Revenge, rage and laughter

A repressive upbringing can make or break a person. For the twenty-seven-year-old Avdotya Panaeva, writing in 1848, it became a lens on the injustices faced by vulnerable members of nineteenth-century Russian society. Her chilling short novel The Talnikov Family strikes a balance between fiction and autobiography through an episodic plot that alternates between rage, revenge and stoic humour.

Panaeva’s extended family, living under one roof, was headed by two actors in St Petersburg’s imperial theatre. In The Talnikov Family the parents are recast as “musicians”, though they are never seen working. The father, physically violent to dogs and children, is more warmly attentive to his caged birds. The mother, an even greater villain, delegates punishment to the fearsome governess. The cast also consists of three unmarried aunts, “already over twenty-five”, and many poorly paid servants: the cook, maid, footman, coachman, nurse and laundress. The parents are addicted to playing cards and to avoiding at all costs the care of their ever- increasing number of unwanted children.

The novel begins with the death of a six-month-old sister – a death from which the parents are absent and at which only the wet nurse weeps, having been robbed of her future salary. Money plays a large role throughout, as each child is made to pay by deprivation of food and clothing for the hobbies and extravagances of the parents. The governess, who had been fired for cruelty toward her previous charges, is given free rein over the children and told to “handle morality however she pleased”. Being made to stand or kneel for hours is standard practice. All of the children are confined to one room, with the adjacent one serving as a combined schoolroom, dining room and bedroom shared by the three aunts and governess. In these claustrophobic circumstances, three sisters and one brother die. The rest, for lack of toys, play games in their free time with flies and cockroaches.

There are some bright spots for the siblings, which the author narrates with relentless sarcasm. The children, for example, share equally in being punished: “until I was ten our life was happy and free. We played all together because our parents did not distinguish between us by gender. Both boys and girls were beaten with birch rods”. The narrator remembers only one close acquaintance, the daughter of a laundress who replaced “the other one who drank”. When this girl complains about how the coachman put his arms around her, the narrator advises her to hit him or throw tobacco in his eyes. The friend remarks that this would be useless because of his greater strength. She further mentions that another girl was thrown out by her mother for accepting “a gift” from a man. When the narrator asks how the mother found out, the friend replies: “Oh, how stupid you young ladies are!” Rape and pregnancy are a constant threat to the girls of the lower classes. The author does not dwell on this, but she does relate in detail the ludicrous toilettes and make-up artifices resorted to by the governess and the aunts in their desperate hope of attracting a man.

A few passages are brilliantly narrated. One concerns the servant Luka, a decent man who had fought the Turks. He struggles to recount, while serving tea and being interrupted right and left, how a Jewish girl he encountered finally escaped her cruel master by running away after slitting his throat. Fiona Bell’s translation competently conveys the varied speech patterns of Luka and the other characters.

Panaeva left her birth family to marry a nobleman at the age of seventeen. The family was surprised, as they had considered her dark complexion and hair unattractive. She wrote for The Contemporary, a journal edited by her husband, Ivan Panaev, whose radical friends cheered her on even as she was called unpleasant names in less progressive circles. Bell’s introduction contextualizes Panaeva with reference to her contemporaries and begs the reader not to be put off by her style, which she has rightly preserved in all its repetitiveness.

After her marriage, she successfully navigated a ménage à trois with the poet Nikolai Nekrasov. The second wife of Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in her memoirs that Avdotya Panaev was the only woman to whom her husband had been attracted in his younger years. The author of The Talnikov Family became known as an “impossible woman” to famous men across the political spectrum. She had overcome the background fictionalized in this messy but rewarding novel.

Barbara Heldt’s books include Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian literature, 1987, and a translation of Karolina Pavlova’s novel A Double Life. She lives in Virginia and Maine

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