Professor Anna Berman

Clare College
  • Professor of Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Culture
  • Slavonic Studies
Professor Anna Berman

Contact

Location

  • Clare College, Trinity Lane, CB2 1TL

About

Anna Berman’s primary area of interest is the nineteenth-century Russian and English novel.  Her research has largely focused on questions about family, kinship structures, love, and marriage, with secondary interests in the relationship between science and literature (esp. the response to Charles Darwin and Ilya Mechnikov in Russian literature), and adaptations of Russian literary classics to the operatic stage. Her current focus is on Russia’s nineteenth-century women novelists, and she is writing a biography of  Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya.

Prof Berman completed her B.A. at Brown University, her M.Phil. at Cambridge University, and her Ph.D. at Princeton University.  She was an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Russian Section at McGill University (Montréal, Canada) before joining faculty at Cambridge.

Prof Berman welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students interested in topics relevant to her research.  

Research

Research interests: 

Nineteenth-century novel, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, kinship, family history, siblings, the family novel, nineteenth-century Russian women prose writers, science and literature, operatic adaptations of literary classics.

 

Recent research projects: 

Prof Berman is currently working on restoring the legacy of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821-1889), one of Russia's greatest forgotten novelists. She is writing the first biography of Khvoshchinskaya, co-editing a number of publications on the Khvoshchinskaya sisters, and working with translators to get more of their works published in English.

 

Published works: 

 

Books

  • Editor. Tolstoy in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
  • The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880. Oxford University Press, 2022.
  • Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Path to Universal Brotherhood. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015.

Articles

  • "A Tale of Two (or Three) Sisters: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Zhukova, Tur, Khvoshchinskaya, and Chekhov." Slavic Literatures 158 (2025): 87-107.
  • “The Problem with Brothers in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel.” Victorian Review 46:1 (2020): 49-66.
  • “The Family Novel (and Its Curious Disappearance).” Comparative Literature 72:1 (2020): 1-18.
  • “Incest and the Limits of Family in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel.” Russian Review 78:1 (2019): 82-101.
  • “Mother of the Novel: Volkonskaya’s Russian Pamela and War and Peace.” Tolstoy Studies Journal 30 (2019, forthcoming).
  • “Lateral Plots: Brothers and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel.” SEEJ 61:1 (2017): 2-28.
  • “Darwin in the Novels: Tolstoy’s Evolving Literary Response.” Russian Review 72:2 (2017): 331-351.
  • “Of Phagocytes and Men: Tolstoy’s Response to Mechnikov and the Religious Purpose of Science.” Comparative Literature 68:3 (2016): 296-311.
  • “Competing Visions of Love and Brotherhood: Rewriting War and Peace for the Soviet Opera Stage.” Cambridge Opera Journal 26:3 (2014): 215-238.
  • “Scripting Katyusha: On the Way to an Operatic Adaptation of Resurrection.” SEEJ 55:3 (2011): 396-417.
  • “Siblings in The Brothers Karamazov.” The Russian Review 68 (2009): 263-82.
  • “The Idiot’s Romantic Struggle.” Dostoevsky Studies 12 (2008):  81-103.
  • “The Sibling Bond: A Model for Romance and Motherhood in War and Peace.” Tolstoy Studies Journal 18 (2006): 1-15.
  • “A Tale of Two (or Three) Sisters” Slavic Literature, special issue “The Unknown Nineteenth Century.”87 (2025): 87-107.

Chapters in Edited Volumes

  • “The Novel 1” in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, 537-552. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
  • “The Russian Woman” in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, 772-787. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
  • “Dostoevsky and the (Missing) Marriage Plot” in Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity, edited by Kate Holland and Katia Bowers, 41-60. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.
  • “‘Viper will eat viper’: Dostoevsky, Darwin, and the possibility of brotherhood” in Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky: Science, Religion, Philosophy, edited by Vladimir Golstein and Svetlana Evdokimova, 83-95. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016.
  • «Фагоциты Мечникова и толстовский синтез религии и науки» in Лев Толстой и мировая литература: Материалы IX Международной научной конференции, 197-205. Тула: Музей усадьба Л. Н. Толстого «Ясная Поляна», 2016.
  • “Pierre and Familyhood” in Critical Insights: War and Peace, edited by Leighton B. Cooke, 166-180. Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2014.

Teaching and supervision

Course contact for: 

SL1: Introduction to Russian Culture

SLA3: Introduction to Russian Culture

SL4: Russian Literature from the Golden Age to the Silver Age

SL11: Topics in Nineteenth-Century Slavonic Literature and Culture: Tolstoy