“Kliger’s groundbreaking study sets a new standard for theoretically and philosophically grounded investigations of Russian realism. Kliger traces the outlines of realist literature—or, to use a nineteenth-century term, poetry of reality—as a sphere of writing and imagination where down-to-earth depictions of everyday existence are permeated by political reflection on such categories as sovereignty and civil society. Kliger’s framework will be productive not only for future studies of Russian realism but also for an inquiry into the roots of Russia’s persistent culture of despotism and the emancipatory movements that have opposed it.”

Kirill Ospovat, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“In this both sweeping and subtle book Kliger returns to the terrain of nineteenth-century fiction to situate the Russian tradition alongside and against the European. Haunting the classical Russian novel, Kliger argues, was a distinct social imaginary closer in spirit to Greek tragedy than to modern fiction, one in which the force of sovereign power served to shatter or remake the individual or social body. Familiar to most of us as Europe’s brilliant if tardy cousin whose cultural development was forever stymied by the looming presence of autocracy, Russian literature is rediscovered here in its new function: to make the state, and the state of exception, visible, not only on the explicitly mimetic level, but allegorically, as the hidden motor of plots apparently remote from the realm of politics.”

Harsha Ram, University of California, Berkeley