The Talnikov Family - by Avdotya Panaeva

About the Book

Avdotya Panaeva's The Talnikov Family portrays a tumultuous upbringing in 1820s St. Petersburg with equal parts wit and rage.

Book Synopsis

In the Talnikov household, violence is in the air. Natasha grows up in a chaotic and abusive family, surrounded by screaming relatives and scurrying cockroaches. Her father whips his children but dotes on his pets. Her aunts and governess take a grim satisfaction in doling out discipline--in between primping and preening for suitors. Amid this bleakness, Natasha and her siblings conspire to steal stray moments of childhood joy.

Avdotya Panaeva's The Talnikov Family portrays a tumultuous upbringing in 1820s St. Petersburg with equal parts wit and rage. Modeled on the author's own life before her marriage to a nobleman writer, this sensational novel joined nineteenth-century Russia's intense debates about gender, sexuality, and revolution. It was swiftly suppressed after its original appearance in 1848, the censor calling it "cynical" and "undermining of parental power." Panaeva published a number of iconic Russian writers; her own novel anticipates Dostoevsky's frenetic quarrels and heightened tone as well as Chernyshevsky's sweeping radicalism. Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Panaeva considers the experiences of servants and workers, and she offers a critique of the family as ruthless as any other in literature. In Fiona Bell's vivid translation, The Talnikov Family offers readers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Russian literature and the society that shaped it.

Review Quotes

A graceful translation.-- "Harper's Magazine"

The Talnikov Family strikes a balance between fiction and autobiography through an episodic plot that alternates between rage, revenge and stoic humour...[a] messy but rewarding novel.-- "Times Literary Supplement"

The Talnikov Family offers not only insight into Russia's rulers' long-standing reliance on "traditional values" to consolidate their power, the novel also entertains, shocks, and provides solace.-- "On the Seawall"

A valuable addition for those interested in the fiction of an author as yet unknown outside her own culture.-- "Open Letters Review"

Panaeva certainly pokes deep and well into the Talnikov family's specific and quite remarkable unhappiness.-- "The Complete Review"

Short, breathless, tinged with humor, The Talnikov Family is a horror show, a litany of cruelty, anger, and violence . . . An eye-popping historical curiosity plumbing the depths of domestic dysfunction.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Bell makes this two-hundred-year-old text crackle with an immediacy that suggests we rethink the canon.--Marian Schwartz, translator of Anna Karenina

About the Author

Avdotya Panaeva (1820-1893) was a Russian novelist, memoirist, and contributor to the liberal and radical literary journal The Contemporary. Her novels include Lady of the Steppes (1855), A Woman's Lot (1862), and, coauthored with Nikolai Nekrasov, Three Countries of the World (1848) and The Dead Lake (1851).

Fiona Bell is a translator and scholar of Russophone literature. Her translations from the Russian include Nataliya Meshchaninova's Stories of a Life and the short fiction of the contemporary Belarusian writer Tatsiana Zamirovskaya.