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 commonsense, 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 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.

About the Author
Sofia Khvoshchinskaya (1824-1865), writer, translator, and painter, published fiction and social commentary in Russia's most influential journals. She and her sister Nadezhda wrote to support their family, struggling members of the nobility, alternating long stretches of toil in their native Ryazan Province with visits to Russia's capitals, where they interacted with some of the country's leading intellectuals. Nora Seligman Favorov is a translator of Russian literature, poetry, and history.

Reviews
A single man of property comes to a country village-unsettling young and older ladies. The village is in Russia, soon after the emancipation of the serfs; Ovcharov is a hypochondriac intellectual. "A comical people," he reflects at one point, and the women and the reader must agree. Admirers of Jane Austen will delight in this charming satire. -- Rachel Brownstein, The Graduate Center at CUNY


Awards
Winner of Best Literary Translation into English, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 2018.



Book Information
ISBN 9780231183031
Author Sofia Khvoshchinskaya
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press