(Rev.) Anna A. Berman. The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880. Oxford UP, 2023. Pp. x + 272. $101.99. ISBN 978-0-19-286662-2 (hb).

Dickens Quarterly. 2023. Vol. 40. No. 4. P. 497–499.

Goroshkova R.

Berman explains the relevance and importance of this book by the fact that she is fighting against the "aesthetic racism" that, in the words of Elaine Freedgood, "has placed the British and French nineteenth-century novel at the masterful, still center of […] novel history" (qtd. 5), and confronting the unfairness of forgetting dominant literary figures. For, "one could hardly claim that Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev were not important contributors to the nineteenth-century novel tradition" (5). The book was written, obviously, before the recent events began, but being released in the middle of speculations about the cancelling of Russian culture, and on the background of rumors about the exclusion of Dostoevsky's novels from the curricula of American Universities, it becomes a heartening ray of sanity, revealing a unique perspective on how literature of both the British and the Russian empires digested and problematized social questions of their time, developing defensive mechanisms against toxic ideology and deleterious beliefs.

Keywords: English novel, Russian novel, Dickens, Dostoevsky