Survival as victory: Ukrainian women in the Gulag

Abstract

the narrative structure of the novel long noted by Dostoevskii scholars. With the rise of capitalism, monetary value becomes ever more difficult to pin down, and the resulting crisis in representation affects the realist endeavour itself. The problem of value becomes even more palpable in The Brothers Karamazov, the subject of Chapter 4. Shneyder examines the circulation of the 3,000 rubles Fedor Karamazov was supposed to give Grushen′ka and the crisis in value the money undergoes; Shneyder shows how ultimately it points back toward another system of circulation: Zosima’s teachings of active love. The two chapters on Dostoevskii reveal that writer’s rootedness in the discursive context of nascent capitalism, thus revealing continuities between his worldview and those of his less well-known peers. Dostoevskii, shows Shneyder, was at once a man of his time and a poet of modernity whose representation of capitalism takes on even greater significance in retrospect. Chapter 5 deals with the period of Chekhov’s later works, when the representation of industrial capitalism had already become a mainstream literary preoccupation. While traces of capitalism are already part of Chekhov’s characters’ daily reality, they remain elusive, part of the broader fin-de-siècle “epistemic murkiness” (29) of the Chekhovian universe. Shneyder argues that in works such as The Cherry Orchard, “A Woman’s Kingdom,” and “A Case History,” Chekhov – unlike his literary predecessors, for whom capitalism remains stubbornly unnarratable – is able to reincorporate capitalists into narrative, but only at the cost of their connections to their factories and businesses, which are no longer objects of their agency. Ultimately, industrial enterprises become subject to the same contested origin stories and representational conflict as the gentry estate, as the literature regurgitates the new challenges represented by capitalism and realist poetics learns to rise to those challenges. In brief, this masterly contribution to the field of nineteenth-century Russian prose fiction is a must-read for specialists, students, and the general public alike. One of its great strengths is that it encompasses not only works of Russian literature canonical in the West but also works that have been rarely if ever examined in scholarship written in English. In this regard, it will also make nineteenth-century Russian prose more accessible to those who cannot read Russian and allow for more comparative study of the Russian novel alongside its English, French, and other European contemporaries.