Irina Reyfman's How Russia Learned to Write investigates the intersection between imperial Russian writers’ service, their place on the Table of Ranks, and their writing from the mid-eighteenth until the end of the nineteenth centuries. In consideration of this poetry and prose, Reyfman focuses on writing as a vocation, its interplay with imperial service, and on writers’ presentation of service in their literary works. As stated in the introduction, the examination of these complex relationships is new: Reyfman argues quite conclusively that these relationships reflect “enduring questions of identity, ethics, and individual and collective responsibility that were live issues for Russian writers during the period of discussion became woven into the fabric” of the literature we read today (19).

Reyfman begins her study with Aleksandr Sumarokov, noting that, “it is logical to begin the discussion of eighteenth-century modes of writerly behavior with Sumarokov, the first writer of noble origin in the modern Russian literary tradition who considered writing his most important occupation” (23). Indeed, Reyfman argues, Sumarokov saw writing as part of his service, even the most important part (28). This relationship set Sumarokov apart from the writers who followed him, including Nikolai L'vov, Ippolit Bogdanovich, Gavriil Derzhavin, and Nikolai Karamzin; however, all the eighteenth-century writers Reyfman includes in her study defined their authorial personae in accordance with or against the Russian State and their own service. Russia's eighteenth-century writers displayed a “diverse pattern of conduct” for authors after them to follow or to reject in their own lives and fiction (43).

Chapter 2 considers “Pushkin as Bureaucrat, Courtier, and Writer,” and his contradictory and often angry relationship with his own service, his unimpressive ascent on the Table of Ranks, and how this ambivalence made its way into his literary works. Reyfman contends that Pushkin's “anxieties over rank and social status” are present in much of his fictional prose, sometimes making up the “core of the narrative,” and she reinterprets Pushkin's prose from this perspective (73). We see that Pushkin's low-ranking heroes are “declared better narrators than high-ranking officials,” and that “Pushkin's narrators … are one step away from Gogol's pathetic characters Aksenty Poprishchin and Akaky Bashmachkin … ” (78–79). This reading links Pushkin's prose to Gogol΄’s, in which the latter replaces Pushkin's anxieties about service and rank with humor, absurdity, and invention.

Gogol΄’s oeuvre, “overpopulated with all kinds of bureaucrats,” serves as the subject of Chapter 3, a delightful account of Gogol΄’s portrayal of civil servants and the Table of Ranks (86). Reyfman explains that in his fiction, “Gogol shamelessly replaces the hierarchy of ranks created by Peter the Great with his own. It seems to be just as orderly as Peter's, but it is not” (86). Gogol΄’s creativity in regard to his presentation of the Table of Ranks and civil service had long-lasting effects on Russian literature, as seen in How Russia Learned to Write’s fifth and final chapter on Fedor Dostoevskii (Chapter 4 being devoted to “Poets in the Military”: Denis Davydov, Aleksandr Polezhaev, and Mikhail Lermontov). It is with Dostoevskii, Reyfman argues, that the treatment of service and the Table of Ranks is at its most sophisticated and significant. “Dostoevsky believes,” Reyfman writes, “neither in the honor code entirely regulating a person's behavior nor in reducing him to his rank. Personality and morality trump conventions and institutions” (172).

Reyfman concludes How Russia Learns to Write with a brief discussion of the system of ranks as a theme in the final years of the nineteenth century and claims that this theme was important last in the works of Afanasy Fet, whose adolescent loss of noble status and “two failures to gain nobility on his own contributed to this obsession” (187). The conclusion is followed by an Appendix (a simplified Table of Ranks over time) and excellent, detailed notes to the monograph. Reyfman's prose is clear and readable throughout, and How Russia Learned to Write adds an intriguing new reading on canonical texts of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is one of those rare books you never knew you needed, but answers questions you have always had.