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Bloggers Karamazov Editor Chloe Papadopoulos recently sat down with Hilde Hoogenboom to talk about Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels: A European Literary History, which was published with University of Toronto Press in 2025 and was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize by ASEEES, for “the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences” in 2026.
CP: Congratulations on your book – and on winning the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize! To begin with, what are “noble sentiments”?
HH: Thank you for selecting my book for this adventure in academic blogging about Dostoevsky. This part of the title was the inspiration of my best friend and editor Nancy Workman, to whom I dedicated the book, perhaps because she kept noting my slippery use of the adjective “noble.” Did I really mean to say that the sentiments of Russian nobles were fine? (I did!) Later I discovered the term “noble sentiments” in George Sand’s Horace (1842), which was important for Dostoevsky upon his return from exile, when he wrote and published his first, and most reprinted, long novel, The Insulted and the Injured. By coincidence, Sand’s novel gave Dostoevsky his title too.
So what are “noble sentiments?” Today the term that comes to mind is “emotions,” but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the buzz-word was “sentiments.” It was a slippery term in debates about sentimentalism, which the cultural critic Raymond Williams groups around the word “sensibility” in his unusual 1976 semantic history, Keywords. As a noun, sentiments meant feelings combined with thought – the kind of thought that restrains emotions. Margaret Cohen first set out to examine this more nuanced sentimentalism for French women novelists in her 1999 prize-winning The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Her brilliant typology of sentimentalism as the struggle to restrain emotions through conflicting duties to others, and her data showing the long market life of sentimental novels from 1750-1850, inspired me to reenvision sentimentalism in Russia. I discovered that while the historiography of European sentimentalism blamed it for unleashing the feelings that led to the French revolution, the Russian historiography emphasized sentimentalism’s conservative, noble roots against the backdrop of the Russian revolution. I reframed Russian novels as the literature of a nobility seeking to understand itself by reimagining the role of duty in noble service culture. It was both a revolutionary and a conservative quest. This new history of sentiments restrained by duty to the greater good is still remarkably relevant today not only in literary history, but in histories of emotions and of liberalism and neoliberalism, which rely on eighteenth-century enlightenment ideas.
CP: Noble Sentiments challenges the “accepted narrative” (6) about Imperial Russian literary production and, in so doing, seeks “to change fundamentally how we think about Russian literature” (7). Can you tell us a little more about how the project approaches this task and what motivated your intervention?
HH: This was a hard book to conceptualize, and it took a long time to write and edit. I wanted to write about nineteenth-century women novelists in a way that finally mattered for our field. I would have to – and wanted to – write about men, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, as well. For over a century, we have been reading about the rise of a few geniuses and some of the greatest novels of all time. It has been such a satisfying story that it’s hard to imagine any other way to tell that history. Barbara Heldt confronted this problem in Terrible Perfection in 1987, and then Catriona Kelly in A History of Russian Women Writers, 1777 – 1992 in 1994. As Irina Savkina succinctly wrote in her 1997 review of over twenty such books: “How to write that history without doubling the canon and without creating a ‘mini-canon’ or an ‘anti-canon,’ still remains an open question.”1
So, this is a problem book, and I found myself going wherever the problem took me. I knew what had to be in the book without knowing the arguments – except for the basic arguments that men and women writers shared the ideals and strictures of noble service, and that together, they wrote Russian literature. Here I was indebted to Marc Raeff, with whom I studied in my first year at Columbia, for his work on the centrality of service to the Russian nobility. My basic arguments led to the unusual chapter structure, where I paired Russian and foreign women writers with Russian men, revealing new unexplored areas of men’s careers.
Data became the main avenue to undermine stereotypes about sentimentalism and periodization; European and Russian markets; and writers’ careers – to level the literary field for women and men. I realized that already beginning in the eighteenth century, there were major women writers in the Russian market – they just were not Russian: Madame de Genlis, Sophie Cottin, and George Sand. And Russians, like Europeans, were publishing multiple editions of translations of sentimental and sentimental realist novels, about the conflicts between sentimentalism and realism. In this way, my book slowly came to represent that gold standard of feminist scholarship – add women and everything changes.
CP: Focusing in on Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who is one of the main characters in your (revised) history of literature in Russia: How has your work on this oft-forgotten writer reshaped your understanding of the nineteenth-century cultural landscape? How does remembering her help us to better understand the “handful of geniuses” (5) that have defined the canon?
Here, I am thinking especially of Chapter Eight, which analyzes Khvoshchinskaya’s and Dostoevsky’s depictions of “duty” in a comparative context.
HH: This is the most complex, interesting question of all because we are still only getting to know Khvoshchinskaya’s life and works. She wrote so much over nearly fifty years – eleven novels, two dozen tales, a dozen short stories, and 200 poems, in addition to essays and much else. Our website Khvoshchinskaya Sisters Digital Collection brings everything together to encourage readers and scholars to start somewhere.
Putting Khvoshchinskaya and Dostoevsky together was the most unknown pairing of all the chapters because it was new. Their regard for each other; their love for George Sand; their one meeting; the Dostoevsky brothers’ request that she write for their journal Time; and their need to earn a living as writers were my starting points. When we add Khvoshchinskaya to the literary duo of Tolstoy and Turgenev, with Dostoevsky bringing up the rear in terms of their popularity – measured by page rates with the major journals – we can contrast the men’s conservative politics and the limited moral range of their heroines with Khvoshchinskaya’s liberal politics, depictions of the evils of serfdom, and her contrarian views on women’s emancipation, especially her evil heroines, which confounded her feminist supporters. While Dostoevsky argued for the limits of duty to restrain our evil inclinations and the need for faith in God, Khvoshchinskaya depicted the need for happiness and love – a duty to oneself – to sustain those fighting evil.
Khvoshchinskaya’s depictions of the toll of the battles of will between good and evil, her dark humor, and her subtle voice were central to how such contemporaries as Dostoevsky and Chekhov appreciated her role in their literary landscape. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky highlights these aspects in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda Von Meck (14 June 1880), which was translated by Nora Favorov and Rimma Garn:
“Do you get Notes of the Fatherland? If so, I strongly recommend reading Krestovsky (pseudonym)’s novella Family and School in the April issue. That Krestovsky (in case you don’t yet know) is none other than Mme Khvoshchinskaya, a very talented woman and author of the famous novels In Hope of Something Better, Ursa Major, and others. I really love this writer, despite the painful undertones running through all her works. She is extremely acute in her psychological analysis, and her deep understanding of the human spirit can be truly remarkable. She is particularly good at the mostly negative types of women she describes. The novella I’m referring to here contains phenomena taken straight from life and drawn with great accuracy. It is a very bleak and sad picture but drawn with a masterful hand.”
I’ll conclude with a Russian proverb that is usually ascribed to Nekrasov, although he was quoting Khvoshchinskaya, who was quoting Stepan Dudyshkin. She wrote: “There have been worse times than this, but none more vulgarly banal” (byli vremena khuzhe – podlee ne byvalo). Khvoshchinskaya specialized in the myriad depravities of “podlost’.”
CP: You write in this same chapter that charity was controversial in the second half of the nineteenth century. Why was this and how does this show up in the literature of the time?
HH: Charity is one of the ways that people think about doing their duty to others. But in the nineteenth century, as today, charity was controversial. Dostoevsky references this debate in Crime and Punishment, through Mr. Lebezyatnikov, who follows the latest ideas and rejects “private philanthropy” because it contributes to the very evil it purports to ameliorate. One of Raskolnikov’s redeeming features is that despite his abject poverty, he spontaneously gives away his last kopecks to people in distress. Unlike the radicals, Dostoevsky believed in individual charity as a way for people to retain their dignity. In Obligations (1886), Khvoshchinskaya, on the other hand, shows a landowner with his former serf systematically giving away all his money to people in need, as organized charity by the nobility.
CP: Noble Sentiments contributes many new insights about literature in Russia, primarily through its use of European data to analyze the Russian book market. You write that “however much critics may distort the issue” of the sentimental novel’s prevalence, “publishing figures do not lie” (9). Can you share the most surprising thing you learned while working with this data?
HH: Surprises big and small about the market and literacy all led me to a remarkable conclusion: Russians were extraordinary readers, which was an inestimable advantage in launching a major new European literature in just a couple of decades. The biggest data surprise came first: through the 1850s, the market for novels in Russia was 90% foreign. In The Atlas of the European Novel 1800 -1900, Franco Moretti has 80%, which led me to my own research when I began writing the book in 2010. I would pester colleagues by asking them what percentage of the market they thought was foreign. As I dug into literacy data, I found that the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla’s elegant little 1969 classic Literacy and Development in the West is still the standard reference. His data showed that literacy for Russia was not 5%, but ranged from 5% to 10%. This made an enormous difference because even just 10% of Europe’s largest country by population was more readers than 90% literacy in Sweden.
But it was urban literacy that really mattered because European booksellers focused their trade on cities, not countries. I could not believe that by 1850, St. Petersburg was Europe’s third largest city, and that together with Russia’s second cultural capital Moscow, these two cities were always among the top five largest cities in Europe. Literacy was higher in Russian cities, around 30%, and highest in St. Petersburg and Moscow, over 60% because, 1) despite all the talk about women readers, men are historically more likely to be literate and 2) Russian cities, especially St. Petersburg, had more men than women, unlike European cities, which tended to have slightly more women. Together, data revealed that Russia’s literary market had real breadth and depth compared to other marginal European markets, contrary to Moretti’s assertions.
CP: Relatedly, your book attunes us to the dominance of translated European novels in the Russian literary market. Has your research into the pervasiveness of these translations influenced how you teach the Russian novel and design your syllabi?
HH: The omnipresence of European novels shapes the story I tell about how writers adapted the themes of European novels to Russian noble service culture – the subject of their novels. I always start with the table of ranks to explain that while writers and their characters are like us, they are also completely different. It’s a lesson my students taught me when they explained that characters as disparate as poor nobles and serfs were middle class. Students soon can ask good questions about who characters are, their motivations, and their feelings. I happen to be teaching Dostoevsky and Tolstoy this semester. The table of ranks helps establish who Raskolnikov is – not just a student like them, but a student who is going to the Harvard of Russia and of whom much is expected, as the future of the noble civil service and of Russia’s empire. Were he to graduate, he would acquire a rank of class XI and likely get a civil service position, which is why he keeps humiliating himself by having to clarify that he is a “former student.” At a basic level, in my course, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are less lofty thinkers than pugilistic writers engaged with the social, political ideas animating the Slavophile-Westernizer debate and trends in the literary market as they work to earn a living. It is my answer to the question about whether and how to teach Russian classics in the light of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the colonizing role of Russian culture. We should teach the classics, and we should ask better questions, grounded in history and politics.
CP: Dostoevsky’s lesser-known and canonical works have recently experienced viral success among Gen Z readers on BookTok and Bookstagram. In the spirit of popularizing bestselling, but silenced and forgotten nineteenth-century authors: which author or work analyzed in your book do you think would be a good candidate for Internet fame in 2026 and why?
HH: Good translations and biographies encourage new readers to try Russian novels. A new translation of an 1858 novella by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, by award-winning translator Nora Favorov, is coming out in November in Oxford World’s Classics– the first by a nineteenth-century Russian woman in this major trade series. Khvoshchinskaya’s The Brother is about three sisters and their mother stuck in the deep provinces and their corrupt, highly placed brother in the St. Petersburg civil service, who steals their portions of the estate and an inheritance, foreclosing any possibility of marriage and an escape to a better life. There are echoes of The Brother in Three Sisters by Chekhov, who admired Khvoshchinskaya. There are other novels in various stages of translation and a collection of short works by all three Khvoshchinskaya sisters – Nadezhda (1821-89), Sofia (1824-65), and Praskovia (1828-1916) – in the pipeline, as well as a biography by Anna Berman.
We imagine fame for our project as a movie. The best candidate for a film script is Nadezhda’s third novel, The Last Act of the Comedy (1856), in which her signature theatricality, biting wit, and irony blossomed. Her acerbic male narrator describes the consequences of a nobleman’s gambling debts and mismanagement of the family estate for his wife, sister, son, and daughter. Imagine Jane Austen turned up a notch.
Hilde Hoogenboom is associate professor of Russian in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University, where she is working on another book project on literary representations of corruption from the eighteenth-century to the present, as a new way to think about the special ethical role that writers have long played in Russian civil society.
Chloe Papadopoulos is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. She is currently writing a book that explores the provocative potential of reform-era depictions of the Russian past in literature, drama, and the plastic arts. She serves as Communications Chair of the North American Dostoevsky Society and is Editor of Bloggers Karamazov.
- Savkina, Irina. “Kto i kak pishet istoriiu russkoi zhenskoi literatury.” Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 24 (1997): 368.
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