“In a room lit by a dim candle, they washed the dead body of my six-month-old sister. The dull and motionless look in her eyes terrified me. The room was silent; neither my father nor my mother cried. Only the wet nurse cried — about the gilded cap and fur coat that she had lost due to my sister’s premature death. If the baby had waited five or six months longer to die, the nurse’s work would have been through, and the promised reward would not have slipped through her fingers.”
So begins a short novel by a talented young writer at the beginning of a nascent literary career. Avdotya Panaeva was 27 when she penned the manuscript in 1847. It was slated to be published — under a male pseudonym — in a subscriber’s edition of Sovremennik, one of Russia’s most prestigious literary journals of the era, a magazine that had already published Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” and Alexander Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter,” and that would go on to publish Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches and Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What Is to be Done?, among others. Panaeva was all but guaranteed literary fame —
This future was not to be.
“Cynical,” “implausible,” “immoral,” wrote the censor on the pages of this manuscript before cancelling the publication of this novel altogether. “I prohibit because of its immorality and undermining of parental authority.”
The year was 1848. A wave of revolutions gripped Europe. Remembered as a “springtime of the peoples,” the revolutions were aimed at removing monarchs from power in favor of the democratic systems of government. Monarchs across the continent responded by suppressing the protests. In Russia, Nicholas I overhauled the censorship system, appointing a member of nobility who had distinguished himself in the military by crushing the Spanish revolution, Dmitrii Buturlin, as the Director of the Imperial Public Library and a supervisor of all censors. Buturlin personally cancelled the publication of Panaeva’s work.
Reading the short novel 176 years after its would-be publication in its first translation to English, I’m captivated by the story, charmed by the voice of a girl-narrator, astonished by how contemporary this voice sounds — no small feat by translator Fiona Bell — and deeply moved by the author’s courage in breaking the norms of her society and speaking out for the underdog. I’m not surprised this novel was censored then. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to be censored again in today’s Russia for refusing to uphold “traditional values,” the 21st century euphemism for the culture of violence. In its radical empathy for victims of abuse, this novel is revolution itself.
Today, this book fits on the shelf right next to the work of contemporary feminist writers like Oksana Vasyakina and Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. Panaeva, a daughter of theatre actors, penned an exposé of a St. Petersburg family from the point of view of an abused child. Although according to scholar Konstantine Klioutchkine, their name “Talnikov” is likely modeled after the muse of theatre, Thalia, and class-wise, Panaeva is describing a family of artists much like her own birth family, off stage and in their daily life, this family is representative of a typical Russian patriarchal household.
At the head of the Talnikov family is Andrei, the father, who is referred to as a musician, presumably at a St. Petersburg imperial theatre. When he’s home, he occupies himself with card playing, drinking vodka, and caring for his dogs and birds. Whenever something doesn’t go to his liking, the father explodes in a burst of rage: “He kept the same malicious calm whether he was plunging a fork into the dog’s back or throwing a plate at his wife.” He’s particularly cruel to the children, lacerating them with wooden switches until they are covered in blood.
His wife Masha, the narrator’s mother, is every bit his equal in protecting exclusively her own interests in the household. She’s addicted to gambling and spends the bulk of the income allocated to the family upkeep to cover her card debts. After the death of her husband’s mother who lived with them, Masha’s gambling costs her thousands of rubles a year, leaving only hundreds on food and clothing for the family. She responds to any complaints in bursts of violence. “Our mother shouted and punished people not in response to their behavior but according to her losses in cards.”
The household that Masha presides over consists of eight children that survive past infancy, the nurse and a nanny, later a governess, Andrei’s one and Masha’s two unmarried sisters, an unnamed cook and a maid, and the one-named male servant Luka. All the children live in one room and are required to take up as little of their parents’ attention as possible. Their clothes are hand-me-downs, and for toys they tie a string to a fly’s legs and follow its flight. Another favorite game involves cockroaches that are abundant in their flat:
“We would cut a horse out of playing cards and glue a cockroach under each of the horse’s legs with sealing wax. We did the same thing with paper geese and ducks, and often a whole flock of these never-before-seen animals ran with extraordinary speed to the crevices of the room as we screamed with joy.”
Casual cruelty is the accepted way of familial interactions in this household, and it appears dramatic only because the narrator, Natasha, a middle child, refuses to accept it as the norm. At the outset, Natasha declares that “I always took the side of the person crying — whether because I cried a lot myself, I don’t know.” Besides the nurse, she is the only one to mourn her siblings who die in infancy, and she keeps the score: by the end of Chapter Two of her narrative, there are four dead babies who die of neglect, three girls and one boy.
The chapters of the novel are structured as a chronicle, with Natasha documenting the life of her family as she grows up from the age of six to about eighteen. In each chapter, her gaze falls to the character and foibles of a different adult. In the middle of the book, Natasha devotes a particular attention to the governess who competes with Natasha’s three unmarried aunts in the game of finding a husband. None of the four women have money for a dowry, making their prospects of marriage extremely unlikely.
The children are a nuisance to the governess just as much as to their own parents, and punishing them is the only trick she knows to get them to behave. She frequently uses the rod on the younger children, and leaves all without food whether or not they committed an offense. “Sunday was a day of massacre in our house. The innocent were punished in anticipation of their future crimes.” The only one to escape punishment is the oldest male sibling, Misha, “because he was brave and strong.” He wins by learning to make the governess and the other adults afraid of him, but when he misbehaves and escapes punishment, his younger siblings are punished in his stead.
Natasha’s language, typically brisk and full of amusing details, is particularly biting when describing the foibles of this hated governess. Natasha catalogs the governess’s extreme beauty rituals, from tightening a corset to the point that she can hardly breathe to “trying to do to her face what the floor polishers were doing to the floor.” Or, “her lips, smeared with pink lipstick, looked like two red earthworms.”
Bell’s translation wisely eschews old-fashioned beauty terms like francophone “papillotes,” a form of curlers, and “a bustle,” turning it into a more commonly used today verb “bustling” — moving from the literal “my aunts’ bustles were tightened” to a phrase that, if somewhat less precise, reads much smoother: “They began bustling more and more.” Here and throughout, Bell’s vocabulary contemporizes the text, bringing it closer to the 21st century reader. She does this so successfully that, returning to the novel in Russian, I was jolted even by the author’s forms of address to her parents, “mamenka” and “papenka.” So old-fashioned!
The hated governess eventually leaves the household, but few changes in this novel are actually for the better. The older children are sent to study with other teachers, each of which is chosen less for their area of expertise than for their skills with the rod. The oldest brother Misha eventually has enough of violence at home and, at sixteen, to avoid yet another beating, decides to stop his schooling altogether and escapes into war. He goes off as a soldier to Caucasus — joining the Russian Empire’s decades’ long, brutal war of conquest in the mountainous region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Misha doesn’t last there long. A few months later, the family receives news of his death in combat.
Not every adult in this book applies violence to children. Notably, Masha’s parents — Natasha’s grandparents — claim to have never hit a child. Also musicians, they live nearby in an uneasy companionship. Although Natasha loves to visit them to listen to her grandmother’s stories, she cannot avoid noticing her grandmother’s heavy drinking. The grandmother is an alcoholic, and her storytelling takes the form of weepy confessions. She seems to blame herself for her daughter’s cruelty, tracing it to the fact that her and her husband’s poverty had forced them to give Masha away, to be raised away from the family. Natasha doesn’t blame her grandmother, but calmly observes that “sometimes, driven to the limit of her patience by [her children’s] rudeness and her husband’s grumbling, [grandmother] drank an extra glass [of wine] and threatened to give everyone a thrashing, but even in those moments she was kind to her grandchildren.”
Natasha herself eventually escapes her family by a chance marriage to a virtual stranger. There isn’t much romance in the novel, and the main source of Natasha’s happiness seems to stem from the fact that, by being married without a dowry, she is able to pull off what her older aunt could not. Marriage gives her, for the first time in her life, “a sense of dignity.” Someone — it’s almost immaterial who — loves her enough to marry her.
If this seems to be a poor way to begin her independent life, it probably is. The novel ends with the wedding, and we can only conjecture how their marriage might fare. What we do know is that Panaeva herself (nee Bryanskaya) eloped with the writer Ivan Panaev at 17 to the displeasure of his noble family. An independent and talented thinker, Panaeva made her own way in the world. For many years, she lived with Panaev in an open marriage, sharing a flat with him and another writer, Nikolay Nekrasov. Together, they ran Sovremennik, the magazine that was prohibited to publish The Family Talnikov by the censor.
Panaeva, however, contributed a number of other pieces to the magazine over the years, alone and in collaboration with Nekrasov. After Panaev’s death, she married again and had a daughter, who also became a writer — Yevdokiya Nagrodskaya. Klioutchkine, associate professor of German and Russian at Pomona College, commented in email correspondence: “Panaeva is a crucial figure in the Russian culture industry at mid-19th century. She played a crucial and underappreciated role in the publication of the main think journal of the era, Sovremennik (The Contemporary). She also was a prolific writer of novels and novellas between 1850 and 1865, as well as influential memoirs at the end of her life.”
Panaeva published her Memoirs in 1889, four years before her death, providing a witty and insightful glimpse of the lives of some of the best-known Russian writers of the 19th Century, including Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. In a message exchange, poet and scholar Polina Barskova called this book “brilliant,” adding that it was “witty, observant and poignant, and has some of the best descriptions of how Russian writers loved, gossiped, and ate.”
Despite its popular and critical success, Panaeva’s Memoirs is yet to be translated to English and has been all but forgotten in the wider Russophone literary circles as well. The omission is not surprising, given the systematic neglect of female voices in the academic and critical Russophone circles. In 2018, when a group of prominent Russian writers and critics created an expert-run website of 108 canonical works of Russian literature, Polka.Academy, the project included only three novels by female writers. Two years later, acknowledging their oversight under the pressure from feminist critics, the editors added a list of 70 works by women. That list included Avdotya Panaeva’s The Talnikov Family.
Nevertheless, Svetlana Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya, a brilliant philologist who taught at the St. Petersburg State University from 1988 until October 2023 (when she was fired from the university for giving linguistic testimony in court on behalf of an anti-war feminist protestor Sasha Skochilenko), reports that today Panaeva’s work is largely absent from Russian university syllabi. In Russia, Panaeva is remembered primarily as a party to a famous ménage à trois and, occasionally, as the author of the Memoirs. Yelena Furman, a lecturer in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at UCLA and a board member of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, adds that in the U.S., in Russian literature courses on the 19th century, women writers are not usually taught. In recent years, however, some incremental change has been happening. At the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, scholars Anna Berman and Hilde Hoogenboom, together with a team of researchers, have launched a digital library dedicated to the work of the “Russian Brontës,” Nadezhda, Sofia, and Praskovia Khvoshchinskaya; and in 2017 Columbia University Press published Nora Seligman Favorov’s translation of Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s novel City Folk and Country Folk. Their 2019 publication of Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life in Barbara Heldt’s translation built on that list, now expanded with the Bell’s translation of The Talnikov Family.
Associate professor of 19th Century Russophone Literature at Oxford, Margarita Vaysman, devoted significant attention to Panaeva in her monograph Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel (Legenda, 2021), arguing that Panaeva’s 1862 novel Zhenskaia dolia (to date, untranslated to English) is “a feminist metafiction with a narrative voice that transgresses the boundaries of gender” as well as discussing in depth Panaeva’s history of publication in the USSR by the prominent writer Kornei Chukovskii, who, while championing her work into print, simultaneously dismissed its quality and misattributed her achievements to her lover.
In today’s Russia that, under Putin, is turning toward totalitarianism, reorganizing every aspect of its society toward fighting its war of aggression against Ukraine, studying the work of women and feminist writers becomes an increasingly political and dangerous act. As in its imperial days, Russia needs men acclimated to violence at home to sow violence abroad. Women are being forced into childbirth by increasing restrictions on abortion and attempts to legislate against “childfree ideology.” In 2023, one legislator proposed a law to declare broadly defined feminism “extremist ideology,” and while the law is not yet on the books, feminists are increasingly under threat in the country, and systemic violence against women is skyrocketing.
I am delighted to see that this work of bringing Panaeva’s legacy to the readers is being done outside of Russia. The Talnikov Family offers not only insight into Russia’s rulers’ long-standing reliance on “traditional values” to consolidate their power, the novel also entertains, shocks, and provides solace. Truly, I cannot name another 19th Century Russian writer I would rather spend time with right now.
[Published on October 8, 2024 by Columbia University Press, 192 pages, $22.00 paperback]