Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels explores the emergence of the Russian novel from a transnational perspective, using statistical analysis to reveal its integration within broader European literary networks. Contrary to assumptions of cultural backwardness, Hilde Hoogenboom argues convincingly that late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia possessed a vibrant literary market and a large, well-read public. Significantly, most books read by Russian audiences were original works or translations in French, German, and English. Establishing a place in the literary field required Russian authors to actively contend with the dominance of foreign rivals, including many women. Drawing on impressive book publishing data, Hoogenboom argues that a pivotal influence on the emergent Russian prose fiction was the sentimental novel, a genre dominated by women writers. Following Margaret Cohen, Hoogenboom suggests that the typical sentimental novel centered on a “war of duties”: the Enlightenment duty of self-fulfillment versus patriarchal obligations to family and kin. While European sentimental authors depicted the rising bourgeoisie, Russian writers—members of the gentry bound to state service since Peter the Great—adapted the genre to educate the service nobility, promoting virtues such as loyalty to the tsar and responsibility for their estates and serfs. Consequently, Russian authors reframed the genre’s central conflict as the tension between personal happiness and service duty. This “prologue” (Part One) is followed by seven detailed case studies organized into three more parts.

Part Two examines the development of Russian noble service culture from the 1780s to the 1850s. The first chapter in this section (Ch. 3) explores Nikolai Karamzin’s indebtedness to the French educator and novelist Madame de Genlis, whose literary and philosophical works he translated. Chapter 4 focuses on Vassilii Zhukovskii’s collaborations with his nieces, Avdotia Elagina and Anna Zontag, with whom he co-translated works by Genlis, August von Kotzebue, Maria Edgeworth, and other authors, effectively jumpstarting the young women’s literary careers. Chapter 5 moves beyond literary focus to examine Empress Maria Feodorovna’s role as patron of several institutes for noblewomen and one of the architects of the official service nobility culture.

Part Three argues that Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, and Ivan Goncharov upheld the ideals of Russia’s service nobility while also revealing their often-overlooked debts to women writers. Drawing on Cohen’s claim that Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal rejected sentimentality in order to marginalize their female rivals, Hoogenboom identifies comparable dynamics in Russian literature. She argues, for instance, that the plot centered on Masha Mironova in The Captain’s Daughter is indebted to Sophie Cottin’s Elisabeth, yet Pushkin erased all references to Cottin in the novel and disparaged her in his criticism. Likewise, the young Turgenev is said to have attacked Evgeniia Tur’s The Niece to sideline a rival. Yet this argument seems doubtful given Pushkin’s admiration for Madame de Staël and Turgenev’s for George Sand. To see why they disparaged some sentimental women novelists but praised others, we must take into account matters of style, an aspect Hoogenboom, consistent with her Bourdieusian suspicion of aesthetics, overlooks. A close reading of Turgenev’s review shows that he criticized Tur’s long-winded, flowery language rather than her sentimentality. Steeped in German romanticism and idealism, Turgenev was certainly not a “realist” in the cynical Balzacian sense of the term. Rather, he was deeply concerned with the plight of the Russian schöne Geister, both male and female. Like Herzen in Duty Above All—a work Hoogenboom mentions but does not analyze in depth—Turgenev probed and exposed the shortcomings of the nobility’s self-conception as state servitors. However, Hoogenboom sidesteps the complex issue of the “superfluous man.” In her readings of Turgenev’s novels and Goncharov’s Oblomov, she emphasizes characters who find—or at least appear to find—fulfilment by accepting the status quo and the social roles it prescribes.

Hoogenboom’s reluctance to recognize the tradition of resistance to the service ideology within the Russian nobility—from the eighteenth-century aristocratic Fronde to the philosophical circles of the 1840s—leads to a fundamental misreading of Lev Tolstoi in Ch. 9 of Part Four. By failing to distinguish Tolstoi’s Platonic preoccupation with virtue from the official rhetoric of virtue that masked servilism, she reduces Anna Karenina to a sentimental novel in which Tolstoi supposedly indicts a woman for derailing the careers of two successful state servants. By contrast, Ch. 8 offers a compelling analysis of the internal crisis within the official nobility ideology as depicted in the sentimental novel, with a dual focus on Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia and Fedor Dostoevskii.