The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

unimportant; they simply love each other, as Tolstoy amply demonstrates. And love works changes. Vronsky becomes stronger, better,more self-critical. Likewise with Chekhov’s Gurov: he becomes dissatisfied with his Moscow life. He can’t forget Yalta. He tracks down Anna Sergeyevna in the city of S., after which she begins to visit him in Moscow. The “supreme thing that replaced all reasoning” now sits at the center of their lives. A rhythm is established that reflects a deep, and deepening, fidelity. The story ends on the verb “nachinaetsia,” “beginning”: they both felt that “the most complex and difficult part was only just beginning.”39

At issue here is not only that Anna Sergeyevna, however unhappy, will not commit suicide. The key to the change that Chekhov works on a Tolstoyan worldview – and, I believe, on a Dostoevskian worldview as well – can be found at the story’s end, in Gurov’s meditations en route to the hotel where Anna is waiting for him. He is explaining to his daughter how thunderstorms work. At the same time he is marveling at the inevitability of a human being having a “double life.” There is nothing pathological about this doubling. That we can act in the world not as we are “in reality” is, for Gurov, a very good thing. Our public life, “which was visible to everybody who needed to know about it, but was full of conditional truth and conditional deceit” (p. 181), was balanced by a private life, which was hidden from others and in which we are sincere. Doubleness is not duplicity. It is precisely the sincerity of what is hidden that makes tolerance so necessary and moral condemnation so difficult. “And he judged others to be like himself, not believing what he saw, and always supposing that each person’s real and most interesting life took place beneath a shroud of secrecy, as if under the veil of night. Every individual existence is a mystery . . .” (p. 181).

This entire meditation, with its binary structure and frequent repetitions, recalls Tolstoy’s style. But its moral is purely Chekhovian. Ideally for Tolstoy, there is always an integration between inner and outer. Before a spiritual epiphany can occur, the false life must be brought into line with the true life. The Tolstoyan self strives toward wholeness, even if the moment does not and cannot last. There should be nothing to hide – which is one reason why the Tolstoyan narrator grants himself such extraordinary access to his heroes’ inner lives.

The Chekhovian self is more modestly constituted. Its credo is not self-perfection and self-completion, but some other thing, perhaps acceptance of

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the “indifferent noise of the sea” that, according to some strange impersonal contract, promises us salvation. Chekhov’s truths, if he has truths, are not punitive, not public, and not symbolic. Tolstoy could not agree to this. The inadequate, makeshift, purely private and secret structures that sustain true human relations in Chekhov’s most luminous stories could not, for Tolstoy, be an acceptable moral resolution. So Tolstoy was to some extent correct when, in 1897, he remarked that Chekhov “wrote like an impressionist.” He was wholly incorrect to suggest that Chekhov wrote like a Decadent.

By the turn of the century, “getting out from under Tolstoy,” explicitly and implicitly, was a major task forthe new generation of Russian writers and artists. This “seer of the flesh” seemed far too cramped and archaic. Writers looked to Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov for guidance. Many of them celebrated precisely what Tolstoy despised: mixed-art extravaganzas, opera, the potential of St. Petersburg as a cultural icon. But what they insisted upon most earnestly was mystery at the core of a narrative and of a self.

Chapter 7

Symbolist and Modernist world-building: three cities, three novels, and the Devil

1904–05:Russo-Japanese War, ending in Russian defeat

1905:The “first Russian revolution” (general strike, establishment of

State Duma)

1914–17:Great War with Germany and Austria (later called World War I)

1914:Zamyatin, a naval engineer, in England supervising the

construction of Russian icebreakers 1917 (spring): Strikes, war losses, and corruption at court force abdication of

Romanovs; installation of Provisional Government

1917 (fall)Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd (St. Petersburg)

1918–21:Civil War between Reds, Greens (peasants), and Whites (tsarist

forces)

1921:New Economic Policy (NEP) partially restores capitalism at retail

level

1925:Bulgakov begins eleven-year association with Moscow Art

Theatre

1927:Closing down of private publishing houses

1931:Zamyatin emigrates from USSR

1931–33:Collectivization and resultant famine claims 1 million lives

1936–38:The “Great Terror” (two million Soviet citizens repressed)

1937:Death of Zamyatin of heart disease at age fifty-three

1937:Death of Bely at age fifty-four

1940:Death of Bulgakov at age forty-nine, blind from uremia, after

dictating final draft of “The Master and Margarita” (first publ.

1966)

In 1893, eight years before publishing his magisterial study “L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” the Symbolist critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) wrote a curious essay titled “On Reasons for the Decline of Contemporary Russian Literature, and on its New Tendencies.”1 It is often taken to mark the end of the Age of the Novel and the beginning of the Symbolist era. In this essay, Merezhkovsky discusses the arrival in Europe of Impressionism, an artistic movement – he approvingly notes – that cared more about mystical content and a heightened

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use of the poetic symbol than about art’s responsibility to socioeconomic problems. Russian literature too had experienced the split in European nineteenth-century culture between a materialist-scientific worldview and an idealist one. But Merezhkovsky then insists that the master Russian prose writers – Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Ivan Goncharov (1812–91, author of Oblomov) – are in fact idealists, although Russia’s militant radical critics refused to recognize it. With the exception of the ascetic pamphlets being produced by the aging Tolstoy – who “would take the pipe away from a bachelor, the jug of wine away from a worker, thereby further narrowing and darkening a man’s life that was already sufficiently narrow and dark” – the works of these novelists are permeated with symbols, a mystical concern for other worlds, and a quest for the beautiful in art. If (he concluded) we now sense there has been a “decline,” it is because literary spokesmen have shouted “utility,” critical realism, and sociopolitical relevance for so long that free artistic inspiration no longer seems sufficient.

Merezhkovsky, a herald of the later Symbolists, had lost patience with literary strategies devised to create the “illusion of reality.” No writer of genius, he felt, could be motivated by so meager a desire. Since the 1880s, the market for poetry hadbeen growing.In fact,theabundanceofpoetic talentin thispre-WorldWar I generation encouraged later critics to apply retroactively the label “Silver Age” to these decades, invoking as benchmark the glorious “Golden Age” of Pushkin and fabricating between the two eras a direct spiritual bond. This revived passion for non-representational poetic worlds did not occur ina vacuum. Interest in spiritualism, ghosts, se?ances, exorcism, folk taboo, and the ethnography of religious cults had flourished throughout the Age of Realism as a vigorous minor line investigating “Homo Mysticus.”2 By century’s end, curiosity about metaphysical and visionary experience had become a legitimate topic of study in learned circles. The founding, in 1885, of the Moscow