Should every description of a traumatic event, death, pain, or cruelty, especially directed at women, be viewed as gothic? Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic, an interesting interpretation of Russian realism, confronts us with this question.
Writing Fear follows the recent trend in scholarship that seeks to uncover gothic elements in realistic novels. Bowers argues that gothic fiction pervaded realism because “[r]ealist writers found the gothic's mobilization of fear within a narrative structure invaluable” (4). The term “gothic realism” is a borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin. However, differently from Bakhtin, who explored the complex relations between realism and preceding literary forms, Bowers tends to identify realism and the Gothic by focusing on their fascination with fear. She claims that the gothic was “a key tool in the project of recreating life in prose.” According to Bowers, the gothic as a genre “relies on the exaggeration of emotions such as fear, horror, and dread.” Realist writers could not resist the Gothic temptation—“the affective capacity of fear”—to make their work more engaging for their audiences (4).
The book's first part, “Gothic Migrations,” addresses the Russian public's encounters with the European Gothic novel, then turns, in search of gothic elements, to Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls, Bezhin Meadow, and “Oblomov's Dream” to exemplify gothic realism. Fedor Dostoevskii's The Idiot is Bowers’ showcase: the novel portrays “the fall of a noble house, the implied quasi-incestuous seduction of an underage ward by her guardian, and the uncanny figure of the Idiot who unconsciously causes violence,” and “constant discussions of violent death” (74–75). Those themes, the author claims, are gothic. The choice of The Idiot and the lack of attention to Landlady (mentioned only in passim in this part), Bobok, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, which contain similar themes, requires better justification.
The second part, “Gothic Realism,” extends this concept to Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovelev's Family, Ivan Aksakov's The Family Chronicle, Dostoevskii's Demons, and Ivan Bunin's Dark Avenues. Bowers links the gothic to social anxieties: “urban poverty, the woman question, the threat of revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family” (14). The choice of texts in this part is equally questionable. For example, in the chapter “Psychological Petersburg, Gothic Petersburg,” the reader finds a two-sentence discussion of Dostoevskii's The Double, and no mention of Nikolai Gogol΄'s Nevsky Prospect, although the image of St. Petersburg plays a prominent role in shaping the psychological experiences of the protagonists in these works.
Bowers inscribes her book in the tradition that defines the Gothic as a repertoire of themes—a plot driven by a mystery, broken taboos, depictions of “fear, anxieties, and revulsion” (7), death, violence, and insanity. She pursues these tropes in Russian realism “from its beginnings . . . to its eventual merger with modernism” (11). Indeed, most of the realist novels use some motives from this list. But if their presence suffices to define The Idiot or The Golovelev's Family as “gothic realism,” almost any literary work evoking fear may be called gothic. What, then, remains of realism? Or of gothic? What is the value of a concept that does not differentiate between genres?
With its overt sensationalism, the Gothic novel offered eighteenth-century readers the voyeuristic thrill of witnessing a victim's fears, entertaining a public that was tired of Classicism. As Bowers acknowledges, there was no philosophy—or moral quests—behind Gothic miracles and agonies. Contemporaries considered Romanticism a high genre because it explored the passions of extraordinary personalities, while Gothic, with its focus on deranged monsters and mysticism, was perceived as a low genre.
Focusing on the writer's goals may offer a better way of defining a genre. What determines the writer's choice to describe a dead body, death, or suicide? A desire to arouse the readers’ morbid curiosity or a necessity embedded in the novel's worldview? In other words, is “writing fear” an essential instrument to express the writer's philosophical or moral inquiries, or is it a commodity?
No matter how criminal or revolting they are, Rogozhin, Smerdyakov, and Karenin are complex humans, not clichéd monsters. However problematic Dostoevskii's worldview as expressed in The Idiot or Lev Tolstoi's philosophy in Anna Katerina (which, arguably, also features the “gothic repertoire”—a victimized woman who commits suicide) may be, those realist novels seek to understand human behavior and psyche and speak about human sufferings. We may doubt that the descriptions of Nastassya Filippovna's or Anna's dead bodies were created to entertain the readers by “the affective capacity of fear.”
