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Author Khvoshchinskai︠a︡, Sofʹi︠a︡ Dmitrievna, 1828-1865, author.

Title City folk and country folk / Sofia Khvoshchinskaya ; translated by Nora Seligman Favorov
Published New York : Columbia University Press, [2017]

Copies

Description 1 online resource (unpaged)
Series Russian library
Russian library (Columbia University. Press)
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Hoogenboom, Hilde -- Notes on the Translation -- Part I. City Folk and Country Folk -- 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4 -- 5 -- 6 -- 7 -- 8 -- 9 -- 10 -- PART II. City Folk and Country Folk -- 11 -- 12 -- 13 -- 14 -- 15 -- 16 -- 17 -- 18 -- 19
Summary An unsung gem of nineteenth-century Russian literature, City Folk and Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of Russia's aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites in the 1860s. Translated into English for the first time, the novel weaves an engaging tale of manipulation, infatuation, and female assertiveness that takes place one year after the liberation of the empire's serfs. Upending Russian literary clichés of female passivity and rural gentry benightedness, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya centers her story on a common-sense, hardworking noblewoman and her self-assured daughter living on their small rural estate. The antithesis of the thoughtful, intellectual, and self-denying young heroines created by Khvoshchinskaya's male peers, especially Ivan Turgenev, seventeen-year-old Olenka ultimately helps her mother overcome a sense of duty to her "betters" and leads the two to triumph over the urbanites' financial, amorous, and matrimonial machinations. Sofia Khvoshchinskaya and her writer sisters closely mirror Britain's Brontës, yet Khvoshchinskaya's work contains more of Jane Austen's wit and social repartee, as well as an intellectual engagement reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell's condition-of-England novels. Written by a woman under a male pseudonym, this brilliant and entertaining exploration of gender dynamics on a post-emancipation Russian estate offers a fresh and necessary point of comparison with the better-known classics of nineteenth-century world literature
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references
Notes Translated from the Russian
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on December 22, 2023)
Subject Country life -- Russia -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction
Gentry -- Russia -- Fiction
FICTION -- Literary.
Country life
Gentry
Russia
Genre/Form Novels
Fiction
History
Novels.
Romans.
Form Electronic book
Author Favorov, Nora Seligman, translator.
LC no. 2016059922
ISBN 9780231544504
0231544502
Other Titles Gorodskie i derevenskie. English