Brother

'For his mother, he was a miracle. . . . Mothers can be deluded.' Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821-89) was recognised in her day, both at home and abroad, as Russia's greatest writer after Tolstoy and Turgenev. In her novella, The Brother, she tells the story of the three Chirkin sisters, who are trapped on their remote, decrepit estate, and their brother, a corrupt official who siphons off what little they have to support his extravagant life of gambling and social climbing in St Petersburg. When he returns home, a dark family drama ensues, infused with wry humour and pathos. An unflinching portrayal of brutal provincial patriarchy, The Brother is a gripping story of struggle and betrayal. Khvoshchinskaya's penetrating insights into the complexities of family dynamics, her ear for dialogue and hypocrisy, and her deep understanding of human psychology led Russian critics to compare her to their favourite English writer: George Eliot. Like all her fiction, The Brother was published under the male pseudonym V. Krestovsky. Fiercely private, Khvoshchinskaya resisted biographers' attempts to write about her in her lifetime, claiming pseudonyms have 'no biography'. This new translation and introduction offer insights into her life, times, and legacy for the 21st century. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Nora Seligman Favorov is a prize-winning Russian-to-English translator specializing in Russian literature and history and fascinated by the interplay between the two. The Brother is her second published translation of a work by one of the Khvoshchinskaya sisters, the first being Sofia Khvoshchinskaya's 1863 novel City Folk and Country Folk (2017), recognized by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages as "best Literary Translation into English" for 2018. Her translation of Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg Khlevniuk (2015) was selected as Pushkin House UK's "best Russian book in translation" for 2016. Anna A. Berman is Professor in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College. She is the author of The Family Novel in Russian and England, 1800-1880 (2022) and Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Path to Universal Brotherhood (2015), and the editor of Tolstoy in Context (2022). Berman has published numerous articles on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the family novel, the relationship of science and literature in nineteenth-century Russia, and operatic adaptations of Russian literary classics. She is currently working on a biography of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya. Hilde Hoogenboom, Associate Professor of Russian at Arizona State University, specializes in nineteenth-century Russian and European literatures, women's memoirs and other life-writing, noble culture, intellectual history, civil society, digital humanities, and book history. She co-translated Catherine the Great's memoirs from French which was published in 2005. Other publications include Noble Sentiment and the Rise of Russian Novels: A European Literary History (2025); an edited volume The Khvoshchinskaya Sisters (forthcoming); the Khvoshchinskaya sisters' archival letters in Russian (2001); and over thirty articles on Russian women writers.