An unsung gem of nineteenth-century Russian literature, City Folk and
Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of Russia's
aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites in the 1860s. Translated
into English for the first time, the novel weaves an engaging tale of
manipulation, infatuation, and female assertiveness that takes place one
year after the liberation of the empire's serfs.
Upending Russian literary cliches of female passivity and rural gentry
benightedness, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya centers her story on a
common-sense, hardworking noblewoman and her self-assured daughter
living on their small rural estate. The antithesis of the thoughtful,
intellectual, and self-denying young heroines created by
Khvoshchinskaya's male peers, especially Ivan Turgenev,
seventeen-year-old Olenka ultimately helps her mother overcome a sense
of duty to her "betters" and leads the two to triumph over the
urbanites' financial, amorous, and matrimonial machinations.
Sofia Khvoshchinskaya and her writer sisters closely mirror Britain's
Brontes, yet Khvoshchinskaya's work contains more of Jane Austen's wit
and social repartee, as well as an intellectual engagement reminiscent
of Elizabeth Gaskell's condition-of-England novels. Written by a woman
under a male pseudonym, this brilliant and entertaining exploration of
gender dynamics on a post-emancipation Russian estate offers a fresh and
necessary point of comparison with the better-known classics of
nineteenth-century world literature.
