City Folk and Country Folk

✍ Scribed by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 196 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

An unsung gem of nineteenth-century Russian literature, City Folk and Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of Russian elites in the 1860s. Translated here into English for the first time, the novel weaves a rollicking tale of social change, villainous machinations, and female empowerment in the wake of the official emancipation of the Russian Empire's serfs.

Upending the literary clichés of female passivity and rural-gentry benightedness, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya centers her story on a tough and savvy heiress who refuses to succumb to the pressure to marry. City Folk and Country Folk unfolds at the country estate of Nastasya Ivanovna, where she lives with her seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter, Olenka. As three Muscovite "city folk" descend on the pair and attempt to take advantage of them, Olenka staves off their efforts to push her into marriage, displaying a courage that is thoroughly uncharacteristic of the heroines of Turgenev's fiction and...