Anna Berman's rich and engaging study of the family novels of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii shifts the usual critical focus from erotic love or intergenerational conflict to siblinghood, tracing the trajectories of both writers as they seek to negotiate the question of love through the polyvalent concept of brotherhood. Building on Juliet Mitchell's work, Berman refocuses our frame of reference from the vertical relations of the family to horizontal or lateral ones (6). In the case of Tolstoi, she sees his fiction as unfolding according to the three phases of love which he later universalized in The Kingdom of God is within You as “the personal, or animal,” “the social, or the pagan,” and “the universal, or the divine” (26). His early works explore love's personal aspect, culminating in the ideal families of the end of War and Peace; Anna Karenina embodies the tensions of the second, social, stage; and Resurrection marks the all-encompassing concept of divine and universal brotherhood encapsulated in Tolstoi's recollection of his brother's dream of all mankind as Ant-brothers, a model which ultimately excludes individual love. In contrast, Dostoevskii never depicts the ideal family. In his early works sibling bonds work within the ubiquitous model of triple love to suggest a powerful alternative to the masochistic suffering created by erotic love. In his later works they work in the vacuum provided by the broken or “accidental family,” serving as the building blocks for a model of universal brotherhood that does not exclude the personal.
By interspersing analysis of her two central subjects' novels, Berman contrasts the parallel development of Tolstoi's and Dostoevskii's representations of siblinghood, showing how they came to such differing conclusions about the nature of universal brotherhood. Chapter 1 explores the foundations of Tolstoi's view of siblinghood in the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand before examining the formative role played by sibling relations in his Childhood trilogy. A reading of War and Peace convincingly shows how siblinghood comes to serve as an alternative to the increasingly problematic notion of erotic love in that novel. Chapter 2 moves to Dostoevskii's pre-1870s works, particularly Crime and Punishment, which reject western models of erotic love and the successes or failures of marriages in favor of plots “fueled by the shifting nexus of lateral relations the characters must navigate as they seek connection in a dark, isolating world” (77).
Chapter 3 examines Tolstoi's expanded model of kinship in Anna Karenina, which Berman identifies as a novelistic world “structured and defined by lateral bonds,” where “literal siblings become the paradigmatic model for other lateral kinship relations” (85). She persuasively demonstrates how this kinship model maps onto the opposition between svoi and chuzhoi which Richard Gustafson has seen as lying at the heart of Tolstoi's psychological make-up (93), and how its outer limits emerge at the novel's ending, when both Levin and Tolstoi reject the notion of a brotherhood that is expansive enough to include those fighting in another country. Chapter 4 deals with Dostoevskii's late novels, showing how the absent sibling bonds and broken families of Demons are finally regenerated through the restoration of universal brotherhood in The Brothers Karamazov. Berman's examination of Smerdyakov as a test case of brotherhood, not just for the Karamazovs but also for the reader, reveals intriguing potential ruptures in Dostoevskii's utopian vision. Chapter 5 examines Resurrection as the apex of Tolstoi's unfolding vision of universal brotherhood and its clash with individual love.
The book's great strength is its shift in focus to the sibling relationship and the new perspective it offers on familiar works: the lateral structures of Anna Karenina, for instance, or the fourth Karamazov brother. This perspective can also be the source of its weaknesses, in instances where the exclusive focus on siblinghood threatens to overwhelm readings of complex novels; in the case of Crime and Punishment the attention paid to Raskolnikov and Dunya's relationship raises many unanswered questions about connections to the plot of Raskolnikov's Idea. Berman's analysis is mainly rooted in ethical and formal questions, and while the influence of historical and social forces in shaping the distinctive representations of the family is brought up in a comparative context, it is given short shrift. The reader is left wondering about the motivation behind the accidental family theme. I would have liked a more thorough and detailed reading of The Adolescent, which is mainly used here as a lens through which to examine The Brothers Karamazov. Berman's book casts new light on the important genre of the family novel and will be of interest not only to scholars of the nineteenth century Russian novel but also to scholars of other novelistic traditions seeking an insight into the specifics of the Russian novelistic situation.
