Sovremennik – Punctured Lines

Avdotya Panaeva was born in 1820 and first began publishing her work in one of Russia’s premier literary magazines, Sovremennik, in 1846. The author of numerous short stories, novels, memoirs, as well as collaborative projects, she has only recently begun to achieve the recognition that she deserves in the English-speaking world.

On October 8, 2024, Columbia University Press published Fiona Bell’s translation of Panaeva’s first novel, The Talnikov Family. This became the second full-length translation of Panaeva’s work to English. In my review of the book in On the Seawall, I mention several social and historical factors that have kept this delightful novel from English-language readers for so long. In writing about this book, I have relied, in part, on Bell’s introduction to the novel and on the research by Margarita Vaysman, whose book Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel devotes a section to Panaeva’s work, including an excerpt that ran in Punctured Lines.

Today, it is my pleasure to discuss this novel and Panaeva’s work more broadly with her translator Fiona Bell and scholar Margarita Vaysman.

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We’re proud to present an excerpt from Margarita Vaysman’s book-length study Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel. Published by Legenda, an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association (where it is available to order), this book focuses on the role of metafiction in the Russian novelistic tradition. The excerpt below is but a small taste of the depth and breadth of this project and highlights the work of one important practitioner of this technique, Avdot’ia Panaeva.

Avdot’ia Panaeva (1819-1893) was a successful novelist and short story writer, who made significant contributions to the development of ideas on education equality, marriage, women’s financial and property rights, and the problem of domestic violence. She was also a common-law wife of poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who was valorized in Soviet literary criticism and the popular canon. We are deeply grateful to Vaysman that, as a part of her research, she illuminates the process through which Panaeva’s legacy as a novelist and short story author has been excised from the canon of nineteenth-century Russian literature and begins the work of restoring it to its rightful place.

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