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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24. Ibid., v-1. On Defoe as Moll's editor, see Tsomondo, Thorell Porter, The Not So Blank “Blank Page”: The Politics of Narrative and the Woman Narrator in the Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century English Novel (New York, 2007), 13 Google Scholar.

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26. Watt was not the first to point out this quality of Defoe's prose: according to Maximillian Novak, it was Sir Walter Scott who first noticed the “‘general charm … [in] the romances of De Foe’” that was conferred by the “appearance of reality to the incidents which he narrates.” Quoted in Maximillian E. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction (Lincoln, 1983), 9. From the persona of Moll Flanders herself, who most likely was based on one or another female criminal from Defoe's time (such as Moll King, Moll Harvey, Mary Godson, and Moll Cutpurse), to the affinities between his style and the scientific prose of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century, Defoe's novels appear firmly grounded in the material world and the here and now. See Durston, Gregory, Moll Flanders: An Analysis of an Eighteenth-Century Criminal Biography (Chichester, 1997), 5 Google Scholar.

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29. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 172. Emphases in the original.

30. Chulkov, Mikhail, Prigozhaia povarikha, ili Pokhozhdenie razvratnoi zhenshchiny, in Povesti razumnye i zamyslovatye: Populiarnaia bytovaia proza XVIII veka (Moscow, 1989), 288-89Google Scholar.

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32. On the question of the finished or unfinished nature of The Comely Cook, see Alexander Levitsky, “Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook: The Symmetry of a Hoax,” Russian Literature Triquarterly: Eighteenth-Century Issue, part 2, no. 21 (1988): 107; Harold B. Segel, introduction to Harold B. Segel, ed., Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia: A History and Anthology (New York, 1967), 26; and Gasperetti, Rise of the Russian Novel, 78.

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.

35. Chulkov, Prigozhaia povarikha, 306.

36. In “Narrative Technique in Chulkov's Prigozhaia Povarikha,” Slavic Review 27, no. 4 (December 1968), J. G. Garrard speaks of the “subtle transformation in her character” (561) after her experience in prison. Viktor Shklovskii also notes that “she becomes different” and refers to the “change in her relationship to life [πepeмeнa жизнeoтнoшeния repoини].” V. B. Shklovskii, Chulkov i Levshin (Leningrad, 1933), 116.

37. Garrard, Mixail Čulkov, 133; Garrard, “Narrative Technique,” 561.

38. Garrard, Mixail Čulkov, 133.

39. Freccero, John, “Autobiography and Narrative,” in Heller, Thomas C., Sosna, Morton, and Wellbery, David E., eds., Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, 1986), 18 Google Scholar; Vance, Eugene, “The Functions and Limits of Autobiography in Augustine's Confessions ,” Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984): 401 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Freccero, John, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” Diacritics 5, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” 19.

42. Brooks, Peter, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago, 2001), 2–3 Google Scholar.

43. Ibid., 5.

44. Zhitie protopopa Avvakuma, im samim napisannoe i drugie ego sochineniia, ed. M. Gordon (Moscow, 1959), 90; V. V. Vinogradov, “On the Tasks of Stylistics: Observations Regarding the Style of The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum,” in Archpriest Avvakum: The Life Written by Himself trans. Kenneth N. Brostrom (Ann Arbor, 1979), 120. Avvakum himself refers to his narrative throughout as a form of “conversation” and “gabbing.”

45. In Priscilla Hunt's words, Avvakum's narrative comprises a “series of symbolic deaths … from which he is always reborn.” Priscilla Hart Hunt, “The Autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum: The Outer Limits of the Narrative Icon” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1979), 11,17. Hunt further considers Avvakum's successive resurrections, whereby grace descends during a moment of “sensual disorientation,” as instantiating the apophatic orientation of Russian Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on “divine unknowing” as well as its “non-rational path to union with God” (85). This is a God, moreover, who is conceived “primarily as motion or process” and thus exists at a far remove from the retrospective enlightenment that marks Augustine's arrival at a static deity, perched at the end of a sentence. Hunt, , “The Autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum: Structure and Function,” Ricerche Slavistiche 22-23, nos. 22-23 (1975-76): 169 Google Scholar.

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47. Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” 18.

48. Avvakum's text, for one, is a composite work that opens itself up to the voice of the other (Avvakum's spiritual father, Epifanii, who contributes a paragraph mid-text); that ends on a plea for dialogic response; and that, as Hunt explains, centers on a complex process by which multiple textual and metatextual subjectivities are metaphorically conflated. In Hunt's telling, Avvakum's efforts to achieve cosmic wholeness even see him “merge with [both]… Christ and the Mother of God,” such that he comes to virtually “encompass … the nuclear family—mother, son and father.” Hunt, “The Autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum,” 18. This is hardly a male story of Oedipal separation; rather, an ethic of intersubjective incorporation is implicitly represented as the workings of a womb, with Avvakum's progress through the narrative equivalent to “giving symbolic birth to himself on increasingly transcendent levels.” Hunt, “Structure and Function,” 159.

49. This subject touches, mutatis mutandis, on Jacques Derrida's famous disquisition on the gift as it necessarily exists outside of any economy of equivalence or one-to-one give and take. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago, 1992). It further relates to a broad philosophical discourse on the gift, reciprocity, gratitude, and the like, carried out by thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Georg Simmel, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and Marcel Mauss, that is beyond the scope of this article but relevant to it. For a collection of such thinking, see Komt, Aafke E., ed., The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Amsterdam, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, 1959), 235 Google Scholar.

51. Ibid., 236.

52. Chulkov, Prigozhaia povarikha, 294.

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).

54. See the entries for these words at Tolkovyi slovar'russkogo iazyka V. Dalia ON-LINE, at http://vidahl.holm.ru (last accessed May 30, 2015). For more discussion of questions of social class and rank in Russia (especially as compared to England), see Dominic Lieven, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, Imperial Russia, 1689-1917 (Cambridge, Eng., 2006), 228-29. For an exploration of the Table of Ranks as it affected the composition of the Russian nobility, see Reyfman, Irina, Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford, 1999), 56 Google Scholar.

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.

61. Butler, Judith, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000), 20, 2 Google Scholar.

62. Chulkov, Prigozhaia povarikha, 313.

63. Stavropoulos, Christoforos, “Partakers of Divine Nature,” in Clendenin, Daniel B., ed., Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader (Grand Rapids, 2003), 187 Google Scholar.

64. Augustine turns to God for a “circumcispon]” of the lips, a castration that would make all his delights “chaste”; evinces horror at his own debauched, pre-conversion form, “sordid… deformed and squalid”; and maintains that grace descends only when “the tumult of a man's flesh… cease[s].” St. Augustine, Confessions, ed. Michael P. Foley, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis, 2006), Xl.ii, VIII.vii, IX.xi.

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.