Realism, according to many critics, speaks to a collective social imaginary that is rooted in the ideals of civil society. Ilya Kliger’s new book asks how realism might be reconsidered and how we might understand realist novels if their orientation was to a political imaginary, a social imaginary rooted in the structures of the autocratic state, as was arguably the case in the context of nineteenth-century Russia.

Sovereign Fictions is deeply grounded in critical discourse—Western and Russian, nineteenth-century and more recent—around the novel and its form. Kliger also draws extensively on intellectual historical sources that consider the structure and power of the state, from ancient Greece to G. W. F. Hegel, from Karl Marx to Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, John Anderson, and Pierre Bourdieu, among many others. Chapter one establishes the book’s argument through a discussion of Vissarion Belinskii’s misreading of Hegel, and how this moment of misinterpretation demonstrates a fundamental difference between the conception of the state in the European political imaginary and its Russian imperial counterpart. This first chapter lays out a broad European political imaginary, its connection to civil ideals, and its representation in fiction, using three works by Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, respectively, to illustrate the relationship between the conceptualization of European sovereignty in thought and the form and structure of the European novel. While this differentiation from Europe is important in articulating the specifically Russian political imaginary, Kliger’s analysis of these three novels alongside Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right results in a tripartite model for consideration of the structures of sovereignty. This model then informs the organization of the following chapters: “State,” “Family,” and “Nation.”

Kliger engages in what he terms “medial reading” (5), a method he distinguishes from close reading and distant reading. For Kliger, medial reading considers “broad patterns across a large number of stylistically and thematically different works by an ideologically diverse group of authors across a relatively large span of time” (5). He relies on a corpus comprised of works by a group of writers selected for their commonalities (all male, all born between 1799 and 1836, all served the state at some point): Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol,’ Aleksandr Druzhinin, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev, Aleksei Pisemskii, Vasilii Sleptsov, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Lev Tolstoi. Kliger notes that his corpus does not include marginalized perspectives, such as those of women or non-elite writers, in order to determine a social imaginary shared by the mainstream establishment. By analyzing clusters of works from the corpus, Kliger attempts to reveal “how the … textual trace of the social situation in which the text is produced … operates upon the customary material of realist fiction” (5). For example, in the second chapter, “State,” Kliger examines eight works published between 1833 and 1872 by eight different authors that all feature a charismatic figure of political authority who disrupts the social establishment and even supplants some aspect of it. Through this comparative reading, Kliger demonstrates that these disparate texts all reveal the political authority of the state as the foundation for Russian society and, moreover, cast individuality as a problematic rather than an ideal. “Family” and “Nation” are structured similarly, considering the way the patriarchal family and the state reinforce each other and the relationship between national belonging and the state, respectively. Kliger demonstrates that the works in his corpus reflect a worldview where social and individual life is structured around the authority of the sovereign rather than democratic or civic institutions. The state consistently appears as a powerful force that governs relationships, identities, and events—sometimes directly, but often as an underlying or symbolic presence.

Kliger’s medial readings across the categories of “State,” “Family,” and “Nation” coalesce in his fifth chapter, which presents the project’s major intellectual labor: a reconstructed poetics of Russian realism that takes into consideration the significance and influence of the state on the development of the Russian social, and by extension, political imaginary. Unlike European realist poetics, in which the novel serves as an expression of social universalism, civil idealism, or individualism, Russian realist poetics, Kliger argues, aligns with ancient Greek tragedy. In this genre, powerful external forces (like the state) shape and define human fate. This perspective, he argues, helps explain both the enduring influence of authoritarianism in Russian culture and the ongoing struggles against it. Kliger’s reconceptualization of Russian realist poetics establishes an impermeable connection between mainstream nineteenth-century Russian writing and the autocratic and imperial Russian state. Sovereign Fictions redefines our understanding of the way Russian realism developed and will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the field.