2025/07/14 by Kate Holland · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/russ.70064
openalex publication_date 2025/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Ilya Kliger. Sovereign Fictions: Poetics and Politics in the Age of Russian Realism. Thinking Literature. University of Chicago Press, 2024. 312 pp. 32.00. ISBN 978-0-2268-3187-9. Some of the most enduring questions concerning nineteenth-century Russian realist fiction revolve around the genre’s relationship to its western European counterpart. Why does the history of the realist novel look so different in Russia than in western Europe? How and why did realist prose emerge in Russia, almost fully formed, in the 1840s, instead of evolving gradually, but consistently, from the mid-eighteenth century onward as in England or France. Why does the Russian novel approach the defining concerns of realism—the individual and society—so differently from the European novel? Ian Watt’s pathbreaking The Rise of the Novel asserts that the English novel developed within the special conditions of a society in which a rising middle class became increasingly differentiated, facilitating a complex sense of particularity, individuality, and selfhood.1 György Lukács’s Hegelian The Theory of the Novel argues that the novel emerges from the modern world’s “abandonment by God” and a subsequent alienation of self, processes of atomization that begin with the Enlightenment.2 Lukács’s later Marxist works and Lucien Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of the Novel draw on the ruptures between the hero and his world in the context of the rise of the French and English bourgeoisie and market society.3 Franco Moretti shows how the Bildungsroman and its narrative features were differently shaped by political, economic, and social conditions in England, France, and Germany during the long nineteenth century.4 For each of these literary theorists, the Russian case has served as an aberration, an irritant, or a provocation.5 How could a country lacking a bourgeoisie, civil society, and even a revolutionary tradition aside from the aristocratic fraternities of the Decembrists, produce a literary realism that quickly became the envy of Europe? How did realism develop its own distinct perspective on the genre-defining novelistic tension between individual desires and the laws of social belonging? Recent works by Bella Grigorian, Victoria Somoff, Vadim Shneyder, and Katherine Bowers explore the social and economic backdrop of the rise and development of realist prose, as well as the particularities of the Russian novel’s discursive and social contexts versus those of the west, but none addresses these questions as directly as Ilya Kliger’s magisterial Sovereign Fictions.6 Rather than restricting himself to the novel as a genre, Kliger chooses to broaden his focus to realist fiction, allowing him to begin with the 1830s, the decade before the realist novel really coalesced. Drawing on canonical works written by male members of the serf-owning estate and state service elite who came of age during the reign of Nicholas I, Kliger argues that these writers construct a “social imaginary” of Russian realism which is shaped both by rebellious dreams and a complicated and ultimately defeatist symbolic relationship to the absolute authority of state power (p. 3). Kliger conceives of Russian realism broadly; included in his purview are prose works normally seen as belonging to romanticism or sentimentalism, as well as more solidly realist novels. He argues that the social imaginary of the works under discussion is haunted by the figure of the state, personified in the sovereign. Their “poetics of realist sociality” is shaped in different ways by the tragic split between individual desires and broader social belonging enforced by the coercive symbolic power of the state (p. 1). Rooted in the philosophical contexts of the 1830s, in which these Russian gentry writers came of age, Kliger’s book steers a middle course between a close reading of these texts and distant reading of their contexts and placement in time and place. This is an intellectually productive position, allowing both for broader theoretical and philosophical argumentation and for close textual evidence of those arguments. Kliger argues that, unlike its western counterparts, Russian realist fiction ultimately stages the fragmentation and remaking of the individual before the force of sovereign power. Following a short introduction, Kliger’s long opening chapter begins with an emblematic event in Russian intellectual history: the moment when Vissarion Belinsky controversially seemed to reverse political course by calling for a “reconciliation with actuality” or an acceptance of the autocratic state’s political reality (p. 10). Kliger shows how the gap between Belinsky’s reading of “actuality” in the preface to Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Hegel’s own understanding of that concept reveals a contrast in the Russian and broader European political traditions (p. 13). Where Hegel’s actuality was a constitutional monarchy bolstered by a liberal tradition, Belinsky’s was an autocracy embodied and symbolized by the figure of the tsar. Belinsky’s reorientation of Hegel’s political philosophy, with its central role for civil society, to 1830s Russia, with no meaningful civil society, leads to a narrative of the tragic conflict between the demands of the individual and those of the state. This conflict is exemplified by Peter the Great’s punishment/sacrifice of his son after he rebelled against him. In this scenario, the needs of the particular (the individual, his family, his love) must always be sacrificed to those of the universal (the state). Personal belonging, such as a relationship, is sacrificed to “substantive belonging,” the unbreakable connection to a larger political entity such as the state (p. 16). For Kliger, Belinsky’s transposition of Hegel’s political philosophy into the Russian autocratic mode recognizes a central contradiction that lies at the heart of the nineteenth-century Russian realist social imaginary: the ultimate impossibility of resisting the power of substantive belonging. Hegelian philosophy and nineteenth-century realist fiction share a concern with the realm where individual freedom comes up against the principle of actualized right, where freedom and responsibility meet. Western realist fiction’s exemplary form is that of the Bildungsroman, a form structured around the protagonist’s and reader’s education in the world that then reveals the tensions between individual desires and social or state demands. Engaging with theorists and critics from Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault to Miller, Gallagher, Goodlad, and Moretti, Kliger uses three Bildungsroman as models—Balzac’s Pere Goriot, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—all of which explore civil society freedoms while recognizing their limits, to discern a broader European social imaginary emerging. Each novel explores a particular area of individual self-improvement, depicting protagonists who develop individually, in time, while also promoting universal value systems of needs, rights, and the law and, thus, necessitating broader social and collective belonging. In the context of Russia, where, in Gramsci’s famous phrase, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous,” the stakes of following individual desires are depicted as even more vertiginous.7 In contrast to France and Germany, “individuation itself—the emergence of the modern, self-governing, self-standing subject—unfolded within the sphere of the civilizing state,” as Kliger puts it (p. 36). He contextualizes this problem within the political thought of the time: Westernizer Boris Chicherin and Slavophile Ivan Aksakov, intellectuals from opposite ends of the political spectrum, agree on the weakness of Russian social forms and institutions, the strength and obstructionism of state power, and the ensuing threat of revolutionary upheaval that proceeds from this power imbalance. Moving from politics to literature, Annenkov’s review of an 1858 novel by Pisemsky helps give shape to Kliger’s argument in its comparison of Russian and western European novelists’ approach to realism. Annenkov asserts that while western European novelists usually avoid representing politics head-on in favor of private life, they show the importance and power of forces that mediate between individual desires and societal norms, stopping the latter from becoming sovereign injunctions and the former from forestalling broader social considerations. He bemoans the absence of such mediation in Russian realist fiction. Kliger’s book examines the contrasting shape of Russian realist plots, where a protagonist’s individual ambitions often lead to a showdown with sovereign power that ends tragically and leaves no question about the authority of sovereign power. Sovereign Fictions is structured in an unusual way. Following the opening discussion of the philosophical, historical, and sociopolitical backgrounds of western European and Russian realist fiction, three core chapters (2, 3, and 4) focus on different modes of substantive belonging: those of the state, the family, and the nation. A long précis introduces the conclusion, revisiting the texts of the three previous chapters from the perspective of their affinities with tragedy and the formal textual features which stage the subordination to sovereign power. While initially difficult to follow, the payoff of this structure is that it allows two separate ways into the problem of these sovereign fictions. Kliger first focuses on the three figurations of sovereign power and the three separate, if interconnected narratives that embody them. He then provides a more concentrated and multifaceted account of the formal “sovereignty effects,” which realist works employ in their representation of a world subject to this sovereign power (p. 195). Given the complexity and density of Kliger’s argument, this structure helps create a clear, convincing throughline of argument. Each core chapter begins with foundational texts from the 1830s that Kliger describes as “protorealist” and moves forward chronologically showing the evolution of the realist sociotopes over time. Chapter 2 begins with Gogol’s Taras Bulba and The Government Inspector and Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman which, despite their contrasting genres, all stage the problem of the social at a moment of crisis, or a “state of exception”—war, a corruption scandal, and a natural disaster respectively, which provokes the exercise of sovereign power (p. 60). Andryi’s avenging father, the State embodied in the genuine Government Inspector, and the spectral Horseman, respectively, conflate the private and the public, “inscrib[ing] the substantive order of the polity directly in the destinies of the protagonists” (p. 61). Each is forcibly reminded of the perils of resisting the sovereign’s power. These texts, argues Kliger, explicitly foreshadow the conflicts of later realist fiction. Goncharov’s The Same Old Story and Pisemsky’s One Thousand Souls both begin by projecting social models that seem to resemble those of the Bildungsroman, with individually driven protagonists on the verge of clashing with older representatives of political establishment values and power. Yet, in both works state power ends up suddenly and dramatically turning the tables, introducing tragic or violent subplots which upend the protagonists and ultimately reveal “the dualism inherent in the figure of sovereignty itself; the dualism between the sovereign as guarantor of law and justice … and as the source of despotic violence” (p. 74). From here, Kliger traces a convincing path to Dostoevsky’s political theology, especially in Demons, where the seemingly demonic qualities of the protagonist, Nikolai Stavrogin, explode ordinary realist socialization narratives still more. Continually allegorizing the “Time of Troubles,” Demons depicts a crisis of legitimacy centered on Stavrogin, who is both imposter and the ultimate vessel of sovereign power. Rounding out the chapter, the final three texts, Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time, Turgenev’s Rudin, and Sleptsov’s Hard Times, all begin by staging social scenarios that appear to the reader as real, only to turn the tables and reveal a larger, more significant context that appears to be more real, whether the imperial conquest in Lermontov, the revolution in which Turgenev’s hero perishes, or the casual violence throughout Sleptsov’s novel. In its usurpation of ordinary social reality, that new, more real context is yet another example of the substantive belonging that is the preserve of the sovereign. Chapter 3 shows how sovereign power asserts itself symbolically through romantic and domestic family relations. In Kliger’s account, Russian realist fiction borrows plots and tropes from its western European counterparts, such as the problem of female sexual autonomy and the adultery plot from George Sand’s Indiana, but projects a world dominated by patriarchal authority. Here too, a multigeneric panaroma of works, including Glinka’s 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar and Kostomarov’s 1865 novella The Son, showcase what Kliger calls “sovereign mediation of intimate life” (p. 104). In these works, characters seek escape from family life onto an individual path, only to be “fatefully reclaimed” by a stand-in for the sovereign (usually fathers or husbands, but also by “their displaced figurations”) (p. 104). Readings of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and Eugene Onegin, Turgenev’s Asya and First Love, Chernyshevsky’s “Russian at a Rendezvous,” Pisemsky’s Boyarshchina, Druzhinin’s Polinka Saks, Herzen’s Who is to Blame?, and, finally, Turgenev’s On the Eve and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, all show how paternal or husbandly authorities take on sovereign power, revealing underlying violence. As Kliger concludes, “what we see is a form of claiming the individual, of reasserting her absolute belonging to a substance, thematized in political-ontological terms” (p. 145). While Kliger’s focus on novels by men is methodologically justified, the field urgently needs studies on women writers to bring another perspective to the problem of sovereign authority. The final arena of substantive belonging Kliger examines is the nation. In chapter 4, he makes no comparisons between western and Russian models of realist fiction, which is a shame, given the connections between the Russian concept of the narod and nationalism’s rise in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. How does realism’s individualist drive respond to the discovery of the nation or the people, which represents a new possibility of belonging at this moment? Kliger’s reading of the ending of War and Peace reveals the difficulty of separating the nation from the sovereign and embracing one without the other. He examines “four national scripts” that he uses to organize realist narratives from the same decade (p. 153). In the first, exemplified by Goncharov’s Oblomov, the progressive Stoltz at first seems to represent the possibility of escaping the national stupor figured in Oblomov through a free, active, individuality, but ends up a forceful figure of governmental authority. Thus, the meaning of Oblomov as national allegory becomes murkier. In the second, represented by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the spectral presence of Petrine ambition and authority projects a conservative vision of national belonging that fuses ruler and people. In the third, which takes Turgenev’s Spring Torrents and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as models, the protagonists are seduced away from personal fulfillment by a woman stand-in for the people whose magnetism cannot be withstood. Finally, the fourth script, seen in Goncharov’s The Precipice, is what Kliger calls “transgressive reenactment.” Here, the protagonist, having lost his way, rejoins “the primordial national substance buttressed by images of political and familial rule” (p. 153). The scale of Kliger’s achievement is, certainly within anglophone scholarship on Russian literature, unparalleled in its serious and thorough examination of the different strains of Russian novelist realism from the 1830s to the 1880s. Though it is not an easy read and at times it could have done with better editing to remove infelicities of language and typos, the rewards of close engagements with its arguments are manifold. The breadth of its scope provides significant insights into common strains of representation that will transform the ways we read and teach nineteenth-century Russian realist fiction. The comparative origins of Kliger’s argument and its rigor provide fruitful bases for other comparative analyses between Russian realist fiction and other non-western traditions in which different scenarios of sovereign or autocratic power continued to hold sway even in periods of rapid modernization, such as late Ottoman Turkish literature or the modern Japanese novel. This book stands out as the kind of truly path-breaking work of scholarship that only appears every couple of decades.