Taking its cue from Lev Tolstoi's claim, in “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” that the Russian novel is a “deviation from European form,” this article investigates deviance as a formal and thematic aspect of the Russian novel. Concentrating on Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook as an early exemplar of the Russian novel form, and locating its deviance against the backdrop of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (the English novel with which it is most frequently paired), I examine both formal matters and the texts' thematic and imaginative clusters. These questions of commercialism, capital, and the role of money; of gender difference, the regulation of sexuality and pleasure, and bodily life generally; of Oedipal family arrangements and communal organization; and of repetition and the production of the new are especially at stake in investigating issues of normativity and abnormality, or regularity and deformity, as they are given shape in the works. In particular, this article concentrates on the police as a multivalent literary, and particularly novelistic, construct to present the Russian novel as a distinctively unpoliced and unregulated genre whose lawlessness is brought into relief by the culture of discipline and legality that pervades Defoe's work.