Bella Grigoryan's debut monograph is a well-written study steeped in the convictions that literature belongs in the public sphere and that it contributes significantly to the construction of a Lebenswelt. Over the course of six chapters, bookended by an excellent introduction and conclusion, Grigoryan's slim but persuasive book investigates the construction of the category of the male landowner “as an imperial subject and citizen” (volume's back cover). Grigoryan offers something other than a comprehensive socioeconomic account of literary history or a thoroughgoing analysis of literary media. Informed by her interest in literary genres and forms, she develops a taut argument, with each of the book's chapters consisting of individual case studies of the levels of self-reflexivity and forms of self-expression in the works of male landowners in Russia. She takes six names as case studies, each of which is examined in an individual chapter: Aleksandr Pushkin, Faddei Bulgarin, Nikolai Gogol΄, Ivan Goncharov, Sergei Aksakov, and Lev Tolstoi, respectively. (Nikolai Novikov and Nikolai Karamzin are examined in her Introduction). Grigoryan compares in specific detail how they (and their immediate predecessors) wrote their landowner and civic novels and their pieces of journalism in the period from 1762 through 1861—from the time of Catherine the Great's attempts to reform the situation of the Russian gentry through the beginning of the period of the Great Reforms under Alexander II.

From our vantage point, we know that the result of these authors’ efforts far exceeded the ambitions and uncertainties of their identity-building or the goals of their familial, native, and cosmopolitan Bildung. Grigoryan aptly demonstrates the irony of their undertaking: their novels turned out to be far more substantial achievements than any gains in civic rights, political and personal inviolability, or corporate pride. Grigoryan bypasses many familiar approaches to these problems of Russian life. There is little or nothing in her study about Russia's “cursed questions,” and she avoids categories such as “superfluous men” and the other clichés that we have come to expect from historical surveys and encyclopedia entries about this period. Instead, she focuses on important, but poorly known instructional literature that shares advice about good fortunes—periodicals and manuals read by her authors and their heroes—including, inter alia, Economic Magazine, Ekonom, Rural Resident, La Noblesse commerçant, and the Handbook of the Russian Experienced Housewife.

Grigoryan begins with the oft-quoted episode of Tolstoi as a student writing a reflection in 1847 on Catherine the Great's Instruction to the Legislative Commission concerning the rights of nobility (1767), which Grigoryan explores in relation to Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Many other scholars have started their studies of this period with this episode, but Grigoryan employs it in a unique way. Rather than taking it as a prolepsis into Tolstoi's anarchic renunciation of public life and the beginning of his retreat into an uncommon type of spirituality, she lays the example into the foundation of her investigation of such noblemen's fascination with “the insecurity of noble status and the instability of noble rights” (5). Tolstoi is at the beginning and the end of Grigoryan's study. It's this Levin—and not Vronsky, the efficient estate manager—who brings Grigoryan to her conclusion that the Russian nobleman is coerced into “mental passivity” (142), disillusioned by the “sorely disappointing” (ibid.) impressions about the course of reforms in the provinces: “In Anna Karenina the chief landowner-protagonist ultimately becomes disillusioned with and abandons the carious avenues for a participatory, communal experience of a corporate noble identity” (143).

The reader will find something interesting in every chapter, but my personal favorite is the chapter on Bulgarin, which plays Moliere's theme of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme off against Bulgarin's Ivan Vyzhigin (where Ivan stands for the customary folkloric character in bylinas and fairy tales, while Vyzhigin is derived from the Russian vyzhiga, the word for an experienced swindler and one who profits from economic fraud [70–88]).

Grigoryan's book is accessible to non-specialists and I have no doubt that it will be used widely in undergraduate surveys of Russian literature as well as in specialized academic settings that take a more pronounced focus on economic history, cultural media, and gender studies. (All of the chapters along with the introduction [3–143] are copiously annotated; notes take up pages 145–69, for an overall ratio of 75 % text and 25 % notes. In other words, this is a thoroughly annotated study). As such, the book joins the list of titles that are indispensable to students of Russian Literature in English. Moreover, it will appeal to anyone fascinated by the timeless magic of Russian realism, which may have started in the villages that belonged to the noblemen who dabbled in writing and in the gentry estates of the pre-capitalist economic order that they were fond of describing, but which continues to flourish in all forms of media in the post-industrialist era—print, audio, and digital—and, as an art form that is not technologically predetermined, goes on to wow and set aflutter the hearts of the global village.