Vadim Shneyder's excellent study contributes to a growing field of economic criticism in Russian literary scholarship. Focusing on the realist epoch, he elucidates how Lev Tolstoi, Fedor Dostoevskii, Anton Chekhov, and other nineteenth-century authors articulated the “economic imaginary” of Russia's capitalist modernity. As Shneyder argues, “Russian realism confronted capitalism as a problem—of social thought, of historical imagination, and of aesthetic representation” (177), and his book thoughtfully explores these three dimensions of this “problem.” Initially, capitalist practices resisted methods of realist representation, a limitation that individual works reflexively conceded in literary structure. However, as capitalism became increasingly central to pre-revolutionary Russian life, it influenced representational conventions of setting, character, and plot, to the point of threatening the very viability of the realist project.
The book's five chapters focus largely on fiction published after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, an event that transformed Russia's economy and society. The introduction outlines the evolution and conceptualization of the Russian economy, and assesses the treatment of economic activity and class identity in works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol΄, and Ivan Goncharov. Chapter 1 examines realist approaches to the factory site, spanning texts by canonical authors (Gogol΄, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Leskov), as well as several who are now less commonly read (Dmitrii Grigorovich, Fedor Reshetnikov, Petr Boborykin, Dmitrii Mamin-Sibiriak). These works, Shneyder contends, elaborate a composite poetics of the factory interior, depicted as an incomprehensible space from the estranged perspective of a newcomer. The second chapter explores Tolstoi's engagement with agricultural and industrial labor in Anna Karenina, and the way these systems either enable or suppress realist representation. While the mowing scene on Levin's estate successfully integrates labor and literary technique, it is nonetheless predicated on the social estate and land ownership of the Russian nobility. Chapter 3 interprets Dostoevskii's Idiot as a contest between two money economies, merchant and capitalist, and their corresponding potential for literary representation. Whereas the merchant fortunes inherited by Rogozhin and Myshkin are inert, their money fetishized as physical objects, the fungible capital of Totskii and Epanchin circulates invisibly through conversion. Their capitalist activity ensures future prosperity, but it also eludes realist methods of emplotment and psychological exposition; Myshkin and Rogozhin, by comparison, exhibit the complex interiority and eventful lives essential to realist narrative. The fourth chapter examines how The Brothers Karamazov deconstructs the convertible potential of money, and applies money's transactional equivalency to the novel's ethical and theological discourses. Dostoevskii grounds his model of “human economy” in Zosima's vision of universal responsibility, securing the possibility of narrative beyond the monetary economy. Chapter 5 analyzes how Chekhov's fiction of the 1890s presents a “naturalized” vision of Russian capitalism as an inevitable economic and social order. In this final case study, realism has incorporated capitalist characters, plots, and environments, but at the expense of meaning, as historical causality, narrativity, and even human communication recede from the representational purview of Chekhov's late prose.
While Shneyder focuses closely on the work of Tolstoi, Chekhov, and especially Dostoevskii, his readings of the three headlining authors is complimented by illuminating analysis of many other realist texts; the approach lends horizontal breadth to Russia's Capitalist Realism, and evidences the pervasive extent of literature's attention to capitalism in the period. Among its many valuable insights, the book demonstrates how Russia's emerging free market influenced the actual poetics of realism. Shneyder details how realist methods of narrative focalization, character interiority, and even empirical observation are problematized in attempts to represent capitalist activity, from industrial labor to commodity circulation. These close readings are facilitated by an interdisciplinary methodology that draws upon narrative theory and New Economic Criticism, and balanced by careful attention to economic and social histories that shaped the material conditions of realist literary production.
Referencing the late Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism (2009), the title of Shneyder's study alludes to both a historical literary tendency, and to the way realist fiction expedited the normalization of Russian capitalism as an ineluctable economic reality. Fisher notes how capitalism articulates itself as “a pervasive atmosphere,” an ideology assimilated not as value, but as fact (16). Though Russian capitalism had achieved this ambient quality by the end of the nineteenth century, when Shneyder's book concludes, industrial production and the free market seemed alien and alarming in the 1860s—as capitalism threatened traditional economic and social relations, and Russian realism approached its full development as a discursive system. Russia's Capitalist Realism traces how literary realism evolved from a defamiliarized outlook on capitalism, to one that reflected capitalist practices as familiar, but alienating. This well-written study combines rigorous analysis, expansive research, and persuasive argumentation; it is highly recommended to scholars and students of nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as readers interested in literary theory and Russian cultural history.
