exposition. Now, quite rightly, in the new school of literature, interest in the details of feeling is taking the place of interest in the events themselves. Pushkin’s stories are somehow bare.”29 As regards “details of feeling,” Tolstoy will indeed have no rival. But the “bareness” of Pushkin’s prose remained for him a constant inspiration. Twenty years later, Tolstoy would stumble across an abandoned prose fragment by Pushkin and credit it, together with the Belkin Tales, for providing him with the courage to begin
Realisms: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov
At some point between 1845 and 1855, the Russian nineteenth century breaks in two. This watershed was real not only in the judgment of later literary historians (“Romanticism” before that time, “Realism” after it); contemporaries also acutely felt the discontinuity. Political, social, and military markers were overt. In 1848, revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe caused panic among the imperial censors and internal police, recalling Catherine II’s reaction to the Terror in France in the early 1790s. In 1856, a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War finally convinced ruling circles of the need for modernization, railroads, and a mobile labor force. The new tsar Alexander II, succeeding the reactionary Nicholas I in 1855, committed to wide-ranging reforms.
Withinthe alienated creative elite, cultural evolution was more gradual. Since the 1830s, literature had been out of the hands of poets in aristocratic salons or the imperial court and increasingly the business of entrepreneurial booksellers
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and journalists. This new commercial class saw its most lucrative markets not in poetry but in prose – and especially in the long serialized novel, indispensable for retaining and satisfying subscribers with installments stretching (if possible) over years.
Russia’stwo major citiesweredevelopingdifferentculturalmythologies,each of which would prove exceptionally durable. As an alternative to “bureaucratic, cynical, pleasure-seeking” St. Petersburg, the ancient but newly rebuilt city of Moscow came into its own – “young, idealistic, inspired, philosophical,” identified with Russocentric or Slavophile beliefs and influenced by German Romanticism.1 Non-noble background was no longer an obstacle to literary activity, as it had been to the critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48), a doctor’s son and autodidact whose passionate, opinionated, highly influential screeds on the Russian writers of his day unerringly selected the most gifted. Writers and critics now met in “circles” and constituted an intelligentsia, a mixed class based on education and ideological commitment rather than birth or government rank. At last, in the 1860s, the cultural traffic between East and West became two-way. Upper-classRussians still spoke and read West European languages – but not as reliably as before. More important than the fading out of multilingualism at home, however, was the fact that some Western European countries began to consider Russian literary products worthy of translation into their own languages. In part because of the lengthy residence in France of the urbane, highly respected Ivan Turgenev, Russia began to be seen as a place that might contribute to the European literary canon.
This diversification, democratization, andEuropeanizationofRussian literature coincided with the beginning of Russia’s serious revolutionary movement. All great writers took a stand toward it or featured fictional heroes from it. Russia’s first political dissidents were dreamers and closeted debaters. Without practical experience and with no political responsibility, this idealistic and inef-fectualgenerationbecame knownasthe“fathers,”the “peopleofthe [eighteen]-forties.” On the far side of the mid-century divide, their sons and daughters became radical populist activists, the so-called “people of the sixties.” Their goals and tactics varied: some were peaceful educators, others went abroad to Geneva or Paris, still others threw bombs. By century’s end, the number of Marxists and internationalists had grown dramatically. Around these polemics and political sympathies a new literary tradition was constructed. Famous Romantic-era heroes (Onegin, Pechorin, Chichikov, Akaky Akakievich) were reclassified in civiccategories,into “superfluous heroes” for upper-classprotag-onists and “naturalist,” pathetic portraits for the urban poor. Neither Pushkin nor Gogol would have understood literary creativity catalogued in this way.
With a brief aside on poetry in an age of prose, this chapter is limited to the work of three titans: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Our strategy will be to take themes and genres familiar from the Romantic era – issues of rank, honor, embarrassment, comedies of self-improvement, the “love story” and “death story” – and suggest how they continue to live inside new literary worlds and answer to new realities. In the previous chapter, for example, we saw that the duel of honor, a central ritual of self-respect and the cause of death for two great writers, survived into the Realist period largely in parodied forms. (This is not to say, however, that Realist-era authors were immune to its appeal in their own lives. In May 1861, Tolstoy venomously provoked a quarrel with the placid Turgenev, his elder by ten years, over a private matter – the latter man’s education of his illegitimate daughter – and challenged Turgenev to a duel with pistols. Friends intervened and the confrontation was averted.) Perhaps because it was so often parodied, dueling retained some literary currency. Other canonized Romantic themes were not so much parodied as pried open, examined from the inside, and given a deeper consciousness.
Consider, as a test case, Gogol’s Petersburg stories of urban poverty and humiliation. His narrators look in on the story from the outside with some glee, moving the sufferer rather quickly to his denouement. Akaky Akakievich falls ill and dies within a page, Poprishchin is committed to a madhouse in half-a-dozen diary entries after which we can assume he dies there – or at least falls silent. Following in Gogol’s footsteps, Dostoevsky takes the same clerk but postpones the end, endows him with more self-awareness and pride, and cuts off the escape. Madness must be lived through at length, and dying people talk right down to the finish line. Since Dostoevsky’s clerks are not just alone but terribly lonely, they seek wherever possible to turn their inner torment into an addressed dialogue. Thus – to take only the pre-exile fiction – DostoevskyfirstreworksPoprishchin’sclerklyconfessions as an epistolary novel (
