means simply romans a these. The reader remembers not only the author's ideological protagonists, but also his remarkable, strong heroines, the background, the dialogue, and, perhaps above all, the consummate artistry. As writer, Turgenev resembled closely his friend Flaubert, not at all Chernyshevsky. In addition to the famous sequence of novels, Turgenev wrote some plays and a considerable number of stories - he has been described as a better story writer than novelist.
Fedor - that is, Theodore - Dostoevsky, who lived from 1821 to 1881, also became well known before the 'great reforms.' He was already the author of a novel, Poor Folk, which was acclaimed by Belinsky when it was published in 1845, and of other writings, when he became involved, as already mentioned, with the Petrashevtsy and was sentenced to death, the sentence being commuted to Siberian exile only at the place of execution. Next the writer spent four years at hard labor and two more as a soldier in Siberia before returning to European Russia in 1856, following a general amnesty proclaimed by the new emperor. Dostoevsky recorded his Siberian experience in a remarkable book, Notes from the House of the Dead, which came out in 1861. Upon his return to literary life, the onetime member of the Petrashevtsy became an aggressive and prolific Right-wing journalist, contributing to a certain Slavophile revival, Pan-Slavism, and even outright chauvinism. His targets included the Jews, the Poles, the Germans, Catholicism, socialism, and the entire West. While Dostoevsky's journalism added to the sound and fury of the period, his immortal fame rests on his late novels, four of which belong among the greatest ever written. These were Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1866, 1868, 1870-72, and 1879-80 respectively. In fact, Dostoevsky seemed to go from strength to strength and was apparently at the height of his creative powers in working on a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov when he died.
Dostoevsky has often been represented as the most Russian of writers and evaluated in terms of Russian messiahship and the mysteries of the Russian soul - an approach to which he himself richly contributed. Yet, a closer study of the great novelist's so-called special Russian traits demonstrates that they are either of secondary importance at best or even entirely
imaginary. To the contrary, Dostoevsky could be called the most international or, better, the most human of writers because of his enormous concern with and penetration into the nature of man. The strange Russian author was a master of depth psychology before depth psychology became known. Moreover, he viewed human nature in the dynamic terms of explosive conflict between freedom and necessity, urge and limitations, faith and despair, good and evil. Of Dostoevsky's several priceless gifts the greatest was to fuse into one his protagonists and the ideas - or rather states of man's soul and entire being - that they expressed, as no other writer has ever done. Therefore, where others are prolix, tedious, didactic, or confusing in mixing different levels of discourse, Dostoevsky is gripping, in places almost unbearably so. As another Russian author, Gleb Uspensky, reportedly once remarked, into a small hole in the wall, where the generality of human beings could put perhaps a pair of shoes, Dostoevsky could put the entire world. One of the greatest anti-rationalists of the second half of the nineteenth century, together with Nietzsche and Kirkegaard, Dostoevsky became with them an acknowledged prophet for the twentieth, inspiring existential philosophy, theological revivals, and scholarly attempts to understand the catastrophes of our time - as well as, of course, modern psychological fiction.
It has been said that, if Dostoevsky was not the world's greatest novelist, then Tolstoy certainly was, and that the choice between the two depends on whether the reader prefers depth or breadth. These are quite defensible views, provided one remembers the range of Dostoevsky, and especially his very numerous secondary and tertiary characters who speak their own language and add their own comment to the tragedy of man, and provided one realizes that Tolstoy too cuts very deep.
Count Leo Tolstoy lived a long, full, and famous life. Bora in 1828 and brought up in a manner characteristic of his aristocratic milieu - magnificently described in Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth - he received a cosmopolitan, if dilettante, education; engaged in gay social life; served in the army, first in the Caucasus and later in the siege of Sevastopol; and became a happy husband, the father of a large family, and a progressive landowner much concerned with the welfare of his peasants. In addition to these ordinary activities, however, Tolstoy also developed into one of the greatest writers in world literature and later into an angry teacher of mankind, who condemned civilization, including his own part in it, and called for the abandonment of violence and for a simple, moral life. In fact, he died in 1910 at the age of eighty-two as he fled from his family and estate in yet another attempt to sever his ties with all evil and falsehood and to find truth. It is indeed difficult to determine whether Tolstoy acquired more fame and influence in his own country and all over the world as a writer or as a teacher of nonresistance and unmasker of modern civilization, and
whether Anna Karenina or A Confession - an account of the crisis that split his life in two - carries the greater impact. In Russia at least, Tolstoy's position as the voice of criticism that the government dared not silence, as moral conscience, appeared at times even more extraordinary and precious than his literary creations.
But, whatever can be said against Tolstoy as thinker - and much has been justly said about his extraordinary naivete, his stubborn and at the same time poorly thought-out rationalism, and his absolute insistence on such items as vegetarianism and painless death as parts of his program of salvation - Tolstoy as writer needs no apologies. While a prolific author, the creator of many superb stories and some powerful plays, Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, is remembered best for his novels, especially War and Peace, published in 1869, and Anna Karenina, published in 1876. In these novels, as in much else written by Tolstoy, there exists a boundless vitality, a driving, overpowering sense of life and people. And life finds expression on a sweeping scale. War and Peace contains sixty heroes and some two hundred distinct characters, not to mention the unforgettable battle and mob scenes and the general background. The war of 1812 is depicted at almost every level: from Alexander I and Napoleon, through commanders and officers, to simple soldiers, and among civilians from court circles to the common people. Anna Karenina, while more restricted in scope, has been praised no less for its construction and its supreme art.
The Russian novel, which in the second half of the nineteenth century won a worldwide reputation because of the writings of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, had other outstanding practitioners as well. Ivan Gon-charov, who lived from 1812 to 1891, produced at least one great novel, Oblomov, published two years before the emancipation of the serfs and representing in a sense a farewell, spoken with mixed feelings, to the departing patriarchal Russia, and a welcome, again with mixed feelings, to the painfully evolving new order. Oblomov himself snored his way to fame as one of the most unforgettable as well as most 'superfluous' heroes of Russian literature. Other noteworthy novelists of the period included Nicholas Leskov who developed a highly individual language and style and wrote about the provincial clergy and similar topics associated with the Church and the people, and Gleb Uspensky, a populist and a pessimist, deeply concerned with peasant life as well as with the intelligentsia. An able satirist, Michael Saltykov, who wrote under the pseudonym of N. Shchedrin, fitted well into that critical and realistic age and acquired great popularity. A highly talented dramatist, Alexander Ostrovsky, wrote indefatigably from about 1850 until his death in 1886, creating much of the basic repertoire of the Russian theater and contributing especially to the depiction of merchants, minor officials, and the lower middle class in general.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth new
writers came to the fore to continue the great tradition of Russian prose. One was Vladimir Korolenko, a populist, optimist, and author of charming stories; another was Anton Chekhov; and a third was the restless Alexis Peshkov, better known as Maxim Gorky, who created his own world of tramps and outcasts and went on to become the dean of Soviet writers. Chekhov, who lived from 1860 until 1904, left a lasting imprint on Russian and world literature. A brilliant playwright, he had the good fortune to be writing just as the Moscow Art Theater was rising to its heights. He is even more important as one of the founders and a master craftsman of the modem short story, the literary genre that he usually chose to make his simple, gentle, restrained, and yet wonderfully effective comments on the world.
Poetry fared less well than prose between the 'great reforms' and the turn of the century. The very great lyricist Fedor Tiutchev, perhaps the world's outstanding poet of late love and of nature in its romantic, pantheistic, and chaotic aspects, died in 1873, an isolated figure. In the decades following the emancipation neither the small
