THE VOGUE of the Russian novel in the West began nearly a century ago and reached its apogee in the years following the First World War. That it rested on an impression of radical novelty (most often construed as the artless expression of a mutant “Slavic soul”) may be sufficiently indicated by a few quotations.

Here is Max Beerbohm on the genius, “national and also universal,” of his composite writer, Kolniyatsch:

I say that Kolniyatsch’s message has drowned all previous messages and will drown any that may be uttered in the remotest future. You ask me what, precisely, that message was? Well, it is too elemental, too near to the very heart of naked Nature, for exact definition. Can you describe the message of an angry python more satisfactorily than a S-s-s-s? . . . First and last, he was an artist, and it is by reason of his technical mastery that he most of all outstands. Whether in prose or in verse, he compasses a broken rhythm that is as the very rhythm of life itself, and a cadence that catches you by the throat, as a terrier catches a rat, and wrings from you the last drop of pity and awe.¹

That, of course, is parody, but its terms are uncomfortably close to those used by Emile Hennequin in 1889 to describe his countrymen’s astonishment at the novels of Dostoevsky. French readers, Hennequin reports, “recognized in these rough [frustes] books the supreme gift of arousing new emotions; they sensed in them a soul savage and sombre interpreting the spectacle of life and the agitation of souls in sensations that were primitive or barbarously [sic] subtle.” Dostoevsky, “that obscure and Slavic soul,” presented characters who were “carnal, wild, violent, brutal, and unintelligent [!]”—qualities that were “latent in [the] rough nature, more animal than spiritual,” of the author, who all the same contrived somehow to produce works “which are more treatises on ethics and on humanity than interesting novels”!² The critic himself here seems to exemplify the condition of Dostoevsky’s French reader at the time: “You read, panting, distracted, unable to analyze or reflect—to such an extent does this monstrous world seize and grip you.”³ That viewpoint is still to be met with. Thus the current (1973) edition of Cassell’s Encyclopedia of World Literature continues to characterize Russia’s contribution to the novel by declaring: “not only was the country not normal, but the heroes of the novels were not normal either: the brothers Karamazov or the prince of The Idiot could not be said to represent human nature. . . . In a way, a kind of superhuman power in the construction of character put both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s creatures outside the novel proper . . . although no one can say to what world they belong.”⁴

Even writers more scrupulous and sympathetic have felt impelled to use similar language. Thus the Vicomte de Vogüé—whom Edmund Wilson credits with offering the first serious presentation of Russian literature to the West—introduced Dostoevsky by exclaiming: “Here comes the Scythian, the true Scythian, who is going to revolutionize all our intellectual habits.”⁵ Vogüé, in the words of one commentator, “loved the Russian novel doubly, first for itself and then as opposed to the French novel” of his time, whose realism, in his view, left no room for the “animating breath” of spirit.⁶ Something of the same might be said of Virginia Woolf, whose hortatory praise makes use of a like vocabulary:

Indeed, it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle in Tchekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and distempers, it is of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky, liable to violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern. Perhaps that is why it needs so great an effort on the part of an English reader to read The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed a second time. The “soul” is alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has little sense of humour and no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection with the intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry. . . . Moreover, when the speed [of fictional events] is . . . increased and the elements of the soul are seen, not separately in scenes or humour or scenes of passion as our slower English minds conceive them, but streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human mind is revealed.⁷

One might easily extend the list of such comments to include those of D. H. Lawrence, who found the secret of Russian fiction to lie in “the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people”; Matthew Arnold, who denied that Anna Karenina was literature at all, declaring it to be rather “Life”; Thomas Mann, who echoed Arnold in more measured terms; and many others who have tried to account for the impact of this extraordinary fiction. “But,” as Virginia Woolf notes in the closing lines of her essay, “the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no doubt, when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian, flies off at a tangent far from the truth.”⁸ What, then, have Russians had to say on the subject?

Of all those who addressed the question at the close of the nineteenth century, the indefatigable scholar Semyon Afanas’evich Vengerov (1855-1920), in Beerbohm’s phrase, most outstands. A preliminary essay on “The Fascination of Russian Literature” (1911) argued that Russian realism differed from that of the West chiefly because Russia had no dominant bourgeoisie; thus one of the central themes of Western fiction, the pursuit of success, occupies the most minor of places in Russian writing, Russian characters being more concerned with making a life than with making a living. Russian literature, Vengerov observes, treats the theme of personal happiness as being “either criminal, if it is achieved at the expense of others, or, in the best of situations, vulgar.”⁹ In his view the quest repeated in the great Russian novels takes place on a higher level, which accounts for the particular tonal range they evince:

The psychology of renunciation, of voluntary asceticism, the refusal of a bourgeois [meshchanskii] world, gives grounds for a particular self-respect and emotional satisfaction. But, naturally enough, this cannot create joyful moods. Hence another source of the fascination of nineteenth-century Russian literature, which I would term its Great Sorrow.

The Russian spirit tends to create “the mournful type of beauty”: “The Russian literary genius can be concretely imagined only as being stern-featured, with eyes feverishly directed into the mystical distance.”¹⁰

Vengerov’s book of 1911, The Heroic Character of Russian Literature, is even more clearly a piece of lofty special pleading, equally remarkable for what it conveniently leaves out of consideration and for what it proclaims but cannot demonstrate.¹¹ The Russian novel is portrayed there as an instrument of moral education, a source of inspiration for the pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, justice, and soulfulness. In Vengerov’s work, as in a spate of fairly recent Soviet works on the distinctive national quality of Russian literature,¹² one finds a more consistent tendency to indulge in collective self-congratulation (and to use the nineteenth-century novel as a stick for flogging “modernism”) than to pursue serious critical argumentation. Surveying such material prompts a suspicion that the question of what is Russian about the Russian novel is an essentially procrustean one, asked most often by those who have not only a special reason for asking but an answer already in mind—and that it may be, if posed in an objective spirit, fundamentally intractable because it fits no discipline.

It does, however, border on many, the most important of which is cultural history. One can speak fruitfully and concretely about the peculiar nature of the institution of literature as it developed, largely around the novel, in nineteenth-century Russia. One can register the conditions in which literature appeared, recalling the words of the minister of education, Uvarov, that “among the rights of a Russian subject, the right of written communication with the public is not included,” the latter being “a privilege which the Government can grant and rescind as it sees fit.”¹³ One can chronicle the often incredible workings of the censorship, and speculate on what it did for the novel in Russia.

Here again the most famous formulation is Vogüé’s, from the foreword to Le Roman russe. What is directly and publicly expressible in other countries in a variety of forms and circumstances, he finds, in Russia is funneled into imaginative literature: “Ideas pass only when concealed in the flexible threads of fiction; but there they all pass; and the fiction which shelters them takes on the importance of a doctrinal treatise.”¹⁴ There is surely a large truth here, but one that is easily misunderstood, for Vogüé’s language suggests a full complicity, in which writers smuggle messages into their works and readers, so to speak, unwrap them. The radical critic and publicist Chernyshevsky (whom Vogüé echoes almost verbatim in the passage cited) had put the matter somewhat more clearly when he wrote that mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature “absorbs virtually the entire intellectual life of the people,” adding that if English novelists, who might have expressed their social concerns in other forms, nonetheless chose to put them into their fiction, “then our fiction writers and poets must feel their responsibility in this regard a thousand times more strongly.”¹⁵ Here the emphasis falls more clearly (and unequally): it is the needs and preoccupations of a particular kind of reader which the writers ought consciously and on principle to serve.¹⁶ This reader was in many ways the censor’s twin; and though he was disposed to embrace what the latter wished to excise, he was no less avid in seeking it between the lines of novels and no less likely to make free with textual evidence in order to find it.

The rise of fiction in Russia, that is to say, went in tandem with the rise of a special readership, the intelligentsia — that self-conscious minority of Russians who enjoyed the privilege of literacy and sought justification in seeing it as a means to the fulfillment of a moral duty. In Isaiah Berlin’s phrase, these were “citizens of a state within the state, soldiers in any army dedicated to progress, surrounded on all sides by reaction.”¹⁷ It is their point of view which the leading critics molded and expressed, and generations of Russians were raised on it. Thus at the time of the First World War Ivanov-Razumnik, in his History of Russian Social Thought, could call Russian literature “the Bible of the Russian intelligentsia”—a position expressed no less memorably by the writer Korolenko, who identified his true homeland as “Russian literature first of all.” Solzhenitsyn has a character echo this peculiarly Russian phenomenon by observing (in The First Circle) that “we have always looked upon a great writer as a second government” (gosudarstvo: literally, “state”), i.e., as a rival for the custodianship of truth and moral authority. Trotsky, true to this common view, gave it even broader expression by observing how, around the first third of the nineteenth century, “reality began to live a second life in Russia, in both the realistic novel and comedy.”¹⁸

The traditional Russian reader, then, as a member of the intelligentsia, is responsible for the dominant view of the Russian novel in his own country and abroad. As critic he expressed it, as simple consumer he tended to confirm it. His reading and misreading habits, his assumptions, sensitivities, and blind spots constitute a subject at once crucial to an understanding of the special function of literature in nineteenth-century Russia and open to the kind of detailed empirical study it has yet to receive.

And yet, even if we had such a study, it would be more relevant to the reception and (albeit in lesser degree) to the production than to the products themselves of Russian fiction. For most of the major writers produced the better part of their art in spite of the censors and the civic-minded intelligentsia critics, complaining time and again of the bias and reductionism with which both groups read their work, the ease with which the primary complexities of literature got ignored in favor of its nonliterary relevance, real and putative. Thus Gogol, who first articulated the role of the writer in nineteenth-century Russia as moral authority, whose artistic and nonartistic writings alike went far toward catalyzing a national community, shared his dismay evenhandedly. Shortly before his death in 1852 he characterized the actions of the censorship as “enigmatic to the point where one begins willy-nilly to suppose it to be harboring some criminal intent and plot against those very regulations and that very policy by which (judging from its words) it purports to be guided.”¹⁹ But he suffered no less from the contention of ideological parties among his readers, each of which created its own Gogol to further its own ends.²⁰ Dostoevsky was to echo this double discomfort, wondering whether the censors who mutilated Notes from. Underground were not “in a conspiracy against the government,” even as he struggled against the radicals’ reduction of art to an instrument of direct propagandistic utility.²¹ Similar testimony, with varying emphases, can be found in Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Chekhov. It is summed up in Tolstoi’s insistence that “if I wanted to express in words all that I meant to say through [Anna Karenina], I would have to write the same novel I wrote, from the beginning.”²² What Tolstoi stresses here is the irreducible complexity of the greatest realistic fiction, its enigmatic purport—and, by implication, its capaciousness in the hands of its Russian creators. This last in turn suggests a hitherto unstressed approach to the distinctiveness of “classic” Russian fiction, and one that is all the more promising because it begins by respecting the centrality of literary art.

An earlier Tolstoian text provides the clue. “What is War and Peace?” he asks in the draft of a preface to that work:

It is not a novel, still less an epic [poema], less still a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted to and was able to express, in the form in which it got expressed. Such a statement of an author’s disregard for the conventional forms of a work of art in prose might seem impertinent, if it were deliberate and if there were no examples. The history of Russian literature from the time of Pushkin on, [however,] not only offers many examples of such a deviation from European form, it does not provide even a single example of the opposite. From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House, in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one work of art in prose even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, epic or story.²³

In alternative drafts he elaborates the same point:

The work offered here comes closest to being a novel or a tale, but it is not a novel, since I am utterly unable to set certain limits to my invented characters—e.g., a wedding or a death, with which the interest of the narration would be cut off. I couldn’t help thinking that the death of one character only stimulated interest in other characters, and a wedding more often than not seemed the beginning rather than the end of an interesting story. Nor can I call my work a tale, since I am incapable of making my characters act only for the purpose of proving or clarifying any single thought or complex of thoughts.²⁴

* * *

Publishing the beginning of this work, I do not promise either a continuation or an ending. We Russians, generally speaking, do not know how to write novels in the sense in which that form is understood in Europe, and the work offered here is not a tale, since no single idea informs it, nothing is proved, no single event is described. Even less could it be called a novel, with a starting-point, a constantly complicated interest, and a happy or unhappy denouement, with which the interest of the narration is liquidated.²⁵

Dostoevsky is on record with a similar point of view about the Russian avoidance of plot, and with a similar conclusion: “Our novelists are first of all poets, and novelists secondarily.”²⁶

For present purposes, these declarations are significant in three respects: (1) They stress the dignity of the novel, equal to that of poetry, as a vehicle of artistic expression, thereby stressing as well the primacy of esthetic ideas in the Kantian sense.²⁷ Moreover, they (2) call attention to the formal eccentricity of the Russian novel, as carrier of such ideas,²⁸ and (3) they make clear the shared sense of a striking historical continuity, i.e., a tight and conscious tradition. Elaborating on these points will allow us to avoid secondary questions involving the peculiar modes and social arrangements on which Russian fiction drew in the last century, and, without denying their importance, to concentrate on a more immediate one, which might be phrased as follows: What literary features account for our sense, in the last, cosmopolitan quarter of the twentieth century, that the greatest names in nineteenth-century Russian fiction (Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Goncharov, Leskov, Saltykov, Chekhov) form a group easily distinguishable as such from their West European and American contemporaries?

The answer, I would suggest, might be sought first of all in form, seen both as enabling factor and as the outstanding constant of the tradition in question. To the frequent complaints in the 1820s and 1830s that there was as yet no Russian literature worthy to stand as “an expression of a mighty and virile people,” a response first appeared in the form of three masterpieces which together constituted the foundation on which the tradition was to rest.²⁹ Each of them stresses its generic anomaly—Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1823-31); Lermontov’s novel, A Hero of Our Time (1840), originally subtitled “A Composition”; and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), whose subtitle, “Poema,” dominated the title page of the first edition.

The nature of plot in Eugene Onegin is skeletal, to say the least; revolving around Tatiana’s love for the title character, it is, up until the concluding chapter, built around three meetings, in none of which she is allowed to utter a word.³⁰ Moreover, the novel continues significantly beyond the climactic point at which this story is abruptly abandoned.

Here is stanza 48 of the last chapter in Charles Johnston’s excellent translation:

What follows is a series of stanzas in which the poet addresses his reader and speaks openly—as he has throughout—about the contrivance of what he calls this “free novel” (svobodnyi roman).

Until our own century, it was the habit of Russian critics either to concentrate their attention on the central characters or to emphasize the capaciousness of social observation in the novel’s digressions. Thus G. A. Gukovsky echoes Belinsky’s approach from a century before:

Already the very quantity of themes and materials from everyday life makes Pushkin’s novel different in principle from the literature that preceded it. In Eugene Onegin there pass before the reader series of everyday phenomena, details descriptive of ordinary life, things, clothing, flowers, meals, customs, types, sketches relating to the aristocratic Petersburg intelligentsia of the early nineteenth century, to high society, to the Petersburg life of various classes, to Moscow and its traditional gentry ways, balls, literary men and so on; to the country—beginning with landowners and ending with peasant boys and girls, to provincial cities; in Eugene Onegin all regions and parts of Russia are shown, all the layers of its population [etc.]. . . . By the sweep of the material from life, custom, and history, Eugene Onegin really appears to us to be an encyclopedia of Russian life of the beginning of the nineteenth century.³²

It remained for twentieth-century critics to elaborate a counterview by taking up Pushkin’s concluding emphasis on his having created a “free novel.” Thus to the notion of the work’s being an encyclopedia of Russian life, the counterclaim has been that it could more properly be termed a literary encyclopedia, given the frequent discussions of prosaic and poetic genres, the mention of Russian and European writers, dead and alive, and the inclusion in the text of Pushkin’s own ideas and plans (not to mention the incorporation of his own creative autobiography). From this it follows that the nuance and complexity of a long prose novel are here transposed, the complex action occurring not so much between characters as between the author and his work, the author and his characters, the various levels of reality invoked, and the very elements of poetry and prose. The freedom to which Pushkin alludes, in this argument, is ultimately the freedom to move from level to level in accomplishing the transposition in question. And it involves a notion of character that is similarly open-ended: Pushkin’s protagonists are not types but literary constructs that give the illusion of being psychic entities at once enigmatically individual and capable of continually surprising the reader through the revelation of new aspects of their being.³³

The author’s creative freedom, in other words, is manifested in the management of his narrative: in the downgrading of the role of story, in the construction of character, and in the open-ended shape of the completed work (which both denies and affirms its completion). The effect is an enhanced illusion of life, as Yuri Lotman has recently argued. The paradoxical strategy is “to overcome literariness as such”—by devising an artistic text (i.e., something organized) that would imitate nonartistic (i.e., unorganized) reality: “to create a structure that would be apprehended as the absence of structure.”³⁴ The way to achieve this very difficult task lies in continually transcending structure by making it manifest and subjecting it to overt discussion, thereby baffling the reader’s conventional expectations and giving the work “the character not only of a ‘novel about people’ “ but of a “novel about a novel”—i.e., about writing a novel, reading a novel, and about the impulses and values that characterize both activities.³⁵ This amounts to an opening out into “real life,” through the reader’s involvement with an unusually complex experience provoked by the text, and with the architect of that involvement (in a whole series of roles).³⁶

The achievement of Pushkin’s novel was thus to accommodate an unprecedentedly broad spectrum of concerns, from specifically historical, cultural, and literary matters to questions of psychology, philosophy, and the problematics of creation itself. For this reason, Eugene Onegin has more than once been seen as containing in embryo the subsequent unfolding of the Russian novel.³⁷ One might say that Pushkin’s historic achievement here proved paradigmatic because, by ignoring generic distinctions and by exploiting the advantages of both poetry and prose, it licensed maximalist ambitions in the next generations of Russian writers.

Gogol’s Dead Souls is a case in point. There has been much discussion of the fact that the basic situation for this novel was “ceded” to its author by Pushkin himself, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the way Gogol’s treatment of that situation betrays an incomparably more significant debt. Gogol advertises the novelty of his work by inverting the Pushkinian formula: where Onegin bore the subtitle “a novel in verse,” the subtitle of Dead Souls astonished readers by insisting that Gogol’s prose novel was in fact to be read as an epic (poema). A comic novel with a serious burden, built around the merest semblance of plot (which, upon inspection, vanishes to leave only a collection of miscellaneous details³⁸), Gogol’s work introduces the moralizing concern with “soul” into the Russian novel. Its overarching theme is the amorphousness, characterlessness, meaninglessness, and purposelessness of specifically Russian life in the first place, but also of life in general, as a challenge to the novelist. Thus Dead Souls abounds, like Onegin before it, in what are traditionally called lyrical digressions—though they are even less digressive (because there is less in the way of the story to digress from) than their Pushkinian counterparts. These switchings of level have two broad functions: they connect the apparently trivial narrative detail with categories of more obvious import, and they proclaim the difficulty and dignity of the writer’s role in creating such a work. As in Onegin, the reader’s vicarious experience—his reliving of the relations between characters—is less significant than his experience of the entire text as enigmatic exhibition and moral provocation. In the famous final paragraph, Chichikov’s departing troika undergoes a visionary transformation to represent Russia as it races into the future, ending the book not with a resolution but with a cloudy series of rhetorical questions, a prestidigitator’s triumph, as Nabokov calls it. Yet Dostoevsky could articulate what many sensed about the book: that it “overwhelmed the mind” with the most profound questions and “the most disturbing thoughts.”³⁹ It did (and does) so, one must stress, precisely by the way it challenges the reader’s expectations of what a novel should do and sets him in search of the elusive import of his experience.

To put it another way, Dead Souls parallels the achievement of Onegin by demonstrating the power of fiction as carrier of the most complex meaning. Beyond the telling of a story, each work, like an op-art painting, allows broad choice of organizing aspect. One can see the latter in form, in lyrical allegory, in texture and dynamics of narrative discourse, or in any of the explicitly discussed themes. All are plausible candidates for primary emphasis, though none is unequivocally dominant.

A Hero of Our Time offers yet another variant of the novel as puzzle and provocation, and betrays a similar debt to Onegin. This, as has been frequently remarked, is evident already in the name of the protagonist and in the treatment of the central love relationship.⁴⁰ Constructed as a linked series of stories whose meaning is greater than the sum of its parts, Lermontov’s novel is, like the two already discussed, a joining of fragments in which crucial information about the protagonist’s life and background is omitted. For the rest, its novelty comes from the consistency of realistically complex psychological portraiture; the book is dominated by a passion for analysis. Indeed, it prefigures Dostoevsky with its claim that “passions are only ideas in the first stage of their development,” and transforms current literary forms by making them not only subserve a single end — the tracing of one significantly enigmatic subjectivity—but represent as well a philosophical inquiry into the implications of extreme individualism, a life lived without a higher sanction.⁴¹

As for Dostoevsky, his links to all three of his great predecessors are direct and obvious. From Pushkin he takes the notion of “free” character, undetermined by past experience; from Lermontov he takes subtlety of analysis and the inseparable compound of idea and feeling, as well as the problematics of individualism. And his “polyphonic novel,” as described by the Soviet scholar Bakhtin, might well be regarded as a transposition of the key traits of Gogolian narration from the level of representation to the level of the represented; thus Dostoevsky, effacing as far as possible the persona of the narrator, had his characters enact that orchestration of conflicting “voices” which the Gogolian narrator reserved to himself.⁴² As in the novels of all three of his predecessors, there is in Dostoevsky’s major works no final, privileged “word” by which to gauge the author’s position on the issues in question. This may be seen already in the ruminations of the writer of Notes from Underground, and in the challenge to the reader with which they end; the cloudy furturity that hangs over the arbitrary termination of that work is also a feature of such later masterpieces as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

It is from Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov that Tolstoi takes the license for his own kind of maximalism as novelist and his own analysis of the fluidity of character. He approaches literature, in the words of Boris Eikhenbaum, “as if there had never been any before, rising gradually from the area of self-observation to that of invention.”⁴³ His first literary experiment, “A History of Yesterday,” shows the process at work and contains the characteristic statement that for a proper analysis of the ostensibly unremarkable events of a single day, “there would not be enough ink in the world to write it or compositors enough to print it.”⁴⁴ Each individual is portrayed by Tolstoi as a microcosm and at the same time as a potential center for an infinite network of relations; no phenomenon could be understood outside its place in a series of such networks. Hence the great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, rather stop than conclude, producing the effect of an art that works like nature (Matthew Arnold, Thomas Mann), an impression that “the world is writing, the world in all its variety” (Issac Babel)⁴⁵—and so exemplifying in yet another way the structural principle first embodied in Pushkin’s novel in verse.

I am attempting no more than to indicate some of the headings under which detailed examples of tradition at work—construed first of all in formal terms—might be elaborated. Other examples could be adduced, among them those of Turgenev, Goncharov, and Leskov—though current Western opinion, with varying degrees of injustice, tends to consider their novels as lesser phenomena alongside the giants mentioned above. But Western opinion does put Chekhov in the company of the greats, and it may be appropriate to end this survey by pointing to his place in the line I have been sketching. Chekhov comes out of Turgenev and Tolstoi, reacting against them and so establishing his right to stand in their company. His cultivation of the short-story form is part of that reaction. He replaces Turgenev’s extended nature descriptions with a poetry of laconic notation;⁴⁶ he offers his version of the central situation of Anna Karenina within the confines of a single story, “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” whose ending excludes any possibility of invoking generalizations about retribution (as Tolstoi had done with the epigraph to his novel):

Then they spent a long time taking counsel together, they talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different cities, and not seeing one another for long stretches of time. How could they free themselves from these intolerable fetters?

“How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only beginning.

Tolstoi himself objected that these characters, “thinking that they have gone beyond good and evil, have actually remained this side of good and evil.”⁴⁷ Judging Chekhov in terms of his own standards, of course, he missed the point. For Chekhov continues the tradition through his rejections—specifically, by cultivating his own radically unconventional form, which is to say, by denying the conventions of his predecessors in the interests (the same interests their new forms had served) of freedom to embody what he perceived as the most important truths. For Chekhov, too, makes maximalist demands on art in the service of something beyond it, though he expressed this maximalism paradoxically, by choosing the most modest form of prose fiction, the short story—and then shortening it even further: “In my opinion, once a story is written, one should cross out its beginning and end. That is where we writers of fiction falsify most of all. . . . And briefly, one must speak as briefly as possible. . . .”⁴⁸ The principled reason behind this attack on convention came from the tradition itself. One need only recall the nonendings of Eugene Onegin, Dead Souls, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov to see the provenance of Chekhov’s declaration that “there is no need for any plots. Life doesn’t have plots; in life, everything is mixed together—the profound with the shallow, the great with the trivial, the tragic with the ludicrous.” Chekhov’s contribution was to remain so faithful to this belief as to call the very distinctions into question, so that his best work illustrates with unexampled clarity Santayana’s dictum: “Everything in Nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.” Gorky was right to protest admiringly that Chekhov was “killing realism,” i.e., exhausting its last remaining technical possibilities, purifying it by refusing (in Charles Du Bos’s words) to overdramatize or to regard life as if it were only a problem. The result was—by another paradox—that he renewed Russian fiction as an instrument of poetic implication (cf. “The Huntsman,” “The Student,” the “little trilogy,” “The Bishop”).

It has been the purpose of these remarks to suggest that what is distinctive in the Russian nineteenth-century novel may be, in the first place, a special variety of fictional discourse (by no means confined to long narratives, or even to prose), elaborated by men who thought of themselves not as “novelists” but as writers. Henry James, failing to perceive the novel form in all that amplitude of ambition, called their products “fluid puddings.” Yet the metamorphoses of the “free novel” as Pushkin first exemplified it are the sign of a tradition in the making. “Never,” as Dostoevsky observed near the end of his life, “in any literature, did there appear so many gifted writers as in Russia,—all along, without intervals.”⁴⁹ The writings alluded to in this paper all appeared within the lifetime of Leo Tolstoi (1828-1910)—which means that the major Russian writers were, broadly speaking, coevals. As such they were intensely aware of participating in a common cultural enterprise; that is, they had designs on their readers (and on themselves) in the name of a Russian cultural identity whose crystallization was still in process. Hence the profound sense of a presence haunting the days of their narratives. The phrase comes from V. S. Pritchett, who explains of their characters:

There lies on those persons, even on the most trivial, the shadow of a fate more richly definitive than the fate of any individual human being. Their feet stand in time and history. Their fate is corporate. It is the fate of Russia itself, a fate so often adjured with eloquence and nostalgia, oftener still with that medieval humility which has been unknown to us since the Renaissance, and which the Russians sometimes mystically identify with the fate of humanity itself. . . .

It was a great advantage to the Russian novelists that they were obliged to react to the Russian question; a great advantage, too, that the Russian question was to become a universal one: the question of the rise of the masses.⁵⁰

This points us toward theme again, and I would not deny the importance of the themes that have so often been emphasized as the heart of the Russian achievement in fiction. But I would emphasize, as I have tried to do here, that all the great themes of Russian fiction—its “content”—derive their power from the fundamentally new forms that were devised to accommodate them. “This indeed,” as Tolstoi insisted, “is one of the significant facts about a true work or art: that its content in its entirety can be expressed only by itself.”

If that seems to leave us with separate works again, it is only appropriate: they survive our generalizations, even as they invite them. But we may also and legitimately be left with a sense that the works in question share an unprecedented breadth of aspiration—which, in ways I have tried to suggest, their authors had to invent structures we now think of as Russian to fulfill.

NOTES

1. Max Beerbohm, “Kolniyatsch,” in his And Even Now and A Christmas Garland (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1960), p. 33.

2. Emile Hennequin, Ecrivains francisés (Paris, 1889), pp. 179-84.

3. Céleste Courrière, Histoire de la littérature contemporaine en Russie (Paris, 1875), P· 322.

4. Denis Saurat, “Novel,” in Cassell’s Encyclopedia of World Literature, 2d ed., I (1973), 430; my italics.

5. Melchior de Voglie, Le Roman russe, 4th ed. (Paris, 1897), p. 203. What makes these words particularly striking is the fact that shortly before applying them to Dostoevsky, Vogue had used them in a newspaper article to introduce Tolstoi! See F. W. J. Hemmings, The Russian Novel in France (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 34.

6. A. Hermant, La Vie littéraire, Première Série (1918), p. 143; quoted in F. W. J. Hemmings, The Russian Novel in France, 1884-1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 30. On the spiritual superiority of Russian realism, see Vogüé’s “Avant-propos” to his Le Roman russe, esp. xliv.

7. “The Russian Point of View,” in Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series (New York: Harcourt Brace, n.d.), pp. 182-84.

8. Ibid., p. 187.

9. S. A. Vengerov, “V chem ocharovanie russkoi literatury XIX veka,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, IV (Petrograd, 1919), 21.

10. Ibid., pp. 22-23.

11. S. A. Vengerov, Geroicheskii kharakter russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg, 1911 ). For a trenchant attack on such effusions, see the review by A. G. Gornfel’d, “Literatura i geroizm,” in his 0 russkikh pisateliakh, I (St. Petersburg, 1912), 262-92.

12. E.g., N. Ya. Berkovskii, 0 mirovom znachenii russkoi literatury (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975); B. Bursov, Natsional’noe svoeobrazie russkoi literatury (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1964; revised edition 1967); E. N. Kupreianova and G. P. Makogonenko, Natsional’noe svoeobrazie russkoi literatury (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976).

13. Quoted in M. N. Kufaev, Istoriia russkoi knigi v XIX veke (Leningrad, 1927), P. 103.

14. Vogüé, Le Roman russe, p. xi.

15. N. G. Chernyshevskii, “Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda,” in his Estetika i literaturnaia kritika (Moscow-Leningrad, 1951), p. 338.

16. See Donald Fanger, “Gogol and his Reader,” in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914, ed. William Mills Todd III (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 61-75.

17. Here, then, is one enormous difference between the Russian literary situation and that of, say, France in the nineteenth century: where the serious French writer felt an increasing alienation from his society and the mass readership it was producing, the Russian writer, for all his frequent despair at tendentious misreadings, was engaged in a quest for union with his readership that rested on agreement about the extreme importance of the literary enterprise and its extra-literary ramifications. Gogol increasingly came to view literary art as a kind of communion; so, in their differing terms, did Dostoevsky and Tolstoi. And it would not be hard to demonstrate how Turgenev’s narrator most often stands as a kind of model of what a cultivated citizen might be (ego and super-ego both)—a model that Chekhov enlarged by purifying. Here the profile of each writer’s “ideal reader,” as stipulated demonstrably in his texts, might form the basis of a fascinating and still unwritten chapter of Russian cultural history.

18. Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli, fourth ed., I (St. Petersburg, 1914), 14; V. G. Korolenko, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, V (Moscow, 1954), 275-77; Leon Trotsky, “Gogol: An Anniversary Tribute” (1902), in The Basic Writing of Trotsky, ed. Irving Howe (New York, 1963), p. 318.

19. N. V. Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1937-52), XIV, 240.

20. Ibid., XII, 437.

21. On the censors’ treatment of Notes from Underground, see Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother Mikhail of 26 March 1864, quoted in F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenni v tridtsati tomakh, V (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), 375. On his defense of art against the utilitarians, see his article “Mr. ———bov and the Question of Art,” in F. M. Dostoevsky, Occasional Writings, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 86-137.

22. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, 23 and 26 April 1876; in L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Jubilee Edition (hereafter cited as PSS), LXII (Moscow, 1953), 268.

23. “Neskol’ko slov po povodu knigi Voina i mir,” PSS, XVI, 7.

24. Ibid., p. 55.

25. Ibid., p. 54.

26. Quoted in V. V. Vinogradov, Problema avtorstva i teoriia stilei (Moscow, 1961), p. 516.

27. “By an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never quite get on level terms with or render completely intelligible. It is easily seen that an aesthetic idea is the counterpart of a rational idea, which conversely, is a concept which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952], pp. 175-76).

28. Cf. J. Hillis Miller’s succinct formulation: “The most important themes of a given novel are likely to lie not in anything which is said abstractly, but in significances generated by the way in which the story is told” (“Virginia Woolf’s All Souls Day,” in The Shaken Realist: Essays in Modern Literature in Honor of Frederick J. Hoffman, ed. Melvin J. Friedman and John B. Vickery [Baton Rouge: State University Press, 1970]. p. 101).

29. The quotation is from P. A. Viazemskii, “O Kavkazsom plennike, povesti soch. A Pushkina” (1822), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, I, 75. For more on this historical situation, see Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1979), chapter 2. On the three works in question as foundation of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, see D. E. Tamarchenko, Iz istorii russkogo klassicheskogo romana (Moscow-Leningrad, 1961), and Waclaw Lednicki, “The Prose of Pushkin,” in his Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Goethe, Turgenev and Sienkiewicz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), esp. p. 32, note 79.

30. See A. L. Slonimskii, Masterstvo Pushkina (Moscow, 1959), pp. 318-19; and G. A. Gukovskii, Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia (Moscow, 1957), pp. 268ff.

31. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. Charles Johnston (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 218.

32. Gukovskii, Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia, pp. 140-41.

33. The points here summarized are argued at length by Leon Stilman in his “Problemy literaturnykh zhanrov i traditsii v ‘Evgenii Onegine’ Pushkina,” in American Contributions to the Fourth International Congress of Slavists (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), pp. 321-68, and by Yuri Tynianov, “Pushkin,” in his Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929), esp. pp. 276ff.

34. Iu. M. Lotman, Roman v stikhakh Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin” (Tartu: Tartusskii gos. un-t, 1975), p. 45.

35. Ibid. pp. 79-80.

36. For a subtle discussion of the interrelations of life and art in Onegin, see William Mills Todd III, “Eugene Onegin: ‘Life’s Novel’,” in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia (cf. note 16, above).

37. See, e.g., Lednicki, “The Prose of Pushkin,” p. 21; and Lotman, Roman v Stikhakh Pushkina, p. 107.

38. On the role of detail, see Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow-Leningrad: OGIZ, 1934), pp. 83ff and 103. See also Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, chapter 7.

39. F. M. Dostoevsky, The Diary of A Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: George Braziller, 1954), p. 277 (April 1876).

40. See, for example, D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Istoriia russkoi intelligentsii, I (Moscow, 1908), 1 12ff; Henry Gifford, The Novel in Russia (London: Hutchinson, 1954), pp. 30-32.

41. On Lermontov’s use of current literary forms, see Boris Eikhenbaum, Lermontov (Munich: Fink, 1967), pp. 148ff. On the philosophical dimension of the book, see I. Vinogradov, “Filosofskii roman M. Iu. Lermontova,” in Russkaia klassicheskaia literatura: Razbory i analizy, ed. D. L. Ustiuzhanin (Moscow, 1969), pp. 156-85.

42. See M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973). The argument for a Gogolian derivation is made at greater length in my article “Influence and Tradition in the Russian Novel,” in The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak, ed. John G. Garrard, forthcoming from the Yale University Press.

43. B. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi, I (Leningrad, 1928), 42.

44. “Istoriia vcherashnego dnia,” in PSS, I, 279.

45. Thomas Mann, “Anna Karenina,” in Essays of Three Decades (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 177; Isaac Babel, You Must Know Everything (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 214. On the network of relations of Tolstoi, see Donald Fanger, “Nazarov’s Mother: On the Poetics of Tolstoi’s Late Epic,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 571-82.

46. Ilya Ehrenburg compares Chekhov’s description of a lightning flash (“To the left it was as if someone had scratched a match across the sky”) with Turgenev’s: “The sky was filled with constant flashes of lightning, muted, long, as if many-branched; they did not so much as tremble and twitch, like the wings of a dying bird” (Perechityvaia Chekhova [Moscow, 1960], p. 87).

47. Diary entry for 16 January 1900; in PSS, LIV, 9.

48. Quoted in Ehrenburg, Perechityvaia Chekhova, p. 86.

49. The Diary of a Writer, p. 583.

50. V. S. Pritchett, “The Russian Day,” in his The Living Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), p. 220.