This satire of nineteenth-century Russian manners and social hierarchies centres around the rural estate of widow Natasya Ivanova Chulkova and her daughter Olenka who work hard to maintain their home and their lives in relative comfort. But as rural figures with modest property they are subjected to the metropolitan snobbery and disdain of two unwelcome guests. The first is Anna, a demanding cousin with her self-righteous religious preoccupation who goes out of her way to undermine and harry Natasya with demands and accusations. There is also Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov the self-absorbed former neighbour who rents their bathhouse for the sake of his health.

Natasya Ivanova is troubled by her sense of duty to her neighbours and perceived social betters, even against her better judgement. She struggles to meet the needs of her “guests” and the superior attitude of the urban nobility towards those they see as simple and rustic. Ocharov is keen to give advice and spends much of his time writing pseudo-intellectual pamphlets about Russia’s backwardness but he has allowed his own large estate languish into disrepair and in the aftermath of the emancipation he grapples ineffectually with the changed relationships with his former serfs. His paternalistic and patronising attitude sees the nobility remaining central to the organisation of the land with few real concessions to the needs of peasants and workers while Natasya and Olenka have managed to adapt to the sweeping changes with relative success.

Olenka objects to her mother’s servility, recognising the weaknesses of their guests. She’s an independent girl who trusts her own judgements more than society’s dictates. She’s often amused by the peccadilloes of Anna and Ocharov but increasingly resents their fussy demands on her mother. As the situation reaches a head with interference from all sides, Natasya and Olenka begin to fight back, recognising their own strength, their independence and hard work as more valuable than titles and prospects. In this they clearly represent the experience of their creators, who lived in similar circumstances.

There’s match-making, affairs, betrayal and social conflicts and Khvoshchinskaya brilliantly sends up the pomposity of her characters, clinging to the social conventions propping up the crumbling hierarchy. The incisive wit and humour are reminiscent of Jane Austen’s works, particularly in the clever dialogue, but the wider considerations of the political and social landscape give it a different intensity and the lack of a neat resolution is immensely satisfying.

Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk was a pleasant, unexpected surprise. Published in 1863, this gentle satire, play-like in its presentation, is a far cry from the usual 19th century Russian novel. The story takes place in 1862, a year after the Emancipation of the serfs. A note in the novel explains “the ensuing reforms required the landowners and peasants to agree which lands the former would make available for purchase to the latter. Until this arrangement was finalized, peasants were considered ‘temporarily obligated’; and continued to pay their landowners (in money or in kind) whatever they had been paying as serfs.”

The plot is simple: Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov, a man in his 40s who has ruined his health with his hard living, wants to holiday abroad and “take the waters” for his rheumatism, but short of funds. he decides instead, and especially in light of reforms, to spend the summer at his country estate, Beryozovka. When he arrives, he finds the place a wreck. Taking a walk, he stumbles across the well-ordered, much smaller, Sneki estate which belongs to Nastasya Ivanovna, a fifty-five-year old widow, “mistress of fifty souls,” who lives with her 17-year-old daughter, Olenka. Erast, who has pleasant childhood memories of Sneki, decides to ask if he can spend the summer there.

He was of modest height, stooped, and had a sunken chest; his long face had sunken cheeks and thin lips; he had thick sideburns and very sparse hair on his forehead, as well as bony hands with almost transparent skin, and eyes that were a bit dull, although they appeared to be very large due to the thin skin of the eyelids and pale forehead. Nastasya Ivanovna was not aware that many find a certain beauty in this sort of semi-decrepitude, as the loss of freshness in a man attends the formation of what is called une physionomie. She failed to realize how highly valued and how highly Ovcharov himself valued it. Ovcharov believed that he had une physionomie de penseur and would not have exchanged it for any other.

Erast, the owner of 500 souls, is socially, much higher class than Nastasya Ivanovna, and his request to stay at Sneki, is socially awkward for the widow. She does not have a spare bedroom, as she already has a surprise guest in the form of her second cousin, a fossilized spinster, the pious, well-respected but nosy and nasty, Anna Ilinishna Bobova.

city folk and country folk

Erast asks to stay in the newly constructed bathhouse, and while the widow accepts him as a guest, he insists on paying especially for the whey he demands daily for his health. An awkward dance of politeness then takes place between the widow and Erast, but finally a deal is struck. The widow is incredibly stressed by this but Erast is happy. The novel then follows the events of the summer:

new currents of education had blown through in a gust, that same education that is wafting from every corner of our native land; second, her home had been the site of a struggle between old and new ideas, and Nastasya Ivanovna had taken part in this struggle and, without realizing it, had even achieved a victory; and third, to her own amazement and the envy of the ladies of the neighboring small estates, she had come within a hair’s breadth of developing into an enlightened woman herself.

While the novel’s initial premise is Erast’s insistence of becoming a guest at Sneki and the widow’s subsequent dilemma (is she a host or a hotel keeper?), the novel spins on class, and this is where the city vs country fits in. The country widow is lower in the class system than Erast, and yet his home is in such a state of disrepair, he cannot stay there. Instead he relies on the widow who runs a well-ordered estate (even if Erast looks down on the decor). There are two other Muscovites who look down their noses at the widow and yet view her as a resource for whatever they need: Anna and Katerina Petrovna. While in reality Katerina is impoverished, her social position places her above the widow and the widow’s daughter, Olenka.

When Katerina who has become a matchmaker, decides, for convenience, to make a match between her impoverished lover, Semyon, a man she calls “mon protegé” and Olenka, she expects everything to go smoothly. The novel’s humour is definitely directed towards the three Muscovites who descend upon Sneki. These three represent the respectable pillars of Moscow society with Erast as the intellectual, Anna almost an institution of religious respectability, and Katerina, the matron who arranges marriages but can’t keep her own house in order. Katerina is a neglectful mother whose children are so ill-fed, they get food from the peasants, and son George can be found singing vaudeville songs. The ‘pious’ Anna is in reality, spiteful, manipulative and cunning. There’s plenty to find amusing in Erast, a man who thinks rather highly of himself, and while he’s a perfect example of the neglectful owner of a country estate, he amuses himself with writing poems, sketches, reviews and rants about the state of the country:

It is time, however, that we-those of rank, the decrepit aristocrats-realized that we won’t be around much longer. Very soon, we will die off. I’ll put it bluntly: there is no need for the upper crust to go on.

City Folk and Country Folk is a 19th century Russian novel of manners. If you’ve read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky novels , then you are used to complex, multi-plot novels with many characters who wrestle with massive moral dilemmas. City Folk and Country Folk is completely different. The novel, which is gently comic, has very few characters, and feels like a play. Characters enter and exit in very specific scene sets.

The author, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, is one of three sisters who were Russian writers. Sofia died at age 41 of abdominal tuberculosis

Review copy

Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

Reading the novel City Folk and Country Folk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (Городские и деревенские, 1863), feels like following a deceptively simple pattern with the tip of our fingers: we can cherish it for its softness to the touch; or we can look further into its intricacy, and admire the way the different threads weave in and turn over each other.

The book is centred around Nastasya Ivanovna, a widow of the lower rural gentry, and her 17-year-old daughter, Olenka. Their untroubled life together in the village of Snetki is suddenly put to test by the arrival of two unexpected guests. Anna Ilinishna, a distant city relative who has spent most of her life under the protection of princesses in Moscow, comes to live with them after falling out of favour. To make matters more complicated for Nastasya, her rich, well-travelled, long-absent neighbour, Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov, is determined to rent her unfinished bathhouse, after having discovered that his own estate is now uninhabitable.

Set in 1862, the story takes place shortly after the abolition of Russian serfdom by Alexander II’s Emancipation Manifesto of 1861. The highlight of the novel for me lies in the sharp light the author manages to throw upon the insecurity and the class clashes of the time. The author takes various intertwined social conflicts - between rich, not so rich and poor; between men and women; corruption and purity; city and countryside – and filters them into a straightforward, satirical narrative.

Strong characterisation is one of the delights of the book. The visitors, in particular, are mockingly portrayed: Anna wears her piety and religion like a mask, and is prone in creating intrigue; Ovcharov is a city (pseudo-)intellectual who suffers from hypochondria and a strong sense of self-importance – for instance, he is convinced that enlightened noble men like him have an important role to play in a changing Russia.

Here again the author's way of playing with contrasting elements provides for much of the novel’s biting wit: despite feeling (and being considered) inferior to Ovcharov, Nastasya is a hardworking woman who knows how to manage her estate, while her supposedly more intelligent neighbour has allowed his estate to fall into disrepair; Ovcharov claims to be an enlighted intellectual, but harbours incoherent theories and changes his ideas according to his convenience; he claims to want to live in a simple country manner, but cannot do without the expensive furniture and tapestry he brings along; convinced of the inferiority of women, Ovcharov remains largely oblivious to the fact that his infatuation for Olenka is not reciprocated.

Nastasya‘s self-doubt about her place among her visitors mirrors (and mocks) the larger theme of a changing society in which no one is really sure of their position anymore. Olenka is the driving force that helps her mother to overcome her sense of inferiority and duty towards the aristocracy.

Unlike other female characters in Russian 19th-century fiction, Olenka is coarse, self-assured and clever. She almost felt to me like your alter-ego, or a force of nature driving the narrative forward. Olenka can see through the visitors’ pretension and snobbery; she can see past their facades; Olenka laughs at the nonsense of social expectations based on class or gender; Olenka skilfully avoids Ovcharov’s attempts to “educate”/tame her. Olenka is a Russian delight.

Behind an entertaining comedy of manners, we are pleasantly presented with a subtle tale of two women standing up for themselves against repressive social norms; a tale of two women denying the unquestioning obedience obliviously expected from them by their so-called ‘socially and morally superior’ visitors; and, finally, a tale of two women learning to assert a free space, a well-deserved room of their own.

What a joy it has been to discover this unknown little gem of Russian literature. Despite having studied Russian and having explored that country’s literature for many years this one had completely passed me by, and I am so pleased to see it finally translated into English and become available to a wider audience. And to discover a book by a woman writer is an added pleasure – I didn’t even know there were any! Perhaps there are more hidden away waiting to be discovered. This charming novel is the story of a noblewoman, Nastasya Ivanovna, a widow, living happily with her teenage daughter Olenka on their estate in provincial Russia, one year after the liberation of the serfs. She’s a pragmatic woman with a common sense attitude to life, but the arrival of two visitors creates considerable upheaval into her previously calm existence. A gentle satire on Russian life, an engaging and entertaining social commentary, and an authentic portrait of Russian provincial society, the novel is a wonderful adjunct to other more well-known classics of Russian literature and is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

In "City Folk and Country Folk," not-particularly-rich minor gentry Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov has returned to his home village to take a rest cure and drink whey. His own estate is not inhabitable, so he ends up renting a bathhouse from his neighbor, Nastasya Ivanovna Chulkova. This draws the both of them into a summer of miscommunications and genteel misunderstandings.

"City Folk and Country Folk" has been compared to Jane Austen's novels, and it has that element of a 19th-century comedy of manners, full of social commentary. However, while Khvoshchinskaya's wit is not quite as elegantly cutting as Austen's, and the only love plot is foiled pretty quickly, "City Folk and Country Folk" is more overtly socially oriented than Austen's novels, more like something by Turgenev. It is a pointed portrait of the mid-19th-century minor Russian gentry, who are struggling to deal with the rapid social changes around them. The novel takes place in 1862, one year after the emancipation of the serfs, and both Nastasya Ivanovna and her former serfs, now peasants who still serve in her house or work her land, are trying to figure out how to negotiate the transition. Meanwhile, Erast Sergeyevich sits in his bathhouse and writes tracts about the bad behavior of modern women (the "woman question" was a major issue at the time, just as it continues to be to this day) and how women must be enlightened (by men) in order to gain a masculine way of thinking without becoming overly impertinent, forward, or independent. One of the more comic moments in the novel comes when he gives some of these tracts to Nastasya Ivanovna and her daughter Olenka, who are furiously offended by them, much to his surprise.

By Russian standards this is a very short novel, and it does not have the extensive philosophizing that readers might expect after reading the works of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. What it does have is a keen insight into the everyday problems of the low-level gentry and simple country folk who made up the bulk of the "real Russia" of the provinces (and who continue, in changed form, to do so today). The humor is not malicious, but it is at times quite sharp, and the tone and message are sneakily feminist--not only are most of the main characters women, but Nastasya Ivanovna is shown to be the one who is capable of managing an estate more or less competently, while her daughter Olenka is a decisive young lady who repels unwanted physical advances with her superior strength. There are very few, one might even say no, female authors in the 19th-century Russian canon, so seeing someone like Khvoshchinskaya being revived and translated is very welcome. Certainly worth reading for those interested in Russian literature or women authors who are finally getting the recognition they deserve.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

For lovers of Jane Austen, this is an excellent look into the social maneuverings of the changing classes in late 19th century Russia. The English translation is very readable, with many passages given in French, but glossed with their meaning at the bottom of the page. Overall, a decent read.

This was so hysterical! I really loved the characters, especially Nastasya and Obcharov. I read the book and then read the intro. and it all made sense. I think the story was a great illustration of the political climate at the time. A good way to be subversive. I didn't know about the emancipation of the serfs until reading this and I think that Nastasya's speech to her servants was wonderful. She was the voice of the future for the working class people of Russia. It was just long enough. I really didn't know about the sisters who wrote this either. Any similarities with the Brontes' is always interesting. Really enjoyed this read.

This Russian comedy of manners is set in the mid-19th Century, just after the emancipation of the serfs. Set in the country it concerns a widowed landowner and her daughter. The woman has lived in the country all her life. Entering into it are three people from the city with very different outlooks on life. One is a "holy woman" who is staying at the woman's house. Another is a man who grew up on the neighboring estate and who is staying at her still-unfinished bathhouse. The third is an impoverished noblewoman who is a matchmaker.

Needless to stay these people come into conflict with the woman. The book is full of satiric encounters between her and the city folk, between her and her daughter,, and between the city folk themselves. All of this leads to confusion in the heroine and to a comic and satisfying conclusion.

The divide between country and city is a popular trope in Russian fiction (at least as far as I can tell with the handful of Russian novels I’ve read). City people believe themselves to be more cultured and intellectually sophisticated than their rustic countrymen. The country people are baffled by the affectations of the urbanites. I hadn’t seen any stories take on these assumptions until I read Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s Country Folk and City Folk (translated by Nora Seligman Favorov). This comic novel—reminiscent of Jane Austen and flavored with the usual Russian philosophizing—takes place around 1860 in the provincial town of Snetki. A trio of Muscovite aristocrats descends on Nastasya Ivanova and her daughter, Olenka and try to manipulate the “bumpkins,” only to realize that these country folk have their share of common sense.

Nastasya Ivanova and Olenka are quite different from each other, though they are an affectionate pair. Nastasya is accommodating and frets if she thinks she’s failed as a hostess and gentlewoman. To Olenka, everything is a joke and she rarely shies from saying exactly what she thinks. They’re cheerful enough living on their estate until Anna Ilinishna, Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov, and Katerina Petrovna Dolgoroskaya turn up in Snetki. Anna wants a free place to live while she waits for the princess she was living with to realize her mistake in turning Anna out. Anna is a “holy woman,” an exceedingly pious woman on the surface but a con artist underneath. Erast Sergeyevich, on the other hand, is a bit more honest. He also wants accommodation, having run through all his funds and learning that even the manor house was dismantled and sold off. Both Anna and Erast find a place to live. (Erast rents the newly built bathhouse.) Katerina Petrovna wants to marry Olenka to Semyon, Katerina’s lover, so that Semyon can have an income and a reason to stay in the country.

Olenka is wise to all of these schemes pretty much from the start, but it takes Nastasya a while to stop trying to see the best in these exasperating people. It also takes a while for the action in Country Folk and City Folk to get rolling. Erast is given many opportunities to embarrass himself at the beginning of the novel. To Russians, I suppose, Erast is a hilariously incoherent social philosopher but I was rolling my eyes hard along with Olenka. When the manipulations start in earnest, I saw a lot of similarities to Austen’s comedies of manners as characters schemed to win over opinions and maneuver people all over the place.

I requested Country Folk and City Folk from NetGalley because I’ve been keen to read another female Russian writer ever since I read Teffi’s Memories. I’ve really enjoyed reading another side of Russian literature: comical rather than depressing, lightly social rather than heavily philosophical. I’m very glad Columbia University Press published this novel, which was previously unavailable in English. It’s a wonderful read for its sarcastic honesty and the way it turns old stories inside out.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 15 August 2017.

Written in the 1860's and translated from Russian to English for the first time, City Folk and Country Folk is a wonderful antidote to the usual Russian literature that is taught in the US. Nastasya is a widow, living with teenage daughter. A distant relative and a rich neighbor all move into their bathhouse one summer. Anna, the relative, sulks around the house, trying to prove to people that she's being mistreated. Ovcharov, the rich neighbor, feels he's changing lives, while Nastasya just finds him annoying.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book!

Premise sounded great but this just wasn't for me. I would not compare to the Brontes.

“And what kind of illnesses do we have here in the country? All good-for-nothing; we don’t have the more refined illnesses here. In town, if you look around, well, there they do have them.”

Why does Nastasya Ivanovna, a widow, feel so inferior to the upper classes? Just how does her teenage daughter go from vexing her widowed mother to helping her find her bite? The wit is in young Olenka’s reactions to the snobbery around her. That she perceives Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov as ridiculous and a hassle, that she resents giving up her room for her sanctimonious relative Anna, unimpressed by her status and holiness which to be fair, would annoy anyone is just what enlivens this novel.” I’m staying out of it; I’m staying out of it,” Anna Ilinishna interrupted her, waving her hands. “Do as you see fit. It’s in my nature to prevent evil- that’s all.” Shocked a man is staying in the unfinished bathhouse, Anna is too pure for these lesser relatives. Olenka sees past the social masks everyone wears, especially her Auntie Anna’s holy facade. Just how accommodating must Nastasya be to everyone? Olenka is exhausted and irritated by Anna’s ‘suffering’ and complaining nature. Olenka’s youth is refreshing and her insight, though less educated than her ‘betters’, is much wiser.

Ovcharov is unimpressed by the home straight away, seeing the shabby old mixed with the tasteless and ugly. He should know, with his rich fashionable tastes, he-a much more cultured, worldly being. Living in the ‘backwoods’, so self proud of ‘roughing it’ with the ‘rural gentry’ it’s hard not to laugh at his snobbery. He longs to bring the peasants up to his level, him being intelligent and elegant of course in comparison to the savages. He laughs at them, not imagining he, in all his rank and glory, is comical to young teenager Olenka. The working class has their own dirt on their superiors, as they always do. To Olenka, the wealthy writer Ovcharov , is nothing but a troublemaker and how she loves to humor him, but isn’t in love with him- though he doesn’t know it. He, much like her Auntie Anna, is just another person causing her mother nothing but stress! He sees her as young, and beneath his class, he the wiser older man and of course he ‘respects ignorance.’ Ha! That is, when he isn’t set on ‘educating her’! His thoughts on femininity and the way it’s fading with the new generation certainly seems to be something said even today, much the same way the old thinks the younger generation is crude, ignorant and so on and so forth. It could be written today! My favorite ‘thought’ he shares ” They were inveterate dreamers idolizers, they read Byron and George Sand, without understanding it, but that didn’t matter.” They didn’t understand it, huh? Those… women! Well, at least he notes there is more variety in women in his present now than with his generation. Men always know just what women should be, lucky for us. So what if women are losing their femininity, which he is sure they are!

I love Olenka’s ‘coarseness’, particularly on their promenade when he is attempting to be manly and carry her across the stream. He, who is ill… “What on earth are you doing? I’m stronger than you are. If you like it, it might be better for me to carry you.” Fiery little minx she is, our Olenka. Will her mother learn to stand up to the very people she is terrified of upsetting? Finally realize what her daughter knows, that they aren’t necessarily ‘better’? Will Anna remain in residence torturing the mother and daughter forever, besmirching their characters? Will Nastasya Ivanovna wake up to the devious nature of her relative? Will Ovcharov take his leave and cease his attempts to educate the ignorant backwoods folk?

This really is what it claims to be, an unsung gem of nineteenth-century Russian literature, it was a delightful read that reminds me of the English classics, like Pride and Prejudice. What’s better than biting wit?

Publication Date: August 15, 2017

Columbia University Press

Per la prima volta, un romanzo di cui mi si dice che "ricorda Jane Austen" mantiene le promesse.
C'è ironia, satira sociale, occhio acuto e grande attenzione ai problemi e alle follie del proprio tempo in questo romanzo, appena riproposto in traduzione inglese, misconosciuto per un secolo; e sebbene la levità miracolosa di Jane sia lontana, pure non si può non sorridere dei maneggi dei nobili di città e delle credenze dei nobili di campagna, volti a preservare gottescamente un passato che non è più.
Da scoprire, davvero.

Written in Russian in the 1860s and just now translated into English for the first time, this novel is a light satire to accompany the serious philosophy of contemporaries like Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy.

The plot: Nastasya Ivanovna is a member of the rural lower gentry, a widow living contentedly with her teenage daughter Olenka. Their summer is interrupted when a distant relative, Anna Ilinishna, comes to live with them, and a rich neighbor, Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov, decides to move into their bathhouse. Anna Ilinishna has spent most of her life living with various princesses in Moscow, and is widely renowned for her religious faith and ability to call down miracles with her prayers. She spends her time in their house sulking and trying to convince witnesses that she's being horrendously mistreated. Ovcharov is an intellectual writer who usually spends his summers travelling to various fashionable European resorts and is only in the countryside because he's decided he needs to drink fresh whey daily for his health. He's convinced that his presence is the philosophical, urbane, and enlightened light come to change everyone's lives: from his serfs to Nastasya Ivanovna to Olenka, who he is of course sure is in love with him and his cutting-edge clothes. In reality Olenka thinks he's a boring old man with weird habits, but Ovcharov is spectacularly bad at realizing this. He also tends to conveniently change his political theories to go along with whoever is flattering him at that moment.

It's a very fun book, and is a completely charming antidote to classic Russian literature (at least of the sort that gets read in the US). My one complaint is that the ending felt very abrupt, but when your only problem is that you wanted to spend more time with the characters, you know it's a good book.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2011986343