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Investigations into the Unpoliced Novel: Moll Flanders and The Comely Cook
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Abstract
Taking its cue from Lev Tolstoi's claim, in “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” that the Russian novel is a “deviation from European form,” this article investigates deviance as a formal and thematic aspect of the Russian novel. Concentrating on Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook as an early exemplar of the Russian novel form, and locating its deviance against the backdrop of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (the English novel with which it is most frequently paired), I examine both formal matters and the texts' thematic and imaginative clusters. These questions of commercialism, capital, and the role of money; of gender difference, the regulation of sexuality and pleasure, and bodily life generally; of Oedipal family arrangements and communal organization; and of repetition and the production of the new are especially at stake in investigating issues of normativity and abnormality, or regularity and deformity, as they are given shape in the works. In particular, this article concentrates on the police as a multivalent literary, and particularly novelistic, construct to present the Russian novel as a distinctively unpoliced and unregulated genre whose lawlessness is brought into relief by the culture of discipline and legality that pervades Defoe's work.
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References
I would like to thank Liza Knapp, Cathy Popkin, Cathy Nepomnyashchy, Robert Belknap, and Nicholas Dames for their comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as Irina Reyfman and Rebecca Stanton for their guidance and Azeen Khan for her subtle reading of the piece. Thank you as well to Robyn Jensen for her help during the early stages of the writing. My gratitude goes to the manuscript readers for and editors at Slavic Review for their rigorous and generous comments. This research was assisted by a New Faculty Fellows award from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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33. Gasperetti for one understands the “noticeabl[e]… lack” of authority figures in Chulkov's novel—the extent to which Martona “refuses to enforce a punitive view of the world or dictate how readers should interpret the text” and the novel's championing of “freedom and pleasure against the more austere demands of constancy, authority, and truth”—as representative of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, whose prevalence, he argues, would become a characteristic of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Gasperetti, Rise of the Russian Novel, 106-12.
34. Chulkov, Prigozhaia povarikha, 292. It is worth reviewing here the meaning of the word politsiia in the context of eighteenth-century Russia. The first incarnation of an independent, specialized police force was introduced to Russia by Peter the Great; although police functions had existed before his rule (mostly informal law enforcement supervised by elected civilians), it was only with the Petrine reforms that a specialized police bureau under a police chief—charged with such matters as supervising building construction, maintaining street cleanliness, pursuing loiterers and drunks, ensuring fire safety, and the like—came into being. The first organized police forces were established in St. Petersburg in 1718 and in Moscow in 1721; in the provinces, specialized police organizations did not emerge until later. Under Catherine II, there was a general relaxation of investigative methods, but even under her reign there was a significant police presence, especially concerning matters of censorship and, of interest for the present discussion, prostitution. On the history of the police in Russia, see Kuritsyn, V. M., ed., Istoriia politsii Rossii: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherki i osnovnye dokumenty. Uchebnoe posobie (Moscow, 1998)Google Scholar; and Zviagin, S. P., Konovalov, A. B., and Makarchuk, S. V., Politsiia i militsiia Rossii v XVIII-nachale XX vv. (Kemerovo, 2001)Google Scholar.
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37. Garrard, Mixail Čulkov, 133; Garrard, “Narrative Technique,” 561.
38. Garrard, Mixail Čulkov, 133.
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53. Though Moll appears to choose her pseudonym herself, its appropriation is in fact overdetermined. Not only is “Flanders” the trade name of the embargoed lace whose theft landed Moll's mother in jail, but “Moll Flanders” is also the signifier assigned to her, in an act apparently unrelated to her own self-naming, by the Newgate convicts, which coincidence eventually marks her as a repeat offender and leads to her felony conviction. Meta-textually, the name is also bestowed by the real-life criminals on whom her persona is based (see footnote 26).
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55. Levitsky, “Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook,” 101. Emphasis in the original.
56. For an in-depth discussion of Martona's use of proverbs, see ibid.
57. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 90.
58. Chulkov, Prigozhaia povarikha, 183.
59. For a discussion of the role of siblings and sibling love in the novels of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii in particular, see Anna A. Berman, “Siblings: The Path to Universal Brotherhood in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012).
60. Chulkov, Prigozhaia povarikha, 93.
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65. Hunt, “The Autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum,” 84, 35.
66. Ibid., 85.
67. These sickbed scenes are Akhal“s forgiveness of Svidal’ at the former's supposed deathbed and the merchant's forgiveness of his wife in the interpolated tale.
68. In response to the theft from a married couple that eventually lands Moll back in Newgate, the wife is “mov'd with Compassion, and enclin'd t o … let me go,” while the husband is intransigent. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 197. By contrast, in an interpolated tale toward the end of The Comely Cook, it is a husband who chooses not to punish his wife.
69. Olia Prokopenko, “The Real-Life Protagonist of Mikhail Chulkov's Comely Cook: A Hypothesis,” Slavic and East European Journal 48, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 225-46.
70. Chulkov, Prigozhaia povarikha, 303.
71. Shklovskii, Chulkov i Levshin, 115.