The Talnikov Family

By Avdotya Panaeva, translated by Fiona Bell

Columbia University Press 2024

Born in 1820, Avdotya Panaeva was a writer and salon hostess who mingled in the highest circles of the fecund 19th century Russian literary scene. Organised along with her husband, these gatherings attracted literary giants like Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. Aside from facilitating all this hobnobbing, Panaeva wrote a number of novels, stories, and memoirs, publishing much of her work under the pseudonym V. Stanitsky. In 1848, her literary debut The Talnikov Family was suppressed by the Russian state censors on the charge of being "cynical" and "undermining of parental power", and it was only in 1927, satisfying the ideological underpinnings of a new regime, that her work was allowed to be published legally and in her own name.

In her notes, translator Fiona Bell informs that only one other unabridged translation of Panaeva's work is available in English, making this slim offering from Columbia University Press a valuable addition for those interested in the fiction of an author as yet unknown outside her own culture.

The novel portrays life in such a tumultuous 1820s St. Petersburg family that it makes the dysfunctional families of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky appear positively serene and wholesome. Modelled on some elements of the author's own upbringing, the book is narrated from the point of view of Natasha, a young girl caught in an abusive household where the father "[keeps] the same malicious calm whether he was plunging a fork into the dog's back or throwing a plate at his wife", and the mother has made a sport out of boxing ears and malignant berating. Natasha is part of a brood of children (some of their deaths provide fresh opportunities for the family to display their horrid callousness) who live in a constant state of fear with their parents and several aunts. In the course of the novel, other relatives, from an uncle who hums folk songs while whipping his nephew into a blubbering mess, to a drunk grandmother hopelessly trying to extricate her grandchildren from this nest of vipers, and a demonic governess, slip in and out of Natasha's litany of domestic abuses. From regular beatings, whippings, and forced starvation, to an incessant drip of verbal assault, the underfoot realism in Natasha's perspective narrates the goings-on of this household in unflinching detail, a stretch of sordid reading occasionally relieved by the mordant humor present in the bickering and cattiness present between the members of the family when they aren't focusing their wrath on the children, or in the hapless haranguing of a cowardly grandfather fond of peddling omens.

Fiona Bell's Panaeva comes across in largely flat and breathless prose, some of which has a frenetic energy anticipating Dostoevsky. There are rare instances of clever phrasing to describe a character, like the governess with a waist so constricted that "her rather fat and wide shoulders ... were completely purple and resembled cuts of raw beef", or whose "lips smeared with pink lipstick, looked like two red earthworms", but usually the rhetoric never rises above the prosaic. Structurally, the book doesn't contain a strong narrative thrust, constructed mostly around vignettes, until the last quarter which resolves some narrative tension. We never see Natasha's interiority develop, let alone that of any other character, and the book very rarely flirts with a more phantasmagoric register to address the tortured psyches in question; something stranger and more effective than the morally dampening effect of piling abuse on top of abuse, a richer examination of a childhood where gluing playing cards to the backs of cockroaches counted as entertainment:

Like a sexless being, neither a girl nor a boy, and unloved by anyone, I was left to nature ... I was lying in a fever next to my brother ... The breathing of my siblings terrified me. It seemed as if they were not sleeping but had died, and they were lying not in bed but in graves. When I closed my eyes, it seemed to me that it wasn't my brother but a giant cockroach lying beside me, touching me with it's antenna.

For a book this transparent in highlighting brutality and degradation across a vast cultural and historical divide, the translator's odd decision to bowdlerize the novel by omitting racial slurs from the main text and hiding them in the notes at the back was unfortunate, and not a little ironic. In this curio from an era of waxing change in Russian literature, at least Panaeva gives the reader no place to hide.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi