Literary References

Tolstoy and Chekhov

The business of comparing national literatures across languages and time is anything but tricky. Take the English 19^th century prose from Jane Austen through Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Trollope, George Eliot, Hardy, to Joseph Conrad. By any yardstick it would be recognized as an exceptional constellation of talent. How exceptional? Well, maybe not so exceptional when one brings in the Russians—the 19^th century Russian novelists and short story writers, that is. What we have there is a fully comparable embarrass des riches: Pushkin (yea, “Eugene Onegin” is a novel) Lermontov (“A Hero of Our Time”), Gogol, Herzen, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov.

It may not come as a complete surprise to readers of this blog or of my books that I love 19^th century Russian literature (I love the English 19^th century too). In fact, the alert reader of The Estate of Wormwood and Honey might notice that the book pays specific homage, in a number of instances, to these 19^th century Russian writers by making references to the various themes that were important either in their lives or in their books.

I challenge you to engage in some harmless literary detective work. Your object is to match a theme in the book to at least one 19^th century Russian writer from among those listed above.  Some connections are fairly obvious, others might not be. 

Look for these themes/references in The Estate of Wormwood and Honey:

1. Battle of Borodino (Chapter XXX)
2. Inanities of provincial courtship (Chapter XXXII)
3. Libraries (Chapter XXXII)
4. Provincial officialdom  (Chapter V)
5. Close bonds with old servants  (Chapter X)
6. Siberian penal settlements  (Chapter XXVIII)
7. Losing one’s prized possessions to gambling  (Chapter XXVI)
8. Cruelty to and abuse of one’s own family members  (Chapters XXII, XXIII, and XXVIII)
9. Elderly decorated officials and their pretty young wives Chapter (Chapter V)
10. Obrok vs. barshchina (modalities of settling serfdom obligations) (Chapter VIII)
11. German relatives (Chapters X, XIX, and XXIII)
12. Natural sons (Chapter XVII and many others)