Ani Kokobobo's engaging and ambitious study reconsiders the late nineteenth-century Russian realist novel through the lens of “grotesque realism.” By grotesque realism, Kokobobo understands a welding of two seemingly conflicting aesthetics: the aesthetic of realism, grounded in empirical observation and committed to objectivity and verisimilitude, and the aesthetic of the grotesque that depicts the distorted, the abnormal, the disfigured, the hyperbolic, and the monstrous.

Kokobobo traces the presence of this “composite style” (11) from the late 1860s to the late 1890s, to argue that it served to reflect the moral and spiritual decline of the gentry class which accompanied its loss of social and economic privilege in the aftermath of the Great Reforms. Kokobobo is mindful of the pressures exerted on the grotesque by the surrounding realist environment of her chosen novels. Stripped of non-realist attributes, realist grotesque externalizes the spiritual void as a variety of less-than-human existences that range from animalistic prioritizing of bodily appetites to mechanistic existence of soulless automatons.

Kokobobo's starting point is the anti-nihilist novel where grotesque realism functions as a means of demonizing the nihilist outsider whose godlessness and materialism are made visible in their persons (as animalistic behaviors or physical ugliness) and in their activities (like desecrations of the dead human body, graphically described). From the isolated figure of the nihilist, the various forms of spiritual affliction and the grotesque that expresses them spread to gentry protagonists and to entire communities. In Fedor Dostoevskii's Demons, Nikolai Stavrogin displays both animalistic and automaton-like characteristics that reflect his inner void and moral monstrosity that are, in turn, mirrored in his surrounding community. In Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, realist grotesque imbues representations of death and sexuality and shapes the descriptions of Nikolai Levin's dying and Anna's sexualized bodies. Anna's overvaluing of physical beauty at the expense of the spiritual dimensions of her being suggests to Kokobobo her grotesque hybridity as part human and part object. And in Resurrection, where most lives, except those of the revolutionaries, are shown to be lacking spirituality, both gentry and non-gentry characters are represented in the key of grotesque realism.

The book's most successful chapter is on Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlev Family. Here, Kokobobo's overarching argument about realist grotesque as externalization of the gentry's moral collapse is genuinely illuminating. In positing it as an aesthetic that structures the inversion of the traditional narrative of the gentry's spiritual plenitude and moral supremacy into a narrative of their degradation, Kokobobo gives a name to a significant element of the novel's poetics that any Saltykov reader will be sure to recognize.

This may not be the case with some of the other texts. Readers will decide if they are prepared to see the deeply suffering and deeply human Anna as an embodiment of the “grotesque other” (62), or wish to accept the claim of resemblance between her and E.T.A. Hoffmann's female automaton Olympia. Or if they agree that all of the discussed instances of defamiliarization in Resurrection qualify as instances of the grotesque. Or if they are willing to see Stavrogin's “dualism” (50) as a type of grotesque hybridity. The last example is especially representative of the looseness of Kokobobo's grotesque. This looseness allows her to keep the story going but at a considerable cost to the term's analytical potential. Its thinness is on full display in the book's concluding chapter on The Brothers Karamazov. The chapter equates the grotesque with moral and physical imperfection, finds the “potential for grotesquerie” (118) to be nearly universal among the novel's characters (including Zosima's “unappealing” appearance [127] and Alyosha's initially degrading, that is grotesque, view of Grushen΄ka), and then argues that Zosima's gospel of active love that embraces everyone redeems the grotesque as an inescapable feature of humanity. Such “broadening” (128) of the grotesque renders the term hollow and all but erases its salience as a category of analysis.

One wonders if instead of broadening the grotesque it might have been worthwhile to broaden the scope of the study beyond the gentry, the novel, and the three chosen decades. Such greater freedom would have allowed Kokobobo to consider a broader swath of realist grotesque without compromising its usefulness. From Nikolai Gogol΄’s Akakii, to Gleb Uspenskii's Mymretsov, to Anton Chekhov's Belikov, to Fedor Sologub's Peredonov, characters from across the social and generic spectra are crippled by inner blankness reflected in a meager, despiritualized existence. Still, even if Kokobobo has chosen not to consider these characters, her contribution includes helping us notice a resemblance they share as figures of realist grotesque.