This small, fascinating volume of literary analysis meditates on the meanings of virtue in modern Russian literature by providing detailed analysis of a number of “greats” in the Russian canon, from Nikolai Gogol΄ to Fedor Dostoevskii and from Boris Pasternak to Vladimir Nabokov. Valentino’s several-layered approach includes analyses of the intersections of virtue, masculinity, and commerce throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is not an easy read, but worth the effort.

The main overarching question (or set of questions) is: how did Russian moderns understand the meaning of “virtue,” and how did that definition change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how does this Russian understanding compare with definitions born in Europe and the U.S.? The book’s introduction takes us on a tour of these definitions and emphasizes not only the multiplicity of meaning, but also the ongoing tension in the relationship between the acquisition of virtue and the acquisition of property in a comparative frame. In the American context, for example, virtuous behavior is “based in the relations of property” and in the Russian context, it is precisely this absence that brings the banner of virtue. Valentino points out that if we compare American and Russian experiences, we find two opposed ideals: the rootless and the propertied. Russian rejection of a propertied, rooted understanding means that the range of connotative associations “of western European virtue vocabulary was never truly assimilated by Russian social thinkers” (17). Indeed, there are many Russian equivalents of the word virtue, from dobrodetel΄ and its emphasis on “ethical and religious heritage”; to sila or “power, force as in virtue of being a soldier”; to tselomudrie, meaning “woman’s virtue or chastity” (14–15). In Russia, instead, there exists “a different sense of rootedness, community, and landed connection,” or what Dostoevskii called pochvennichestvo, or “landedness, grass-rootedness” (15).

Each of the four substantive chapters that follows is organized around a primary analysis of one or more of the great Russian authors and a representative novel or two, all the while, taking a loose chronological look at the virtue ideal, as it moves from virtuous to virtual, but always circles back to the image of the woman in the window, who serves as a mechanism for masculine self-definition and reckoning. The first chapter includes an extended analysis of Gogol΄’s Dead Souls and Dostoevskii’s The Double. Here, Valentino confronts the question of how a nascent commercial culture is integrated into the Russian landscape. The answer is that, at best, there is an ambivalent relationship, which Valentino argues is exemplified by Dostoevskii’s protagonist Golyadkin in The Double. Over the course of the novel, Golyadkin becomes enamored with commerce, exchange, and money, which are, as Valentino writes, precisely those values most alien to the Russian “agrarian ideal.” This process of alienation leads, ultimately, to his sense of himself and his masculinity as fractured and dependent upon a fantasy that requires the fashioning of multiple selves. When Golyadkin considers ways of engaging in a growing commercial world, he emerges split from himself. The second substantive chapter continues to tackle the relationship among virtue, masculinity and the commercial world. Valentino’s presentation of Lev Tolstoi’s Vronsky and Levin and Gogol΄’s Chichikov reflects the idea that the virtuous man must be vigilant and must possess a strength and firmness of character; he is to be undistracted by the marketplace and its shiny objects. The virtuous man must live a singular, integrated life. Here commerce leads to falseness and ultimately to the empty metaphors that Gogol΄ is so famous for presenting. Likewise, Valentino provides his readers a comparative look at the sense of manliness embodied by Vronsky and Levin in Tolstoi’s novel Anna Karenina. Valentino emphasizes how it is in these two characters where there begins to be a “shift from landed (virtuous) to symbolic (virtual) conceptions of property” (88). Modern ideas of masculinity and virtue transform in a commercial environment.

The final substantive chapter—before the conclusion—compares Nabokov’s Lolita with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The protagonist in each of these masterpieces provides fascinating fodder for an analysis of masculinity norms, as we witness the decline of the heroic norm and the rise of the commercial one. On the one hand, Valentino explains, there is Zhivago, a suffering hero, and on the other, Humbert, who represents something “fundamentally material and plastic.” Reflecting this contrast, Humbert envisions his love object instrumentally, someone to be had, while Zhivago imagines Lara as the “whole of his life” and “all God’s earth” (108). The contrast revolves around ownership, property and ultimately love and virtue.

Overall, this volume, which tackles many of the central themes of comparative study of Russia and the west, ends with a discussion of Don DeLillo and Cosmopolis in a comparative frame. In this sense, A Woman in the Window is a comment on the state of virtue in the modern world, as it asks the central question of how have processes of modernization and economic transformation impacted notions of masculinity and virtue in Russian consciousness and self-definition. In this sense, it is a useful read for those of us interested in thinking about how modern Russian literature and culture fits into a larger conversation about the rise of consumerism so characteristic of the modern world. The one area where Valentino might have been more analytical is in regards to his grounding in gender theory. There is an entire literature about meanings of manhood in Russia, Europe, the U.S., and beyond that might have helped him think through the insistence on single gender narratives and unified subjectivities.