have settings (such as the Caucasus or Ukraine) well outside the ambit of polite society and foreign to its behavioural norms (Todd's treatment of A Hero of Our Time poses problems in this respect).

Most interesting, perhaps, is Todd's approach to the question of readership. There is a useful and informative examination of the publicistic ethos (or lack of it) of the early journals, and examination too of the (not unrelated) reader-preoccupations within the novels themselves (digressions in Dead Souls and Evgenii Onegin, the 'Author's Preface' and the 'Foreword' to Pechorin's Journal in A Hero of Our Time). In this quest for the adequate reader Gogol' proves the most tenacious and systematic; even Selected Passages from a Corres- pondence with Friends can be favourably re-appraised from this point of view, while Gogol"s masterful readings of Dead Souls in the salon provoked the first critical argument over that work- between the hearers and the mere readers.

Ideology is a numinous presence throughout this study, forever symptoma- tized and reflected but never quite self-evident. Often the arguments advanced would seem to work well enough without it, not much being lost, for instance, in substituting 'polite society' for 'the ideology of polite society' or 'strategies of linguistic enrichment' for 'ideology's strategies of . . .'. On the other hand the heuristic advantages of the term are obvious: as the presumed conditioner of such disparate phenomena as duelling, reading, salon etiquette, publication, etc., it leaves them free to be juxtaposed on a basis of equal interaction and mutual relevance.

This work is well grounded in both Russian primary sources and modern critical and sociological theory (Jakobson is applied with profit to the readership question and Erving Goffman's work on human interaction is used to elucidate aspects of society life). The book should interest not only specialist

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REVIEWS 609

Slavists but also those more generally concerned with the relationships of literatures to their societies.

The Queen's University of Belfast ROBERT REID Department ofSlavonic Studies

M0ller, Peter Ulf. Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the I890S. Translated from the Danish by John Kendal. E. J. Brill, Leiden, I988. xviii + 346 pp. Bibliography. Index. Hfl. I20.00.

ALTHOUGH the subject of sexual morality must inevitably dominate a book devoted to The Kreutzer Sonata and its aftermath, Dr M0ller's detailed and scholarly study has no moral axe to grind, but is a literary-historical examina- tion of the debate generated by Tolstoi's uncompromising story, and its prominent place in the Russian literature of the I89os. The book is, as its author says, narrow in its isolation of one theme, but broad in its pursuit of the literary ramifications of that theme. In The Kreutzer Sonata, M0ller argues, Tolstoi sought to embody his recently formulated principles of Christian art, and successfully achieved his aims of originality, clarity, and sincerity. M0ller's account of the story's publication, although broadly familiar, draws on neglected archive material, and is an excellent case history of the tortuous workings of the Russian censorship, which nevertheless did little to limit the story's impact on the reading public. His book considers the reception of The Kreutzer Sonata in Russia and abroad, its illegal distribution at home, and the correspondence it provided, much of it still unpublished, with Tolstoi in the unlikely role of a 'Miss Lonelyhearts'. It focuses on the public debate in Russia on both pre-marital and marital sexual relations, and the 'counter-literature' directed specifically against the morality of The Kreutzer Sonata. The contribu- tions by Tolstoi's wife and son are well known, but few scholars will have read Mehring's amusing parody with its arguments in favour of total abstinence from food, or the English version of Tolstoi's story in which Mrs Pozdnyshev is not killed, but becomes an inmate of a Catholic nunnery in England! After looking briefly at Tolstoi's Epilogue and his later stories on sexual themes, M0ller devotes the rest of his book to the demand created by The Kreutzer Sonata for 'more of the same', and the part played in the debate in its later, anti-ascetic stages, by such different writers as Chekhov, Merezhkovskii, Gippius, Briusov, and Rozanov.

Some parts of M0ller's study have been published before, and there is some overlapping and repetition of material in it, but on the whole it is neatly organized and lucidly presented. If the final chapters tend to be overburdened with plot resumes, these are always relevant to the author's main theme. The translation from Danish reads well; the bibliography is extensive and the Soviet archives have been combed with enviable thoroughness. Perhaps Dr M0ller may now be persuaded to extend his researches to the period I 90-I 7, a story which he says 'simply begs to be told'. Department of Russian R. F. CHRISTIAN

University ofSt Andrews

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