Description

In the Talnikov household, violence is in the air. Natasha grows up in a chaotic and abusive family, surrounded by screaming relatives and scurrying cockroaches. Her father whips his children but dotes on his pets. Her aunts and governess take a grim satisfaction in doling out discipline–in between primping and preening for suitors. Amid this bleakness, Natasha and her siblings conspire to steal stray moments of childhood joy. Avdotya Panaeva s The Talnikov Family portrays a tumultuous upbringing in 1820s St. Petersburg with equal parts wit and rage. Modeled on the author s own life before her marriage to a nobleman writer, this sensational novel joined nineteenth-century Russia s intense debates about gender, sexuality, and revolution. It was swiftly suppressed after its original appearance in 1848, the censor calling it cynical and undermining of parental power. Panaeva published a number of iconic Russian writers; her own novel anticipates Dostoevsky s frenetic quarrels and heightened tone as well as Chernyshevsky s sweeping radicalism. Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Panaeva considers the experiences of servants and workers, and she offers a critique of the family as ruthless as any other in literature. In Fiona Bell s vivid translation, The Talnikov Family offers readers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Russian literature and the society that shaped it.