Authors

Discussion

My talk will be devoted to Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s 1869 short novel Pervaia bor’ba, in relation to the question raised recently by scholars reviving interest in the nineteenth-century Russian realism: “why does the social imaginary of Russian realism generate alternative types of plots within the framework of pan-European genres?” (Kliger, Ospovat, Vaisman, Vdovin in Russkii realism XIX veka: Obshchestvo, znanie, povestvovanie, 2020) I read Khvoshchinskaia’s novel as operating within the Western novelistic tradition through its desiring narrator, its general plot structure, and its ending of compromise. Yet the forms of this desire and the kind of compromise established at the end reveal a certain “deformation” of the more traditional form; these elements point to a culturally specific post-Reform Russian social imaginary that shapes the novel’s transgression of the Western realist tradition. 

The contours of this transgression become clear under the lens of evolutionary discourse as one dominant epistemological paradigm at the time. Taking the text’s emphasis on “struggle” as an invitation to explore its evolutionary undertones within the pan-European ethos of “struggle for existence” at the time, I search for what constitutes “struggle” for the anti-hero of the novel. While the scenario of “struggle” is usually staged within a populated urban environment in which numerous possessive individuals compete for profit and social standing within a bourgeois civil society, Khvoshchinskaia’s ironic staging of “struggle” finds itself within sparsely populated provinces and is directed inwards, at sustaining the illusory identity of a romanticized aristocrat by an impostor. To emphasize how Khvoshchinskaia’s text both absorbs and reorganizes the more standard Western European realist form, I will build a comparative analysis with Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, which Pervaia bor’ba explicitly references and which also arguably presents a classical account of post-Malthusian literary scenario of “struggle for existence.”