The Imperative of Reliability examines the development of nineteenth-century Russian prose and the remarkably swift emergence of the Russian novel. Victoria Somoff identifies an unprecedented situation in the production and perception of the utterance that came to define nascent novelistic fictionality both in European and Russian prose, where the utterance itself whether an oral story or a found manuscript became the object of representation within the compositional format of the frame narrative. This circumstance generated a narrative perspective from which both the events and...