Adulterous Nations Adulterous Nations Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel ✦ Tatiana Kuzmic northwestern university press evanston, illinois this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2016. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of Congress. Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons At- tribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Kuzmic, Tatiana. Adulterous Nations: Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2017. The following material is excluded from the license: Epigraph, illustrations, and parts of chapters 1 and 3 as outlined in the Acknowledg- ments For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit www.nupress.northwestern.edu An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. To my parents, who imparted to me — through both nature and nurture— their love of books and languages Beauty and the Beast The deceiving beauty Slammed the door Finally Like the Homeland And disappeared Into History. Therefore, the deceiving beauty And the Homeland Have something in common: Both leave behind Boys Who will die For them. war 1991 — Ferida Duraković, Sarajevo Contents Acknowledgments xi Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates xv Introduction 3 PART I: EMPIRES Chapter 1 Middlemarch: The English Heroine and the Polish Rebel(lions) 27 Chapter 2 Effi Briest: German Realism and the Young Empire 57 Chapter 3 Anna Karenina: The Slavonic Question and the Dismembered Adulteress 92 PART II: NATIONS Chapter 4 The Goldsmith’s Gold: The Origins of Yugoslavism and the Birth of the Croatian Novel 131 Chapter 5 Quo Vadis: Polish Messianism and the Proselytizing Heroine 155 Conclusion 181 Notes 189 Bibliography 213 Index 223 Acknowledgments In many of the workshops I attended about publishing one’s first book, the project was frequently compared to a firstborn child. If it takes a village, as the saying goes, to raise the latter, the same can be said for completing the former. I will begin with the people most recently involved in seeing Adul- terous Nations through to its fruition and proceed backwards. Mike Levine, acquisitions editor for Northwestern University Press, first expressed inter- est in the project and continued to express interest as I struggled on chapter by chapter. Comments from all three readers for the press were helpful in making the final rendition substantially better than it was in its original form, but I wish to extend special thanks to Reader 3 for a particularly at- tentive reading (and for using the adjective “outrageous” as a compliment). At the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, where I first had the opportunity to “test- drive” the book project in front of an interdisciplinary audience, the British Studies Society, which hosted the intellectually invigorating Friday lunches, and the Humanities Institute, where I worked on chapter 3 of the book, offered inspiration, feed- back, and occasional research financing, the last of which came with the all- important teaching release. The book has also benefited from the dedi- cated work of my two graduate student research assistants. Nadya Clayton plowed through Tolstoy’s letters in search of references to the Russo- Turkish War, alerted me to relevant entries in Sofya Tolstaya’s diary, and forwarded to me the news about Anatoly Lebed’, the Russian colonel who fought in Serbia in the 1990s. Katya Cotey also plowed through Tolstoy’s writings as well as writings about Tolstoy; she is an inexhaustible source of information with an extraordinary gift for locating everything, including a nineteenth- century article on Polish beggars, which enriched my reading of Middle- march. Over the many hours of conversation we have spent on our shared love of the nineteenth- century novel I have also come to regard her as a dear friend. The book has also been enriched by the faculty book club that I led for two years, and I wish to thank everybody who was involved in it. Most of the participants were in the stressful pre- tenure phases of their careers when they read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and (even more amazingly) War and Peace, as well as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, with me. Thanks to Lisa Neff for coming up with the idea, to Jenni Beer for teaching with me a course on psychology in the Russian novel that was a direct consequence of the xi xii Acknowledgments book club, and to all of the following for their involvement: Ted and Chris Huston, Deborah Beck, Angie Littwin, Cristine Legare, Rebecca Callahan, Marie Monfils, and Paige Harden. To all of the psychologists in the group, a special thanks for making me appreciate Tolstoy all the more for your valu- able insights and connections. Outside of the university, I wish to thank Ellen- Elias Bursać for always and quickly answering my e- mail questions about August Šenoa and Vienac and for putting me in touch with Ferida Duraković, whom I heartily thank for permission to use her poem as an epigraph. I also thank Irina Rubis for permission to use the image from her and Katerina Venzhik’s Ne dai Russ- komu campaign. Shorter versions of chapters 1 and 3 were previously pub- lished elsewhere, the former as “‘The German, the Sclave, and the Semite’: Eastern Europe in the Imagination of George Eliot” in Nineteenth- Century Literature 68 (2014): 513– 541, and the latter as “‘Serbia— Vronsky’s Last Love’: Reading Anna Karenina in the Context of Empire” in the Toronto Slavic Quarterly 43 (2013): 40– 66. NCL editor Jonathan Grossman and the anonymous reviewers not only sharpened my thinking about George Eliot but also made me into a better writer overall and taught me skills I have continued to use in other projects. I cannot say that I did not realize while in graduate school how fortunate I was to have landed in such a supportive environment, but over the years my gratitude only grew. My committee chair, Harriet Murav, can only be de- scribed by that wonderful German word for one’s adviser— Doktormutter; Lilya Kaganovsky was always generous with both intellectual and practi- cal advice; and Valeria Sobol has been a delightful source of inspiration in my Tolstoy scholarship, all the more for answering every one of my calls to participate in a conference panel. Among the graduate students whose friendship has withstood the test of time and distance, Dheepa Sundaram and Karen Lukrhur were always and still are willing to “talk theory,” whip up an amazing meal, and offer pet- sitting services, all of which supported my research. There are aspects of this book that date back to my undergraduate days and the two professors who influenced me most. Elaine Phillips taught me the wonders of the Hebrew Bible, and at a random piano recital that we both happened to attend years after I graduated, when I told her about my disser- tation, she introduced me to the term “porno- prophetics.” The chapter on Anna Karenina would have been seriously impoverished without that con- cept. My favorite psychology professor, Bert Hodges, claimed that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were the best psychologists he had ever read and so, albeit unintentionally, steered me into a different field of study. (He also pointed out the beautiful mowing scenes in Anna Karenina as the perfect depiction of the famous social psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s notion of flow, Acknowledgments xiii which came in very handy fifteen years later when I taught Russian Litera- ture and Psychology with Jenni Beer.) Last and most important of all, I wish to thank my family. The credit for the catchy phrase that is the main title of this book goes to my uncle— ujo— Miroslav Volf, who came up with it when I shared with him my first thoughts about the project, before it was even a dissertation draft. My sis- ters, Kristina and Petra, shared their kids with me, sometimes even across continents, as when Kristina allowed me to fly her Luka and Matea all the way from L.A. to Croatia several times over the summers. Petra made her home my home during those summers, a few holidays, and one semester that I spent completing the book; she cooked all of my favorite meals and pushed me to write when, more often than not, I preferred to play the role of aunt rather than scholar. As I have often told her, her idyllic life with her husband and their four beautiful children in the Croatian countryside would make Tolstoy proud. I owe the deepest level of gratitude to my parents, Vlasta and Peter Kuz- mič, to whom this book is dedicated. One of my earliest memories is that of my dad creating rhyming songs for me in order to teach me to count (ti i ja— to smo dva; mama, ja i ti— to smo tri . .) or help me remember the names of our numerous relatives (starting with himself— tata Petar, brz k’o vjetar).