Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels: A European Literary History

Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels rewrites the history of nineteenth-century Russian novels. Hilde Hoogenboom examines how Russians created a new literature against substantial odds: 90 per cent of novels published in Russia through the 1850s were foreign.

Using data from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century catalogues, Hoogenboom visualizes readers’ large appetite for translated sentimental and sentimental realist novels, many by such internationally renowned women as Madame de Genlis, Sophie Cottin, and George Sand. The book reveals that, contrary to stereotypes of emotional excess, Sentimentalism was a tenacious, opportunistic chameleon that allowed writers to both challenge and reaffirm the social order. Russian writers used European novels as they sought to understand themselves and the challenges of their position as hereditary service nobles in charge of an empire with fifty million serfs. Together, noblemen and noblewomen adapted the fundamental European literary conversation – on a sentimental moral education in duty to the greater good – to their search for a life of purpose. Hoogenboom’s study sheds new light on Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy and introduces readers to major authors Evgeniia Tur and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia. Their debates and rivalries with each other and with European novelists gave birth to an exciting, influential literature.

Hilde Hoogenboom is an associate professor of Russian at Arizona State University.