Adulterous Nations Adulterous Nations Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel ✦ Tatiana Kuzmic nort h w e st e r n u n i v e r si t y pr e ss eva nston, ill i nois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2016. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of Congress. Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons At- tribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Kuzmic, Tatiana. Adulterous Nations: Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel . Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2017. The following material is excluded from the license: Epigraph, illustrations, and parts of chapters 1 and 3 as outlined in the Acknowledg- ments For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit www.nupress.northwestern.edu An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. To my parents, who imparted to me — through both nature and nurture— their love of books and languages Beauty and the Beast The deceiving beauty Slammed the door Finally Like the Homeland And disappeared Into History. Therefore, the deceiving beauty And the Homeland Have something in common: Both leave behind Boys Who will die For them. war 1991 — Ferida Durakovi ć , Sarajevo Contents Acknowledgments xi Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates xv Introduction 3 PART I: EMPIRES Chapter 1 Middlemarch : The English Heroine and the Polish Rebel(lions) 27 Chapter 2 Effi Briest : German Realism and the Young Empire 57 Chapter 3 Anna Karenina : The Slavonic Question and the Dismembered Adulteress 92 PART II: NATIONS Chapter 4 The Goldsmith’s Gold : The Origins of Yugoslavism and the Birth of the Croatian Novel 131 Chapter 5 Quo Vadis : Polish Messianism and the Proselytizing Heroine 155 Conclusion 181 Notes 189 Bibliography 213 Index 223 xi Acknowledgments In many of the workshops I attended about publishing one’s first book, the project was frequently compared to a firstborn child. If it takes a village, as the saying goes, to raise the latter, the same can be said for completing the former. I will begin with the people most recently involved in seeing Adul- terous Nations through to its fruition and proceed backwards. Mike Levine, acquisitions editor for Northwestern University Press, first expressed inter- est in the project and continued to express interest as I struggled on chapter by chapter. Comments from all three readers for the press were helpful in making the final rendition substantially better than it was in its original form, but I wish to extend special thanks to Reader 3 for a particularly at- tentive reading (and for using the adjective “outrageous” as a compliment). At the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, where I first had the opportunity to “test-drive” the book project in front of an interdisciplinary audience, the British Studies Society, which hosted the intellectually invigorating Friday lunches, and the Humanities Institute, where I worked on chapter 3 of the book, offered inspiration, feed- back, and occasional research financing, the last of which came with the all-important teaching release. The book has also benefited from the dedi- cated work of my two graduate student research assistants. Nadya Clayton plowed through Tolstoy’s letters in search of references to the Russo-Turkish War, alerted me to relevant entries in Sofya Tolstaya’s diary, and forwarded to me the news about Anatoly Lebed’, the Russian colonel who fought in Serbia in the 1990s. Katya Cotey also plowed through Tolstoy’s writings as well as writings about Tolstoy; she is an inexhaustible source of information with an extraordinary gift for locating everything, including a nineteenth- century article on Polish beggars, which enriched my reading of Middle- march . Over the many hours of conversation we have spent on our shared love of the nineteenth- century novel I have also come to regard her as a dear friend. The book has also been enriched by the faculty book club that I led for two years, and I wish to thank everybody who was involved in it. Most of the participants were in the stressful pre-tenure phases of their careers when they read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and (even more amazingly) War and Peace , as well as George Eliot’s Middlemarch , with me. Thanks to Lisa Neff for coming up with the idea, to Jenni Beer for teaching with me a course on psychology in the Russian novel that was a direct consequence of the xii Acknowledgments book club, and to all of the following for their involvement: Ted and Chris Huston, Deborah Beck, Angie Littwin, Cristine Legare, Rebecca Callahan, Marie Monfils, and Paige Harden. To all of the psychologists in the group, a special thanks for making me appreciate Tolstoy all the more for your valu- able insights and connections. Outside of the university, I wish to thank Ellen-Elias Bursa ć for always and quickly answering my e-mail questions about August Šenoa and Vienac and for putting me in touch with Ferida Durakovi ć , whom I heartily thank for permission to use her poem as an epigraph. I also thank Irina Rubis for permission to use the image from her and Katerina Venzhik’s Ne dai Russ- komu campaign. Shorter versions of chapters 1 and 3 were previously pub- lished elsewhere, the former as “‘The German, the Sclave, and the Semite’: Eastern Europe in the Imagination of George Eliot” in Nineteenth- Century Literature 68 (2014): 513–541, and the latter as “‘Serbia—Vronsky’s Last Love’: Reading Anna Karenina in the Context of Empire” in the Toronto Slavic Quarterly 43 (2013): 40– 66. NCL editor Jonathan Grossman and the anonymous reviewers not only sharpened my thinking about George Eliot but also made me into a better writer overall and taught me skills I have continued to use in other projects. I cannot say that I did not realize while in graduate school how fortunate I was to have landed in such a supportive environment, but over the years my gratitude only grew. My committee chair, Harriet Murav, can only be de- scribed by that wonderful German word for one’s adviser— Doktormutter ; Lilya Kaganovsky was always generous with both intellectual and practi- cal advice; and Valeria Sobol has been a delightful source of inspiration in my Tolstoy scholarship, all the more for answering every one of my calls to participate in a conference panel. Among the graduate students whose friendship has withstood the test of time and distance, Dheepa Sundaram and Karen Lukrhur were always and still are willing to “talk theory,” whip up an amazing meal, and offer pet-sitting services, all of which supported my research. There are aspects of this book that date back to my undergraduate days and the two professors who influenced me most. Elaine Phillips taught me the wonders of the Hebrew Bible, and at a random piano recital that we both happened to attend years after I graduated, when I told her about my disser- tation, she introduced me to the term “porno-prophetics.” The chapter on Anna Karenina would have been seriously impoverished without that con- cept. My favorite psychology professor, Bert Hodges, claimed that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were the best psychologists he had ever read and so, albeit unintentionally, steered me into a different field of study. (He also pointed out the beautiful mowing scenes in Anna Karenina as the perfect depiction of the famous social psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s notion of flow , xiii Acknowledgments which came in very handy fifteen years later when I taught Russian Litera- ture and Psychology with Jenni Beer.) Last and most important of all, I wish to thank my family. The credit for the catchy phrase that is the main title of this book goes to my uncle— ujo — Miroslav Volf, who came up with it when I shared with him my first thoughts about the project, before it was even a dissertation draft. My sis- ters, Kristina and Petra, shared their kids with me, sometimes even across continents, as when Kristina allowed me to fly her Luka and Matea all the way from L.A. to Croatia several times over the summers. Petra made her home my home during those summers, a few holidays, and one semester that I spent completing the book; she cooked all of my favorite meals and pushed me to write when, more often than not, I preferred to play the role of aunt rather than scholar. As I have often told her, her idyllic life with her husband and their four beautiful children in the Croatian countryside would make Tolstoy proud. I owe the deepest level of gratitude to my parents, Vlasta and Peter Kuz- mi č , to whom this book is dedicated. One of my earliest memories is that of my dad creating rhyming songs for me in order to teach me to count ( ti i ja— to smo dva; mama, ja i ti— to smo tri . . . ) or help me remember the names of our numerous relatives (starting with himself— tata Petar, brz k’o vjetar ). The hours and hours I spent listening to my mom read aloud to me— everything from the international children’s favorite The Chronicles of Narnia to the Croatian masterpiece of children’s literature, Ivana Brli ć - Mažurani ć ’s Šegrt Hlapi ć —remain my favorite childhood memories. xv Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates All translations of the non-English quotes used in this book (as well as the poem that serves as the epigraph), unless otherwise noted, are my own. I have attempted to remain as literal as meaningful English permitted. In transliterating names of Russian authors and fictional characters, I have used the Library of Congress system, except for those last names whose endings are typically rendered with a y in English-language publi- cations, both male—Tolstoy and Vronsky, for example, instead of Tolstoi and Vronskii— and female—Tolstaya and Kovalevskaya instead of Tolstaia and Kovalevskaia. In addition, in order to avoid the orthographical awk- wardness of the apostrophe in the middle of Tolstoy’s wife’s first name— Sof’ia— I have spelled it Sofya. I have also used English spelling for the En- glish nicknames— popular at the time— of Russian first names, so that Kiti, for example, is Kitty, and Dolli is Dolly. In the original Quo Vadis Henryk Sienkiewicz rendered the ancient Ro- man names in Polish; thus, Petronius is Petroniusz, Vinicius Winicjusz, and so on. I have used the Latin spelling for easier readability in English, except for when it does not make a difference, mainly with Ligia, whom English translators tend to spell Lygia. The prerevolutionary calendar in Russia was Julian or Old Style, and its dates remain as such in the official collected works of Tolstoy and in his sec- retary Gusev’s Annals of the Life and Work of Tolstoy . I have not changed them to Gregorian dates in my work, which means that they are 12 days (and from February 17, 1900, 13 days) behind the Gregorian calendar. Finally, most novels discussed in the following pages were, as was typical in the nineteenth century, serialized in literary journals before becoming books, and I have strived to be clear about which of the two modes I refer to when listing their publication dates. When no explanation is given, the year listed refers to the book. Adulterous Nations 3 Introduction “Adultery is not just the favorite, but also the only theme of all novels.” 1 So writes the great Lev Tolstoy in 1898, exactly twenty years after his own, enormously successful Anna Karenina had come out in book form. What Tolstoy detects— rather bitterly, since at this point he has parted with high culture and renounced his former masterpieces as yet another source of plea- sure for the idle wealthy classes— is the prevalence of the novel of adultery in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it had practically become a subgenre within realism. The inaugural novel of this subgenre is typically considered to be Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary , to which all subse- quent novels of adultery have been compared. Its serialization in 1856 was followed by a lawsuit against the author on account of “outrage to public and religious morals and to morality,” 2 which only made the sales of the 1857 book version skyrocket. Although Madame Bovary was, obviously, not the world’s first novel to take up the theme of the unfaithful wife, it did establish a particular pattern for addressing this theme. The aforementioned Russian Anna Karenina , for example, the American The Awakening (1899), and the somewhat lesser known German Effi Briest (1896) all feature, like the French masterpiece, an attractive and energetic young woman, who, feeling stifled in a marriage to a dull and significantly older man, cheats on him and subsequently commits suicide. The eponymous heroine of Effi Briest , to be precise, dies a natural death but one that is occasioned by the stresses of her unenviable situation. Although volumes have been written about the various nineteenth- century novels of adultery and the politics of gender that are inherent in them, none have as of yet analyzed the adultery plots from the perspective of nationalism and imperialism that imbued the time period of these novels’ literary dominance. Relying on the long history of gendering nations as female, the present volume offers a reading of the adulterous woman of nineteenth- century European fiction as a symbol of national anxieties. The notion of adultery as an international crisis played out in miniature within the confines of a nuclear family becomes almost obvious if we con- sider the fact that some of the world’s best-known novels of adultery portray