Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by KatherineBowers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. xvi + 241 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐2692‐4

Katherine Bowers has written a stimulating and timely study in which she traces the role of the Gothic mode and its attendant devices in the development of Russian prose fiction, chiefly Realism. Bowers’s work may be viewed as part of a growing field of inquiry devoted to the Russian Gothic. In this context, such scholarship as Vadim Vatsuro’s Goticheskii roman v Rossii (2002), as well as Valeria Sobol’s Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (2020) and the special issue of the journal Russian Literature (May–June 2019), which was devoted to the Russian Gothic, come to mind. Bowers’s study is a welcome addition to what remains an underexplored but clearly productive area of research. In the Introduction Bowers gives an overview of her project and explains such key terms as “gothic realism,” which, she writes, “refers to moments when authors writing in what we recognize as a realist style turn to gothic narrative devices” (p. 10). Bowers contextualizes her study in relation to recent scholarship on the role of the Gothic in the development of other Realist traditions. Bowers points out that “what is compelling about how Russian realists use the gothic is … that many different writers over an extended period consistently use the gothic in similar ways, even to depict differing or opposing philosophical and political positions” (p. 11). One aspect of the significance of Bowers’s study lies in underscoring the degree to which the role, uses, and deployment of the Gothic may be fruitfully examined in potentially multiple nineteenth-century traditions as something of a transnational phenomenon. In chapter 1, Bowers surveys Russian readers’ probable familiarity with the Gothic in the 1830s and 1840s to arrive at a repertoire of Gothic works and devices that would have been known to the Russian educated public; she maintains that even without reading the main Gothic texts a typical reader would have known and recognized these features. In chapter 2, Bowers reads specific moments in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Tatiana’s dream) and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (Pliushkin’s decaying estate) as instances of Gothic appropriation through an ironizing engagement. She explains that these two novels’ particular deployment of Gothic devices shaped later appropriations. In chapter 3, Bowers identifies “gothic framing devices” in Ivan Goncharov’s “Oblomov’s Dream” and Ivan Turgenev’s “Bezhin Lea” (p. 53). Bowers argues that Goncharov and Turgenev use the Gothic frames in order to complicate the educated readership’s potentially dismissive engagement with folk belief systems. Chapter 4 is devoted to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which is treated (aptly) as one of the Russian tradition’s most productive and extensive engagements with the Gothic; here Bowers provides a detailed reading of the novel in what amounts to a fitting culmination point to Part One of the book. Part Two is comprised of fascinating case studies that take up works of literature in connection with various social and cultural questions. In chapter 5, Bowers examines the works of multiple authors including Nikolai Nekrasov and Vladimir Dal' to explore the ways early Realist prose about Petersburg used the Gothic to cultivate such affects as horror, anxiety, and dread; ultimately, Bowers helpfully traces the Gothic dimensions of the Petersburg Text. Chapter 6 provides an especially appealing pairing of texts—Evgeniia Tur’s underexplored (especially so in Anglophone scholarship) Antonina, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man—to propose intertextual links in the context of how Tur responds to the Woman Question. Chapter 7 offers another interesting pairing of texts—Dostoevsky’s Demons and Boris Savinkov’s Pale Horse—to show that the two writers use devices drawn from the Gothic to divergent ends in their representation of revolutionary terrorism. In chapter 8, Bowers focuses on the Gothic in narratives about family, emphasizing family decline and disorder: Sergei Aksakov’s Family Chronicle, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Golovlyov Family, and Ivan Bunin’s Dry Valley. The conclusion, which is devoted to Anton Chekhov’s works, gestures towards the vitality of Gothic appropriations beyond Russian Realism, notably in the first glimmers of Russian Modernist writing. Bowers’s study is appealing both for the insightful readings of specific works and for the big picture about Russian Realism’s encounters with the Gothic that ultimately emerges. Writing Fear is likely to be of keen interest to those who study nineteenth-century Russian literature as well as to colleagues who study non-Russian literary traditions and have an interest in the Gothic.

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