The Talnikov Family

"The Talnikov Family (1848) follows Natasha, a girl growing up in a psychologically and physically abusive household of Petersburg actors. Modeled on Panaeva's own life prior to her marriage to radical Ivan Panaev at 18, the piece was published in the important thick journal The Contemporary but was swiftly suppressed. Censors called it "cynical," "immoral," and "undermining of parental power." Published the same year as Karolina Pavlova's A Double Life, The Talknikov Family has a similar attunement to gender inequality, but its subject matter of the urban working class will be more familiar from Dostoevsky's novels or Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (1863), which also centers on a female protagonist who escapes her dark family life by marrying a young radical"--