Belarus: prospects of a middle power

of realism in literature and the arts in the Russian literary context, among them Molly Brunson’s Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890 (2016); Vadim Shneyder’s Russia’s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov (2020); Margarita Vaysman’s, Aleksei Vdovin’s, Il′ia Kliger’s, and Kirill Ospovat’s edited volume Russkii realizm XIX veka: Obshchestvo, znanie, povestvovanie (2020); Chloë Kitzinger’s Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel (2021); and others. In applying metafiction theory to the study of the Russian novel, Vaysman has written a theoretically elegant study that enhances our understanding of realism and Russia’s unique form of it.