INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

PUSHKIN

Introduction
GOGOL DOSTOEVSKY

to Russian
TOLSTOY CHEKHOV

Realism
SHOLOKHOV

by ERNEST J. SIMMONS

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

BLOOMINGTON
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1965 by Indiana University Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress catalog card number: 65-12189
 THE PATTEN FOUNDATION

Mr. Will Patten of Indianapolis (A.B., Indiana Uni­

versity, 1893) made, in 1931, a gift for the establish­
ment of the Patten Foundation at his Alma Mater.
Under the terms of this gift, which became available
upon the death of Mr. Patten (May 3, 1936), there is
to be chosen each year a Visiting Professor who is to
be in residence several weeks during the year. The
purpose of this prescription is to provide an oppor­
tunity for members and friends of the University to
enjoy the privilege and advantage of personal ac­
quaintance with the Visiting Professor. The Visiting
Professor for the Patten Foundation in 1964 was
Ernest J. Simmons.
 PREFACE

In the preface of his recent brilliant book, from which 1 have

learned much: The Gales of Horn: A Study of Five French
Realists, Professor Harry Levin mentions in passing that he
spent more than fifteen years of intermittent effort on this ex­
tensive work. One may safely conjecture that a similar compre­
hensive investigation of Russian realism would require about as
much time and industry. I hasten to add, however, that I have
had no such aim in mind in the present brief study. It is a some­
what augmented version of the Patten Foundation Lectures
which I was invited to deliver at Indiana University in February
and March of 1964. Within this framework the effort can claim
to be merely an introduction to a vast and profoundly challeng­
ing subject, in which I have stressed not so much the problem
of the definition of realism, so adequately handled by Professor
Levin, but rather the place—in terms of developing Russian real­
ism—of certain literary works in the minds of their authors and
in the literary, social, and political movements of the age. My
only hope is that this short introduction to the subject will per­
suade some younger and more able scholar to attempt an ex­
haustive study of Russian realism.
viii PREFACE

The form of the work has been necessarily dictated by the

lectures. Though there may seem to be some arbitrariness in the
selection of the six authors used as examples, they were chosen
because it seemed to me that each had an important contribution
to make to the forward progress of Russian realism. But I
frankly admit that another student of the subject, faced with
the same task, might alter the selection with good reason.
I have taken the liberty of omitting the usual ample apparatus
of footnotes and bibliography which appeared to be out of place
in a study of such limited scope. Further, I hope I may be for­
given the use I have made of books and articles I have published
on some of these authors, for I have depended on them for oc­
casional factual data and also for translations I had previously
made of Russian memoirs, diaries, letters, etc. However, foot­
notes are given for translations other than my own. I should
like to thank the following publishers for permission to quote
from works under their copyright: University of California
Press, for excerpts from Eugene Onegin; Oxford University
Press, for excerpts from the Tolstoy Centenary Edition; Alfred
A. Knopf, for excerpts from The Overcoat and Other Stories,
Ilya Ehrenburg’s Chekhov, Stendhal, and Other Essays, and The
Silent Don. I have also drawn upon my book, Dostoevsky : The
Making of a Novelist (New York. 1940), for a critical approach,
which I have somewhat elaborated in the present study, in the
interpretation of his fiction.
Some of the research and much of the writing of this book
were done at The Center for Advanced Studies, Wcslcvan Uni­
versity. I am deeply grateful to the Center’s Administration for
its material aid and the ideal facilities it provides for living and
working, to the thoughtfulness and assistance of its able staff,
and to the constant encouragement of its distinguished scholars
and artists in the creation of things of the mind and spirit.
 CONTENTS

I Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 3

II Gogol—Live or Deal Souls 44
III Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 91
IV Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 135
V Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 181
VI Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 225
Index 265
INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM
I•PUSHKIN

The Poet as Novelist

It is not my purpose here to formulate a conclusive definition

of realism in the course of a comprehensive examination of
Russian fiction. My objective is a much more modest one—to
explore and analyze the inception and development of certain
aspects of realism in significant works of six major Russian au­
thors.
Frankly I distrust efforts to define realism with the finality
which scientists define physical laws of nature. A literary critic
ought to be guided by the humility of common sense when con­
fronted bv a problem so complicated by human imponderables
of life and art. In any event, he ought not to begin, as a Madison
Avenue mogul might, with the clinching assertion that the prod­
uct, like a doctor’s prescription, contains twelve ingredients.
If it is anything, realism in fiction is a literary artist’s way of
looking at life. Although this harried word, realism, which
comes to us from the fine arts, is supposed to signify life as it <
actually is, we know perfectly well that in the art which grapples
with, assimilates, and interprets reality, the subjective element
plays an enormous role, to say nothing of the purely subjective
3
 4 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

element in the reader, viewer, or listener reacting to the artist’s

reactions to reality.
With disarming frankness Maupassant, in the preface to
Pierre et Jem, tells of the artist’s subjective involvement in the
realism of his fiction: “Into the characters whose hidden, un­
known being we pretend to reveal, we can only partly trans­
plant our own vision, our own knowledge of the world, our
own ideas of life. . . . The writer’s skill lies in not allowing the
reader to recognize his ego behind the various masks which he
assumes to hide it.”
When Henry James described the novel as “felt life,” he was
at once criticizing the conventional conception of realism and
emphasizing the author’s personality and imagination in em­
bodying the images of characters, situations, and scenes. In
short, though the novelist must use his senses and intellect to
explore reality, he observes things and persons and their activi-
f ties in the external world not always objectively, but through
the prism of his own impulses and emotions. In fact, he is often
concerned with man not only as he is, but as he ought to be, and
to this extent the novelist can be an illusionist, though we would
all agree that illusion may also be a definite feature of reality.
In our own day realism in fiction has taken on still other di­
mensions which some critics believe are bringing about the de­
mise of the novel as we understand it, although this judgment
seems rather premature. The realistic novelist has often been
critical of some of the conventions of existence, but nowadays
he can be in violent conflict with reality in his effort to fashion
a truthful picture of the world. And this picture can and docs
represent a reality which the reader has never experienced, a
personal, ambiguous world of the novelist himself—a symbol of
contemporary “reality.” Carried a bit further, this trend has
developed into the nonrealistic novel of our time.
, It has been argued that realism in fiction, because it assumes
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 5

an impossible point of view—one that lacks a viewer—can never

correspond to the reality of life. This is being semantically abso­
lutist to an intolerable degree, as though art did not always in­
volve artifice. To say that a novelist does not reflect the world
but creates an entirely imaginary world true to his personal
vision is to place an unwarranted limitation on his function as an
artist. The purely imaginary does not exist. In L’Hovmie révolté
Camus correctly observes that art cannot reject reality, and with
insight he adds that real literary creation “uses reality and only
reality with all its warmth and its blood, its passion and its out­
cries. It simply adds something which transfigures reality.”
It has been said that every age has its own realism, a some­
what sweeping generalization that gains nothing in convincing­
ness if we add that so does every country. However, one does
not have to be a devotee of Marxian determinism to observe a>
striking correlation between social change in historical time and /.
the birth and subsequent growth of realism in fiction. It will be
instructive to say something briefly about this pattern of cause
and effect in Western Europe, for its impact on the beginnings
of Russian realism proved to be significant.
The wealth of fiction from the ancient and medieval worlds
contributed nothing to the conception of the modern novel ex­
cept an interest in sheer storytelling and a passing curiosity
about men and women. If the classical epic and the medieval ro­
mance, the first of which glorified a ruling military society and
the second a courtly one, have left any mark on the novel today,
it is an idealized reflection of social aspects that still have some
relevance. After all, the military is a well-known staple of so­
ciety in all ages, and even hard-bitten modernists sometimes
dwindle into romance, both risqué and roseate. The tunnel of
romantic escape from a rcalitv too much with us is as irresistible
now as it was in the medieval past. As for ancient myth, well we
are more than partial to it in the novel today where centaurs
6 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

and unicorns in modern dress only go to show that there is noth­

ing new under the sun in life or in fiction.
Rabelais and Cervantes, spanning the expansive Renaissance
transition between medieval feudalism and the first stirrings of
capitalism, created something less than the form of the modern
novel and something more than its traditional content. For if
Gargantua and Pantagruel discovered the human body with all
its coarse delights, Don Quixote placed a soul in it. The result
was a heavy brew of realism that intoxicated the mind and ex­
hilarated the spirit. Toward the end of his famous quest, the
good Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance confessed that
heaven can be conquered but not the world of men, that inac­
cessible goal of both heroes and antiheroes in so much modern
fiction. Unlike later philosophical novels, such as those of Kafka,
Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Camus, where the burden of weighty
speculation tends to disintegrate the absorbing fabric of life, the
philosophy of Don Quixote, perhaps the most philosophical
novel of Western literature, is carefully sublimated in an atmos­
phere of riotously funny adventures. In this burlesque of out­
moded romances of chivalry, the Don is a tragic hero who is
compelled to realize in the end that man cannot shape reality and
his own destiny in the image of his chosen ideal. Turgenev and
Tolstoy regarded the work as a supremely great book. Its hero
influenced the creation of that positively good man, Prince
Myshkin, in The Idiot, and the grateful Dostoevsky declared:
“In all the world there is nothing more profound and more
powerful than Don Quixote. Further than this, it is the last and
greatest word of human thought, the most bitter irony that man
can express.” Such praise is not accidental. The art of Cervantes
in his masterpiece and that of these great Russian realists had
much in common.
If a country’s dominant social class tends to create the art
form which will provide the fullest and most accurate exprès-
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 7

sion of its behavior pattern and economic consciousness, then it

would seem almost inevitable that England’s rising middle class,
a product of the burgeoning eighteenth-century industrial revo­
lution, would create the novel. Its inevitability, however, might
just as easily be accounted for by the widespread commercial­
ization of printing at this time and by the development of pub­
lishing as a big business. For English novelists of the eighteenth
century would perhaps have echoed Arnold Bennett’s answer in
the twentieth to a starry-eyed worshiper who asked what inner
urge had driven him on to create his masterpiece, Old Wives'
Tale: “I needed the money,” he replied.
Certainly a merchandizing value was not far removed from
Daniel Defoe’s mind when he created Robinson Crusoe, often
regarded as the first English novel and even as the very first of
all novels. But material rewards have never been incompatible
with man’s compulsion to express himself artistically, and Robin­
son Crusoe is art of a high order. It defined the novel, however
inadequately, as the art form of bourgeois society. For if Defoe
was unaware that the novel’s distinguishing feature, as E. M.
Forster put it, was to make the secret life of man visible, he did
recognize that it must deal with man’s struggle against society
and against nature, but a struggle waged in a real world where
the balance between man and society is often lost.
Like Defoe, other great English novelists of the eighteenth
century, such as Fielding in Tom Jones and Smollett in
Humphry Clinker, were concerned primarily with an objective
picture of society. The inner life of their characters they either
evaded or did not think important. As writers in the grand epic
tradition of the ancient past, action and not the analysis of its
motives or of the feelings of the hero of action claimed their
principal attention. The lack of this important dimension of
realism, so pervasive in the novel today, was overcome by the
discovery of sensibility which so markedly affected those other
8 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

masterpieces of eighteenth-century fiction—Richardson’s

Clarissa, Sterne’s Tristrcmi Shandy, and Rousseau’s Nouvelle
Héloïse. Here the consciousness of the individual and an intense
preoccupation with motives and the intimate feelings of the
heart became the focus of the novelist’s view of reality. In truth,
Sterne went even further. For him analysis was an end in itself,
and he substituted relativism for the “tapeworm of time,” that
temporal framework of all fiction up to this point. It was an ap­
proach anticipating in certain respects that-of Proust and Joyce
more than a century later. But one danger of excessive emphasis
on analysis is the separation of the individual from society which
ultimately marks a retreat from reality.
Despite the contributions of the eighteenth century, espe­
cially in England, to a definition of the modern novel, they had
failed to bring within the compass of a single work a comprehen­
sive picture of developing middle-class society involving, let us
say, an artistic treatment that combined the epic approach of ac­
tion of a Fielding with the close analysis of motive and feeling
of a Richardson.

The English realistic novel caused a literary stir in eighteenth­

century France and Germany where it influenced fiction writ­
ing. The response in Russia was considerably different. Though
Russia had existed as a separate nation for several hundred years,
it was still struggling to achieve national self-consciousness, a
necessary condition for the development of an original literature
and culture. Various political, economic, and social factors had
caused the delay. Among them may be mentioned the continued
existence of serfdom, which had begun to disintegrate in the
West as early as the twelfth century, and the country’s isolation
and fear of foreigners, perhaps more a heritage of the long Tatar
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 9

yoke than a fault of the insularity and xenophobia of the Church,

as has sometimes been charged. Though Peter the Great, in the
early years of the eighteenth century, is credited with ending
this segregation by opening his famous window to the West,
it must be said that it was hardly a bay window but rather one
of those Russian fortochkas, a tiny pane of glass in a large sealed
window which allows just enough fresh air into the room to
keep one from suffocating in the winter. Without minimizing
Peter’s service in introducing Russia to many features of the
most advanced civilization of the West, he plainly overlooked
one of Europe’s greatest glories—its literary culture. The only
books that concerned him were those that could be put to prac­
tical use in his reforming zeal. Belles lettres he scornfully de­
scribed as “mere tales that simply waste time.” Historically
speaking, perhaps he was right. Before Russia could absorb the
finer aspects of European culture, a great deal of elementary
preparation had to take place.
Culture is international common tender and over the centuries
the coins of literary and artistic achievement of each of the
major countries of Western Europe made their way from one to
the other multiplying and enriching the culture of all. In addi­
tion, these countries were cultural beneficiaries of Greece and
Rome and the brilliant literary and artistic efflorescence of the
Renaissance. Circumstances deprived Russia of these influences
throughout its formative period, and its contacts with Byzan­
tium in no way compensated the country. An indicator of its
relative backwardness is the fact that printing did not begin in
Russia until 1564—the year of Shakespeare’s birth!
By the time of Peter’s death in 1725 Russia was nearly ready
for invasion of European literature and thought. During the
transition period from Catherine I to Catherine II (1725-62), a
span of thirty-seven years, German and French favorites close
to the throne furthered Peter’s open-door policy to the West. By
 IO INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

this time the grand tour in Europe had become a kind of social
status symbol among members of the gentry. New educational
institutions—the Academy of Sciences, a university at St. Peters­
burg and one at Moscow, and several preparatory and special
? schools—were staffed largely by French and German teachers.
In fact, the education of the generation of writers who now
inaugurated Russia’s continuous literary development was more
European than Russian. After being exposed to a foreign-ori-
ented initial training in Russia, such future authors as Lomono­
sov, Kantemir, Tredyakovsky, and Sumarokov traveled to
countries of Western Europe to finish their education.
The Russian cultural time-lag was also reflected in the foreign
literary influences that dominated these early writers; they
succumbed completely to the French neoclassical school with­
out being aware that its contemporary significance was fast wan­
ing. Corneille, Molière, Racine, Boileau, and later Voltaire and
A the Encyclopedists were imitated, often slavishly, and the vogue
of French neoclassicism lasted for years in Russian literature.
During the long reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96)
which, culturally, marks the beginning of modern Russia, this
Gallomania swept all before it. It has been estimated that three
fourths of the books read in Russia over these years were
French. Anything regarded as connue il faut in Paris was sure
to be imitated in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Among the upper
classes French virtually usurped the place of the Russian ver­
nacular as a medium of polite communication. Years later the
critic Belinsky, whose combination of ignorance and knowledge
resulted somehow in remarkable judgments on literature, wryly
commented on this situation: “Imagine a [Russian] society that
spoke, thought, and prayed to God in French.” In Fonvizin’s
satire of this pervasive foreign influence on social life in his well-
known comedy, The Brigadier, the character Ivanushka, who
in default of his body hoped that his soul might be French,
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 11

limned the Frenchified Russian type for all time: “Everyone

who has been in Paris has the right, in speaking about Russians,
not to include himself in their number, for he has already become
more French than Russian.”
The example of Catherine herself, who had some pretension
to authorship, encouraged the growth of belles lettres. Although
this activity centered mostly in court circles and readers were
not numerous, still the long, slow task of creating a national
literature had begun in real earnest. Poetry was emphasized, most
of it uninspired imitations of French verse, and dramas, largely
modeled on neoclassical French plays, conformed to the unities
and were devoted to themes of love and duty. Only two figures,
Derzhavin in poetry and Fonvizin in comedy, rose above the
dreary level of imitativeness and created works that were orig­
inal and belong to the body of enduring Russian literature.
Catherine was the prime mover in promoting an interest in
moral and satirical journals, many of which were published
during her reign. Nothing is so calculated to convince one of
the derivative nature of Russian literary efforts at this time than
a close examination of these periodicals. Their origin was not
only inspired bv foreign models, but their contents were often
made up partly or entirely of translations from English, French,
and German journals. And sometimes the social abuses satirized K
in the few original articles had more relevance to foreign coun­
tries than to Russia.
English eighteenth-century satirical and moral journals were
heavily drawn upon, especially the Spectator, and this wealth of
material on English life, customs, manners, and culture contrib­
uted to developing a degree of Anglomania which was wel­
comed in some Russian quarters as a desirable offset to the devo­
tion to everything French. Here, too, the Empress, with her
admiration of English institutions—she even attempted rework­
ings of several of Shakespeare’s plays—set something of an ex­
12 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

ample. One result was the accumulation in Catherine’s Russia of

a rather extensive body of English literature in translation.
It is interesting to observe, however, that this Anglomania
was in many respects a kind of bv-product of Russia’s Gallo­
mania. For after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, thou­
sands of French Huguenots fled to England. But they did not
sever connections with the motherland and for over half a cen­
tury these refugees, through numerous publications and visits to
the Continent, were the means of disseminating a knowledge of
English life, thought, and culture in France. Anglophiles among
such men of letters as Prévost, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
and Diderot popularized English literature in France, and an
endless stream of translations of poetry, plays, and fiction
flooded the country.
Russia, with its inordinate cultural dependence on France,
appropriated also this French Anglomania. Since English was
then little known in Russia, people read English literature in
French translations which in turn were often rendered into Rus­
sian. And one of the genres that appealed most, aided no doubt
by its popularity in France, was the English realistic novel.
Hitherto fiction in Russia had been limited to translations of
medieval heroic romances and a few original tales of the chap­
book variety. But in the reigns of Elizabeth and Catherine the
French romans d'aventure of such authors as La Calprencdc,
Scudéry, and Madame La Fayette became a veritable craze.
After the establishment of a translation department in the Acad­
emy of Sciences in 1767, by far the majority of books issued by
the press were these French romances. Although their improb­
able characters and sensational adventures were sometimes de­
nounced in Russia for poisoning the minds of vouth, such ro­
mances as Cassandre, Farainond, and Artawene were curiously
credited with awakening an intellectual interest among a peo-
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 13

pic who up to this time had not conic into contact with any ex­
tensive narrative literature.
The sweeping popularity of the English realistic novel in
France, which contributed to undermining the vogue of the
romances there, also served the same end in Russia. French and
German translations of English novels, and imitations or highly
original works influenced by this new form, such as Rousseau’s
Nouvelle Héloïse and Goethe’s Werther, were translated into
Russian and eagerly read. In the second half of the eighteenth
century, for example, Russian translations of the following Eng­
lish novels appeared, in some cases in several editions: Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe; Richardson’s Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles
Grandison; Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and Jona­
than Wild; Smollett’s Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker,
and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (Tristram Shandy, though
probably read earlier in French translation, did not appear in
Russian until 1804-7).
Here were superb models, among them some world master­
pieces of the new modern trend in fiction, which, if conditions
had been ripe, might have initiated the great stream of Russian
realism decades before it actually began. The age of Catherine,
however, was in no sense prepared for such a development. Lit­
erature was still largely derivative for it lacked the centuries of
continuous growth of the literatures of England and France.
And that all-important concomitant of maturity in belles lettres
—a sophisticated self-criticism—had not yet got underway. The
social and economic conditions that had given rise to the realistic
novel—a nascent capitalism and an emerging middle class—were
not present in this scmifcudal Russia with its vast, amorphous
population of serfs, its landed gentry, and ruling aristocracy.
Implicit in the realistic novel is the freedom to comment on and
even to criticize the social and political institutions that form
 14 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

J and condition men’s lives. Yet when Nikolai Novikov attacked

serfdom in his satirical journal, Catherine promptly banned all
such journals. And when Nikolai Radishchev, in 1790, dared
to criticize social and political abuses in his famous book, A
Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the Empress had all
copies of the work impounded and the author exiled to Siberia.
-Z Whatever liberal tendencies she may have displayed before the
^French Revolution, after it she would tolerate no criticisms of
r Russian life that reflected on her absolute power. In short, if one
of the principal aesthetic problems of realism is adequate presen-
/ tation of the complete human personality, this problem was
quite irrelevant in Catherine’s Russia where the individual as
such did not exist in a political and social system that exacted
T blind obedience to the state from every subject.
Though the unvarnished realism of Fielding’s novels was ad­
mired in eighteenth-century Russia, readers, once again bowing
to French taste, preferred Richardson and his moral and moral­
izing heroines. The importation of English sensibility or senti­
mentalism, also through the medium of France, undoubtedly
contributed to this preference.
Russian eulogies on Richardson, especially in introductions to
translations of his novels, border on the rhapsodic, as they did in
France and Germany. He was praised not as a master of realism,
but as the creator of creatures of enchanting sentiment and im­
peccable virtue. In the 1787 version of Pamela, the Russian trans­
lator, after confessing that he experienced every terror of the
heroine and wept over her unhappiness, declares: “All families
will wish to have in their homes a Pamela who may serve as a
shining example of honor and unyielding virtue.” Obviously this
Russian admirer would hardly have appreciated Fielding’s sly
notion that though Pamela regarded her virtue a pearl of pre­
cious price, she tended to place too much emphasis on the
price.
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 15

In this initial period of Russian fiction it was also Richardson

among the English novelists who was accorded the flattery of
imitation, and in one case at least also inspired an original effort
in his manner. Two years after the translation of Patnela a novel
by P. Lvov appeared, entitled A Russian Pamela, or the History
of Mariya, a Virtuous Peasant Girl. The author informs us in a
foreword that his heroine “was as much honored in her actions
as, for example, the heroine of Pamela written by the glorious
Richardson. For this reason I have called her a ‘Russian Pamela,’
for there are among us such tender hearts of noble sensibility in
lowly circumstances.” It is the story of the love of a young
member of the landed gentry for a comely peasant girl, in which
the couple are kept apart for many pages by the actions of a
cynical friend of the hero. In Mariya we have a sedulous imita­
tion of Pamela. Like her English model, she is modest to a fault
and is given to a specious kind of moralizing at great length. Her
lover, however, resembles the faultless Grandison more than
Pamela’s designing Mr. B., whose traits reappear in the hero’s
crafty friend.
A more sophisticated and more independent effort was the
short novel, Poor Liza (1792), by the eminent author Nikolai
Karamzin. This story, which won fantastic popularity, involves
the same general theme as Richardson’s Pa?nela, but the peasant
heroine’s love affair takes a tragic turn and she commits suicide.
Richardson’s notions of social equality in marriage are preached
in Poor Liza, whose heroine embodies more of the features of
Clarissa than of Pamela.
Within a few years Russian readers would laugh over such
tales with their exaggerated sentiments and idealized peasants
who resembled the utterly unreal shepherds and shepherdesses
of French neoclassical poetry. So deeply engrained was the habit
of imitation that these Russian authors, with their foreign models
too much in mind, failed to observe the native life around them.
 16 1 N T H O II U C T I O N TO B U SS I A N H E A L 1S M

It is clear that in this first phase of Russian literature the de­

velopment of a realistic approach in fiction was incompatible
with the spirit and practice of the times. Belles lettres had not
yet become a profession. It bore an entirely official character and
depended on the patronage of the court for its existence. In­
stead of faithfully depicting man and society as complete enti­
ties, authors were disposed to idealize Russian life and people or
even to substitute for them the portrayals found in their French
neoclassical models. In fiction alone some conception of the
reading public’s inability to overcome their devotion to foreign
literature may be gathered from the fact that 463 translations of
French, German, and English novels appeared during this period
and only 32 by Russian authors, that is, on the average less than
one a year!

3
At times the Communist Party line has compelled Soviet
critics to forsake internationalism in an un-Marxian nationalistic
effort to prove that Russian literary development over the cen­
turies was uncontaminated by foreign influences. This chauvin­
istic “discovery” was apparently dictated by the political need
to identify a continuum between pre- and postrcvolutionary lit­
erature without ever running the risk of uncovering Western
, European skeletons in the Soviet cultural closet.
The literature of no nation fails to benefit from the cultural
advances of its neighbors, and only a distorted patriotism would
regard such borrowings as in any wav demeaning. Belinsky,
whom Soviet authorities, after much doctrinal shuffling, have
accepted as a kind of early nineteenth-century precursor of the
Marxian approach to literature, regarded the matter otherwise.
He saw clearly that Russia’s manifold borrowings from the
West since the reign of Peter the Great could not essentially alter
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 17

the country’s emerging nationality which, he declared, was the

aggregate of all the spiritual powers of the Russian people. He
wisely understood that these foreign riches, which reanimated
the people with the spirit of a new and fuller life, were neces­
sary during the early stages of Russia’s cultural growth.
To some extent this conviction was borne out in the reign of
the enlightened Emperor Alexander I (1801-25), when vigorous
discussions took place on Russia’s need for an original literature
of its own, and writers, who increased in number, where held
in higher esteem and regarded as important factors in the body
politic. Further, the French invasion of 1812, which shook the
whole country, revealed unexpected sources of strength. Rus­
sia’s victorious participation in the Napoleonic wars stirred up
national consciousness and pride, encouraged the birth of pub­
licity as a forerunner of public opinion, and brought the tri­
umphant country face to face with Europe for the first time.
Neoclassical theory and practice continued down into the
reign of Alexander but less inclusively so and eventually sur­
rendered important ground to another movement, the cult of
sensibility, which had begun to penetrate Russia from England,
France, and Germany at the end of Catherine’s reign. Though
initially an outgrowth of such novels as Clarissa, Nouvelle
Héloïse, Werther, and especially Sterne’s Sentimental Journey,
the movement was soon infused with the special qualities of feel­
ing to be found in such English works as Thomson’s The Sea­
sons, Young’s Night Thoughts, and the Poems of Ossian, all of
which were translated into Russian and much imitated. A veri­
table philosophy of feeling absorbed a number of writers and
acted as an antidote to the rationalism of neoclassicism.
Karamzin, the author of Poor Liza, became the high priest of
the new sensibility, especially after his immensely popular Let­
ters of a Russian Traveler (1797) where the analysis of his own
feelings, his “joy of grief,” and tearful sadness before the beau-
18 INTRODUCTION' TO RUSSIAN REAMS M

tics of nature amounted to a revelation to the reading public. His

utter subjectivism and emphasis on his own spiritual experiences,
so alien to the neoclassical outlook, were influential among liter­
ary disciples in the first part of Alexander’s reign. However,
neither his poctrv nor tales, written in the spirit of the cult of
sensibility, nor those of his followers, contributed anything
memorable to Russian literature. Karamzin’s real service was as
a historian and the creator of a literary language that was mod­
ern and supple enough to be used in a variety of genres, the lack
of which hitherto had been a serious hindrance to the develop­
ment of Russian prose.
As in the previous periods, original fiction was mostly’ ne­
glected. The literary' historian N. 1. Grech, in reviewing the
total output for the single year 1814, could list only’ two novels,
and these wrere both translations from the German. Though
Karamzin never wrote a full-length novel, some of his later short
stories—he was really' the first to introduce this form into Rus­
sian literature—such as A Knight of Our Times, reveal a degree
of artistic form and skill in characterization not to be found in
the sparse body’ of previous fiction. Hoyvever, in his almost ex­
clusive preoccupation with tearful and noble sentiments of sim­
ple hearts, he never comes to grips with reality. The only’ full-
length novel to reflect the manners and customs of the times,
perhaps more influenced by' Smollett’s blunt realism than by
that of Fielding, is Vasily' Narezhny’s A Russian Gil Blas, the
story' of a wretched squire’s adventures in the provinces and in
the tyvo capitals. It is a crude effort, for Narczhnv lacked the
imagination and art to endow reality' yvith life, and hence the
yvork failed to play any' part in the future development of the
novel.
A writer at this time who observed life closely and possessed
the art to charge it with living reality’ was Ivan Krylov, whose
nine volumes of fables appeared between 1809 and 1820. Though
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 19

the verse fable was an approved and popular neoclassical genre,

Krylov easily surpassed his Russian rivals in form and in the
realistic, instead of prettifying, manner in which he handled his
subjects. The result was a classic of Russian literature. In these
fables Krylov, in a style that drew upon the speech of common
folk, satirized and ridiculed the foibles, especially arrogant
stupidity, of high and low. Though the limitations of the form
hardly allow for realistic treatment in depth, Krylov’s animals
no less than his peasants come to life. And the world they live
in, despite its restricted dimensions, is a very recognizable Rus­
sian world filled with healthy humor and good practical com­
mon sense. Belinsky once remarked that if the work of any
Russian writer up to this point were translated into a major
European language, foreign readers would have found it of no
interest because they would have long ago read this kind of thing
in their own literature, whereas they would have welcomed a
translation of Krylov’s fables as something different and quin-
tessentially Russian. Actually these fables were a first step in the
direction of that kind of realism which later became the hallmark
of Russian literature. They very likely influenced the course of
Pushkin’s realism and also Griboyedov’s famous comedy, Woe
from Wit, whose characters were so brilliantly stamped out of
the common clay of Russian existence, and they no doubt con­
tributed to the “poetry of real life” which characterized so much
of Gogol’s fiction.
In truth, during Alexander’s reign decades of preparation were /-
approaching an end and literature advanced from imitativeness
to originality in the wonderful flowering of verse described as
Russia’s “Golden Age of Poetry.” Though Pushkin emerged as
the leading figure of the movement, it included a sizable group of
unusual poets of whom Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, and Baratyn­
sky are the most remarkable ones. The intellectual and artistic
climate was still that of Western Europe, but it was now an jt
 20 I N T B O D U CT I O X TO H U SS 1 A N REALISM

entirely assimilated climate reflected in verse that was European

without being imitative. The verse of these poets, nearly all of
whom belonged to the gentry class, was distinctly classical,
( especially in the purity of its form, and also, to a large extent, in
its subject matter.
By 1820, however, this movement began to encounter the stri­
dent claims of European romanticism and its concomitant Ger­
man idealism. Soon a critical debate ensued in the monthly re­
views, which now played ar. important role in literature, be­
tween proponents of strict rules of French neoclassicism and
those who favored romanticism with its greater freedom in form
and content. Then the death of Alexander 1 and the Decembrist
Revolt, which ushered in the reign of Nicholas I in 1825, were
I. events that deeply affected cultural developments. The revolt
ended in the suppression of many of the intellectual elite among
the gentry and new plebeian writers took their place. A growing
commercialism started to make inroads on literature, and one re­
sult was a decline in the popularity of poetry and a rise in the
importance of prose. In the very year of revolt Alexander
Bestuzhev-Marlinskv, a young poet and later an extremely popu­
lar fiction writer, asserted in a letter to Pushkin: “People no
longer listen to poetry now that everyone is able to write it. The
current murmur has risen to a general outcry: ‘Give us prose!
Prose!—Water, plain water.’ ” With romanticism in the saddle, it
was only natural in these circumstances that its greatest represen­
tative in fiction, Sir Walter Scott, should have prompted and
influenced new developments in the Russian novel.
Unlike the West, in Russia romanticism never assumed social
^or political dimensions, nor did it reflect individual revolt against
real or imaginary evils of society. It never amounted to much
x more than a narrow and even ephemeral literary movement al-
Gmost wholly stimulated from abroad. Though the works of cer­
tain French writers and German philosophers were eagerly read,
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 21

the writings and personalities of Byron and Scott were by far the
largest influence in introducing romanticism into Russia. In 1827
the able poet and critic Peter Vyazemsky declared, perhaps with
some exaggeration: “In our age it seems impossible for a poet not /
to echo Byron or for a novelist not to reflect Walter Scott.” i
Abundant evidence indicates that Scott became a kind of literary
hero, the object of endless admiration and curiosity in the pages
of Russian periodicals. From 1820 to 1830 no less than thirty-
nine translations of Scott’s novels were published, often running
into several editions and including nearly every title in the long
series. These works served to arouse the interest of Russians in
their country’s past and also influenced the writing of a con­
siderable number of historical romances.
The most popular of these, and certainly the most enduring,
was Yury Miloslavsky, or the Russians in 1612 (1829) by '
Mikhail Zagoskin, who won the sobriquet of the “Russian Wai- /
ter Scott.” It was also published in England in 1834, an unusual j
tribute, for translations of Russian literature into English were
very rare at this time. The background of the novel is the Time
of Troubles when the Poles occupied Moscow. Yury falls in love
with a beautiful noblewoman, and after various adventures, in
which Kirsha, the stout bodyguard of the hero performs prodi­
gies of valor, Yury wins his fair damsel. Zagoskin wrote other
historical novels but none of them achieved the fame of Yury
Miloslavsky.
Faddei Bulgarin also contributed historical romances, such as
The False Dmitri (1830) and Mazepa (1834), but he won much
more réclame with his picaresque novel, Ivan Vyzhigin (1829),
in which the effectiveness of rough hut genuine transcripts of
Russian life is unfortunately neutralized by the author’s excessive
moralizing. Similarly Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, who published an
historical romance, Incursions, as early as 1824 and followed it
up with others less satisfactory, won his widest popular success
 22 I N T H O 1) UCT I ON TO RUSSIAN H E A L 1 S M

with purely romantic talcs of his adventures as a soldier in the

Caucasus, such as Avrmalet Bek ( 1832). But the author who
more than Zagoskin deserved the title of “Russian Walter Scott”
was Ivan Lazhechnikov who wrote a series of historical ro­
mances. One of his earliest, and in some respect the best. The
Last Novik ( 183 1-33), drew from Belinsky these words of
praise: “It reveals in the author a considerable talent and estab­
lishes his claim to the honorable place of first Russian novelist.”*
This tribute is not hard to understand, for The Last Novik, a
story centered in the epoch of Peter the Great, is peculiarly
modern compared to the archaic flavor of all preceding Russian
fiction. Though the hero is most unconvincing, several of the
secondary characters emerge as real human beings.
None of these writers occupies a lofty place in the annals of
Russian literature, but they are worth mentioning because they
came at a point when the Russian reading public first evinced a
need for fiction, and by and large they attempted to answer it,
in the spirit of the times, with the historical romance. Realism,
as the art of trying to envisage the ever-changing and tangible
world, is as relevant to the past as to the present, a fact that
Balzac recognized when he stated in the introduction to The
Human Comedy that he regarded his own novels as continua­
tions of the historical romances of Scott. He saw clearly that
Scott emphasized the development of social elements instead of
/the external glitter of historical events. And Balzac praised him
for assigning secondary roles to great historical figures in order
^to concentrate on the spirit and morals of an age or on the
causes which lead to and explain significant events.
For the most part these early Russian writers of historical ro­
mances largely missed this concentration, perhaps because they
lacked Scott’s extraordinary talent and the long development of
* V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1948), p. 89.
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 23

literary culture that informed it. They were not endowed with
the magical art with which he conjured the varied atmosphere
and scenery of his events and incidents, nor did they have his ex­
ceptional power of vivifying the past on an extended scale.
Though they faithfully4 *7 imitated his brilliant efforts to provide
the local color of a vanished epoch by historical research, they7
yvere unable to transcend the trivial and the average in a quest
for the deeper essence of reality hidden beneath the surface. The
reality of atmosphere of a past age yvhich they sought to grasp
conveyed nothing of that yvonderful ancient Russianism yvhich,
let us sav, is conveyed in medieval ikons. They yvere not analysts
of human nature. Scott often fails in his non-Scotch character­
izations, but the pulse of real life throbs in his native portrayals,
yvhich is rarely the case yvith any of the characters of these early7
Russian historical novelists. And though they and Scott are un­
convincing in their love scenes, the Russians tend to emphasize
the love element, failing to realize that Scott regarded his novels
not as romances of love but rather as the romance of human life
and its activities. So very7 often, it seems, the flavor of these Rus­
sian historical novels yvas not that of real life but of make-believe.

4
Throughout the eighteenth century no yvriter had appeared
yvho possessed the genius to identify himself completely with
the national epos in original creative endeavors and give the kind
of direction to Russian literature that yvould enable it to take a
yy'orthv place in the stream of yvorld literature. Alexander Push­
kin ( 1799-1837) performed this service in the early7 years of the
nineteenth century and richly deserves the title accorded him bv
genealogically minded native critics of “the father of modern
Russian literature.”
24 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

Of course, no attempt can be made here to evaluate Pushkin’s

extraordinary accomplishments in a variety of literary genres,
although a fresh assessment that would avoid both the exag­
gerated praise and depreciation of nineteenth-century critics and
the sprightly dullness of Soviet worshipers, who regard him as a
kind of predecessor of socialist realism, is very much needed in
our own day. Our concern is with Pushkin’s contributions to
the Russian novel and, more specifically, to the formation of its
realistic traditions.
Within this limited sphere Pushkin’s unusual artistic qualifica­
tions conditioned the nature of his contributions in a unique
manner. Though writing in the nineteenth century, the qualities
of his mind and art were formed largely by the eighteenth. That
is to say, he was a classicist in his literary tastes, in his sense of
form, and in his habits of thought and feeling. The special intel­
lectual essence which we associate with the classical approach to
life and art—nothing over much, a preference for the reality of
things, and an intense dislike of excess and insincerity—charac­
terized not only the manner in which he wrote, but also the
themes he selected. Unlike such great writers of fiction as Balzac
and Dostoevsky, who by becoming emotionally involved at
times in the life they observed and in the men and women they
created and to this extent distorted the realistic image of their
milieu, Pushkin’s artistic detachment enabled him to remain quite
objective even when there could be no doubt of his social sym­
pathies or prejudices. Irony appealed to him more than direct
criticism, subtle satire more than forthright denunciation. Like
Tolstov, his breeding as a member of the gentry colored his
whole outlook on life, but unlike Tolstov, his “six-hundred-
ycar-old ancestry” never turned him into a conscience-stricken
nobleman.
Pushkin, however, did not remain serenely above the battle.
In his youth lie evinced political sympathies close to those of the
Decembrist rebels and literary tendencies that allied him with
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 25

romanticism. But he was a literary artist and not a political

thinker. Disheartened by persecution during the reign of Alex­
ander I, he hopefully made his peace with the new regime of
Nicholas I. And the classical discipline of his artistic tempera­
ment soon compelled him to repudiate romanticism. Though his
magnificent “Southern Verse Tales,” such as The Robber
Brothers (1821), The Captive of the Caucasus (1822), and The
Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1824), were clearly inspired by
Byron’s “Eastern Verse Tales,” Pushkin was too dedicated to
technical mastery to tolerate Byron’s faults of form and too ra­
tional to have any sympathy with his pessimism, disillusion, and
romantic posing. In rejecting Vyazemsky’s request in 1824 that
he write a fifth canto to Childe Harold as a tribute to Byron after
his death, Pushkin remarked: “You arc sad about Byron, but I
am quite happy in his death, as a lofty theme for poetry. Byron’s
genius faded from his youth. . . . There was no gradation; he
suddenly ripened and matured, sang and then grew silent, and
his first melodies never returned to him.”
The beginning of Pushkin’s transition from romanticism to
realism may be discerned as early as 1824 in the exquisite dra­
matic narrative poem, The Gypsies, in which both strains are
curiously mingled. The subject has romantic overtones: the
sophisticated hero Alcko deserts civilization for life among the
gypsies. Later, enraged bv his sweetheart’s betrayal of him, he
kills both her and her lover. As punishment these children of
nature, who believe that one cannot say to a young girl’s heart:
“Love only one, you must not change,” oblige the murderer to
leave them. It is possible that some thirty years later Leo Tolstov
had Alcko and the theme of The Gypsies very much in mind
when he wrote his novel The Cossacks, in which he poses a
somewhat similar conflict between the unreflecting natural life
of the Cossacks and the conventional worldly existence of his
hero Olenin.
In The Gypsies an effective concentration on descriptive de-
26 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

tails of setting and action in order to achieve verisimilitude and

convey atmosphere strikes an entirely new realistic note in Rus­
sian literature. Some notion of these effects may be obtained
from a literal, unrhymed rendering of a few of the opening lines,
however much violence it may do to the poetic beauty of the
original:
The gypsies in a noisy crowd
Wander over Bessarabia.
Today they spend the night
In tattered tents by a river bank.
Like freedom their camp is joyous,
And they sleep peacefully under the sky.
Between the cart wheels,
Half-covered by rugs,
A fire burns; a family round it
Prepares supper; in the open field
Horses graze; before a tent
A tame bear lies untied.
All is lively in the steppe:
Peaceful family cares,
Preparation for the morrow’s short joumev,
The singing of women, shouts of children.
And the sounds of a portable anvil.

There is much more in this vein, all of which led Belinsky to

date the beginning of Russian realism with this opening passage
of The Gypsies.
Aleko is hardly a typical Byronic figure with the usual ro­
mantic trappings. This fact is made amply clear in the famous
passage at the end of the poem where the old father of the slain
girl, speaking for all the gypsies, explains to Aleko: “You for
yourself desire freedom.” and he bids him leave them in peace.
The individual will is defeated by the will of the communin’.
Pushkin’s resolution of the tragedy is classical in intention—
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 27
Nemesis presides over the destiny of man. Not the vengeance of
the gypsies overtakes Aleko, but a kind of tragic poetic justice.
It is difficult to accept the judgment of so acute a critic as
Mirsky that The Gypsies is “the most temptingly universal
imaginative work in the Russian language.” Various writers have
discovered in it a profound philosophical meaning. Dostoevskv,
for example, in his speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monu­
ment in Moscow in 1880, acclaimed Aleko as the primordial type
of the unhappy Russian wanderer who must learn—as Aleko did
from the humility of the gypsies—to humble his pride and thus
achieve his freedom. Only when the intelligentsia learns this les­
son, Dostoevsky concluded, will it be able to lead the people in
fulfilling its manifest destiny of reconciling the proud and dis­
cordant Western world to the Russian universal message of
humility.
Pushkin’s classical realism eschewed overt philosophizing. The
only major Russian author who resembled him in this respect
was Chekhov, a fact recognized by Doctor Zhivago manv years
later. For Pasternak’s hero prefers the modest reticence of Push­
kin and Chekhov who, unlike Dostoevskv or Tolstov, thought
it pretentious and presumptuous to indulge in speculation on the
ultimate purpose of mankind. To all those who attempt to dis­
cover a deep or hidden meaning in his writings, Pushkin would
characteristically answer, as he in fact did in the case of Zhukov-
skv: “You ask what is the purpose of The Gypsies? What should
it be? The purpose of poetry is poetry. . . .”
Pushkin had hardlv finished The Gypsies when he took an­
other step in the direction of realism. He had discovered Shake­
speare, and with that innovating boldness which was a distinc­
tive trait of his genius, he decided to write a historical tragedv
that would end the long neoclassical tradition of Racine in the
Russian theater and, hopefully, start a new trend in native drama.
“Verisimilitude of situations and truth of dialogue—here is the
28 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

real rule of tragedy,” he wrote his friend Nikolai Raevsky in

1825. “(I haven’t read Calderon or Vega), but what a man is this
Shakespeare! I can’t get over it. How small Bvron rhe tragedian
looks in comparison with him!”
The play, of course, is Boris Godunov, and though it has fail­
ings as a historical tragedy5*7 in blank verse, Shakespeare’s full-
blooded realism is reflected in the best of rhe characterizations,
in the mob scenes where rhe dialogue so naturally suits the lowly
speakers, and especially in rhe comic scene of rhe two miscreant
monks in the inn ar the Lithuanian border.
At that time Boris Godunov was a unique Russian effort to re­
create the historical past in drama. In rhe same realisric pursuit,
but now with a difference, Pushkin attempted to modernize
Shakespeare. Impishly7 wondering what would have happened in
The Rape of Lucrece if the lovely victim had only thought of
slapping Tarquin’s face at the appropriate moment, Pushkin
provided an answer, in a contemporary7 setting, in his verse tale
Count Nulin. The gay7 count mistakes the coyness of his charm­
ing hostess as an invitation to something more intimate. But
when he attempts to pursue this idea rhe resounding slap in the
face she gives him forces rhe count inro a humiliating retreat. In
short, while he was realistically7 treating a historical theme in
Boris Godunov, Pushkin revealed his ability, in the delightfully
narrated Count Nulin, to depict a slice of modern Russian life
with convincing realism.

5
This natural movement in Pushkin’s arrisric development from
neoclassical fugirive poetry, verse epistles, and Anacreontic
lyrics of his novitiate, and romantic “Southern Verse Talcs” of
his youth, to concentration on literature of realism at the outset
of maturity found its first major expression in his great master-
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 29

piece, Eugene Onegin. He announced the beginning of this long

narrative poem of over five thousand lines in a letter to Vyazem­
sky on May 9, 1823: “I’m not writing a novel, but a novel in
verse—a devil of a difference—in the manner of Don Juan." But
long before Eugene Onegin was finished eight years later,
Byron’s initial influence had vanished in the slow, forward prog­
ress of perhaps the most original work Pushkin ever wrote, and
one that endeavored to present a comprehensive and realistic
picture of one whole segment of contemporary Russian life.
Pushkin did not share the confusion of that estimable Mon­
sieur Jourdain—he knew that he was writing, if not speaking,
poetry in Eugene Onegin. Yet he liked to regard this long poem
as a novel and actually divided it into chapters instead of cantos.
And if one cares to accept Pushkin’s odd but meaningful descrip­
tion of Eugene Onegin, containing much of his finest verse, one
may regard it as the first Russian realistic novel, for it possesses
the ordinary surface features of the genre: characters, a plot
with well-marked beginning, middle, and end, and a treatment
of the precise content of life in given circumstances.
A realistic embodiment of this Russian wav of life in either
poetrv or prose was a challenge, for nothing quite resembling it
existed in Western Europe, although the eighteenth-century
squirearchy of Fielding’s Tow Jones bears points of similarity.
Catherine the Great’s charter of 1785, defining the privileges and
responsibilities of the nobility, gave moral impetus to the growth
of a class of middle nobility or landed gentry. They spent most
of their time on estates in the country, except for a few winter
months of intense social activity in the capitals or large provin­
cial cities. With their special privileges and similar education and
tastes, this class over the years developed a spiritual and cultural
consciousness of its own as the significant core of Russian so­
ciety. Pushkin belonged to this class, and in Eugene Onegin he
was the first to present its contemporary image and inner life. To
30 INTRODUCTION' TO RUSSIAN REALISM

estimate the uniqueness of his achievement, one would have to

be aware of prior efforts which amount to so many sketches and
crude copies rather than the imaginative re-creation of original
art. With his realistic depiction of people, manners, and morals,
Pushkin at once rendered laughably obsolete those prodigies of
vice and paragons of virtue who had been the main staple of Rus­
sian readers of neoclassical and romantic poetry and prose.
Eugene Onegin is a perfect expression of the landed gentry of
Pushkin’s time.
Though the polished world-weary hero is a product of the
society to which he belongs, it would be a mistake to regard
Onegin as a simple type. His is a complex nature which changes
and matures as does that of Pierre Bezukhov or Prince Andrew
over the years of the action of War and Peace. Onegin’s early
Bvronic posing soon fades and the deeper traits of a type com­
mon enough in the society of the time begin to emerge. In reality
he is alienated from his class, not because he rejects its values,
although there is something of this in him, but because a lack of
belief in himself prevents him from playing the part of a leader
which inwardly he aspired to be. His cynical behavior is a prod­
uct of this frustration which also explains his sudden retreat to
the simple life of the country, his rejection there of Tatyana’s
passionate love, and his callous killing of Lensky in a duel.
Onegin is the first convincing full-length characterization
in Russian literature. Pushkin, however, docs not employ fine-
spun analysis to bring out the complexities of his nature or to
explain the motivation of his feelings, a technique which he must
have observed in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and Richardson’s
novels. Though the limitations of a novel in verse may have ren­
dered such an approach pecularily difficult, it was also alien to
Pushkin’s classical temperament and the objectivity and restraint
which were touchstones of his art. The indirect realistic method
he used was very much his own. The total image of Onegin
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 31

emerges from an artistically contrived mosaic of impressions—

the furnishings of his room, his toilet articles, the books in his
study with special passages marked by the imprint of his finger­
nail, his actions and statements as they affected others, and their
reactions to him. Later Turgenev learned much from this
method.
The importance of Onegin as a type for the future of Russian
literature can hardly be overestimated. There is perhaps an ele­
ment of distortion in the familiar claim of critics that he inspired
a whole galaxy of so-called superfluous heroes in fiction, for the
type was indigenous in Russian life, although the image altered
with changing social conditions. But it is safe to say that, without
Onegin, the introduction of the type might have been delayed
for years, and the portrayals might well have lacked something
in convincingness without the perfectly realized model provided
by Pushkin.
The realism of Tatyana’s portrait loses nothing in verisimili­
tude because Pushkin appears to idealize her, for like many
romantic country girls of the landed gentry she herself idealizes
life, often mistaking its sober prose for sheer poetry. Though she
lives entirely in her own feelings, thoughts, and experiences,
Tatyana possesses a strong individuality and a mind of her own.
When Onegin appears in her rural solitude she falls ardently in
love, for she sees in him her ideal hero, an image drawn from her
reading of English and French romances. The cynical Onegin is
momentarily touched by Tatyana’s wonderful letter to him, but
he fails to perceive in this anguished poetic outpouring of a
young girl’s heart the innate integrity of her nature and her in­
finite capacity for self-sacrifice.
The seemingly swift transformation of the shy, dreamy, pro­
vincial Tatyana into a majestic queen of Petersburg high society
after her mother marries her off to the fat general has often been
criticized as unfaithful to the reality of things. However, if one
32 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

is attentive to the deeper spiritual and moral qualities of Tatyana,

revealed particularly at the time of Onegin’s rejection of her
love, then the change is no less acceptable and comprehensible
than that of Tolstoy’s Natasha in War and Peace when she mar­
ries Pierre Bezukhov shortly after the tragic denouement of
her love for Prince Andrew.
Similarly Pushkin has been blamed for contriving an unreal
ending when he has Tatyana, in turn, reject Onegin, although
she frankly admits her continued love for him, after he returns
from his wanderings and discovers in this beautiful, matured so­
ciety leader his ideal woman. However, Tatyana’s declaration to
Onegin on this occasion: “I have been given to another and I’ll
be true to him forever,” is entirely in keeping with the logic of
her developing personality. Back in the country she would have
sacrificed anything she held dear because of her love for Onegin,
like that other strong-willed woman Anna Karenina who did
sacrifice everything because of her love for Vronsky. But Anna
found out only too late that her idol had feet of clay and was
unequal to her great love. A tragic conclusion was inevitable.
Tatyana discovered this fact about Onegin before it was too
late. If she could believe that he would return a love as profound
and enduring as she was capable of offering, she might well have
broken with society and its conventions. But she had learned
much about Onegin’s weaknesses, distrusted the genuineness of
his motives now, and had become convinced of his incapacity to
respond to her love in equal measure. And though she weeps
nostalgically over his passionate love letters, over her former
dreams and hopes, she now knows that he could never be the
hero of her romance.
The relations of Onegin and Tatyana fed the imaginations of
future Russian novelists in their creation of unhappy pairs of
weak-willed heroes and strong-willed heroines. These charming
women have served to convince readers that the female was the
better half of the Russian race.
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 33

Though Belinsky’s much-quoted declaration that Eugene

Onegin is an encyclopedia of Russian life is quite preposterous,
there can be no question that Pushkin’s depiction of the country
existence of the middle gentry and the city life of its more so­
cially prominent members is realistically perfect and extraordi­
narily effective. In these respects he went far beyond the small
beginnings in The Gypsies and Count Nulin, for he now drew
heavily upon village life on his own estate at Milhailovskoe and
on his varied experiences in Moscow and Petersburg salon so­
ciety. One is fascinated not only by his uncanny selection of
precise detail, but also by his amazing re-creation of the moral,
emotional, and spiritual pattern, the moods and feelings, and the
inner rhythm of this order of society.
One catches the beat of this inner rhythm, especially as it ap­
plies to the glittering worldly youth of Onegin’s set, in the first
stanza of the poem in which the hero contemplates the ap­
proaching death of his uncle whose country estate he will in-
herit:
“My uncle’s life was always upright
And now that he has fallen ill
In earnest he makes one respect him:
He is a pattern for us still.
One really could not ask for more—
But heavens, what a fearful bore
To play the sick-nurse day and night
And never stir beyond his sight!
What petty, mean dissimulation
To entertain a man half dead,
To poke his pillows up in bed,
And carry in some vile potation,
While all the time one’s thinking, ‘Why
The devil take so long to die?’ ”*

• Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translated into English by

Dorothy Prall Radin and George Z. Patrick (Berkeley: University of Cali­
fornia Press, 1937), p. Î.
34 I N T H O D U CT 1 O N TO R USS 1 A N REALISM

Pushkin swiftly carries his readers through the early upbring­

ing, education, passing love affairs, and social activities of this
gilded youth, but he strives, and nearly always successfully, to
combine the visual perception of things with their essential
atmosphere, adding depth to the total realism of the picture. For
example, Onegin visits the ballet theater and this is what he
sees:
The house is full, the boxes glitter,
The pit is like a seething cup,
The gallery7 claps with loud impatience,
The curtain rustles—and goes up.
There, half of air and all aglow,
Obedient to the magic bow,
Circled by nymphs in lovely bands,
Istomina, resplendent, stands.
Balanced on one toe, tremulous,
She slowly whirls the other round.
Then with a sudden leap and bound
Flies as if blown by Aeolus.
She winds, unwinds and, light as feather.
In mid-air beats her feet together.
*

With similar evocative power Pushkin portrays the simple

life of the landed gentry on their country estates: that of the
Larins—Tatyana’s parents and her sister; the neighboring estate
of Onegin which he had inherited from his uncle; and the
smaller property of the idealistic, romantic poet Lensky whose
quarrel with his friend Onegin ended in the fatal duel. Here
nature adds its beauty and burden to daily living, and no Russian
poet ever described it more realistically and sympathetically
than Pushkin, especially when it is tricked out in winter’s snowy
splendor. The old-fashioned cultural interests of the Larins; the
small talk of country folk when neighbors gather; their simple
’ Ibid., p. 12.
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 35

amusements such as the name-day party at the Larins where the

condescending Onegin deliberately provokes Lensky by his ex­
cessive attention to the poet’s betrothed, Olga, Tatyana’s sister;
the folk superstitions of provincial damsels and the enchanting
wintry beauty and eerie terror of Tatyana’s symbolic dream; her
old peasant nurse’s captivating account of how she was given in
marriage at the age of thirteen; the duel scene with its exquisite
lyric ending so strangely prophetic of Pushkin’s own death in a
duel—these and many similar scenes constitute an altogether con­
vincing picture of a way of life hitherto unexampled in Russian
literature. In truth, this impressive portrayal of the middle
gentry became the source that fed the mainstream of Russian
nineteenth-century realistic fiction.

That Russia’s greatest poet should have eventually turned to

prose does not seem so startling in the light of Pushkin’s growing
preoccupation with artistic problems of realism. To be sure,
other factors were involved. It has been pointed out that by the
end of the reign of Alexander I the popularity of poetry began
to fade, and as the 183O’s approached the public interest in
Walter Scott and the historical novel intensified. Then, too,
Pushkin’s increasing financial worries, connected with his mar­
riage, compelled him to turn to prose for which there was a
growing demand. When he began his career poetry was still re­
garded in Russia as the leisure-time avocation of gentlemen who
did not design to exploit their talent for money. Though Pushkin
was virtually the first to make literature a profession in Russia,
it was always difficult for him to overcome the feeling that
writing poetry for gain was a violation of the nobleman’s code.
Necessity, however, forced him to compromise with his convic­
tion, and he found a way out, equivocal though it may seem, that
36 INTRODUCTION TO II U S S I A N REALISM

satisfied both his need and his pride. Once, in answering a

pointed question of his brother, he declared: “I sing as the baker
bakes, as the tailor sews ... as the physician kills—for money,
money, money. In my nakedness such is my cynicism.” But more
cogentlvr he told Vyazemsky: “I write for myself and print for
money....” That is, he went on to explain, it was all right for an
author to sell his manuscripts, but he must never sell his inspira­
tion. And he sincerely lived up to this credo, for he wrote a
number of things which he realized would never see the light of
day because of the rigorous censorship. Even his masterpiece,
Eugene Onegin, he began in the firm conviction that it could not
be printed.
At the outset Pushkin expressed a scorn for prose. “How
sorry are those poets who begin to write prose,” he lamented to
a friend. “I confess, if I were not obliged by circumstances, I
would not dip my pen in ink for prose.” During the last ten years
of his life, however, he dipped his pen deep and often for prose
and brought to the practice of it the same innovating power and
artistic demands everywhere apparent in his poetry.
A combination of family pride on the defensive and the ex­
ample of Walter Scott may well have prompted Pushkin’s first
effort in prose fiction—an unfinished historical novel about his
black great-grandfather, The Negro of Peter the Great ( 1827-
28). In the manner of Scott, Pushkin intended to provide a care­
ful historical reconstruction of Peter’s reign which would focus
on the opposition of the old nobility to the Europeanized re­
forms of the tsar. In this respect, as well as in creating a prose
style suited to the demands of historical fiction, he seemed to
be on the wav to success. The reticent Scott would have been
somewhat shocked over the freedom Pushkin allowed himself in
the realistic account of his ancestor’s amorous adventures. But
after a most promising beginning of seven chapters, Pushkin
abandoned the work because, it is said, of his failure to find a
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 37

solution to a radical change in the plot which he felt necessary.

In the third chapter of Eugene Onegin, in one of the many
half-serious, half-joking digressions which constitute one of the
poem’s chief charms, Pushkin anticipates the time when he’ll
“dwindle into peaceful prose” and write “a novel in the old
style” about the doings of a Russian family. And among the
beginnings, sketches, and outlines of some twenty short stories
and novels which he wrote down in his copybooks between
1829-36, there are several fragments that may represent attempts
to fulfill this design of a family novel. One, for example, is “A
Novel in Letters,” which might have been inspired by the episto­
lary fiction of Richardson or Rousseau. Another, “A Russian
Pelham,” might have been suggested by Bulwer-Lytton’s novel,
although the few sample pages and rough plan bear little resem­
blance to the contents and style of the English Pelham. Yet these
numerous fragments are evidence of Pushkin’s keen interest in
trying his hand at fiction during this period, and his failure to
complete any of them perhaps indicates frustration in creating a
style and treatment that would satisfy his artistic standards in
writing a family novel of manners.
As a matter of fact, Pushkin’s first completed effort in prose
fiction, Tales of Belkin (1830), was a conscious experiment in
artistic form and narrative approach at a time when both seemed
inconsequential to Russian writers of fiction. His intention was
to offer models of how a particular type of story ought to be
told. The five tales in the collection (The Shot, The Snowstorm,
The Stationmaster, The Undertaker, and The Lady-Rustic),
which have no connection with each other, are held together by
the imaginary personality of the narrator, Belkin, a brief sketch
of whose life is given in the preface to the collection. One reason
for this mystification may have been a desire to create an illusion
of reality, for in the preface each tale is represented as a true
storv told to Belkin by a real person, a device which Pushkin
38 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

may have learned from Scott’s Tales of My Landlord. Pushkin

may also have wished to disguise his authorship—the collection
appeared without his name—perhaps because of his uncertainty
about critical reaction to a work so experimental in nature.
His concern was justified, for.contemporary critics were
baffled by a narrative method entirely unlike anything they were
accustomed to, one conscientiously pruned of all the conven­
tional ornaments of fiction writing. The stories arc told in an
extremely simple, direct style, with a paucity of description,
dialogue, and authorial reflection or analysis. They are largely
action stories, and in this type, Pushkin believed, nothing should
be allowed to get between the reader and the forward progress
of the action.
The Tales of Belkin arc sometimes described, in the German
sense, as novellas, and in several stories, especially in The Snow­
storm, they contain the surprise ending that Goethe believed
was essential in this genre. More precisely they are anecdotal
short stories which Pushkin may well have heard from his friend
Delvig, and he tells them with rare narrative skill and conscious
restraint.
Apart from innovation in form, Pushkin also strikes a new
note in his occasional emphasis on social tensions, as in the clash
between the declassed officer and his aristocratic opponent in
The Shot, and the seduction of the poor stationmaster’s daugh­
ter by the wealthy hussar in The Stationmaster. But compassion
for the lowly or the underdog does not lead to a distortion of
reality. The declassed officer is not triumphant in the end, and
the seduced girl, who would have been represented as the ruined
victim of moral depravity by any contemporary treating the
theme, happily marries her seducer at the conclusion of the
storv. Pushkin always perceives the irony of life as a possible
solvent of its inequities. And though his and the reader’s sympa­
thies arc clearly for the grief-stricken father of the seduced girl,
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 39

Pushkin docs not humiliate him with pity, a fact that led
Dostoevsky to value this tale higher than Gogol’s famous story,
The Overcoat, which in its concentration on the sad fate of a
humble person may owe something to The Stationmaster.
The Tales of Belkin waited a long time before winning gen­
eral recognition from critics, and one suspects that it was an un­
discriminating acceptance connected with Pushkin’s lofty posi­
tion by then in Russian letters. However, a judge as perceptive as
Tolstoy expressed his delight over these tales as perfect models
of the art of narration. The work is the first piece of Russian
fiction of enduring artistic value.
The social tensions which Pushkin had barely touched upon
in The Tales of Belkin assumed a more central position in his
next two works of fiction, The History of the Village of
Goryukhino (1830) and Dubrovsky ( 1832). Perhaps the deeper,
darker realism of his treatment of the subject explains why he
never completed either novel, for they could hardly have been
published during the “iron reign” of Nicholas I. It is most re­
grettable for both gave every promise of becoming outstanding
novels on quite different themes.
It occurred to Pushkin to continue the development of Belkin,
the fictitious narrator of the Tales, and in The History of the
Village of Goryukhino he turns him, even in that incomplete
portrayal, into a memorable character—a shy, lovable, wryly
humorous individual with timid ambitions to be an author. With
the aid of old records he has discovered, he sets out to write the
history of Goryukhino, the village in which his estate is situated.
Actually this is an amusing parody of The History of the Rus­
sian People by Pushkin’s literary enemy Nikolai Polevoi, and at
the same time an effective satire on the whole structure of serf­
dom. Behind Belkin’s distorted historical account of the village
and its inhabitants, reflecting the pomposity of pseudo-scholar­
ship in his comic legalistic reverence for forms and titles, looms
40 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

the somber reality of the ruination of the peasants because of the

steward’s calculated repressions. In his naive concentration on
historical cause and effect, Belkin never perceives the harsh un-
changcability of peasant life or the one peculiarity of his village,
namely, that it has no history.
In Dubrovsky the tensions growing out of a different social
situation are treated. Troekurov, a swaggering, powerful, and
wealthy member of the landed gentry in the reign of Catherine
the Great, persecutes and finally brings about the death of his
neighbor Dubrovsky, who possesses fewer worldly goods but
dares to show his independence. Pushkin finished only about
half of this novel which is one of his best examples of sheer
storytelling ability. There is perhaps more Scott-like romance
than realism in the melodramatic action of a tale that involves
the vow of young Dubrovsky to avenge his father’s death; his
leading a robber band to steal from the rich and help the poor;
his secret love for his intended victim’s daughter and his disguise
as a French tutor to gain access to her; his beloved’s forced mar­
riage to Vereisky, another powerful but polished nobleman, and
young Dubrovsky’s attempt to foil it; and the attack on the rob­
ber band with which the fragment ends. But the plausibility of
these romantic adventures is secured by a realistically conceived
picture of the social milieu in which they take place—expansive
daily life on huge landed estates, the absolute power of their
owners over law courts and all who arc socially inferior, and the
stark horror of the murder of the drunken officer of the law in
Dubrovsky’s flaming manor house. Though the hero, young
Dubrovsky, is the pure stuff of old-fashioned romance, the
characterizations of Troekurov and the sinister Vereisky arc
among Pushkin’s best and arc harbingers of the great realistic
portraits to come in Russian fiction.
Pushkin’s zeal for experimentation in prose as well as in
poetry, an important service in this early stage of Russian litcra-
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 41

ture, continued during the last few years of his life when he
wrote more prose than verse. Another such experiment, the long
short storv. The Queen of Spades (1834), was his most popular
contribution to fiction during his lifetime. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
tales of the supernatural may well have suggested the plot-line
of The Queen of Spades, where the ghost of the old countess
conveys to Herman the mysterious secret that will enable him to
win at cards, but there is nothing of the German’s romanticism
in Pushkin’s narrative manner. A carefully7 designed pattern of
realistic effects compels a suspension of disbelief in the central
supernatural device, and the swiftly moving action is heightened
by a taut, terse, unadorned prose that subtly contrives an
atmosphere of utter credibility. Though Pushkin had read
Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Herman is hardly a Julien
Sorel. However, the Napoleonic type, the man with an over­
weening thirst for personal success, had already begun to
make its way into Russian literature, and Herman’s cold,
insatiable ambition is described as Napoleonic. But the retribu­
tion of madness that overtakes him in the end is the Pushkinian
tragic fate that presides over the destinies of many of his heroes.
Nothing remotely resembling The Queen of Spades had ap­
peared in Russian literature before Pushkin, and though its total
artistic impact, more one of manner than of substance, was
never successfully duplicated, the story greatly impressed and
obviously influenced such writers as Gogol in The Portrait and
Dostoevsky in The Gambler.
Once again the works of Walter Scott were in Pushkin’s
mind, especially The Heart of Midlothian, in his final effort at
fiction—the historical novel The Captain's Daughter (1834)—a
kind of by-product of his scholarly study of an event during the
reign of Catherine the Great, The History of the Pugachev Re­
bellion (1834). Like everything he wrote, however, this novel
also bears the stamp of Pushkin’s originality. It is shorter and
42 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

more compact than Scott’s novels, and it is centered as much on

the history of two families, the Grinevs and the Mironovs, as on
the re-creation of the historical past. Though Pushkin is exact
about historical details and local color, with his usual sense of
measure he does not overwhelm the reader with an elaborate
superstructure of antiquarian research. His interest is concen­
trated more on the manners and morals of people than on the
dress and loose ornament of history'. Perhaps this is why’ he suc­
ceeds so brilliantly' in such portray'als as the comically' henpecked
Captain Mironov, commander of the remote Belogorsk fortress,
who, in nightcap and dressing gown, drills his few soldiers with­
out ever being able to teach them the difference between the left
and right foot, and his strong-willed wife who with dignity and
courage shares her husband’s death at the hands of the rebels.
And hardly less striking are the impetuous young Grinev and his
stern father, who values a soldier’s duty' to his military’ oath
above everything in life. Apparently' Pushkin did not favor the
institution of serfdom and the few individualized portraits of
serfs in his writings reveal a deep and sympathetic understanding
of them. One of the most remarkable of such creations is the old
servant of the Grinevs, Savelich, whose integrity' and cross-
grained devotion to his masters illuminate a nature that is as at­
tractively' simple as it is morally' beautiful. Pushkin is not so ef­
fective with the rebel leader Pugachev, no doubt because of the
rigorous censorship, but even this necessarily' restrained charac­
terization suggests what Pushkin might have done with it if he
had had an entirely free hand.
Pushkin has been criticized in The Captain's Daughter for al­
lowing the interest in events to predominate over the interest in
details of feeling. This is essentially true, particularly in young
Grinev’s love for Captain Mironov’s daughter which hardly rises
above the banality of Scott’s treatment of affairs of the heart.
But this criticism could also be applied, with only few exceptions,
 Pushkin—The Poet as Novelist 43

to the whole development of fiction in the West and in Russia

from Cervantes to Pushkin. Of course, the modern critical
understanding of realism was still lacking and its practice in fic­
tion remained confused with romanticism with which, histori­
cally, it was related. In the chronicling of action, events were an
end rather than a means in determining why characters acted or
felt as they did. The analysis of feelings by Richardson and
Rousseau and their imitators was too dominated by the cult of
sensibility to become an effective instrument for probing the
multifaceted aspects of human behavior.
In this respect it cannot be said that Pushkin contributed any­
thing startlingly new to the novel. But in other ways—plot-mak­
ing, situations, narrative methods, characterization, and prose
style—he tremendously advanced the whole conception of Rus­
sian realism. That is, the life of the landed gentry which he de­
scribed seemed to readers to be life as it is, free from the bookish
stereotyped conventions and artificialities of the efforts of his
native predecessors and contemporaries. And this achievement,
as well as the finest characters he created, significantly influ­
enced the subsequent development of Russian realism. Just as
surely as Pushkin changed the whole context of Russian poetry,
he also changed the context of Russian fictional prose. He ini­
tiated what is sometimes described in literary history as the
“Classical School of Russian Realism.” Indeed, if he had lived
longer than his brief thirty-eight years, he might well have writ­
ten the first great Russian realistic novel in prose, as, in Eugene
Onegin, he did write the first great Russian realistic novel in
verse.
II • GOGOL

Live or Dead Souls

If the essence of Gogol’s creative art is a phenomenon of lan­
guage, as some critics affirm, then a study of form and structure
might be the key to an understanding of his total accomplish­
ment. In this case the Aristotelian method of inductive classifica­
tion of available material might seem to he the desirable ap­
proach. The trouble here is not with Aristotle’s method, but
with the modern classifier’s frequent failure to realize that the
development of literature has been subject to all the winds of
change and that it may be a mistake to attempt to reduce its
variables and imponderables to static patterns of illumination, to
codify, so to speak, the uncodifiablc, to impose order where no
natural order can possibly exist.
With equal justification one could assert that the essence of
Gogol’s creative art is really a phenomenon of his developing
personality. While this would have the enthusiastic support of
psychoanalytically minded literary critics, it would evoke the
wrath of Aristotelian methodologists and also that of formalists
who deplore biographism in their emphasis on the certainties of
verbal structure and the precise devices of art.
To be sure, the strange aspects of Gogol’s realism and the
44
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 45

stranger facts of his life have served to create a climate of irre­

sponsibility in the study of his fiction, a sort of open season in
which more critical hunters have been slain than Gogolian prey.
Leading Russian sociological critics of the nineteenth century—
that is really what Belinsky and his followers Chernyshevsky and
Dobrolyubov were—thought they had the matter well in hand in
acclaiming Gogol as a novelist of social significance, concerned
with exposing and satirizing the evils of Russian life. Though
this position assumes that Gogol had in him more of the egalitar­
ian spirit than he actually possessed and an antagonism to estab­
lished authority quite alien to his conservative views, this
interpretation has pretty much dominated the textbook image of
Gogol and his works ever since.
At the turn of the century, Symbolist writers and critics, >
such as Bely, Bryusov, and Rozanov, attempted without much
success to destroy7 this image by insisting on the absurdity of
the contention that Gogol was interested in social reform and
that The Government Inspector, Dead Souls, and The Overcoat
were faithful transcripts of Russian life in the 183O’s and 1840’s.
Instead they offered ingenious symbolic explanations, by way of
throwing a dark light, so to speak, on the meaning of Gogol’s art.
Chichikov’s traveling box was really his wife and Akakv Akakie­
vich’s new overcoat his mistress. And Bely saw in the emphasis^
on roundness of things and people the central symbol of Dead
Souls, by virtue of which the novel became a whirling wheel
with the rotund Chichikov as its hub, a kind of apex of the cen­
tripetal forces drawing all the action of the story to itself.
Perhaps somewhat inspired by the dissent of the talented Sym­
bolists to the Belinsky-Chernyshevsky interpretation, a nearly
contemporary group of academic pundits set out to explain the
complexities of Gogol’s art and creative personality7 in terms of
the ambivalence of his nature. Kotly7arevsky7 saw the struggle as
one between Gogol’s romantic orientation and his desire to pro-
 46 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

ducc realistic fiction, as though these creative instincts were

necessarily incompatible. For Ovsyanikovo-Kulikovskv, the
abiding contradiction was rooted in the disparity between
Gogol’s soaring artistic genius and a weak intellect. Then Gip­
pius argued that the ambivalence was an outgrowth of Gogol’s
obsessive desire to escape from the influence of his rather com­
monplace Ukrainian social milieu while at the same time being
irresistibly attracted to it.
Soviet critics, on the other hand, with their admiration of
and Chernyshevsky as precursors of socialist realism,
have accepted their views on Gogol after considerable Marxian
face-lifting of them. In the process, of course, there has been
some critical and moral shuffling. Not all of Gogol’s writings,
and certainly not the events of his life, exemplify critical realism,
that invented preview of socialist realism, which prerevolution­
ary authors accepted into the fold of Soviet respectability are
supposed to have practiced. Although it might appear to be
about as difficult to find lurking Communist teachings in Dead
y-Souls as in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Soviet critics
have a facile way of subjecting great writers of the past to a kind
•. of Marxian rehabilitation. Thus we sec the beginning of this
transformation in Gogol’s case in the early 1929 statement about
him in the official Literary Encyclopedia: “However, despite the
fact that Gogol was subjectively a representative and defender
of reactionary interests of the landed nobility, objectively, in
his artistic achievements,7hc served the business of the revolution?
arousing among the masses a critical relation to their surrounding
reality.” e
Since then Soviet appreciation of Gogol has been on an
ascending scale, displaying more and more a tendency to mini­
mize or even to disregard his ideological failings. Fine editions of
his works and some brilliant Soviet scholarship on his life and
writings have been published. This favorable interest reached
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 47
new heights in the 1952 national commemoration of the hun­
dredth anniversary of Gogol’s death. At a large meeting in Mos­
cow, one of the principal speakers declared that Gogol, after
Pushkin, consolidated the glorious tradition of defending the
common man, and that he was “indissolubly linked with all that
is best and most progressive in mankind.”
Nothing could represent a more striking contrast to this
other-directed Soviet criticism of Gogol than the views of the
few modern Western critics who have chosen to write about
him at length. The aggressive, mocking antirationalism that oc­
casionally enlivens Gogol’s writings has a modernistic corre­
spondence that intrigues some of our critics. The Government
Inspector has been made to anticipate the current drama of the
absurd, and novelists devoted to what they regard as the night­
mare life of irreality today find in Dead Souls a familiar terrain
of absorbing symbols and meaningful nonsense.
Some such reaction appears to dominate Vladimir Nabokov’s
book on Gogol,
* a work of charm and originality diluted with
more than a spoonful of Gogolian extravagance for which the
author seems to have considerable affinity. For Nabokov, Gogol
was anything but a humorist, he was completely uninterested in
social reforms, and the Russia he wrote about was an entirely
invented one, peopled by men and women who had no sensible
existence except in their creator’s imagination. In short, he as­
serts, Gogol was not at all concerned with real life. He “never
drew portraits—he used looking glasses and as a writer lived in
his own looking-glass world.”
The Govermnent Inspector, Nabokov declares, is not a
comedy at all; it “is poetry in action, and by poetry I mean the
mysteries of the irrational as perceived through rational words.”
This seems so to Nabokov because, as he says, Gogol’s genius
• Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions
Books, 1944).
48 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN RE A L I S M

“deals not in the intrinsic qualities of computable chemical mat­

ter .. . but in the mimetic capacities of the physical phenomena
produced by almost intangible particles of re-created life.”
In the light of that beginning, we are not surprised when
Nabokov next remarks that it would be ludicrous to search for
an authentic Russian background in Dead Souls, just as it would
be to form a conception of Denmark from Hamlet, which of
course ignores the fact that Gogol was writing about existence in
Russia during his own lifetime and Shakespeare about life in a
foreign country lived long before the Elizabethan period. As for
Chichikov, he is, in Nabokov’s words, an “unpaid representative
of the Devil, a traveling salesman from Hades,” and the other
characters of the novel arc described as partaking of the same
irreality. Further, the flavor of Nabokov’s fascinating discussion
of The Overcoat may be conveyed by his characterization of it
as “a grotesque and grim nightmare making black holes in the
dim pattern of life.”
These few generalizations and quotations summarize briefly,
and therefore perhaps unfairly, Nabokov’s negative reaction to
all who regard Gogol as a realist and his writings as a conscious
artistic effort to portray more or less faithfully broad aspects of
the Russian life of his time. Nabokov’s positive analysis of
Gogol’s art is something else again and it is executed with pene­
trating insights that are sometimes as confusing as they are illum­
inating. In general, he believes that when Gogol wrote under
the influence of literary traditions and attempted to treat rational
ideas in a logical manner, his talent vanished. However, when he
was concerned with his own private world of the absurd, which
for Nabokov is filled with extraordinary and universal symbolic
implications, then Gogol became Russia’s greatest literary
master.
This brief rechauffe of a century of critical opinions about
Gogol, a writer often regarded as the initiator of the great stream
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 49
of Russian realistic fiction, obviously creates more problems than
it solves. It reminds one of the virtue of T. S. Eliot’s observation
on literary history that the whole body of tradition—the past no
less than the present—is constantly being modified by fresh de­
velopments. In any event, the puzzling variety of opinion on the
nature or even the very existence of realism in Gogol’s art sug­
gests the application of an old principle, namely, that an his­
torical perspective is perhaps an essential prerequisite of sound
judgment.

2
Gogol’s literary career spans about twenty years, from 1830 %
to 1850 (he died in 1852), although what writing he actually
did was probably confined to a much shorter period. In social
and political, as well as literary, terms these two decades were of /'•w’" "
considerable importance in Russian history, for they mark the r '
active beginning of that intellectual ferment which seethed and
bubbled throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century \
and finally boiled over in the revolutionary events of 1917. X-/
Though we like to think of Gogol’s masterpieces as peculiarly"
timeless, he himself was very definitely" a product of his times 1 ’
and so yvas the Russia that appears in his yvritings.
The fear of popular opposition yvhich Nicholas I experienced *
as a consequence of the Decembrist Revolt at the beginning of
his reign was greatly intensified by the revolutionary activity
that syvept Western Europe betyveen 1830 and 1848. With little
cause morbid fear convinced him that revolution yvas at Russia’s
threshold, and it yvas fear rather than political self-aggrandize­
ment that led him to take the military steps yvhich earned him
the title of “Gendarme of Europe.” Fear again prompted such
repressive measures as a perfected system of police spying, un­
compromising censorship, and the demand for absolute accept- -/
 5o INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

ance of “orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism,” the phrase

that defined his limited conception of Russian patriotism.
Despite these stern measures, the severity of which was little
mitigated by the tsar’s few moderate reforms, Russia continued
to change in the direction of progressive developments inherited
from the preceding reign of Alexander I. Trade expanded, and
with the growth of industry the country’s feudal-monarchical
structure began slowly to crumble, though this pattern of cause
and effect would still require many years to reach its climax.
Under such pressures one may observe the first stages in the
(alteration of the class structure—the economic decline of the
I* landowning gentry, despite additional privileges conferred upon
it by Nicholas I, and the corresponding increase in economic
power of the small but growing middle class. Then the mounting
I restiveness of the peasants, who during the reign of Nicholas I
perpetrated 587 outbreaks, many of which had to be put down
by the military, underscored once again the fact that serfdom
was still Russia’s greatest unsolved problem.
One has only to read the memoirs and correspondence of this
period to learn that the ugly7 picture of society in Gogol’s works
was not exactly7 drawn from a Russia that he had invented, as the
Symbolist critics would have us believe. Civil service, education,
I [and even the Church were overrun by7 a venal bureaucracy.
(•Politics, in the sense that it functioned in Western Europe,
simply did not exist in Russia. Turgenev, looking back at this
time, when he was a beginning writer, remarks in his literary
reminiscences that no one in the sixties could have any idea of
the persecution to which the printed word was subjected under
Nicholas I. There was no press, he writes, no public opinion,
no personal freedom. To quote him: “You looked around:
bribery was everywhere .. . the barracks dominated everything,
no courts of justice, rumors that the universities would be
' closed . . . trips to Europe becoming impossible, no good books
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 5i

could be ordered from abroad, a dark cloud hung over the whole
of the so-called department of learning and literature, and, to
top it all, denunciations were whispered and spread on all sides.”
The young Herzen, wandering through forsaken towns and
villages of provincial Russia during his first banishment from
Moscow in the late 183O’s, provides us with a factual picture of
parasitic gentry, rapacious merchants, and ignorant priests,
which suggests that the corrupt provincial life described by
Gogol in The Government Inspector and Dead Souls was an
understatement of the reality of things. In one letter Herzen
writes: “When will the Lord take pitv on these people, who are
as far from being humans as they are from being birds. It is really
terrible to see how trivialities, nonsense, gossip swallow the
lives of creatures who under different conditions might actually
have been men.”
It is necessary to identify this existence as an actuality and not
a dream-world in considering Gogol’s fiction from the point of
view of realism. At about the time Gogol was working on Dead
Souls, Herzen, in his Notes of a Young Man, tells of his reactions
to the provincial society of Vyatka: “At first I wrote gaily, then
I began to be depressed by mv own laughter. I choked from the
dust I raised and sought some human conciliation with the bot­
tomless void, the filth, and looked for an escape even in despair.”
Gogol too, when first contemplating the Russian scene, had be­
gun with laughter and then grew depressed. He said that when
he read the beginning of Dead Souls to Pushkin, he, too, laughed
uproariously, but as Gogol went on Pushkin grew gloomy and
exclaimed: “God, how sad is our Russia!”
However, Gogol’s Russia was not the Russia of Catherine the
Great. Progressive Western European intellectual thought
which had fed the catastrophic Decembrist Revolt of 1825 con- '
tinued its heady influence despite government prohibitions. As
always, reactionarism bred its opposite. Young people began to
 52 1 N T ROD U CT1O N TO RUSSIAN H E A LISM

i turn to intellectual pursuits of a frccthinking nature during the

last few years of the 183O’s when Gogol’s literary career was
I already under wav. Attracted by certain European political and
philosophical trends, students in Moscow University formed
themselver into two groups. One, nicknamed the “Frenchmen,”
of whom Herzen was a leader, was devoted to the utopian social­
ism of Saint-Simon. The other, called the “Germans,” to which
■ young Belinsky belonged, was concerned mainly with questions
of aesthetics and philosophy. In reality both groups espoused
with different emphasis the dominant trend of European culture
at that time—romanticism.
The secret police, which soon dispersed the “Frenchmen,”
somehow discounted the radical possibilities of German philos­
ophy. “In that period,” Belinsky recalls, “we felt through,
thought through, and lived through the entire intellectual life of
Europe, echoes of which were reaching us across the Baltic.”
Starting with the aesthetics of Schelling, the “German” group
next turned to the ethics of Fichte, coquetted with the categori­
cal imperatives of Kant, and final]v came to a resting point in
--/ the revolutionarv dialectics of Hegel, which, in the carlv forties,
I they combined with the revolutionarv materialism of Feuerbach.
On the basis of this fused formulation of Germanic thought,
the two foremost Russian intellectual leaders of the time, the
philosopher and creative writer Herzen, then an exile abroad,
and the literary critic Belinsky, joined forces in a program aimed
at molding social consciousness bv revealing objective rcalitv
which in belles lettres meant a faithful depiction of the harsh
abuses of the regime of Nicholas I, especially serfdom, and their
evil influence on national life. For good or ill, social significance
had at last become a primary touchstone of Russian literature,
which Belinsky and later thinkers and critics regarded as the cen­
ter of all intellectual activitv of consequence. In fact, creative
f literature had become the only form of public opinion in a police
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 53

state, as well as a force capable of attracting, from all levels of

society, like-minded and educated people who constituted a
distinct and easily recognizable class which was eventually des­
ignated as “the intelligentsia.” And it was Gogol, with his extra­
ordinary grasp of reality, whom Belinsky hailed as the first
writer in Russian literature to offer a devastating indictment of
the evils of official bureaucracy and the serf-owning gentry.

3
To the impressionistic critic it may seem that Gogol is telling
a pack of lies in his creative writing and—to paraphrase an
aphorism of D. H. Lawrence, used in another connection—out
of this pattern of lies his art weaves the truth. This would be to
mistake for lies what was a conscious device of exaggeration,
humorous or otherwise, which Gogol was as fond of as either
Balzac or Dickens. Like both these near-contemporaries, Gogol
may properly be described as a romantic realist whose liking for
fantasy never allowed him to forget the fundamental connec­
tion between the art of the novel and the real life of society.
Because of the literary time-lag in Russia, Gogol grew up at
the height of the romantic movement when his favorite reading
was the early poetry of Pushkin and the historical novels of
Walter Scott and his imitators. And a rich combination of ro­
mantic absurdity and realistic fun-making largely accounts for
the immediate popularity of his first attempts at fiction, two
volumes of Ukrainian talcs, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
( 1831-32). Although the humor of a precocious youth of
twenty-two and the romantic activities of spooks and devils
drawn mostly from Ukrainian folklore do not strike us today as
either very funny or scary, in 1831 they introduced a new note
into Russian literature. Two of these stories, however, contain
54 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN R KALIS Nt

a foretaste of the future Gogol—The Terrible V engeance, a

purely Gothic tale of incest devoid of humor and involving the
horrible punishment of the wronged girl’s father, and the sar­
donically amusing and erotically suggestive Ivan Fyodorovich
Shponka and His Aunt, in which the undersexed nephew is ter­
rified by his aunt’s efforts to push him into marriage. The attrac­
tiveness of this whole collection rests primarily on the gay,
breathless liveliness of the stories which is as much a quality of
their varied style as of their content.
Pushkin hailed Gogol’s first effort: “Here is fun for you,
authentic fun of the frankest sort with nothing maudlin or prim
about it. And what of the poetry and delicacy of sentiment in
certain passages. All this is so unusual in our literature. . . .”
Only ten years older, Pushkin took the adoring Gogol under his
literary wing, although no two authors could have differed more
in their approach to art. Perhaps this fact, as well as Gogol’s dis­
cordant personality, prevented them from ever becoming inti­
mate friends. However, during their four years of direct contact
( 1832-36), Pushkin, always generous to younger writers, acted
as a kind of literary catalyst, for it appears that all of Gogol’s
major works were conceived during this period and some of
them written. Gogol turned to Pushkin for subjects and evi­
dence indicates that the poet supplied him with the themes of
The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. “One has got to be
more careful of this Ukrainian,” Pushkin jokingly remarked to a
friend, “for he’ll plunder me and I’ll be unable to crv out in pro­
test!” So significant was the relationship in Gogol’s eyes, that he
declared, shortly after Pushkin’s death in a duel in 1837: "Mv
life, my greatest happiness died with him. . . . When I created I
saw before me only Pushkin. Everything good in me I owe to
him.” Indeed, an essential stabilizing influence in Gogol’s deli­
cately balanced emotional nature vanished after Pushkin died.
When the youthful Gogol came up to Petersburg from the
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 55

Ukraine, he was neither well educated nor well read, and one of
Pushkin’s services was to provide him with a list of belles lettres,
especially by foreign authors. The impression seems to exist in
some quarters that Gogol’s creative faculties were singularly un­
contaminated by exposure to the writings of his contemporaries
and predecessors. It is no disservice to his unquestioned orig­
inality to point out that he read, apart from many native Ukrain­
ian and Russian authors, the works of French, German, and
English writers. Scholars have demonstrated the influence on
Gogol’s writings of Homer’s Iliad and of certain of the works of
Cervantes, Molière, Le Sage, Sterne, Scott, Maturin, and the
German romanticists, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Tieck.
For example, the influence of Homer and Scott is incongru­
ously combined in Taras Bulba, Gogol’s historical romance on
the sixteenth-century Cossack Ukraine which appeared in his
next collection of tales, Mirgorod, in 1835. History temporarily
fascinated Gogol. The year before, through the efforts of a
well-placed friend, he had obtained an adjutant professorship of
history at the University of St. Petersburg. At this time he was
still undecided on literature as a career, and with his insatiable
ambition he now set out to storm the academic world with vast
plans for writing a universal history and geography in two to
three volumes, a history of the Ukraine in eight or nine volumes,
and for good measure he threw in a project for a history of the
Middle Ages.
Gogol began his academic career with a brilliant lecture in
which the absence of factual information was compensated by
glittering historical generalizations. But he soon ran out of them
and had nothing to offer in their place. This creative artist as an
academician suffered the fate of academicians who think they
are creative artists. At the end of the first term Gogol pro­
nounced an epitaph to his teaching career: “Ignorant I mounted /.
my professor’s chair and ignorant I descended.”
56 I NTHODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

The only completed work to emerge from all his projects on

history was the novel Taras Bulba. Although descriptions of
the glorious battle scenes between Poles and Cossacks echo the
Iliad, all this is pure heroic romance, an historical period and
events re-created by some process of divination rather than by
careful historical reconstruction in the manner of Scott. Scenes
tumble over one another in exuberant abandon, and the swift
pace of the heroic parts is slowed down only by an occasional
concentration on humorous incidents and a secondary love affair
between the son of the old Cossack leader Taras and a beautiful
Polish girl. Gogol handles this with all the unreality of Scott’s
treatment of love and in addition enervates the theme by his own
peculiarly' sexless idealization of the tender passion. In an inde­
finable wav the sustained rhetoric of the style propels the nar­
rative into life at the sacrifice of nearly every illusion of reality7.
Gogol returns to realism in two other tales of the Mirgorod
collection: Old-World Landowners and The Story of How
Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich. But it is a
particular phase of realism—Gogol has more than one—in which
he engages life imaginatively to the end of intensifying it. The
device he uses in the first story is to magnify7 the gluttony of the
old pair by7 ironically rhapsodizing over it, and in the second he
ironically7 exaggerates the friendship of the two Ivans in order
to contrast it with the trifling incident that brings it to an end
in hopeless litigation. Beneath the two humorous but different
situations Gogol provides fleeting glimpses of a common yvay7 of
life which, in its destructive absurdity7, creates such situations.
Another phase of Gogolian realism turns up in the famous
story7 The Nevsky Prospect, which appeared in Arabesques, a
second collection of tales in 1835. Although there has been some
critical mystification about its communication, at least the sur­
face intention of the story7 is made quite clear at the end yvhere
Gogol observes that in a world of contrasting experiences fate
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 57

unaccountably plays tricks on us, and in this sense he wonders

whether we ever attain that for which our powers are specially
suited. To illustrate this surmise he narrates the contrasting ad­
ventures, arising out of similar circumstances, of two young
friends, a gay army officer, Pirogov, and a sensitive painter,
Piskaryov. On an evening stroll together along Petersburg’s
Nevsky Prospect, the officer pursues a pretty blonde and the
artist a beautiful statuesque brunette. Comedy and tragedy, real­
ism and romance characterize their subsequent experiences.
Though the dumb blonde fails to comprehend the purpose of
Pirogov’s advances, her husband comprehends it only too well
and takes an amusing revenge on this officer who presumes to
interfere in his married life. The sensitive artist timidly follows
the lovely brunette and his idealizing nature has already invested
her in an atmosphere of mystery and hallowed enchantment.
But the pursuit ends in a brothel where she plies her trade.
Crushed by this discovery, he returns home, falls asleep, and
sees her in his dreams, the perfect fulfillment of his ideal woman.
Eventually, he has recourse to drugs in order that he may live in
this unreal world with his charming infatuator. In the end he is
found a suicide in his dingy room, apparently preferring death
to the intolerable reality of an unattainable ideal.
After awakening from one of his exotic dreams, Piskaryov
exclaims: “Mv God! what isour life! An everlasting disharmony
between dream and reality!” Indeed, disharmony was the ful­
crum of reality on which Gogol’s vision of life constantly
teetered—the clash of appearance and substance, the real and the
unreal, life as it is and life as it should be.
A limiting factor in this storv, as in much of what Gogol
wrote, is a kind of Poe-like “purity complex” that inhibits his
treatment of the more intimate relation between men and
women. It is a mistake, however, to translate this failing into an
incapacity to cope artistically with feminine characterizations,
58 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

for when he confines himself to their outward appearance and

surface relations he is often brilliant. But love between the sexes
is a sterile plant for hint, reflecting his own physical sterility, and
perhaps he found a sensuous compensation in idealizing feminine
purity which sometimes led him into banal bombast in defense of
its virtues. Thus the brothel in The Nevsky Prospect becomes
one of “those dens in which man sacriligiouslv tramples and
derides all that is pure and holy, all that makes life fair, where
women, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation. . . .”
Native and foreign critics have employed concepts drawn
from Freudian psychoanalytic theory to solve the riddle of
Gogol’s sexual abnormality and demonstrate its influence on his
writings. It would he captious to deny the relevance of this ap­
proach, even when applied to literary figures long since dead,
but its success is seriously impaired bv the lack of complete per­
sonal case histories, which the modern clinical psychoanalysts
find so vital in dealing with living subjects.
Other stories in Arabesques which have their setting, like The
Nevsky Prospect, in Petersburg extend the range of Gogol’s
commingling sheer fantasy with realistic effects and at the same
time reveal an intensification and also a subtilizing of his rich
vein of humor. In his An Author's Confession, Gogol observes
that at about this point in his career he would imagine all sorts of
amusing situations and funny characters in an effort to counter­
act fits of depression. Perhaps one should see no more than this
kind of nonsense in The Nose, in which the government offi­
cial Kovalyov wakes up one morning to find that his nose is
missing. It turns up in a loaf of bread baked bv the wife of
Kovalyov’s drunken barber—the only concession to realism in
the talc—and next appears in a fine uniform wandering about the
streets in a posture of defiance to the real owner. Whether
Gogol’s unusually long nose or Laurence Sterne’s unusually long
treatise on noses prompted this escape from depression into the
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 59

comfort of the absurd, it is hard to say. To those who see in this

story a castration fantasy with Freudian overtones of phallic
symbolism, Tristram Shandy’s premonitory caution to his
readers may be offered: “I declare, by that word I mean Nose,
and nothing more, or less.”
This good-natured fun-making continues in The Memoirs of
a Madman, with its talking dogs who also write letters to each
other. But it ends on a poignantly realistic note when the poor
copying clerk, frustrated in love, goes mad, imagining himself
the King of Spain but at the same time praying to his mother to
save him from the beatings and tormenting of his keepers in the
insane asylum.
The Portrait, a Petersburg story of the supernatural, forces
comparison with Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades which may
have inspired it, although Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer,
translated into Russian, may also have suggested the central
theme of a portrait that comes to life. Like Herman in Push­
kin’s story, Gogol’s artist is obsessed by ambition and acquisi­
tiveness, and this passionate desire for wealth brings about the
downfall of both through the medium of a supernatural agency.
In nearly every respect, however, the two narrative methods
differ. Pushkin’s crisp, restrained style and carefully constructed
realistic background compel belief in a supernatural experience.
Gogol, on the other hand, fails to create an illusion of reality,
even in the extensively revised 1842 version of this story, for his
realistic details are swamped by rhetorical outpourings of ro­
mantic feeling.
The most celebrated of the Petersburg tales, The Overcoat,
published in 1842 but no doubt drafted much earlier, brings to
a focus all the lines of Gogol’s amazing technique in the crea­
tion of a work that Tolstoy would have placed in his category of
universal art, for the story of the poor copying clerk Akaky
Akakievich appeals equally to the young and the old and to
6o I N T H O D UCT I O N TO H USS IA N Il E A L I S M

cvcrv laver of society. Here are realism and fantasy, humor and
pathos, laughter and tears exquisitely proportioned in a sym­
phony of fiction the perfect artistic unity of which is perhaps
flawed, according to some tastes, only by the introduction of
the supernatural at the end where Akakv’s ghost seeks the stolen
overcoat.
It is almost irrelevant to talk about realism in the ordinary
sense in this famous tale, in which Gogol appears to be con­
cerned with a primal relation of humanity and ultimate reality
such that when once confronted reality is recognized for what
it is. In man’s struggle with life’s adversities we all sympathize
with the underdog’s striving to obtain a moiety of happiness as
he sees it. /Many critics, however, have regarded The Overcoat
as a deliberate realistic exposure of social inequities of the reign
of Nicholas I and a satiric attack on the “circumlocution offices”
of government bureaucracy. It is true that passages can be sin­
gled out which seem to amount to special pleading on behalf of
the insulted and injured little people, such as the reflection of the
new office worker who associates himself with others in tor­
menting Akaky Akakievich: “Long afterwards, at moments of
greatest gaiety, the figure of the meek little clerk, with a bald
patch on his head, rose before him with his pitiful words: ‘Let
me alone! Why do you insult me?’ And in those heart-rending
words he heard others: ‘I am your brother.’ And the unhappy
young man hid his face in his hands, and many times afterwards
in his life he shuddered, realizing how much inhumanity there
is in man, how much vicious brutality lies hidden under refined,
cultural politeness, and, mv God! even in a man whom the world
accepts as a gentleman and a man of honor. . . This statement
might almost stand as the manifesto of the “philanthropic fic-
* The Overcoat and Other Stories. By Nikolay Gogol, translated by
Constance Garnett (New York: Knopf, 1923), pp. 14-15.
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 61
tion” that sprang up in Russia after Gogol’s immensely popular
story.
It would be idle to deny the subjective nature of this and
similar passages, such as the elegiac valediction after the death of
Akaky, or the satiric fun that Gogol has at the expense of gov­
ernment bureaucracy. These elements, however, are plainly
subordinated to the artistic imperatives of the storv; they play a
functional part in setting the narrative tone and in developing
the personality’ of Akaky Akakievich. That is, Gogol was not
crusading for social reform in The Overcoat. He was not an
artistic ideologue. In this talc the foibles and abuses of society4 *7
were part of the pattern of reality7 yvhich provided the material
of his art. If there yvas any7 subjective emphasis, it was moral and
not social. Later this concern with morality, especially7 in the
Christian sense, loomed much larger in his vision of life and in
his art.

4
However, it yvas The Government Inspector, yvritten in 1835,
produced the next year, and often regarded as Russia’s greatest
play, that initially yvon for Gogol the reputation as a realist of
genius concerned primarily yvith exposing and satirizing social
evils. No such portentous purpose presided over the play’s
origin. He wrote Pushkin: “Do me a kindness; give me some
subject or other. . . . For God’s sake, my mind and belly7 arc
famished.’’ Pushkin obliged yvith the anecdote of a traveler who
is mistaken in a small toyvn for a government inspector, an ex­
perience which he had had himself in his travels.
The result was a comedy7 which, along with Dead Souls, dreyv
from Gogol’s contemporary7 Belinsky7 the emphatic declaration
that these yvorks “deal exclusively yvith the world of Russian
62 1 N TROD UCT ION TO RUSSIAN R E A L IS M

life,” and that Gogol had “no rivals in the art of portraving it in
all its truth.” Moreover, Belinsky saw in Gogol the most na­
tional of Russian writers, the first to be so regarded abroad in
translation, and the first author in Russian literature who de­
picted ordinary people without idealizing them, guided—the
critic said—by a belief in art as “the representation of reality in
all its fidelity.”
Elsewhere Belinsky qualified these opinions, asserting that
Pushkin had anticipated Gogol as a national writer and also in
the realistic depiction of Russian society. The important fact is
that not only Belinsky, but other contemporary or near-con­
temporary figures, including both Turgenev and Dostoevsky,
agree that Gogol’s major works faithfully portray the social
existence and people which these individuals knew from their
own experience. Such unanimity of judgment by keen observers
of Gogol’s own day must stand as a refutation to later critics
who refuse to see in The Government Inspector and Dead Souls
an authentic picture of the Russia of that time and, in the charac­
ters, men and women drawn from real life. Additional support
for this view may also be obtained, as previously indicated, from
accounts of life in contemporary letters and memoirs.
On the other hand, Belinsky and his followers in criticism,
especially Chernyshevsky in his study of the Gogol period in
Russian literature, were wrong in asserting that Gogol deliber­
ately set out to expose the harsh realities of the reign of Nicholas
I, although they were correct in believing that his realistic writ­
ings helped to initiate a literary movement in fiction devoted
to revealing and criticizing social and political abuses. Gogol was
an artist of things rather than of ideas. When he concerned him­
self primarily' with intellectual matters, as in his letters and in
the volume Selected Passages from a Correspondence ixith
Friends, he tended to think more feebly' than justly. Revolution
would have horrified him for, like Karamzin in the preceding
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 63

age, he believed that the political and social order of Russia was
ordained by God. A convinced proponent of serfdom, he was
opposed to education for peasants who, he declared, should not
even know of the existence of any book except the Bible.
“Do not chafe at the looking glass if vour mug is awry” is the
Russian proverb that Gogol set down as an epigraph to The
Government Inspector. Nothing could more plainly indicate
Gogol’s intention in the play or the type of character he held the
mirror up to. In the opening of the fragmentary second part of
Dead Souls Gogol writes: “Why should we always describe
poverty, wretchedness, and imperfections and unearth charac­
ters from wild and remote corners of our country? But what is
to be done if such is the author’s bent....” He was not interested
in the ordinary, the average, or in saints uncorrupted, but in
rogues who, he apparently believed, were all too numerous in
Russian life. And he wanted enough of them to fill a comedy in
five acts which—he told Pushkin in the letter already quoted—
would be “funnier than hell.” And so it is. There is not a sym­
pathetic character in the play; they are all addicted to the
roguery of Russian life.
Except for the awkward asides, one of the conventions of
eighteenth-century satiric comedy that influenced Gogol, The
Government Inspector is a gem of pure art in its perfect fusion
of form, content, and treatment. Its aim is a persuasive picture
of living life and not a pot of social message. Nicholas I, who
overrode the censor’s rejection of the play, is reported to have
remarked after the first performance: “Everybody got his due,
I most of all.” Unlike many of the critics, he was wise enough to
realize that Gogol’s comedy was not an attack on his govern­
ment, but a rollicking exposé of abuses in the body politic which
any ruler would want to see eliminated.
In all the boisterous action of the play there is hardly any point
in querying whether we have a fantastic product of the imagina-
 64 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN' REALISM

tion or something truly real. It is like so much dough, kneaded

and pummcled by Gogol, charged with copious portions of his
yeasty brand of realism, and emerging from the creative oven in
an odd-sized baked shape but always recognizable as a large loaf
of good Russian black bread, the staff of life. One likes to think
that he approached his caricatured men and women very much
as Dickens did those zany creations in Pickwick, that is, in a
spirit of pure fun. But in Gogol’s case there is nearly always an
element of human negativeness about the people who inhabit
his artistic world. From the lowliest citizen to the highest official
in this little town everybody seems to be swindling everybody
i else. Bribery has become institutionalized. It is an extravaganza
I in civic waywardness. With irony which in the circumstances
borders on the morbid, that arch pair of dissemblers, the Mayor
and Khlestakov, solemnly agree that they don’t like two-faced
people, which is of a piece with the darkly humorous slip of the
Trustee of Social Welfare Institutions who explains that in his
hospital the patients “all get well like flies.” And the same in­
dividual, when arranging for the collective bribery by the town
officials of Khlestakov, who is mistaken for a government in­
spector, insists that it be done properly, the way it is “done in a
well-run society.” In the play’s matchless final scene the dread­
ful truth of this society’s complete corruption is driven home by
the Mayor, the greatest scoundrel of the lot. As each gulling
official in turn laughs at the exposure of his colleagues in the let­
ter of Khlestakov, who had gulled them all, the Mayor furiously
shouts: “What arc you laughing for? You’re laughing at your­
selves!” The Government Inspector, which makes sport of evil,
symbolically" suggests what Gogol directly" expressed in the well-
known words at the end of his early’ humorous talc about the
quarrel of the two Ivans: “It is gloomy in this world, gentle­
men.”
In general, Gogol’s realistic method failed to stress the de­
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 65

velopment of self-knowledge in his characters, even when he

refrained from turning them into caricatures. They explode into
life, as it were, by virtue of the extraordinary force of his imag­
inative creativeness, in which salient features are magnified to
the point where reality is on the edge of but never quite tumbles
over into unconvincingness. Whenever the action skirts irreality,
Gogol’s superb dialogue, alive with the naturalness of living
speech, saves the situation. Nearly all the characters in The Gov­
ernment Inspector are of this type, and especially the Mayor and
the central figure Khlestakov, one of the very great charac­
ters in Russian literature.

5
This much attention to a play in a study of fiction seemed
necessary, not only for the light it throws on Gogol’s develop­
ing realism, but also because Dead Souls is a kind of extension of
The Government Inspector with the difference that the author’s
increased maturity over the seven years he took to write it and
his changing outlook clothed the world of the novel in darker
hues in which evil is tempered more by judgment than by
comedy. However, there is no lack of the comic in Dead Souls,
and Gogol also projects some of his recently learned dramatic
technique into the novel: he structures his great scenes the wav
a playwright might, and some of his most amusing characters are
really “character parts” in the theatrical sense.
Gogol appears to have begun Dead Souls in the autumn of
1835, that is, preceding the performance of The Government
Inspector. But in June 1836, after the production of his play, he
went abroad and remained there during nearly the whole period
of the writing of Dead Souls. He returned to Russia in 1841 to
sec his novel through the press. It was published the next year.
Dead Souls may be approached on any one of several levels
66 I NTRODU CTIO N TO RUSSIAN H E A L IS NI

of conscious or unconscious artistic intention. But a careful

reading of both the first part and the fragment of the second
leaves little excuse for regarding the whole as a nonrcalistic
symbolic work, a kind of vast metaphor of the evils of Russian
life, articulated in language symbols and images that are per­
sonifications of universal sin. That is, to seek for the novel’s
ultimate design in what Henry James called the author’s “deep
well of unconscious cerebration” seems quite unnecessary.
The derivation of Dead Souls from the picaresque tradition
in the works of such writers as Lc Sage and Bulgarin requires
no substantiation, however much Gogol’s storv of a rogue and
his travels transcends Gil Blas and Ivan V yzhigin in moral con­
ception, imaginative inventiveness, and artistic treatment. In
these respects Dead Souls bears comparison with Don Quixote,
although the hero Chichikov has his wits about him and pur­
sues a plausible if illegal objective in a real world, whereas the
mad Don is in quest of a defunct ideal in a romanticized world.
Cervantes deals with the lost illusion of knight errantry bv wav
of ridiculing the foibles of the present. Gogol is concerned with
the greed that corrupts man, a human condition which serves
as a vantage point from which to satirize the failings of his
countrymen.
If the hero of Balzac’s Human Comedy is the franc, that of
Dead Souls is the rouble. Though Gogol, unlike Balzac, docs not
attempt to create a philosophy of accumulation, he is deter­
mined, in a land where bribery is endemic, to exemplify the
moral wisdom of the Biblical injunction that the love of money
is the root of all evil. It was the main theme of The Portrait; its
ramifications touched nearly every character of The Govern­
ment Inspector; in Dead Souls it is a persistent offstage voice
that humorously pokes fun at the evil of acquisitiveness, and in
the fragmentary second part it rings out stridently in moral
homilies. Failure to recognize the wisdom of the precept is
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 67
Chichikov’s chief weakness. “It would be more just,” Gogol
writes in the novel, “to call him simply a proprietary and acquisi­
tive man. Acquisitiveness is the sin behind everything. . . .”
The wonderful opening of Dead Souls would have lost much
in artistic effectiveness if Gogol had substituted for it the last
chapter which is the natural chronological beginning of the
novel, for it is there that we learn of Chichikov’s early years and
initial waywardness so necessary for an understanding of his
complete personality. And here also, in an amusing rejection of
the virtuous romanticized heroes of previous Russian fiction,
Gogol declares that “the time has come at last to put the rogue
in harness,” that is, to move closer to the reality of things as
Gogol saw them. For the young unloved Chichikov life was sour
and uncomfortable under the stern guidance of a pinched, nar­
row-minded father of obscure gentry origin who mingled fre­
quent punishment with pious exhortation. The boy had no
friends or playmates, and his father’s parting advice, on sending
him off to school for the first time, was not to gad about, be
subservient to teachers and superiors, and guard the few kopecks
he gave him because—he said—“with money you can do any­
thing in the world,” advice which the son never forgot.
To overlook this and similar evidence is to ignore the degree
to which the faulted nature and insensate ambition of the mature
Chichikov were formed by the unhappy circumstances of his
childhood. Certainly Gogol himself stresses the point, for he re­
turns to it in a passage of major emphasis in the incomplete last
section of the fragmentary second part, incidentally an indica­
tion of planned continuity in the characterization which is all
too frequently ignored. There, when disaster finally overtakes
Chichikov because of inability to resist temptation, Gogol rep­
resents him as reflecting on the reasons behind this lost oppor­
tunity: “Feelings which had hitherto been unknown, unfamiliar,
and inexplicable welled up within him, something belonging to
68 I N T II O D U CT I O N TO H USSI A N H E A L I S M

the grim, dead precepts of his early childhood with its lonely
joylessness—the desert-like emptiness of his home life, his isola­
tion in the family, and those first impressions of poverty and
misery....”
Though Chichikov is a model worker in the positions he as­
sumed in government service after his schooling and exercised
every form of self-denial in an effort to save, he soon falls into
the peculation and bribe-taking generally practiced by civil
servants. One is reminded of the eager advice which Gogol’s
fatuous mother wrote him when as a young man he entered the
civil service in St. Petersburg, namely, that since everybody
was doing it he should try to supplement his income by taking
bribes! But Chichikov plays this game with a charm, dignity,
and discrimination beyond the abilities of his bungling competi­
tors in the nice art of getting ahead by illegal means. Gogol is
perhaps being more realistic than ironic in suggesting that his
hero simply goes along with the generally accepted order of
things in endeavoring to satisfy his ambition. But what is this
ambition? To possess what his father was unable to bequeath to
him—an income-bearing landed property, the status symbol of
the gentry. He yearns after a well-equipped house, a carriage,
good food, and ultimately a wife and children. Chichikov rea­
sons that others had risen from nothing, so why shouldn’t he?
However, Gogol stresses that Chichikov, despite his ambition,
docs not love money for its own sake and is not at the mercy of
meanness or avarice. He is neither harsh nor callous, writes
Gogol, nor devoid of pity or compassion.
When Chichikov is detected in shadv dealings, he uses all
his wiles and bribery to escape prison, although on each such
occasion he is compelled to slip back to the bottom again in his
efforts to climb the civil-service greased pole of success. In a
bureaucracy where dishonesty is the rule rather than the excep­
tion, it is little wonder that he eventually begins to think of him­
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 69

self as a victim of circumstances beyond his control. As he

whimsically puts it, he suffers “in the cause of justice.” And
Gogol, satirizing these warped moral values of Russian society,
has his hero comically protest, after repeated exposures of his
chicanery: “Why was I picked out? . . . they are all stuffing
their pockets. I’ve made no one unhappy, I didn’t rob a widow
or turn anyone into the streets. ... If I had not profited, others
would have done so. Why then are the others flourishing and
why must I perish like a crushed worm?”
It is at this low point in his fortunes that Chichikov takes
up the rather dubious calling of a legal agent. One of his first
jobs is to arrange the mortgage of serfs of a bankrupt estate.
After performing what Gogol describes as the necessary “oil­
ing” of the officials concerned, Chichikov honestly admits to
one of the bribed functionaries that half the serfs of the mort­
gage list are dead, and the official jovially wonders why he wor­
ries about so trifling a matter. This comment suggests to
Chichikov the idea which Pushkin is reported to have conveyed
to Gogol as the basic plot line of the novel. Chichikov plans to
visit various estate owners and obtain from them, by regular
legal transfer, their dead serfs or souls, as they were called. He
is convinced that the owners will be glad to part with them for
nothing or for a mere token fee, for they have to pay a head
tax on every registered serf until the next census catches up with
the dead ones. Chichikov gleefully estimates that he can easily
obtain a thousand dead souls, mortgage them at two hundred
roubles each as living serfs, and with this capital of two hundred
thousand roubles realize his dream of buying an estate, marrying,
and living comfortably with his future wife and children in
what the old-fashioned novelists called connubial felicity.
This account of Chichikov’s early career in the last chapter of
Dead Souls explains much about the hero’s behavior and
thoughts throughout the whole course of the novel and it also
70 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

adds a good deal to the unity and direction of the characteriza­

tion. In the last pages of this chapter, Gogol, by way of insisting
upon the realism of the portrayal, begins by twitting the pa­
triotic reader for resenting the scalawag of a hero as representa­
tive of the Russian people. But the author, Gogol insists, must
speak the truth and nothing but the truth, because readers are
afraid of looking too profoundly into anything. What disturbs
him, however, is the type of reader who will actually be pleased
with his hero. In moments of communion with himself, writes
Gogol, this reader will ponder the weighty question in the
depths of his soul: “ ‘Is there not also something of Chichikov
in me?’ he will ask. Of course there is! Yet if any acquaintance
of his, neither too exalted nor too low, should pass by at that mo­
ment, he would take him by the arm and, barely restraining a
guffaw, would say to him: ‘Look, look, there goes Chichikov,
Chichikov has arrived!’ And then, just like a child, forgetting
the respect due to rank and years, he will run after him, teasing
and shouting: ‘Chichikov! Chichikov! Chichikov!’ ”
In any event, shortly after he conceived his get-rich-quick
scheme, this middle-aged gentleman, dressed in immaculate but
conservative attire, his total savings locked up in a traveling box,
took to the road in a chaise, a troika, such as a well-appointed
bachelor favors, accompanied by his smelly valet Petrushka and
his irresponsible coachman Selifan, and eventually arrived at the
town of N., his initial base of operations in the mysterious busi­
ness of buying up dead souls.

6
The provincial town of N. is larger than the one in The
Government Inspector, but its various officials are every bit as
corrupt, only they play the national game of bribery with much
more sophistication. And Chichikov, who has nothing in his
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 71

makeup of the bravado, crudity, and outrageous lying of Khles-

takov, easily wins his way into the affections of the town fathers
and their wives with his genteel manners, oily flatterv, and the
appearance and appointments of a Petersburg gentleman.
Towns for Gogol are centers of concentrated human folly
and he brings them to life with a creative gusto that is positively
Rabelaisian. Cobblestone streets, traffic, fences, houses, hotels,
office buildings, and meetings, dinners, card games, balls, and a
variety of typical townsfolk and their conversation are described
in a bewildering combination of reality and exaggeration. It has
been asserted that the world of Dead Souls is sheer invention,
that Gogol, living abroad so long, was largely ignorant of pro­
vincial Russian towns and country estates. Nothing could be
more erroneous. Only when art and nature join forces, he de­
clares in one place in the novel, does description achieve the
impossible. Gogol possessed what Coleridge called the “ebul­
lience of the creative faculty” which in the art of description
enables him to realize the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossible
rendered probable or not improbable. If existence in the town of
N. strikes one at times as a bit bizarre, it is owing to Gogol’s fa­
miliar device of intermingling the strictest realism of detail with
the unreal. His notebook, which is crammed with precise data
about the appearance, the social life and official administration,
and the typical inhabitants of provincial towns, testifies to his
zeal for the correctness of such details.
In the cause of objective realism, another stricture may be
made against those who believe that Gogol’s satire is a subjective
“exteriorization of the fauna of his own mind,” a kind of uncon­
scious catharsis or purgation of his real or imaginary defects. On
the other hand, it is also unlikely, as the sociological critics
claimed, that Dead Souls was designed as a broad attack on the
institution of serfdom. Although the novel’s preoccupation with
the unsavory business of buying and selling human beings, even
~JQ. INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

dead ones, no doubt suggested this conclusion, it is obvious that

Gogol regarded the theme simply as a convenient device for
writing the kind of picaresque novel he had in mind. After all, he
plainly accepted the institution of serfdom as a fact of Russian
life.
What he does satirize is the real world of the landed gentry,
the bungling, inefficient, and impractical way in which they
organize their existence and that of the peasants on their estates,
and the corruption, snobbery, extravagance, and false posturing
they fall into when assuming office in town or citv government.
There is nothing subjective or introspective about such satire,
which is often accompanied by comic, caricaturing touches to
heighten the element of ridicule. For example, when the “well­
born agreeable ladv’’ of the town of N. calls on her friend, the
“agreeable lady in all respects,’’ for a gossip session on Chichikov,
we have a lengthy delightful scene entirely satiric in intent. The
opening lines illustrate Gogol’s method: “As soon as the ladv
agreeable in all respects learned of the arrival of the agreeable
ladv, she at once ran into the hall. The ladies clutched each other
bv the hands, exchanged kisses, and cried out as do two girls
meeting not too long after graduation from boarding school,
but before their mothers have had time to explain to them that
the father of one is poorer and of lower rank than that of the
other. Their kisses had a resounding smack to them and made the
dogs bark, and for this they were spanked with a handker­
chief. . .
The part of the novel devoted to Chichikov’s visits to the five
estate owners outside the town of N. to purchase their dead
souls is the core of the work and perhaps its finest contribution
to literature. Here Gogol’s method of characterization deepens
and even alters to some extent. Like Sterne, from whom he mav
have learned the device, Gogol is verv fond of digressions. They
mav be chattv monologues of instruction to readers in the man­
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 73

ner of Thackeray, or vivid rhetorically poetic passages on the

joys of the road, or the beauties of the Russian language, or that
famous concluding digression of the novel where Chichikov’s
galloping troika, its bells filling the air with their wondrous
pealing, symbolizes the headlong progress of Russia.
In one such digression in the seventh chapter, Gogol explains
to his readers that there arc two types of authors. One type be­
comes celebrated by drawing exceptional characters embodying
the highest values of humanity. Such characters, declares Gogol,
cloud men’s eves with the smoke of illusion and obscure the
sadness of life by showing man as a thing of beauty. The other
type, among whom Gogol includes himself, is the author who
dares to concentrate on everyday characters and present them
roundly and clearly for the benefit of all. Contemporary judg­
ment, Gogol insists, does not recognize that great spiritual depth
is required to illuminate a picture drawn from depressed life and
to make of it “a pearl of creation.” And he concludes that he is
destined to wander together with such heroes and to observe the
whole vast movement of life—“to observe it through laughter
which can be shared bv all and through tears which are un­
known and unseen.”
No one would deny that Gogol has elevated these five land­
owners to pearls of creation bv the sheer force of his art. Like
certain characters in Pickwick, they are not types but “humors”
in the Ben Jonsonian sense—the slothful, sentimental, saccharine
Manilov, living in a fool’s paradise completely unrelated to re­
ality; the congenital liar Nozdryov whose gross fictions are
psychological manifestations of his need to quarrel and bully;
that epitome of stolid self-sufficiency, the huge bear-like Sobake-
vich, who regards every endeavor as a challenge to self-aggran­
dizement; the greedy old widowed Korobochka in her tiny
pumpkin-like coach who must first find out the nonexistent go­
ing rate on dead serfs before she will sell hers; and finally the
74 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

miser Plyushkin, a monster of avarice, who owns a thousand

serfs yet continues to cram his bulging storehouses with all the
abortion of life and uses a yellowed toothbrush in the family
since before the time of Napoleon.
In another sense one may regard'these pearls of creation as
allegorical personifications of various failings of the landed
gentry as Gogol sees them. Though caricature is pushed to the
extreme in these portrayals, they are not puppets; a mimetic
degree of actuality is always present. In one of his asides in The
Overcoat, Gogol protests that “there is no creeping into a man’s
soul and finding out what he thinks,” an effort that was to be­
come a major concern of Dostoevsky in characterization. But
with minor exceptions it is true that Gogol’s realism in the pro­
jection of characters is devoid of psychological analysis of
thought and feeling.
To transform everyday characters into pearls of creation and
still not produce unbelievable emblematic creatures, Gogol relies
heavily on massive realistic details. His inspiration is mainly the
inspiration of detail, and no Russian author ever employed it as
abundantly and as effectively as Gogol, unless it be Tolstov who,
before he renounced the technique, always used much more re­
straint than Gogol in the practice of it. In the thirty pages of the
chapter on Plyushkin, more than half of it is devoted to meticu­
lous description of the approach to the estate, then to its im­
mediate surroundings and the village, the external appearance
of the manor house, its interior, and finally a minute detailing
of the looks, dress, and habits of the master. Much of this effort
is designed to build up a unified picture of the total correspon­
dence between the “humor" of the character in question and his
appearance, behavior, and all his surroundings.
As indicated, realistic descriptive touches arc frequently en­
livened by comic exaggeration. Chichikov’s heart “flutters like
a quail in a cage” after his quarrel with Nozdryov. Sobakevich’s
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 75
face has “a tempered and glowing look such as is to be seen on
a copper coin,” and in keeping with the hugeness of everything
in this huge man’s ménage, the turkey served up for dinner is
“as big as a calf.” The wooden planks on the road to Plyushkin’s
home “rise and fall like piano keys” when Chichikov walks over
them. And in the copying office in the town hall, Gogol observes
that there is “a great deal of pen-scratching and the noise of it
is like the passage of carts loaded with brushwood through a
forest several feet deep in withered leaves.”
A favorite technique is to pyramid a simple description into
digressive proportions which in a curious way contributes to the
atmosphere of a given scene. To illustrate this practice by a very
short sample—when Chichikov drives up to Sobakevich’s porch
he notices two faces at the window: “one was a woman’s, long
and narrow as a cucumber, crowned with a bonnet; the other a
man’s, broad and round as a Moldavian pumpkin, called gourds,
from which Russians make balalaikas—light two-stringed balala­
ikas, the pride and amusement of some smart twenty-year-old
lad, saucy-eyed and jaunty, winking and whistling at the white­
breasted and white-throated maidens who gather around to
listen to his soft strumming.”
Not a little of the humor of Dead Souls is of the picaresque
variety, springing from the daily give and take of Chichikov and
his two servants who were part of the meager inheritance from
his niggardly father. Their relations represent the closest that
Chichikov ever comes to dealing with live peasants, and in them
he reveals himself as a typical serf-owner. Though Petrushka
and Selifan are of the breed of Sancho Panza, their behavior is
that of real Russian peasants and Gogol portrays it with a realism
in which the humor is little exaggerated. Like most peasant
coachmen, Selifan has the habit of singing and talking to his
horses, the lazy dapple-grey on the right that never pulls its
weight, the bay in the center, and the fallow-bay on the left,
76 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM
nicknamed Assessor because it had been bought from one. When
Selifan is tipsy, as is the case on the return trip from his master’s
visit to Manilov’s, his horse-talk soars to heights of purple elo­
quence and his driving to recklessness that ends with an over­
turned chaise and Chichikov in the mud.
“ ‘Cunning are you, cunning! There, I’ll out-cunning vou!’
said Selifan as he stood up and whipped the lazybones. ‘Learn to
work, you German pants-maker! The bav’s a respectable horse,
he does his dutv. I’d willingly give him an extra of oats because
he’s a respectable horse, and the Assessor, too, he’s a good horse.
. . . There, there! Why are you twitching your ears? Listen,
idiot, when you’re spoken to! I shan’t teach you nothing wrong,
vou lout. What d’va mean, crawling like that?’ Then he again
applied his whip, adding: ‘Ah, you barbarian! You damn Bona­
parte, you!’ And he urged on all three: ‘Giddap, you darlings!’
and he flicked them all with the whip, not bv wav of punish­
ment, but just to show that he was pleased with them. Having
given them that pleasure, he again addressed the dapple-grey:
‘Do you think I don’t see the wav you’re carrying on? No, vou
must live in truth if vou want to be respected. Nov’ the folks we
just visited were fine people. It’s a pleasure to talk with a good
man; with a good man I’m friends always, the best of pals,
whether it be to drink tea or cat a bite—with pleasure, I sav, if
he’s a good man. A good man has everyone’s respect. Now take
our master, everyone respects him, because, do vou hear, he was
in the government service, he’s a collegiate councilor....’ ”
Selifan is right; everyone in the town of N. respects Chichi­
kov. And when the news gets around that he is buying large
numbers of serfs—at first it is not suspected they arc dead ones—
he is regarded as a millionaire and the catch of the season for
some marriageable lady. The most prominent people invite him
to their homes, and he behaves toward all with courtesy, mod­
esty, and quiet charm. In the light of a reputation of this sort, the
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 77

reason for his eventual ostracism is a laughable commentary on

the intelligence of the townsfolk: it is caused not so much by
the rumor, which is never proved, that he is purchasing dead
souls, but by the entirely groundless rumor that he plans to
elope with the governor’s young daughter. However, the dis­
creet Chichikov, fearing a real exposure of his past, promptly sets
out again on his travels, moderately pleased with the notarized
lists of dead souls legally transferred to him.
In this first part of the novel Gogol endows Chichikov with
the essence of universal comedy—he is a liar, dishonest, and a
racketeer in the modern sense, while at the same time he fully
believes in his own pretensions to honesty, justice, and the good
life. But Gogol never for a moment leaves him without redeem­
ing features, however ironic they may seem juxtaposed to his
human failings. His heart is compassionate, Gogol repeats, and
he is shocked at the haggling of some of the owners in selling
their dead serfs. Sobakevich’s trickery in slipping into his list the
name of a nonnegotiable female serf pains him. And he even
complains—to himself to be sure—of the expensive finery worn
by the women at the governor’s ball: “To think of it, some of
them had a thousand roubles of rags on them! And all squeezed
out of the peasants or, worse still, at the expense of their con­
science.” If it is difficult to judge him harshly in this first part of
the novel, it is because he seems, in comparison with all the other
characters, more attractive in appearance and behavior, as well
as more intellectual and moral, if we construe this latter quality
not absolutely but as one of degree.
The fantastic element, an attribute of Gogol’s special brand
of realism—a contrast between the real and the unreal—accounts
for much of the novel’s charm, which is further enhanced by an
amazing vividness of perception and the most intense verbalizing
style in Russian fiction, a torrential, engulfing outpouring which
varies from grandiloquent poetic rhetoric to evocative mimetic
78 I NT HO DU CT ION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

dialogue and elaborately structured description, never dull,

never dead.
The life resurrected in Dead Souls, according to Gogol, is
observed through laughter and also through tears. Though the
comic spirit prevails, below the surface there is always the in­
finite sadness of Russian life, its corruption, its inequities, its
endless stagnation.

7
When Gogol first thought of Dead Souls in 1835 he did not
appear to have had any concrete plan in mind for the novel’s
development. Presumably it was to be an effort in one volume,
written in the humorous, carefree vein of The Government
Inspector on which he was then working. His later assertion
that he was prompted by Pushkin’s advice at this time to con­
cern himself with serious themes has no support.
On the other hand it seems clear that public and critical re­
action to the opening performance of The Govemment Inspec­
tor in 1836 deeply disturbed Gogol and no doubt activated
religious and moral fixations which had always been a part of
his complex personality. Though the play was actually success­
ful and repeatedly performed, he was distressed by the mixed
praise and blame it aroused. Some critics hailed his civic courage
in exposing corruption and others condemned him for attack­
ing the tsar’s government.
Always highly sensitive to criticism, Gogol’s immediate re­
action was to leave his native land, which he did in 1836 shortly
after the first performance of his play. From abroad he was soon
writing friends back in Russia that he had drawn up a compre­
hensive plan for Dead Souls, as though he wished to confound
hostile critics by undertaking a work of major artistic propor­
tions compared to The Government Inspector, and to please
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 79
favorable critics by contemplating a large novel that would re­
flect his true opinions of Russian society and offer it a message
of social significance. The novel will be “enormous,” he wrote,
several volumes in length, in which “all of Russia will appear,”
and he plainly hints at its social and accusatory contents. It
would be a huge comic-satiric novel—or poem, to use Gogol’s
word—realistic in form and moralistic in purpose, which in three
separate but thematically connected parts would be concerned
with important stages in the adventurous career of his hero as
observed against a varied background of Russian life.
This larger purpose, which Gogol seems to have formulated
over 1836-38, is reflected in the completed first part of Dead
Soids as it was published in 1842. Moreover, in this first part
there are allusions to his plan for the continuation, and in the
last chapter he directly informs readers that “two long parts of
the poem are still to come, and that is no trifle.” Contemporary
critics acclaimed the first part, praised its realism, and saw in
Chichikov a typical representative of innumerable Russians who
were not particular about the means they used to amass money.
One critic also described the novel as an “epic” because it em­
braced all the important aspects of Russian life, and he eagerly
looked forward to its sequel. Opposition critics, however, de­
nounced the novel for its coarseness and its concentration on
low characters.
Any measure of praise for the extant fragmentary second part
of Dead Souls is hard to come by. It is customary, especially
among Western critics, to dismiss it with a shrug and expression
of regret that Gogol ever attempted it. The usual judgment is
that the fragment contains a few good bits but on the whole
represents a marked artistic falling off from the first part. To
support the contention that it was impossible for Gogol to con­
tinue his masterpiece on the same high level, critics cite the sad
facts of his psychological and spiritual crises during the last ten
8o INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

years of his life. To this end arc mentioned his growing religious
mania, the strange obsession that he was destined to perform an
artistic mission of universal significance, and his disturbing at­
tempts to discover in works he had already published an ethical
content designed to reform his sinning countrymen, a notion
that led him to revise Taras Bulba and The Government Inspec­
tor to conform to this pattern. Also mentioned as indications of
incompetence arc his pathetic appeals from abroad to friends
and readers for ideas on the further development of the plot of
Dead Souls and for detailed information about life in Russia to
aid him in piecing out the imperfections of his waning imagina­
tion. Additional evidence of intellectual deterioration is found
in his book Selected Passages front a Correspondence u'ith
Friends, that amazing concoction of moral and practical pre­
cepts upholding the political and social order of the regime of
Nicholas I which so infuriated the dying Belinsky and provoked
his celebrated letter of denunciation. Further, critics point out
examples of confused thinking in Gogol’s Selected Passages, An
Author's Confession, and in various letters, where he speciously
endeavors to “update” his earlier works in terms of his altered
views—that in his heroes lie really exposed the banality of his
own soul and thus his readers, in laughing at his characters, were
actually laughing at him which enabled him to free himself of
odious features; that his works were not so much a reflection of
social vices of society as of his own vices, for he sought self­
chastisement or to be chastised by others because his soul was an
unworthy receptacle of divine inspiration. Finally, critics main­
tain that in burning the manuscripts of the continuations of
Dead Souls, one in 1845 and the other shortly before his death
in 1852, Gogol was prompted by a moment of artistic truth,
realizing that the sequel was a failure, although it could just as
cogently be argued that he burned the last version in a moment
of religious self-mortification, urged on bv the preaching of
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 81

his spiritual advisor, Father Matvei, who believed that literature

was the work of the devil.
However, one may approach this difficult problem of the con­
tinuation of Dead Souls with a different perspective and one for
which some evidence exists. That is, despite his illness and
worsening psychotic state, Gogol never lost sight of the total
design of his novel, clearly implicit in the complete first part,
and that his continuation of it, to the extent that we can judge
his efforts on the basis of the extant fragmentary second part, is
consistent with this design and is effectively realized, without
any marked failing of artistic power.
A clear hint of the future development of his hero occurs in
the last chapter of the first part where Gogol treats the subject
of passions. He writes that there are good passions which bring
boundless bliss, but there are evil passions, and one of them has
taken hold of Chichikov—an insignificant urge in a man “born
for better deeds, forcing him to forget high and sacred duties
and to see in worthless baubles something great and holy.”
If this intention is kept in mind, certain puzzling features of
Chichikov’s personality and behavior in the first part of the
novel are easily clarified. For example, Gogol’s baffling stress on
Chichikov’s attractive personal aspects and dormant moral
capacities was deliberate, for he intended to suggest the possibil­
ity of his later moral reformation, to emphasize even this early
that so striking a change was not at all alien to the logic of the
developing personality of his scamp of a hero.
In short, the extensive design of the novel was hardly an after­
thought, as is sometimes supposed, inspired by public reaction to
the published first part and Gogol’s mounting religious mania
and morbid psychopathic condition. If he designed the proposed
three parts of Dead Souls to parallel the Inferno, Purgatory, and
Paradise of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the first part of the novel is
Chichikov’s inferno and its final chapter announces that the
82 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

hero’s “existence held the secret of what would later bring him
to his knees and reduce him to ashes before the wisdom of
heaven. . . .” And Chichikov is reduced to ashes, figuratively
speaking, at the end of the fragmentary second part, where also
the theme of the “wisdom of heaven” is caught up in the Chris­
tian precepts of old Murazov who prepares Chichikov for his
new life.
One might deplore a certain moral emphasis in the continua­
tion as a betrayal of Gogol’s major talent as a humorist, which
would amount to ignoring the moral element in his early works
and the humor in the second part of Dead Souls, as well as the
enriching influence of time and maturity on the artistic growth
of an author. And though one might also question the judgment
involved in Gogol’s total design for Dead Souls and the baleful
influence of his religious “sickness” on the sequel, there can be
no doubt of the sincerity of his tremendous spiritual struggle.
Whether such an experience was inevitably inconsistent with
artistic fulfillment is purely a matter of opinion. Gogol tells us in
An Author's Confession that in order to portray positive aspects
of Russian life he had to have an intimate knowledge of the hu­
man soul, and that this could be achieved only by a study of the
soul’s greatest master—Christ. In his self-appointed mission to
reintroduce the teaching of Christ through the medium of artis­
tic literature, Gogol was simply a predecessor of Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy. Indeed, his religious experience bears some simi­
larity to that of Tolstov, who continued to create great fiction
after his spiritual revelation although many regarded him as
insane.
Fluctuating between the claims of personal religious devotion
and those of literature, Gogol’s struggle to make one serve the
other undoubtedly intensified his neurotic state, a condition that
mav well have driven him in 1845 to burn nearly all that he had
written of the second part of Dead Souls. But it would be a mis­
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 83

take to imagine that thereafter he succumbed entirely to the

inner turmoil of his mind. Rejecting his spiritual advisor’s plea to
seek calm by retiring from the world, Gogol once again took up
the task of continuing his novel. We have glimpses of him at this
time recopying sections of the second part of Dead Souls with
pleasure and ardor, laughing over funny passages, and asserting
that he never felt better. Almost to the end of his life Gogol did
not lose faith in the power of literature to serve the moral and
Christian destiny of Russia.

What has survived of the second part of Dead Souls is not so

much of a “fragment” as its usual cursory critical handling
would indicate. In the Gogol edition of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences, this “fragment” runs to slightly more than half the
length of the completed first part.
If the transformation of the cunning rogue Chichikov into a
positively good man, like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The
Idiot, would seem to be a more suitable task for a Salvation
Army worker than a literary artist, the process is not exactly
foreign to the experience of life or, for that matter, the en­
deavors of novelists. The fact is that Gogol does not attempt
to describe this process until the very end of the second part of
Dead Souls, and there Chichikov is represented as merely experi­
encing a change of heart because of the misfortunes he has suf­
fered. The real transformation was to take place in the third
part, of which nothing has come down to us, and hence the bulk
of the fragmentary second part is devoted to a continuation of
Chichikov’s efforts to lengthen his list of purchases of dead souls.
If in these efforts one expects more of the gusto and gro-
tesquerie of the first part, then there is bound to be some dis­
appointment. But it must be realized that such an emphasis was
84 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM
quite out of place in terms of Gogol’s overall plan of the novel.
In the second part the quality of the realism changes. There is
less stress on the fantastic, more on actuality. A different set of
characters and different experiences in the context of an equally"
real but different slice of Russian life were necessary to bring
about the slow dawning of a Christian moral conscience in
Chichikov. And an element of didactic moralizing was inevi­
table, but it is no more offensive in this scheme of things than it
was later in some of the greatest novels of Turgenev, Dostoev­
skv, and Tolstoy.
Throughout most of the fragment there is no falling off in
the further characterization of Chichikov. He pursues his travels,
now in southern Russia, with Petrushka and Selifan, still bent on
buying up dead serfs and an estate. His initial encounter is with
Tentetnikov, the first thoroughly" honest landowner to appear
in the novel and a brilliantly realistic portrayal. The image may
have been suggested by Pushkin’s Onegin and certainly" looks
forward, in some of its traits, to Goncharov’s Oblomov.
Tentetnikov, like Prince Nekhlyudov in Tolstov’s later story,
A Landlord's Morning, tries to run his own estate only" to dis­
cover that the peasants do not understand him any more than he,
with all his book knowledge, understands them. In his failure,
he slips into complete inactivity" and boredom, weakly" justifying
himself by endless plans to write a book which he never man­
ages to begin.
Chichikov next boldly" calls at the magnificent neighboring
estate of Tentetnikov’s friend, General Betrishchyov, where, as
always, his gracious deportment makes him a welcome guest.
Only once does he slip in lying to his host that Tentetnikov is
writing a book about generals. When the host demands to know
what general in particular, Chichikov in confusion answers
“about generals in general.” The wealthy, pompous Betrish­
chyov, drawn in Gogol’s best caricaturing manner, readily be­
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 85

lieves Chichikov’s fabrication that an old uncle has offered to

leave him in his will three hundred serfs if the nephew can
match them with an equal number. And when Chichikov ex­
plains that it would be a good joke if he met the demand with
dead serfs, the general laughs uproariously and at once offers to
help him accumulate them.
Friends who heard Gogol read from a much longer version of
the second part than has survived have left enthusiastic accounts
of further developments in the characterizations of the general
and Tentetnikov, who becomes betrothed to Betrishchyov’s
daughter, is exiled to Siberia for a political offense, and marries
his beloved who follows him there. These accounts arc, in part,
supported by extant discarded fragments of the longer version.
Betrishchyov falls in with Chichikov’s suggestion that he visit
the estates of the general’s relatives in the surrounding country­
side, apparently with the intention of procuring more dead
souls. This device provides occasions for encounters with a
group of landed gentry that parallels the amazing group in the
first part of the novel. The contrast is striking for now Gogol
has a different purpose to serve. The moral unpleasantness of the
first group is replaced by moral goodness in the second, al­
though each is a type and has his oddities and failings which
reflected those Gogol professed to see in the whole class. It
would be hard to find the likes of the first group anywhere in
Russian literature, but reasonable facsimiles of the second appear
frequently in later fiction. They are realistically individualized,
occasionally flecked with comic caricatured traits, but they
never possess the grotesque features of the first group. They in­
clude the gloriously described mountain of fat Petukh, the type
of wasteful landowner who lives only to eat; the intelligent
Platonov who is utterly bored with everything and especially
with the idea of managing his estate; the cracked Colonel
Koshkorvov, an addict of foreign expertise in efficiency and
86 I NTHO D UCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

agriculture, who compels Chichikov to file his request for dead

serfs in the estate office, Bureau of Reports and Petitions, from
which comes the reply that there arc no dead souls for souls arc
immortal, and that anyway all the serfs on the estate have al­
ready been mortgaged twice over; arfd Khlobuyev, a highly cul­
tured landowner who has allowed his estate to fall into ruins
simply because he lacks the will to do anything about it.
The one exception to this group is Kostanzhonglo, obviously
Gogol’s answer to what he regards as the national weaknesses
of the whole class of landed gentry. It is at this point that Gogol
first introduces a didactic moralizing clement in Dead Souls.
Kostanzhonglo is a model, self-made estate owner who has
achieved remarkable success and much wealth through hard
work and business acumen. He willingly offers the enraptured
Chichikov an exposition of his methods and philosophy of life.
In the course of stressing the doctrine of hard work, honesty in
all dealings, and the charm of country existence, he attacks the
stupidity, laziness, and lack of thrift of Russian landowners and
the waste, corruption, and snobbishness of those who desert
their estates for the city. In condemning the growing tendency
of landowners to substitute for Russian initiative the latest Euro­
pean ideas and agricultural techniques, he echoes the Slavophils,
and his insistence that the farmer’s simple existence is the only
natural life and that on the land man is morally purer, nobler,
and higher, he anticipates the thinking of Tolstov. In fact, some
of the views and agricultural practices of Kostanzhonglo reap­
pear in Tolstov’s future characterizations of Levin in Anna
Karenina and Nikolai Rostov in War and Peace.
Chichikov is in ecstasies over these revelations and regards
Kostanzhonglo as the most intelligent man he has ever met.
Though he drcams of owning such a model estate and managing
it in this expert manner, his mind is primarily concerned with
profits, with how his wealthy host “rakes it in” as he phrases it.
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 87
When he puts the question on how he can get rich quickly on
the land, his host harshly tells him that he must work not only
for his own prosperity but for that also of all around him. How­
ever, Chichikov confesses his inability to believe that one can
acquire a fortune without sin, but his host assures him that it can
and must be done by the most honest and just means, by starting
with kopecks at the bottom and working with and getting to
know the common people.
On Kostanzhonglo’s advice and with a loan from him and
Platonov, Chichikov buys the bankrupt estate of Khlobuyev.
After the purchase he reflects on the “patience and work” he
will need to develop his estate. He had grown to know such
virtues, he ponders, ever since he wore baby clothes, but he won­
ders whether he possesses them now in middle age. Other less
commendable ways of exploiting his property occur to him, and
the thought even flits through his cunning brain that he might
bolt and get out of paying his loans. As he drives away from his
estate, this man, who had traveled over much of Russia schem­
ing, planning, contriving, obsessed by what Gogol calls an evil
passion, glories in the fact that he now owns land, property, and
serfs, not just imaginary serfs, but real, existing ones, and he be­
gins to jump up and down on his carriage seat, rubbing his
hands, winking at himself, and then, putting his fist to his
mouth, he blows a march on it as on a bugle.
This measure of success, however, fails to work a moral
change in Chichikov. On the contrary, it intensifies his instinct
to accumulate more in dishonest ways. At this point five or six
chapters which must have followed have not survived, but their
story line may be roughly reconstructed from hints in the last
extant section of the second part of the novel. Chichikov ap­
parently visits other landowners, obtains more dead souls, and
makes the acquaintance of the fabulously wealthy Murazov, who
is Kostanzhonglo’s ideal of a man who amasses a fortune hon­
88 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

estly by hard work, uses it to help others, is deeply religious, and

lives according to Christian ideals.
Then it appears that Chichikov takes up residence in one of
the principal cities of the province and duplicates, on a more
elegant and expansive scale, the social success he achieved in the
town of N. in the first part of the novel. If anything, the city of­
ficials are more corrupt than those in the town of N., and it seems
that Chichikov becomes involved with them in fraudulent ac­
tivities, one of which is arranging the falsification, to his own ad­
vantage, of the will of the rich old aunt of Khlohuyev. In all
these manipulations he has acquired a sum of three hundred
thousand roubles, two estates, and a long list of dead serfs.
The last section of the fragment
* opens with Chichikov pre­
paring to set out on his travels again before the law catches up
with him. While he is admiring himself in the mirror in a new
suit of silky material in his favorite lingonberry red, the police
arrive. Brought before the Governor General of the province,
who had arrived to clean up the city’s scandalous corruption,
and confronted with accusations and proofs of wrongdoing,
Chichikov’s poise vanishes and he is reduced to an abject, cring­
ing seeker for mercy. He ends his pathetic plea: “My whole life
was like a whirlwind or a ship tossed among the waves at the
mercy of the winds. I am a human being, Your Highness!” But
this uniquely honest official promptly sends him to prison.
In his dirty, stinking cell, the purgatory that Gogol has des­
tined for him, Chichikov is visited by the kind, religiously
minded Murazov, who sees in him admirable qualities that have
been wasted in a blind pursuit of property. In his utter despair
Chichikov does not so much try to justify as to explain his be­
havior to Murazov. The statement illuminates further Chichi-
* This final section, apparently an unfinished last chapter of the second
part, was apparently the only section of the 1845 burned manuscript that
survived. The other chapters that have been summarized here belong to a
later version of the second part of the novel.
 Gogol—Live or Dead Souls 89

kov’s amoral personality as Gogol had conceived it from the

very beginning of the novel: “I can claim that I earned my
kopecks with bloodsweating patience, by toil, toil, and not by
robbery or by absconding with public funds as some people do.
And why did I save my kopecks? In order to spend the re­
mainder of my days in comfort; in order to be able to leave
something to my children whom it was my intention to acquire
for the good of my country. That is why I wished to save. I’ve
been a little crooked, I won’t deny it, I have been crooked. That
can’t be helped now. But I became crooked only when I saw
that I could not get anywhere along a straight road and that the
crooked road led more directly to the goal. But I toiled and used
my wits. If I stole, I did so from the rich. But what about all
those scoundrels who hang around the courts, taking thousands
of roubles from public funds, robbing the poor, stripping the last
kopeck from those who have nothing! . . .”
Is Gogol telling us here that in a country of crooks the way to
hell is paved with good intentions? Is this the purpose he had in
mind when he first hit upon the vast design of Dead Souls—to
present Chichikov as a kind of Russian Everyman, transgressing
the moral and civil laws of the land, to take him through stages
of crime and punishment, and in the end to lead him to redemp­
tion as a object lesson to his countrymen to go and sin no more?
Was Gogol, dealing with a lesser but more typical Russian crim­
inal than Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, anticipating
Dostoevsky’s doctrine of salvation by suffering? However that
may be, the good Murazov, after delivering Chichikov a sermon
on Christian ethics, obtains his release and sends him on his way
with the final practical advice to find a quiet retreat as near as
possible to a church and a community of simple people, and then
marry and forget the noisy world and its temptations. “I will,
I will!” the grateful Chichikov cries. And Gogol adds, as
Chichikov once more sets off on his travels. “He was no longer
go 1 NT HODUCTION TO H USS 1 A N » E A L IS M

the former Chichikov. He was like the ruin of the former

Chichikov. The inner state of his soul might be compared with a
building that has been taken to pieces in order to make out of it
something entirely new. . . .” In short, Chichikov, who had
traversed the long road of his inferno and purgatory, was now
prepared to seek his salvation bv good deeds—the paradise of the
unwritten third part of Dead Souls.
It seemed desirable to dwell at some length on this substantial
fragment, so often scanted by critics, not only to demonstrate
the impressive scope of the total conception of Dead Souls and
the profoundly unified and realistic treatment of its remarkable
hero, but also to suggest that if this second part had only come
down to us in complete and finished form, its artistic impact
would probably have been as great as that of the famous first
part.
Ill • DOSTOEVSKY

“A Realist in the Higher Sense”

Speaking for his own generation of fiction writers, Dostoevsky
is reported to have declared, although the statement may be
apocryphal: “We have all sprung from Gogol’s Overcoat'' and
with an important qualification to be mentioned later, this gen­
eralization could stand. On the strength of Dostoevsky’s first
story, Poor Folk (1846), Belinsky had designated him an adher­
ent of the “Natural School,” a new trend in realism which, ac­
cording to Belinsky, had been started by Gogol. Actually, this
label was first used by Faddei Bulgarin in the early 1840’s to dis­
parage writers who imitated Gogol’s lowly characters and his
satire of government bureaucracy. With scorn Belinsky pointed
out the immeasurable chasm that separated Bulgarin’s picaresque
novel Ivan Vyzhigin, in 1829, and Gogol’s Dead Souls, in 1842.
The difference was that between a clever hack writer and a
literary genius, between a period floundering in prose fiction
and one that had acquired a sense of direction and momentum
that carried the movement to the end of the century and even
beyond into the Soviet period.
The adjective “Natural” was obviously used by Belinsky as a
synonym for “realistic,” a word that had not yet come into
9i
92 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

vogue in Russian literary criticism. What he had in mind was the

old-fashioned imitation of nature—a fiction that was not rhetori­
cal or idealizing but one based on a faithful representation of
life. The Natural School was in no sense an anticipation of the
Naturalism of Zola, who proposed to substitute novels of ob­
servation for novels of imagination in which the form would be­
come a kind of scientific laboratory where the writer conducted
objective, controlled experiments. Although it might occur to
Soviet socialist realists today, as it apparently did to Zola, that
fiction should be informed with a bright affirmation of progress
to be achieved through man’s ability to control his environ­
ment, it would hardly have entered the thoughts of great Rus­
sian realists of the nineteenth century.
Yet similarities and dissimilarities between French and Rus­
sian realism compel notice. The major works of Stendhal, Balzac,
Flaubert, and Zola were known in Russia and to a limited extent
influenced novelists. Dostoevsky paid eloquent tribute to Balzac
and his first published effort was a translation of Eugénie
Grandet, although he no doubt found the works of Victor
Hugo, Eugene Sue, and especially George Sand more to his
liking. Bv the end of the nineteenth century his own novels
began to influence French fiction and by the twentieth thev
played a major role in the development of the literary intel­
ligence of France.
Belinsky did not live long enough—he died in 1848—to grasp
that French realistic fiction was fundamentally the characteristic
expression of bourgeois society. One of his few lapses in critical
discernment was his failure to appreciate the worth of Balzac,
who has been described as “the sociologist of the novel.” On the
other hand, he seemed determined to turn Gogol and his fol­
lowers, including Dostoevsky, in the new Natural School into
sociologists of the Russian novel. In June 1841 he wrote his
friend V. P. Botkin: “I have developed a sort of wild, frenzied
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense" 93

fanatical love for freedom and independence of human person­

ality which are possible only in a society founded on truth and
virtue.” And three months later he informed Botkin: “And so, I
am now at a new extreme—the idea of socialism—which has be­
come for me the idea of ideas. . . .”*
Belinsky gathered under the umbrella of the Natural School
the unusually rich outpouring of fiction during the two years
1846-47, all of it, with one exception, consisting of the first
works of new young writers. The list included Dostoevsky’s
Poor Folk and the first stories of Turgenev’s Sportsman's
Sketches, as well as A. I. Herzen’s Who is to Blame?, A. V.
Druzhinin’s Polinka Saks, I. A. Goncharov’s A Common Story,
D. V. Grigorovich’s The Village and Anton Goremyka, and A.
F. Veltman’s Adventures from the Sea of Life. Belinsky evalu­
ated this fiction, not as a class-conscious Utopian socialist, but
rather as a sociologically minded critic searching for artistic
treatment, in realistic terms, of the social problems that beset his
country. He approved the rejection of idyllic scenes of happy
peasants and descriptions of lovely exteriors and interiors and
praised the concentration on real peasants, house porters, cab­
bies, and clerks as heroes, pictures of the haunts of the starving
and dens of immorality, and the poverty, suffering, and ugliness
of Russian life.
Though Belinsky maintained the right of art to serve the pub­
lic interest, he always insisted on the primacy of art in this com­
mitment, a fact too often overlooked by Soviet expositors of his
ideas. It is difficult to say how far his political convictions would
have swayed his literary judgment if he had not had to contend
with the severe censorship of the reign of Nicholas I. Alluding
to this fact, he wrote Botkin: “I am ... obliged to act against my
nature and character. Nature has condemned me to bark like a
* Quotations from V. G. Belinsky are from his Selected Philosophical
Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948).
94 1 NT H O D U CT I O N TO RUSSIAN REALISM

dog and howl like a jackal, but circumstances compel me to mew

like a cat and wave niv tail like a fox.” However, he sternly
warned against a spirit of partisanship and sectarianism in liter­
ary criticism. There is a danger, he wrote, that “the influence of
contemporary social problems will vitiate art.” Though he be­
lieved that literature must be an expression of society, he also
affirmed that “art undoubtedly must first be art as such and only
afterwards can it be an expression of the spirit and drift of so­
ciety in a given epoch.” In the case of the novelist, he saw clearly
that there was something beyond realism, something that was in­
volved in the relation of the writer’s world to the real world.
As Belinsky put it: “One must be able to pass the facts of reality
through one’s imagination and endow them with a new life.”
The social factors that concerned writers of the Natural
School were different in degree and intensity from those that
preoccupied French novelists. The defeat of the revolutions of
1848 in Western Europe, the consolidation of the bourgeoisie,
and the swift rise of capitalism created the social patterns of life
that were so strikingly reflected in French realistic fiction. In
Russia there was no revolution, a middle class and capitalism
were still in an early stage of growth, and the resolution of the
age-old problem of serfdom would not take place until the
Emancipation Act of 1861. However, the collapse of the repres­
sive rule of Nicholas I after the debacle of the Crimean War, his
death in 1855, and the reforms which his successor Alexander II
was virtually compelled to introduce, brought about an upsurge
of democratic thinking in the freer climate of opinion that was
then permitted.
The intelligentsia, which had barely begun to sprout in the
suffocating atmosphere of the 1840’s, now positively flourished.
It had split into two rival groups, the Slavophils and the West-
ernizers, and though both believed equally in Russia’s destiny of
future greatness, they offered different programs for its realiza­
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 95

tion. The Slavophils preached a return to indigenous Russian

virtues before the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great. The
Westernizers saw nothing in Russia’s past that was worth re­
viving and advocated that the country intensify its practice of
absorbing the best in Western European education, culture, and
institutions.
Though both groups praised Russia’s supposed freedom from
class strife, it is curious that the Westernizers split into two fac­
tions that suggest a positive class differentiation. For in the late
fifties and in the sixties the raznoch'mtsy, that is, men from vari­
ous strata of society—poor, struggling students, sons of priests,
traders, petty officials, and peasants—who had obtained status
with higher education and membership in the intelligentsia,
tended to oppose the landed gentry among the Westernizers.
In actuality, the basic social and political struggle of the time
was between these aggressive intellectual commoners, the so-
called radical democrats, who demanded the abolition of serf­
dom and progressive changes in the whole feudal agrarian
structure, and the conscience-stricken liberals belonging to the
landed gentry who sought these same goals but hoped to achieve
them without causing any conflict within their own class or with
the bureaucracy or autocracy. This struggle was reflected in
every intellectual and artistic endeavor, and the leading mouth­
pieces of the radical democrats were those two members of the
raznochintsy, the ideological heirs of Belinsky—Chernyshevsky
and Dobrolyubov.
This social pattern, so different from that of the West, pro­
duced a literature with quite a different realistic emphasis. Un­
like French realism, Russian realism, created by novelists from
the landed gentry, failed to come to grips with society as a
whole and it was often much less objective as a reflection of life.
These Russian writers did not stress economic determinants of
human action, like Balzac and Zola, but were more concerned
96 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

with intellectual and moral growth or failure among the landed

gentry. Such emphasis accounts for the unique educative or
“teaching" aspects of Russian realistic novelists whose typical
approach was to join social and historical problems with those of
individual fitness and behavior. If French realism of the nine­
teenth century is preoccupied with the greatness and decline of
the bourgeoisie, the characteristic concern of the Russian is with
the greatness and decline of the landed gentry.
A familiar observation is that political and social criticism in
Russia, driven underground by government persecution and
rigid censorship, was forced to incorporate itself in the dramatic
imagery of fiction and that this in turn affected the quality of its
realism. There is some truth in this observation but it perhaps
ought not to be pushed too far. During the twenty-six years of
the reign of Alexander II (1855-81), a period of reforms and
relatively enlightened censorship, all of the great works of
Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstov were published and the
best of Goncharov and Saltykov-Shchedrin. In these many
novels, including nearly all the masterpieces of Russian fiction,
there is really very little overt criticism of the regime or the so­
cial structure, only an indirect criticism of the stagnation of the
kind of life, mostly that of the landed gentry, which these novel­
ists largely depicted. Yet during these years an expanding and
occasionally violent revolutionary movement developed, there
was much pungent journalism, and Chernyshevsky’s tenden-
tiously radical novel, Wbat Is to Be Done? (1863), appeared. In
fact, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, who nurtured a
higher personal view of art, were opposed to the utilitarian posi­
tion of the radical democrats that literature’s primary function
was to serve the crying needs of the people for social change.
Years later Gorky, evaluating the attitude of these novelists
to the harsh realities of their own day in his article, “Notes on
the Petty Bourgeoisie” (1905), condemned their passive attitude
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 97

toward life, especially Dostoevsky’s doctrine of patience and

Tolstoy’s preaching of nonresistance to evil. “For the two world
geniuses,” he declared, “lived in a country where the abuse of
people had already reached dimensions shocking in their licen­
tious cynicism. Despotism, drunk with its own impunity, turned
the whole country into a dark torture-chamber where servants
of the regime, from the governor to the village policeman, arro­
gantly plundered and tortured millions of people, playing with
them like a cat with a mouse it has caught. And they said to these
tormented people: ‘Do not oppose evil!’ ‘Have patience!’ ”
Chernyshevsky and especially Dobrolyubov drew attention to
this passivity, this do-nothing attitude of the great novelists re­
flected in their pictures of Russian life. Though these two critics
of the fifties and sixties have often been stigmatized for their
antiaestheticism and one-sided insistence on the social signifi­
cance of literature, in which a work of art is always regarded as
a specific objective form of mirroring reality, actually they con­
tributed important insights for our understanding of trends in
the fiction of the time. If Dobrolyubov, in his famous article on
Goncharov’s Oblomov, conceived too narrowly the actionless
hero who sees no purpose in life, there can be no doubt that he
identified a pattern of reality reflected in Russian literature from
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin through the fiction of Gogol, Ler­
montov, Herzen, Goncharov, Turgenev and beyond. Speaking
of the estate of Goncharov’s hero, Dobrolyubov declares: “No,
Oblomovka is our own motherland, her owners are our teach­
ers. . . .” What Dobrolyubov failed to observe was that these
novelists were primarily concerned with portraying faithfully
the life they knew best and with distilling from it, to the greater
glory of their art, the essence of eternal, universal problems and
not the transient news of the day. If these novels may sometimes
be called problem novels, they are so because they are devoted to
humanity’s great problems of good and evil, of life and death.
98 1NT IIODUCT IO N TO RUSSIAN REALISM

Dobrolyubov’s article, however, suggests an orientation in the

development of Russian realism different from that popularized
bv Belinsky as the Natural School. In short, there is good reason
to place Gogol in the Classical School of Russian Realism begun
bv Pushkin and including such great continuators as Lermon­
tov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstov, and Chekhov, to mention
onlv the most prominent names. From Pushkin to Chekhov
something is held in common which is passed on from one writer
to another. The style and form of each seem to make a logical
transition from one to the other, changing of course over the
y ears but essentially the same throughout. They7 all begin with
disharmony7 and attempt to find harmony7. The milieu they treat
is largely7 that of the landoyvning gentry7 in their existence in the
country7 and the citv. In general, the chief protagonists arc inef­
fective, often yveak men and strong-minded women, the pro­
totypes of yvhich yvere Pushkin’s Eugene and Tatyana. Family7
life is the focus of interest, indeed often the only7 solid element
of plot; moral and philosophical problems arc stressed; and the
characters, yvho are tvpically introspective and more or less un­
happy, are treated yvith sympathetic understanding. Description
is emphasized, even to the point of the superfluous, and stvle is
artistically restrained and kept unobtrusive.
Noyv Gogol’s fiction undeniably7 fits into this pattern, but it
also reveals certain sharp differences. The most striking are his
highly individualistic, rhetorical stvle, romantic elements in­
volving much exaggeration, extreme caricaturing, a predomi­
nance of satire, and his occasional introduction of loyvh7 charac­
ters.
There can be no doubt that some of these differences in­
fluenced a development in the forties and for vears later of a
body7 of so-called “philanthropic fiction” that stood apart from
the mainstream of Russian classical realism and concentrated on
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense" 99

humble characters with the deliberate intent of exposing social

evils.
It was this last aspect of Gogol’s art that initially attracted
Dostoevsky, as well as other “philanthropic” writers, and
prompted his statement that he and his immediate contempo­
raries in the forties had all sprung from Gogol’s Overcoat. Apart
from this, however, there is little else in Gogol that reappears in
Dostoevsky. Nor in any significant sense does he have anything
in common with the other writers in the Classical School of Rus­
sian Realism. Some of his earliest critics were quick to point out
this fact. Dostoevsky was unique in Russian realistic fiction and
established his own school.

From the outset of his literary career Dostoevsky seemed

aware that he was adding a new dimension to the conception of
realism in fiction. The Overcoat of Gogol was in Dostoevsky’s
mind when he conceived his first work, the short novel Poor
Folk, but so was Pushkin’s The Stationmaster. In commenting
on both of them in Poor Folk, the hero Devushkin no doubt
states Dostoevsky’s opinion. Devushkin prefers Pushkin’s tale
because the old stationmaster is portrayed in such a simple, life­
like manner, and he dismisses the whole situation in The Over­
coat as an insignificant action drawn from vulgar, everyday life.
Besides, he adds, it is a work of an evil tendency, untrue to life,
“for there cannot have been such a clerk” as Akaky Akakie­
vich.
As early as the end of 1846, by which time Dostoevsky had
published only his first three talcs, Poor Folk, The Double, and
Mr. Prokharchin, some critics had already discerned his original­
ity and the special emphasis of his art. In 1847, for example, V. N.
1OO INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

Maikov wrote: “. . . Mr. Dostoevsky’s creative method is orig­

inal in the highest degree, and he is the last person to be desig­
nated as an imitator of Gogol. . . . Both Gogol and Mr. Dostoev­
sky portray actual society. But Gogol is primarily a social
writer and Mr. Dostoevsky a psychological one. For Gogol the
individual is significant as representative of a certain society or
circle; for Dostoevsky society is interesting only to the extent
that it influences the personality of the individual.”*
As a matter of fact, Dostoevsky’s letters at this time to mem­
bers of his family, as well as other data, suggest that Poor Folk
has more autobiography in it than Gogolian inspiration. What­
ever influence Gogol may have had, Dostoevsky soon sur­
mounted it as is indicated by his amusing parody of the master’s
style and personality in the character of Foma Opiskin in the
early work The Village of Stepanchikovo. From the young
Dostoevsky’s point of view, Gogol’s characterization of Akaky
Akakievich was a mere externalization that sacrificed probing
the soul in depth to brilliant surface effects. It was precisely an
analysis of Devushkin’s soul that Dostoevsky was primarily in­
terested in, as he rather bumptiously informs his brother in a
letter shortly after the publication of Poor Folk-. “They (Belin­
sky and others) find in me a new and original spirit in that I
proceed by analysis and not by synthesis, that is, I plunge into
the depths, and while analyzing every atom, I search out the
whole; Gogol takes a direct path and hence is not so profound as
I. Read and see for yourself. Brother, I have a most brilliant fu­
ture before me!”
On the perceptive but slight foundation of initial com­
mentary, a superstructure of criticism of staggering propor­
tions has been erected over the years, both in Russia and the

* Quoted, with slight alterations, from the translation in Vladimir

Scduro’s Dostoyez’ski in Russian Literary Criticism, 1846-1956 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 11.
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” loi

West, in the course of which every major and minor aspect of

Dostoevsky’s life, thought, and art has been minutely investi­
gated. It is a quality of his genius that he has meant all things to
all peoples, but if his personality, as well as those of the great
characters of his fiction, are still discussed in print as unfathom­
able riddles, it is to be attributed more to the human passion for
conundrums, real or imaginary, than to the dubious complexity
of his life and art.
So numerous and varied have been the Russian critics that
it is possible to organize them into schools identifiable by the
special emphasis of their approaches: comparative-historical,
sociological, political, symbolic, decadent, mystical, psychologi­
cal, linguistic, impressionist, religious, formalist, polyphonic,
early Marxian and later Marxian.
The mass of Western criticism cannot be so precisely differ­
entiated, although a considerable body of writing has accumu­
lated which could be properly designated as a “psychoanalytical
school.” In the West the frequent lack of Russian among investi­
gators has tended to shift the emphasis from studies of form,
style, and language to nonliterary matters. Although a literary
artist is concerned essentially with creating life and not systems
of thought, a surprisingly large amount of Western criticism of
Dostoevsky’s fiction is devoted to appraisals of him as a prophet,
a philosopher, a psychologist, and a political, social, or religious
thinker. Some of this is perhaps understandable in our day of
hard choices in philosophical and political loyalties, for many of
the intellectual problems that have disturbed generations be­
tween two catastrophic world wars and since then are most ef­
fectively dramatized in Dostoevsky’s celebrated novels. This is
one reason why these works are more popular today than they
were in their author’s lifetime. We are aware that Nietzsche,
whose philosophy has been recently resurrected, admitted to
learning his psychology from Dostoevskv. Nietzsche’s central
102 N T H O D U C TIO N TO RUSSIAN H E A LI S M

doctrine that he who wishes to be a creator of good or evil must

first destroy all values resembles closely that of Shigalyov in The
Possessed. Sartre too has paid his tribute to Dostoevsky whose
condemnation of the tyranny of reason may well have furnished
some inspiration for the French thinker’s existentialist belief that
human action becomes simply the expression of a biological urge
to self-assertion. And Camus also, in one of his last books,
L’Honmie révolté, draws heavily upon the agonizing questions
raised in The Brothers Karaviazov in elaborating his thesis that
the mistaken belief in reason in modern times has led to a loss of
all sense of values and to the cynical seizure of power by dic­
tators.
Despite some Western opinions to the contrary, the Soviet
contribution to our understanding of Dostoevsky has been of the
first magnitude. To be sure, the official Party line on him has
been much influenced by the views of Lenin and Gorky. When
asked what he thought about the novels, Lenin is reported to
have replied: “I have no time for such trash.” And Gorky re­
peatedly condemned Dostoevsky’s irrationalism, passivity, and
his doctrine of salvation bv suffering. But both were peculiarly
ambivalent about the novelist and their uncertainty has infected
all subsequent Soviet reaction. Lenin early authorized a statue in
Dostoevsky’s memory, and he is quoted on excellent authority
as esteeming his talent. Nor could Gorkv refrain, in his “Shop
Talk,” from listing Dostoevsky’s works among the greatest
novels of all time, those marvelously fashioned from the
“thought, feeling, blood, and the bitter, burning tears of the
world.”
Though a number of Soviet analyses have tried, quite uncon­
vincingly, to prove that features of Dostoevsky’s novels were
socially predetermined, other Soviet Marxian and non-Marxian
studies—literary, stylistic, linguistic, and ideological—amount to
major contributions. However, the most significant and useful
 Dostoevsky—"A Realist in the Higher Sense” 103
Soviet publications are those which have provided a mass of
fresh factual information on Dostoevsky’s life, his creative art,
and the development of his thought. These include biographical
studies, annotated editions of his fiction and magazine articles,
four volumes of letters, a number of notebooks, and the corre­
spondence, memoirs, and diaries of members of his family and
friends. In addition, a series of investigations on the influence of
native and foreign authors has underscored the fact that Euro­
pean adventure novels more than once served Dostoevsky in the
fantastic incidents and construction of his plots.
To mention the existence of this large body of factual ma­
terial is perhaps salutary, for a comprehensive knowledge of it
helps dissolve the attractive mystery which has nurtured so
much of the highly imaginative criticism, especially in the West,
of Dostoevsky’s life, art, and thought. For it is now possible to
establish the extent to which his fiction is autobiographical, the
prototypes of some of his principal characters, and the influence
of foreign models on the form, plots, and incidents of his novels.
Then the publication of the rich material in the notebooks bear­
ing on the composition of all his major novels takes us into the
writing laboratory of Dostoevsky and allows us to study, in un­
exampled detail, the whole process involved in the creation of
these masterpieces. This process, as well as the abundant infor­
mation about the conception and plans of his works which
Dostoevsky often provides in his letters, may in turn be most
fruitfully checked for fulfillment of artistic intentions against
the finished novels. Finally, the vexed question of the corre­
spondences of Dostoevsky’s thought and ideas and those of his
characters may be substantially resolved by correlating his
views, fully expressed in the pages of his two magazines, Thue
and Epoch, in The Diary of a Writer, and in his letters, with
those of the characters in the novels.
None of this is meant to suggest that one can explain the deep
104 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

mystery of genius in the creation of enduring art but simply

to warn critics of the futility of attempting to do just that. Con­
scious that he was an innovator in fiction, Dostoevsky was not
disposed to keep his future commentators in the dark about it.
He did not consider himself a writer of any definite social group.
Rather he regarded his work as of universal significance, an
effort, he said, “with complete realism to find man in man.” He
defined his innovation as an attempt to represent in fiction
spiritual phenomena above and beyond social practices, to re­
solve the psychological contradictions of man in terms of true
and eternal “humanness.” “They call me a psychologist,” he
wrote in his notebook. “It is not true. I am only a realist in the
higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.”

3
Such a claim reminds one of the observation that the art
of fiction is bv its very nature irrational. Being a realist in the
higher sense may seem a little bit like being more equal than
equal, and it raises a suspicion that Dostoevskv, like some mod­
ern realists in fiction, was more in contact with himself than
with life. Yet he had definite ideas about realism and they seem
to articulate the kind of fiction he wrote.
Compared with his landed-gentry rivals, Turgenev, Goncha­
rov, and Tolstoy, Dostoevskv regarded himself as an intellec­
tual proletarian with an entirely different outlook on life. They
were novelists of the countryside, he was a poet of the citv. In
their works they chronicled the biographies of members of their
class, whereas he wrote about off-center city dwellers living in
off-center worlds of their own. He thought that their realism, at
its best, dealt with the typical and surface features of existence,
at its worst, with the irrelevant, whereas he was completely ini-
 Dostoevsky—"A Realist in the Higher Sense” 105

mersed in the realities of the spiritual life of men. That is, he

preferred to shift the action from the external world to that of
the mind and heart of his characters. For him art was a medium
for conveying the wisdom of life, the emotions of the soul.
Confronting the issue of realism squarely, Dostoevsky wrote
to one of his correspondents: “I have an understanding of reality
and realism entirely different from that of our realists and critics.
My idealism is more real than theirs. Lord! To relate sensibly all
that we Russians have experienced in our last ten years of spir­
itual growth—indeed, do not our realists cry out that this is
fantasy! Nevertheless, this is primordial, real realism!” And by
wav of clarification he wrote another correspondent: “I have
mv own special view on reality in art; what the majority call al­
most fantastic and exceptional sometimes signifies for me the
very essence of reality. ... In every issue of a newspaper you
meet accounts of the most real facts and amazing happenings.
For our writers they are fantastic; they are not concerned with
them; vet they are reality because they are facts.”
In his notebooks and elsewhere Dostoevsky reiterates this
stand that fantastic but actual happenings, usually involving
misfortune, have a deeper reality for the artist because they em­
body a tragic vision that is the quintessence of life. And in The
Diary of a Writer he gives an example of how he and Tolstoy
would differ on this question of realism. There he retells an in­
cident in Tolstov’s Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth of how a
child, in an unhappy moment, thinks of killing himself and of the
consternation this act would cause among his family. Then
Dostoevsky repeats a recent newspaper report of a twelve-vear-
old bov who does commit suicide after having been punished
for doing poorly at school. For Dostoevsky the fantastic, tragic
event is the more real one, not only because it happened, but also
because it challenges the writer to probe al) the psychological
factors that compelled the bov to kill himself.
106 INTIIODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

Certainly “fantastic realism” well characterizes many of the

striking actions of Dostoevsky’s heroes and heroines. He was an
avid reader of newspapers, and he drew on them, as well as upon
Gothic tales and adventure stories, for some of the seemingly
bizarre elements of his plots and the stranger lineaments of his
characters. It gave him no little artistic satisfaction, in terms of
his convictions on “fantastic realism,” to read in a newspaper,
shortly after the appearance of the first part of Crime and Pun­
ishment, an account of the murder of a pawnbroker by a Mos­
cow student under circumstances that resembled closely those
connected with Raskolnikov’s murder of the old pawnbroker.
It is illuminating to observe how Dostoevsky directly trans­
mutes one of these “fantastic facts of reality” into the pure gold
of art. He read in the newspaper of a young woman who, clasp­
ing an ikon to her breast, jumped four stories to her death. The
incident inspired his exquisite tale, A Gentle Creature. Starting
with the suicide, the bare facts of the press release pass through
the alembic of his uncanny analytical imagination as he works
backwards in an effort to build up a frame of action that is con­
sistent with psychological realism and the truth of the tragedy.
Dostoevsky’s literary stvle and method were fairly well
formed by 1849, when he was sentenced to prison in Siberia for
revolutionary activities in connection with the Petrashevskv
Circle. In the course of this first period, besides Poor Folk,
twelve more pieces appeared—sketches, short stories, a novella,
and the unfinished novel Nctochka Nezvanova. Most of the sur­
face aspects of the great literary artist of the future may be de­
tected in these early writings. In one of the short stories, A
Faint Heart, he describes his narrative approach. He begins with
the action, in medias res, avoiding the long build-up in character­
ization or in events so common with his great contemporaries in
fiction. At the outset this technique may cause some confusion
for the reader and it creates at once an atmosphere of foreboding
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense" 107

or expectancy. Chronology and logical sequence are dispensed

with as incidents occur before the conditions governing them;
the relations between characters are told or their behavior de­
scribed before they themselves appear on the scene. The air of
mystery which surrounds his tales at the beginning is largely a
result of these devices; it eventually vanishes and the world of
reality appears. The method, of course, is consciously dramatic
and has led some critics to assert that Dostoevskv actually
blocked out his novels as a dramatist might plan a play, a notion
that loses credibility in the light of the structure, psychological
analysis of the characters, and the length of the novels. The use
of dramatic devices in prose fiction was already an established
technique which Dostoevskv could have learned from foreign
Gothic tales and stories of adventure which he obviously rel­
ished. Even this early in his fiction one perceives detective story
elements, action that develops swiftly unimpeded by long de­
scriptions, and the characters, mostly wretched clerks and poor
students dwelling in the unsavory corners of St. Petersburg, fall
into definite psychological types who live through their feel­
ings, in the chaos of passion.
Dostoevsky spent nearly ten years as a convict at Omsk and
in compulsory service as a soldier in Siberia before he was per­
mitted to return to St. Petersburg and once again resume his
literary career. There was no essential change in his creative
methods, as is commonly maintained, only a steady development
of established techniques. If anything, prison defined and
deepened his creative urges. But his harsh experiences in Siberia
did markedly alter his outlook on life and profoundly influenced
the content and spiritual quality of his fiction. His youthful,
radical yearning for social reform had been sublimated in a re­
newed faith in the teachings of Christ and in the power of the
Orthodox Church to bring surcease to the troubled existence of
Russia. In prison he had constantly read the New Testament, the
io8 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

only book allowed, and it had taught him, along with his own
unhappy experiences, the doctrine of salvation bv suffering.
Shortly after his release, he wrote a woman who had befriended
him as a convict and told her of his new faith, a statement that
illuminates the spiritual change he had undergone: “Here it is:
to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound,
more sympathetic, more reasonable, more manly, and more per­
fect than Christ, and not only is there nothing, but, I tell mvself
with jealous love, there can be nothing. Besides, if anyone proved
to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really was so
that the truth was outside Christ, then I should prefer to remain
with Christ than with the truth.”
The importance of this credo in the development of Dostoev­
sky’s future thought and for the spiritual content of the great
novels to come is self-evident. Finally, in prison he had got to
know the common people of Russia as never before, and in their
natural gifts and their infinite capacity for patient suffering he
saw more hope for the future of Russia than in all the efforts of
the intellectuals. Dostoevsky left Siberia with a mind crammed
with rich material for further study and future writing.

4
Between 1859, when he resumed publishing, and 1862 Dos­
toevsky wrote the long short storv Uncle's Dr coin; a novelette,
The Village of Stepancbikovo; The House of the Dead, a book
based on his prison experience; and his first completed full-
length novel, The Insulted and Injured. The fiction represents a
continuation in form and content of his pre-prison stories but
with some advance in the delineation of character. Though The
House of the Dead, which Tolstov for reasons of his own placed
at the head of his rival’s works, is usually regarded as a piece of
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 109

superb reporting, it is obviously much more than this. In the

grim, detached realism, the selection of detail, and especially in
the imaginative apprehension and psychological analysis of
leading personalities among the convicts, Dostoevsky is every bit
the literary artist. In the early tales he had evinced a passing
interest in the criminal type, such as Bykov in Poor Folk and old
Murin in The Landlady. Now, in The House of the Dead, he
manifests a keen psychological interest in the incorrigible crim­
inal, such as Orlov and Petrov, who kills on instinct rather than
by reason and thus reveals a positive connection between crim­
inality and the dominance of self-will. This more penetrating
understanding of the criminal type served Dostoevskv well in
the creation of similar characters in the great novels.
In 1861, the year Dobrolyubov died, he published a compre­
hensive critical review of all Dostoevsky’s fiction up to that time.
Though the article is essentially a treatment, from the radical-
democratic point of view, of Dostoevsky’s compassion for the
downtrodden “little people,” Dobrolyubov also pointed out the
tendency of the principal characters to fall into two easily recog­
nized types which he called the “embittered” and the “meek.”
And one of these embittered heroes, Golvadkin in Dostoevsky’s
second story The Double, he further described as a “split per­
sonality.”
This early singling out of types, supported later by their rep­
etition in the great novels, has provided a special focus for a
wealth of critical analysis, in which the structural unity and
philosophical ambience of Dostoevsky’s fiction are sometimes
regarded as deriving from the inner significance of type person­
alities. In much of this critical literature nowadays two or even
three well-defined types are recognized—the Double, the Meek,
and the Self-Willed criminal type.
These types, especially the Double with its often puzzling
psychic ambiguities, have attracted psychologists and psvcho-
1 10 1 N T H O 1> U G T 1 O N T () RUSSIA N B E A L I S .M

analysts who have published a number of interesting case studies

which in general attempt to relate the complex behavior pat­
terns of the characters to the unconscious drives of their crea­
tor. In these efforts methods of investigation and conclusions
have varied somewhat. Freud saw Dostoevsky as a victim of
parricidal impulses and a consequent guilt complex reflected in
Ivan and Dmitri Karamazov. P. C. Squires decided that “Dos­
toevsky was an epileptic, schizophrène, paranoid type, compli­
cated by hysterical overlay.” J. Neufeld reached the startling
conclusion that the Slavophilism projected in the novels was
owing to an Oedipus complex which represented Dostoevsky’s
impassioned love for his “mother," the “mother” in this ease
being Mother Russia. W. Stckcl explained the theft of a pair of
pants in the short story The Honest Thief as a transformation
of homosexuality into kleptomania! S. O. Lesser based the fatal
relations of Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Nastasya Filipovna in The
Idiot on the strong homosexual bond between the two men. Of
two investigators of Crime and Punishment, one concludes that
“Raskolnikov was an autistic personality with traces of the
manic depressive,” and the other that his murder of the old
moneylender “was the result of efforts to appease unconscious
guilt due to an incestuous attachment to his sister.”
In The brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky once remarked that
psychology cuts both ways. One suspects that lie would have
happily agreed with Jung’s observation that that which con­
stitutes the essential nature of art must always lie outside psy­
chology’s province. Long before the advent of Freud lie had
become a brilliant amateur psychologist with the profound in­
sights of a literary genius, and before Proust lie had learned to
explore the unconscious in depth, but with an artistic purpose
quite different from that of the great French novelist. While lie
was still doing his enforced military service in Siberia, Dostoev­
sky planned to collaborate with a friend oil the translation of
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” m
the work of a German physician and zoologist C. G. Cams,
Psyche: Zur Eiit'wicklitngsgeschichte der Seele (1846). Though
the project was dropped, Dostoevsky no doubt absorbed ideas
from this book which were later used in his fiction, such as the
theory that an abnormal state of mind may be the gateway to
supernormal experiences, a process which seems to be reflected
in the behavior patterns of Raskolnikov, Myshkin, and Stavro­
gin; the notion of the periodic throwback of conscious activity7
into the unconscious which illuminates the actions of several
characters and is directly echoed in The Idiot by Myshkin; and
the idea that magnetism is the intermarriage of nervous systems
insensibly7 drayving tyvo people together, yvhich may account
for the emphasis Dostoevsky places on the magnetic attraction
of such pairs as Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, Myshkin and
Rogozhin, Pvotr Verkhovensky7 and Stavrogin, and Ivan
Karamazov and Smerdyakov. Then, too, Cams’ theorizing on
the symbolism of dreams may have encouraged Dostoevsky’s
frequent use of this device in his fiction.
In general, hoyvever, Dostoevsky7 seemed to be opposed to
systematic psychology. His method is to dramatize the psycho­
pathic experiences of his characters yvithout indulging in ex­
tended psychological comment. Intuition and self-observation,
as yvell as observation of others, largely7 account for his astound­
ing knoyvledge of the yvorkings of the conscious and uncon­
scious mind. In terms of the recent theory7 of “intentional fal­
lacy” in fiction, yvhich has understandably encouraged psychi­
atric speculation about the creative process, Dostoevsky’s
novels fail to support the proposition that a yvork of art cannot
be ey7aluated according to its manifest intention, that yvhat really7
matters is not yvhat the author intends, but yvhat he actually
yvrites in the finished novel. There is little need to guess at
Dostoevsky’s intentions. They are abundantly7 expressed, in the
case of the major novels, in notebooks, letters, and other docu-
112 INT HODUCTION TO HUSS I A N H E A LISM

mentarv material and they appear to he amply fulfilled in the

printed works.
Some psychoanalytic literary critics admit that it is impos­
sible to realize scientific conclusivcness in such investigations,
since characters in novels arc not real people and biographical
information about their authors is hardly ever sufficiently com­
plete for case-study purposes. Added to this uncertainty is the
fact, which Freud asserted in his study of The Brothers Kara­
mazov, that every author is free to borrow from the treasury
of world literature various standard situations of psychiatric
import.
Despite Dostoevsky’s assertion that he was not a psycholog­
ist but a realist in the higher sense, his fiction conforms in part to
Freud’s description of the psychological novel as one in which
modern writers split up their ego into component egos through
a process of self-observation and in this way’ personify' in many’
heroes the conflicting trends in their own mental life. This defi­
nition, however, fails to suggest Dostoevsky’s artistic skill
in allowing even his most dialectically’ minded Doubles to speak
only’ their own thoughts. Or, it might be better to say, he cre­
ates this illusion.
Though Dostoevsky’s experiences and self-examination enter
into portrayals of the fascinating series of Doubles, he was per­
fectly’ aware of the psvchopathological aspect of the type even
though he lacked the technical refinements of modern novelists
who follow a master such as Freud. As early’ as The Double,
where he carries the development of the type to the extreme
of insanity and of projecting a second self, Dostoevsky’s com­
ments reveal his knowledge of the abnormal manifestations
involved in the characterization of Golyadkin. And A Rave
Youth, written much later and ranked artistically below the
four famous novels, is nevertheless intensely’ interesting for the
student of Doestoevskv’s method and for its direct statements
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 113

on the ambivalence which had dominated many of his charac­

ters up to this point. Speaking of the personality of the major
figure, the Double Versilov, his son Dolgoruky remarks: “It
has always been a mystery, and I have marvelled a thousand
times at that faculty of man ... of cherishing in his soul his
loftiest ideals side by side with the greatest baseness, and all
quite sincerely.” Versilov frankly confesses to such feelings:
“Yes, I am split in two mentally and I am terribly afraid of this.
It is just as though your double were standing beside you; you
yourself are sensible and rational, but this other person beside
you wishes without fail to do something senseless and occa­
sionally something funny, and God knows why; that is, you
want to against your will, as it were; although you fight against
it with all your might, you want to do it.” And at the end of
the novel, his son says of his father’s dualism: “But the Double
I do accept unquestionably. What exactly is a Double? The
Double, at least according to a medical book of a certain ex­
pert ... is nothing other than the first stage of a serious mental
derangement, which may lead to something very bad.”
The part self-observation may have played in the conception
of the Double type is suggested in a letter that Dostoevsky
wrote to a female correspondent who sought his advice on her
dual impulses which, she feared, led her to commit reprehen­
sible acts. He answered: “That trait is common to all. . . . that
is, all who are not wholly commonplace. Nay, it is common
nature, though it does not evince itself so strongly in all as it
does in you. It is precisely on this ground that I cannot but re­
gard you as a twin soul, for your inner duality corresponds
exactly to my own. It causes at once great torment and great
delight. . . . Yes, such duality is a great torment. . . . Do you
believe in Christ and in His Commandments? If you believe in
Him (or at least have a strong desire to do so), then give your­
self wholly up to Him; the pain of your duality will be thereby
ii4 i Nr no»uc r ion to n ussi a n healis m
alleviated, and you will find the true way out—but belief is first
of all in importance.” This is a key statement in support of
Dostoevsky’s complete awareness of what he was about in the
artistic creation of those famous characters that fall into the
category of the Double. And belief-in Christ, as he told his cor­
respondent, was also his solution, however unconvincing, for
the resolution of their tormenting dualism.
In a recent article an expert in psychology has properly
pointed out that the divided selves of Dostoevsky’s Doubles do
not correspond to psychiatric notions of the “split personality,”
nor to the commonly accepted symptoms of schizophrenia.
“Dostoevsky’s consciously ‘split’ characters,” he writes, “do
present classical symptoms of the obsessive-compulsive charac­
ter, however. The ‘split’ is not a separation of selves, it is an
obsessive balancing or undoing of one idea or force with its
opposite.”* This really' seems to describe the invariable state of
mind of the Doubles. They arc men and women obsessed by
contending forces such as love and hate, pride and meekness,
belief in God and disbelief, and the struggle for dominance
determines the actions of the characters and defines their per­
sonalities. At times it appears that the Double combines in its
makeup the traits of the other two types—the Meek and the
Self-willed.
Before Notes from the Underground (1864), the Double
was clearly adumbrated in a number of talcs, but these early'
characters reveal little sclf-knoyvlcdgc of their personalities and
never analyze in any depth their dualistic feelings and convic­
tions. T'hc nameless hero of Notes from the Underground,
however, is a profound analyst of his oyvn ideas and feelings as
* Lawrence Kohlberg, “Psychological zXnalysis and Literary Form: A
Study in the Doubles of Dostoevsky," Daedalus, 92 (Spring 1963), p. 352.
The evidence assembled in this excellent article has been very helpful in
rhe formulation of my own views on the problems connected with
Dostoevsky and psychology.
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 115

well as those of others. He is a “thinking Double” and in this

respect marks a significant advance in Dostoevsky’s essentially
realistic method of characterization.
In fact, this remarkable work, which employs a concentrated
power of psychological analysis unique in literature at that time,
signalizes a turning point in Dostoevsky’s creative art. A se­
ries of happenings in his life shortly before writing Notes from
the Underground probably contributed to its misanthropic
tone. Trips abroad disillusioned him about the political and so­
cial structure there and strengthened his faith in the future
high destiny of Russia if it could be kept free of the material­
istic poison of the West. These experiences parallel a shift from
the mild liberalism he had been expressing in his magazine Time
to the conservatism that shortly appeared in his new magazine
Epoch. Then an unsuccessful love affair with that strange
woman Polina Suslova deeply affected him both emotionally
and creatively. The love-hate feeling of this female Double in
real life enriched his understanding of the type in fiction.
Finally, the death of his wife and older brother, so closely as­
sociated with him in his journalistic endeavors, scarred his mind
at the time of writing Notes from the Underground.
This short work is a kind of prologue to the great novels
to come for it contains their basic motifs in attenuated form.
Its first part is often regarded, on a purely metaphysical level, as
an early and amazing foreshadowing of modern existentialism.
The fullest expression of man’s individuality characterized in all
its most revolting aspects emerges triumphant in the end as a
manifestation of the highest good. Dostoevsky himself was not
an existentialist, but the first part of Notes from the Under­
ground is a remarkable overture to that philosophy in which
may be found the major themes that have concerned existen­
tialist thinkers from Kierkegaard to Sartre.
However, Dostoevsky was writing fiction and not a philo-
116 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN' REALISM

sophical tract. The underground man takes his place among the
Doubles. Every positive human attribute of his nature seems to
inspire its negative quality. He thirsts for power and is power­
less, he desires to torture and be tortured, to debase himself and
debase others, to be proud and to humble himself. He is an
antihero like nearly all Dostoevsky’s major figures, a rebel
against the constituted order of things. These very catchwords
suggest the modernity of Dostoevsky and why he has influ­
enced the novel and thought of our own time. The under­
ground man, for example, would fit very well into the tragic
and absurd condition of life which Sartre allots to man. There
is, of course, an overriding difference in the approaches.
Dostoevsky’s emphasis is on the spiritual life of dislocated man
in a real and acceptable world, whereas the antiheroes of not
a few novelists today arc concerned solely with anxieties and
contradictions of their inner life growing out of daily battle
with an unreal, dislocated world whose irrational responses
seem to leave them no alternatives other than sex and alcohol.
But the underground man, unlike earlier characters of this
type, is fully aware of his dualism and subjects all the contradic­
tions of his distorted personality to a searching analysis. He con­
cludes that his fundamental conflict is based on an opposition
between will and reason. Will negates reason and in turn is
negated by reason. He inveighs against socialists who think that
man can be governed bv rational self-interest, a position that
Dostoevsky himself had taken shortly before in an article in his
magazine. Reason no more determines the path of man’s life
than the path of history, argues the underground man.
There is some evidence that Dostoevsky had offered a substi­
tute for the evil of reason in Notes from the Underground and
that it had been deleted bv the censor. However, he had earlier
advocated this substitute in his magazine article, “Winter Notes
on Summer Impressions,” namely, man must have religion to
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense" 117

fall back on. That is, the underground man would have to
achieve faith in a love of Christ in order to find peace of mind
and ultimate salvation. This way out is plainly indicated in the
second part of Notes from the Underground where the prosti­
tute, who possesses pity and love, can be saved, whereas the
underground man has only reason to fall back on and hence is
cut off from life.
It is little wonder that Nietzsche’s “joy was extraordinary,”
as he expressed it, when he first read Notes front the Under­
ground, and he discovered in it “music, very strange, very un­
Germanic music.” No work of fiction had ever previously
analyzed the complexities of the human personality so com­
pletely. Moreover, in Notes front the Underground, Dostoev­
sky had taken a long step forward in intellectualizing his favor­
ite type character, the Double, and in involving it with philo­
sophical, political, and social ideas of great importance in his
future novels.

5
In the series of celebrated novels beginning with Crime and
Punishment (1866), Dostoevskv stressed a feature that had
been only hinted at in his earlier writings and was new in Rus­
sian and European fiction in general. Ideas now began to play
the central role in his novels. His chief figures are often em­
bodied ideas and he appears to be concerned not so much with
the life of his characters as with the ideas they represent. Such a
process, of course, leads to the disintegration of the ordinary
world of the novel and in its place we have a world of men and
women organized according to the ideas that possess them. The
characters have no biography, for they are exempt from the
cause and effect of daily life and the only verisimilitude is their
inner word about themselves.
118 I NT H O D U CT I O N TO RUSSIAN REALISM

In Russia in the 1920’s excellent critical studies were devoted

to the significance of ideas in the structural complex of Dos­
toevsky’s fiction, hut all were agreed that he wrote not philo­
sophical or purpose novels, hut rather novels about ideas. The
essential conflict in these investigations was whether Dostoev­
sky synthesized the ideas of his characters into a philosophical
position of his own or whether he refrained from resolving
their conflicting ideas, allowing them to coexist as a perpetual
dramatization of the internal contradictions of man. In the latter
case the assumption would he that the hero was given complete
freedom to develop his ideas because Dostoevskv was not inter­
ested in him as a typification of a wav of life, as an object of
reality, but only as a special point of view on the world and on
himself.
If these scholars had been able to make full use of Dostoev­
sky’s notebooks, letters, and journalistic writings, the extent of
his conscious control over the characters and ideas they » embody
would have been much clarified. To be sure, the character’s
integrity and self-awareness of ideas deriving from his total
personality are always artistically sustained, but it is a mistake
to imagine that Dostoevskv did not consciously work out in
advance a concrete system of thought for a major character,
although he may have elaborated the plan set down in his note­
books and letters in the course of writing the novel.
For example, in the notebooks and in letters to his pub­
lisher Katkov, Dostoevskv provides us with a comprehensive
outline of Crime and Punishment and much information about
the nature of Raskolnikov and the basic ideas he embodies. He
wishes to present his hero at the moment of the birth of a ter­
ribly destructive idea which is the fruit of his rebellion against
society. Raskolnikov’s theory of ordinary and extraordinary
people and the crime that results from it are products of what
Dostoevskv’ considered the distorted thinking of the young
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense" 119

revolutionary-minded generation. They arc people who think

it possible to organize a social system on a rational plan, that
reason can take the place of human nature, of the living process
of life. In his journalistic writings, as well as in Notes fronr the
Underground, Dostoevsky had already expressed a negative
position on these claims which he associated with the preten­
sions of socialism, for he believed that life would not submit to
mechanical rules or the living soul to logic. '1'his is the central
idea of Crbne and Puirisbinent—to portray a man who is the vic­
tim of “incomplete ideas’’ going the rounds, as lie explained in
his letter to Katkov, a person who tries to order his life on a self-
willed plan of reason. In addition, Dostoevsky further explains
to his publisher, he wants to demonstrate through his hero that
the legal punishment inflicted for a crime intimidates a criminal
infinitely less than lawmakers think, partly because the guilty
person morally demands punishment.
In the notebooks as Dostoevsky analyzes the idea in terms of
the hero, he recognizes a persistent ambiguity deriving from
the dualism of Raskolnikov whom lie has cast as one of his
thinking Doubles. Of this there can he no doubt. In the novel
Razumikhin says of his friend Raskolnikov: “In truth, it is as
though he were alternating between two opposing characters.”
And a striking jotting in the notebook nor only identifies the
fact of dualism in the characterization, but also reflects Dos­
toevsky’s image of the Doubles as containing the opposing
traits of two other character types—the Meek and the Self-
Willed. For he writes: “Svidrigailov is desperation, the most
cynical. Sonya is hope, rhe most unrealizable. (These must be
expressed by Raskolnikov himself.) l ie is passionately attached
to them both.”
It is rhe inner contradiction of self-will and submissiveness
in Raskolnikov’s nature which, when expressed in action, cre­
ates rhe intense drama of rhe novel. 'This dualism undermines
120 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

his self-willed theory of murder and in the end leaves him com­
pletely confused about his motive for killing the old pawn­
broker—a miracle of psychological perception on Dostoevsky’s
part. And after the murder Raskolnikov is similarly torn be­
tween Sonya’s path of submissivencss to expiation of his crime
and his self-willed pride which convinces him that the murder
was a crime only because he failed in his purpose.
Interestingly enough, the notebooks indicate that Dostoev­
sky, having originally launched his hero with a single-minded
motive for committing the murder, also got momentarily lost in
Raskolnikov’s dualistic crosspurposes. In a fragment of dialogue
in the notes Raskolnikov argues a specific motivation for the
crime: “There is one law—a moral law. Agreed, agreed! Well,
sir, and this law? Why, if conscience does not accuse me, I seize
authority, I acquire power—whether money or might, and not
for evil. I bring happiness. Well, then, because of a paltry
screen, to stand and look over to that side of the screen, to envy
and hate and to stand still. That’s ignoble.” On the margin,
opposite the passage, Dostoevsky wrote: “Devil take it! This is
partly right.”
Similarly, Raskolnikov’s arguments for and against revealing
his crime and accepting punishment obviously began to raise
doubts in Dostoevsky’s mind that the denouement which he
had long since conveyed to his publisher was the artistically
logical one. Entries in the notebooks show his fluctuations on
this score. Should Raskolnikov, a facet of whose nature is en­
dowed with satanic pride, seek the way out of suicide, the only
possible solution of the wholly self-willed character Svidrigai-
lov? And under the heading “Conclusion for the novel,” Dos­
toevsky set down in one of the notebooks: “Raskolnikov goes
to shoot himself.” But in the end Dostoevsky sacrificed this
aesthetically' satisfying conclusion to the original idea of the
novel which was his own idea rather than that of his hero—
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 121

Raskolnikov must reveal his crime, accept his punishment, and

having discovered faith in Christ, will learn in prison that hap­
piness cannot he achieved by a reasoned plan of existence but
must be earned through suffering. Dostoevsky had applied the
balm, salvation by suffering, which he had learned in his own
prison experience, to resolve the dualism of his hero and dis­
sipate the dangerous “incomplete ideas” which had led him to
crime as, in a sense, they had once led Dostoevsky to commit a
crime against the state. It is a most lame and impotent conclu­
sion.
From this point on the remaining novels reveal a pattern of
uniformity in dramatized ideas, type characters, and Dostoev-
skian philosophy cast against a background of extraordinary
diversity of action. There is no lack of individualization in
heroes and heroines, but increasingly all reality becomes only an
element in their self-knowledge. As in the case of Crime and
Punishment at the end, the other masterpieces irresistibly reach
out more and more to the chief question that consciously or un­
consciously profoundly troubled Dostoevsky’s mind—the ex­
istence of God.

A long stay abroad with his second wife (1867-71) served to

crystallize Dostoevsky’s opinions concerning the religious and
political opposition between Russia and Western Europe. Many
letters back home show his growing conviction of the mission
of Russia and its Orthodox Church to save Western civiliza­
tion whose decay, he imagined, was being brought about by
bourgeois materialism and socialist chicanery. He worried
acutely over the influence of Western radicalism on revolution­
ary-minded Russian youths. During these years and later he
dreamed of a vast artistic work that would involve a treatment
122 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

of the theme of the ultimate salvation of a civilization at war

with itself, in which Russia and its Christian faith would be the
instruments of grace. While he was writing The Idiot, he
worked away under the shadow of this cosmic idea which, he
felt, would require three to five connected novels bearing the
general title, “The Life of a Great Sinner.” Though he never
wrote this huge work, for which he has left behind some rough
plans and notes, he borrowed from it in creating several novels
in which he depicted the tragedy and pain Russia would have
to suffer before it could achieve world leadership and the salva­
tion of Europe envisaged in the sweeping design of “The Life of
a Great Sinner.” Facets of the design shine most brightly in
The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, but The Idiot
must be regarded as an initial contribution to a fictional project
concerned with an artistic synthesis of universal salvation.
In this work the towering love-hate motif involving Myshkin,
Rogozhin, Ganva, Nastasya, and Aglaya; the rebellion against
God of the ambivalent Terentev, whose philosophizing de­
velops that of Raskolnikov and anticipates the ideas of Kirilov
in The Possessed and Ivan Karamazov; the noisy protests of the
young radicals; and the confusing activities of the Epanchins,
Ivolgins and their hangers-on—all tend to obscure the central
idea of The Idiot. Its successful realization was regarded bv
Dostoevsky as the principal aim of the work. He wrote his
friend Strakhov: “In the novel much was composed in haste,
much is prolix and has not succeeded, but something has suc­
ceeded. I do not stand behind the novel. I stand behind my
idea.”
Through many pages of eight separate outlines of The Idiot
in the notebooks, one may follow Dostoevsky’s frustrating
search for the identity of his hero. Without a clear image of
him and the idea he represented the novel remained mired in
false starts. Interestingly enough the original conception of
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 123

Myshkin is that of a Double and his dominant traits resemble

those of Rogozhin in the novel rather than those of the Idiot
Prince. In one of the notes in the sixth plan Dostoevsky pin­
points his chief characteristic as “The dualism of a profound
nature.” But certain Christian features are opposed to the titan-
ism and morbid pride of his dual personality. In the plan Dos­
toevsky developed these softening traits much further in still
another character whom he later discarded. This preoccupation
with Christian attributes very likely caused him to connect
them with the image of the hero which so persistently evaded
him. For toward the end of the seventh plan a sudden inspiration
flashed through Dostoevsky’s brain. He set down a cryptic
note, pregnant with meaning in terms of the finished character­
ization of the hero of the novel: “He is a Prince. An Idiot Prince
(he is with the children)?!”
Actually, Dostoevsky claimed that the idea represented by
Myshkin had been in his mind for a long time, and apparently it
required only a clear image of his hero to bring it to realization.
“The chief idea of the novel,” he wrote his niece, “is to portray
the positively good man. There is nothing in the world more
difficult to do, and especially now. . .. The good is an ideal, but
this ideal, both ours and that of civilized Europe, is still far from
having been worked out. There is only one positively good
man in the world—Christ.” Further, for Dostoevsky the idea
was also concerned with the larger problem of ethical and
moral good in the Russian nature.
Dostoevsky was aware of the difficulty of convincingly por­
traying a character endowed with the perfect moral beauty of
Christ, for he realized that human perfection in any form did
not exist in real life. We find him confronting the problem in
the notebooks and offering his own solution: “How to make the
figure of the hero appealing to the reader? If Don Quixote and
Pickwick, as virtuous figures, succeed in gaining the sympathy
124 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

of the readers because they are laughable, the hero of the novel,
the Prince, if he is not laughable, then he has another appealing
feature—innocence!” In the further interests of realism, Dos­
toevskv also felt it wise to introduce the human flaws of epi­
lepsy and idiocy in the otherwise perfect white marble surface
of Myshkin’s moral beauty.
Myshkin is the first of the Meek characters to become the
hero of a novel, and unlike the others—Sonya Marmeladova,
for example—he has the capacity to analyze his feelings and
thoughts and develop what might be called the Meek person­
ality’s philosophy of life. He has a kind of sixth sense, mentioned
by Dostoevskv in his notes, which enables him to see through
the thoughts of others. His social and religious views, in their
positive or negative meaning, anticipate those of characters in
The Possessed, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karawiazov,
and they are very close to Dostoevsky’s if we may judge from
the personal opinions he expressed in letters and journalistic
articles. In brief, Myshkin asserts that the authoritarian path of
both the Roman Catholic Church and socialism leads to the de­
struction of society in which they seek to impose the equality
of despotism. Myshkin, on the other hand, calls on all to accept
the Russian Orthodox faith which, he insists, aims to bring
about universal harmony by preaching submission and service
to one another and thus achieve a true equality.
Like all the Meek characters, Myshkin is passive, but the
greedy, sensual, sinning society in which he moves is intensely
active. His influence is exercised solely through the spiritual
perfection of his own life and the force of his radiant person­
ality. Despite his great religious faith, which calls for an en­
raptured unification with the highest synthesis of life, he fails
in his mission. He finds it difficult to comprehend the passionate
love Nastasya and Aglaya offer him, for what his morally per­
fect nature seeks is a spiritual, not an earthly, union of man and
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 125

woman. At the conclusion of the novel nearly all the sinning

people he has influenced arc rendered unhappy. Nastasva has
been murdered, and Myshkin himself has lapsed into idiocy.
Perhaps Dostoevsky intended the outcome to symbolize Christ’s
failure on earth among those of little faith.
Unlike The Idiot, The Possessed is not dominated by a cen­
tral, all-pervading idea, or perhaps it might be more correct to
say that if Dostoevsky began the novel with such an idea, it
got lost in the conflicting action of the work. It was the only
novel he ever wrote with a deliberate didactic purpose in mind,
and its inadequacies may be attributed to this fact.
In the second half of 1869 Dostoevsky began to write a novel
the subject of which we have no way of knowing. Shortly after
he started he was electrified to read in the press of the murder
of a young Moscow student who belonged to a secret political
society organized by S. G. Nechaev, a disciple of the revolu­
tionist Bakunin. The student had been slain because of suspected
treachery to the group. Dostoevsky promptly seized upon the
Nechaev affair as the main theme of the novel he was trying to
write. Apparently he originally thought of it as a quick Action­
ized version of the political conspiracy and the murder which
would enable him to pay off a long overdue debt in accumulated
advances to his publisher. Besides, he saw an opportunity to
speak out more directly and forcefully against radical tenden­
cies which he believed were undermining Russia.
Dostoevsky’s creative process did not operate in this manner.
The more lie worked on The Possessed the longer and more
complicated it became. The notebooks shed light on some of
his difficulties, especially the fact that the Nechaev affair soon
began to attract into its orbit certain of the situations and at
least one major character from the plan of the unwritten “Life
of a Great Sinner,” as well as profound questions of religion and
morality implicit in that projected work. More so than in any
126 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

previous novel, characters in The Possessed are modeled on real

people—the political conspirators on the participants in the
Nechaev affair, old Verkhovensky on T. N. Granovsky, a
piously liberal professor of history in the 1840’s, Karmazinov
on Turgenev. Dostoevsky had turned against his own liberal
youth, and these satirical portraits of older liberals reflect his
growing conviction that they were responsible for the revolu­
tionary activities of murderous young radicals such as Nechaev
and his followers. Eventually he managed to integrate, though
not always successfully, the two main strands of his plot—the
romantic element built around Stavrogin and suggested in part
by the plan of “The Life of a Great Sinner,” and the political
conspiracy headed bv the bloodthirsty young Verkhovensky,
modeled on Nechaev.
Dostoevsky declared that the main character in The Pos­
sessed is Stavrogin and the wealth of material on him in the
notebooks indicates that no other figure caused him so much
uncertainty. With some prescience he wrote his publisher: “It
seems to me that this figure is tragic, although many will no
doubt say, after reading: ‘What is that?’” Critics, perhaps se­
duced bv the charm of bafflement, have written much about
Stavrogin, preferring to sec in the curious evasiveness of the
characterization occult significance, psychoanalytical denota­
tions, or profound symbolic truths. In searching for a striking
svmbolic correspondence, a recent critic proposes that the birth
of Christ is relevant to the birth of Stavrogin’s illegitimate son
bv Mariya Shatova!
More than once Dostoevskv has been charged with failing to
preserve logical coherence in the projection of his complex
characters. Pressures of illness, time, deadlines of serial publica­
tion, and the urgent need for money may account for some of
his lapses in this respect. Although an author ought never to
mystify himself, to say nothing of his readers, it is possible to
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 127

discern an artistic purpose in what might be paradoxically de­

scribed as the logical incoherence of Stavrogin, for certainly in
terms of the story of The Possessed his enigmatic nature seems
definitely to have contributed to his extraordinary fascination
for the reader.
The evil model in the plan of “The Life of a Great Sinner”
seems to have been the starting point of the characterization of
Stavrogin, but in adapting him to the plot of another novel
ambiguity set in. Although at least two real persons have been
mentioned as models, it is clear from the notebooks—as Dostoev­
skv worked away at Stavrogin—that the image began to attract
some of the typical traits of the Byronic hero, such as Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin. In one place in the
notes Dostoevsky actually describes him as “Byronic.”
It is interesting, however, that there is much clarifying ma­
terial in the notebooks on the career, personality, and motives
of Stavrogin’s strange actions, yet Dostoevsky studiously avoids
working it into the finished novel. In fact, in one place in his
notes he reminds himself “not to explain the prince [Stavro-
ginl,” and in another, “to keep the reader in a quandary.” And
under the caption “Very Important” in the notes, he jots down:
“The prince reveals himself to no one and is everywhere mys­
terious.” Instead of Stavrogin becoming the typical Dostoev-
skian hero who is a bearer of ideas, the author cautions himself
in the notes: “The prince does not have any special ideas. He
has only an aversion to his contemporaries, with whom he has
resolved to break. .. . But there are no ideas.”
Finally, though his publisher refused to print the famous sec­
tion, “The Confession of Stavrogin,” which contains the ac­
count of his violation of the little girl and much other important
information about his actions and thoughts, there is no evidence
that Dostoevsky protested this exclusion, nor did he ever at­
tempt, as he could so easily have done, to include it in subse­
128 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

quent editions of the novel. Yet the facts in this omitted section
concerning Stavrogin’s past life and the emphasis upon the
crime against the girl which torments his conscience contribute
much toward explaining his unaccountable behavior in The
Possessed. On the whole, it seems clear that Dostoevsky deliber­
ately strove to make Stavrogin a mysterious, enigmatic charac­
ter because he believed that this kind of portrayal would best
serve the artistic purpose of his novel.
Though the personal magnetism of this strange man draws all
to him and he exerts a powerful influence over such individuals
as young Verkhovensky, Shatov, Kirilov, Liza, and others, in
the end they recognize the deception and pitiful emptiness of
their hero. Stavrogin, in his struggle between good and evil,
reaches the bottom of psychological amoralism where he is
finally unable to distinguish between good and evil. Eventually
even the struggle ceases, and as a complete moral and spiritual
bankrupt he takes the only way out—suicide.
It is the world of revolutionary conspiracy, in which Stavro­
gin plays a rather passive role, that provides most of the action
of The Possessed. The whole handling of the conspiracy is, of
course, a grotesque parody of Russian radicalism of the time.
But Dostoevskys’ bitter satire of the participants is sincere, in­
spired by fierce ideological opposition and deep anxiety over
the use of violence to achieve political ends. Here realism is
sacrificed to didacticism, and the characters in question, instead
of being driven by their own ideas, arc driven by those imposed
upon them by their creator.
A different matter arc Shatov and Kirilov, both of whom arc
in the process of breaking away from the conspiracy. They
represent brilliant ideological projections that strangely com­
plement each other in their polarity. Shatov believes in a God
who is a man and Kirilov in a man-God. For Shatov faith in the
world destiny^ of Russia and its people requires faith also in the
 Dostoevsky—“A Realist in the Higher Sense” 129
Russian Orthodox God. Kirilov believes that it is man who has
created the world and God and that they exist only to the extent
that the individual wills them to exist.
At the end of The Possessed, it is that charming and amus­
ingly satirized old liberal Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky
who carries the real message of the novel—Dostoevsky’s answer
to the radicals. For driven to hysteria by the crimes of his son,
the old man wanders off in a quixotic search for Russia, and he
finds it in his new faith in the religion of the masses whom he
had always scorned.

7
It was in The Brothers Karamazov, however, that Dostoev­
sky offered a final answer to the problem of faith, of God,
which had encroached on all his previous major novels and had
obviouslv troubled his own dualistic thinking for years. The
search for God is the central idea of The Brothers Karamazov.
In no other novel has the white-hot intensity of his ideological
world glowed so brightly or has he spiritualized ideas so ar-
restingly. And nowhere else has he employed so compellingly
his wonderful artistic capacity to evolve ideas of universal sig­
nificance from the sordid stuff of life as in this story of the ter­
rible crime of parricide and clashing passions of love and hate.
The taint of old Karamazov, a monster of lust and debauch­
ery, exists in all his sons. It is less apparent in the saint-like
Alyosha, perhaps because his image is incomplete in the novel.
Dostoevsky’s notes and the novel itself indicate that the por­
trayal of Alyosha would continue in one or more sequels, for
like the projected hero of the plan of “The Life of a Great Sin­
ner,” who undoubtedly influenced the conception of Alyosha,
he was destined to go out into the world and live through a
stormy period of sinning and revolutionary activities before he
130 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

achieved salvation by suffering. But Dostoevsky had only a few

months to live after completing The Brothers Karcnnazov. In
the novel Alyosha is the only one of the brothers who loves life
more than the meaning of life. He has the intuitive wisdom,
selfless compassionate heart, and radiant personality of the meek
Mvshkin, and like him he morally’ influences all with whom he
comes in contact.
The Karamazov taint of carnal sensuality is strongest in
Dmitri, who in some respects may be regarded as the hero of
the novel for its story is largely his. Simplicity and deep feeling
are the essence of his nature. He acts on instinct rather than on
calculation. Dmitri earns the right to forgiveness of all the
evil in him by his capacity to repent and suffer. He admits to
a certain moral guilt when falsely7 accused and convicted of the
murder of his father, and conscious of his baseness, of having
sullied his honor, he declares at the trial, “I accept the torture
of accusation and my public shame. I yvant to suffer, and bv
suffering I shall purify myself.”
The notebook and letters, however, indicate that Dostoevskv
thought of Ivan as the hero. He is easily the most absorbing
character in the novel and in certain respects he reflects the
mental image of his creator. In the notebooks Ivan is actually
mentioned as the murderer of his father, thus conclusively estab­
lishing the full import of his moral guilt in implanting the idea of
the slaving in the tyvisted mind of his illegitimate half-brother
Smerdvakov.
Ivan is the last and the most fascinating of Dostoevsky’s series
of Doubles, and his ambivalence takes the highest form of a
cosmic struggle of man yvith God. He begins yvith an act of
rebellion and ends in complete metaphysical insurrection against
God’s yvorld. The Karamazoy7 taint in him takes the form of
intellectual pride. When his pride asserts itself, he drcams, like
Tcrentey7 and Kirilov, of becoming a man-god; yvhen the sub­
 Dostoevsky—"A Realist in the Higher Sense” 131

missive side of his nature predominates, he is dejectedly pre­

pared to accept the world-god, for he cannot understand the
higher harmony between man and the world of God.
The resolution of Ivan’s struggle, as well as the whole ideo­
logical emphasis of the novel, is concentrated in the section
entitled “Pro and Contra,” one of Dostoevsky’s greatest artistic
achievements. Evidence has been provided in this study to
demonstrate that the leading characters and their ideas are not
unconsciously symbolic creations or uncontrolled manifesta­
tions of “intentional fallacy.” On the contrary, they are very
consciously controlled creations of a great literary artist who
carefully shaped his material to fit prepared designs and did
not hesitate to use his characters as mouthpieces of his own fa­
vorite ideas, although this is nearly always contrived with con­
summate art and realistically adjusted to the intellectual and
spiritual horizons of his protagonists. In the notebooks, for ex­
ample, and in a long letter to his editor on “Pro and Contra,”
Dostoevsky emphatically states that his main intention in this
section, which he regards as the culminating point of the novel,
is not so much a denial of God as a repudiation of the meaning
of His creation. He connects this position of Ivan with so­
cialism which, he declares in the letter to his editor, “sprang up
and started with a denial of the meaning of historical actuality
and arrived at a program of destruction and anarchism.” And he
pleads with the editor not to change a word in Ivan’s recital of
the shocking sufferings of little children, for these are all true
accounts, he explains, which he has taken from newspapers and
other authentic sources. Then he pointedly insists that Ivan’s
contention, based on the senseless sufferings of innocent chil­
dren, that the whole of historical actuality is an absurdity, is an
unassailable argument.
Moreover, Dostoevsky resolves the uncertainty of readers as
to whether or not Ivan really agrees with the Grand Inquisitor’s
132 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

condemnation of Christ for preaching man’s freedom of choice

in the knowledge of good and evil. He writes his editor: “But
my socialist (Ivan Karamazov) is a sincere man who frankly
confesses that he agrees with the Grand Inquisitor’s view of
mankind, and that Christ’s religion (as it were) has raised
man much higher than man actually stands. . . . They [the
socialists] bring to mankind the law of chains and of subjection
by means of bread.” Here is plain proof that in the Legend of
the Grand Inquisitor Dostoevsky’s intention was to identify
Roman Catholicism and socialism, as Myshkin had done in The
Idiot.
In another letter to the editor Dostoevsky elaborates the argu­
ment which he will place in the mouth of the old monk Zosima
as an answer to Ivan’s denial of God’s world. He not only as­
sociates himself with this answer, but he explains rather naively
how he will turn it into an artistic statement. “7 avili compel peo­
ple to admit," he writes, “that a pure, ideal Christian is not an
abstraction, but a vivid reality, possible, clearly near at hand,
and that Christianity is the sole refuge of the Russian land from
all its evils. . . . You will understand that a great deal in the
precepts of my Zosima (or rather the manner of their expres­
sion) belongs to his character, that is, to the artistic presentation
of his character. Although I myself hold the same opinions
which he expresses, yet if I expressed them personally [as com­
ing] from myself, I would express them in a different form and
in a different style.”
Indeed, Zosima’s answer to Ivan, expressed in Dostoevsky’s
own voice, appears in various pages of The Diary of a Writer—
that equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man;
that suffering does not destroy the harmony of life but is a ful­
fillment, an act of Godly justice which corrects transgressions
for the sake of the whole; that the secret of universal harmony
is not achieved bv the mind but by the heart, by feeling and
 Dostoevsky—"A Realist in the Higher Sense” 133
faith; that if one loves all living things, this love will justify
suffering, and all will share in each other’s guilt, and suffering
for the sins of others will then become the moral duty of every
true Christian.
The great debate between Ivan and Zosima reflects the an­
guished dialogue that went on in Dostoevsky’s doubting dualis­
tic mind in his own search for faith. Shortly before his death he
unwittingly exposed these overriding uncertainties in reacting
to radical critics, who condemned the conservative ideology of
The Brothers Karamazov, and to conservative critics who be­
rated him for atheistic tendencies. He wrote in his notebook:
“The villains teased me for my ignorance and a retrograde
faith in God. These blockheads did not dream of such a power­
ful negation of God as that put in the [mouth of the Grand]
Inquisitor. . . . Even in Europe there have never been atheistic
expressions of such power. Consequently I do not believe in
Christ and His confession as a child, but my hosanna has come
through a great furnace of doubt” He seems more proud of
Ivan’s Negation of God than of Zosima’s faith in Him.
Though no art, not even the most abstract, can completely
reject reality, some exasperated critics deny any reflection of it
in Dostoevsky’s novels; others have perceived in them an aware­
ness of a world outside the realm of human consciousness, the
source of the higher realism he claimed. To be sure, there is
little in human experience that quite satisfactorily explains the
behavior patterns and exaggerated motives and actions of
Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov, and
one could add many other characters to this list. Yet these
characters seem real and vital, they win our sympathy, and we
have little difficulty in identifying ourselves with this or that
aspect of their natures.
Yet Dostoevsky, unlike Flaubert who hated being called a
realist, valued this attribute of his art even to the extent of being
134 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

on the defensive whenever he anticipated charges that he had

violated reality. We find him writing his editor that however
unconvincing Ivan Karamazov’s arguments against the ab­
surdity of historical actuality may seem to the readers, “I know
that the figure of my hero is real in the highest degree.” And
suspecting that some critics will regard his portrait of the Rus­
sian monk Zosima as unfaithful to life, he protests to his editor:
“I think I have not sinned against reality: It is true not only as
an ideal, but it is true as reality.”
In a sense, this was one of Dostoevsky’s principal difficulties
—he constantly fluctuated between the real which reveals life
and the ideal which exposes the soul. In any event there was
nothing in him of the conventional realistic novelist who strives
to reproduce reality in its immediate aspects. He well under­
stood that to write is to choose. Dostoevsky preferred to think
that the higher realism which he took as his province, so differ­
ent from any manifestations of realism in fiction that had pre­
ceded him, was like that of Shakespeare—not restricted to
mere imitations of life but concerned primarily with the mys­
tery of man and the human soul. In truth his men and women
seem to be part of a region of experience from which all the
circumstances of ordinary life have been banished and only
the soul survives. In that region earthly reality tends to ap­
proximate more and more closely to spiritual reality. He sought
reality not in the mundane facts of daily existence but in the
tragic absurdity of life, and bv his art he imposed on it a spiritual
or ideological unity which transfigures it and creates a higher
realism.
IV • TOLSTOY

“My Hero is Truth”

Much has been written about similarities and dissimilarities
in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but no two great novelists differed
so fundamentally in their conception and practice of realism in
the art of fiction. Though both authors, ideologically speaking,
had a vested interest in Christ’s teachings, Dostoevsky was pe­
culiarly spiritual and Tolstoy completely earthbound.
Like Gogol, whom lie preferred as a storyteller, Tolstoy be­
lieved that a work, in order to be good, must conic singing from
the author’s soul. But lie criticized Gogol for a pitiless and un­
loving attitude to his characters, a charge from which he ab­
solved Dickens, and lie could quite justly have absolved himself.
Though in What is Art? he failed to admit any of Dostoevsky’s
writings to his category of “universal art,” which conveys feel­
ings of common life accessible to everyone, he did include the
talcs of Pushkin and Gogol.
Tolstoy had the greatest admiration for Pushkin, although as
a young writer lie complained of the bareness of his prose and
criticized The Captain's Daughter because the interest in events
predominates over interest in details of feeling. But the account
is well known, although its veracity lias been questioned, of how
135
136 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

his enthusiasm for the opening of a Pushkin short story, which

plunged directly into the action, inspired him to begin Anna
Karenina in the same manner.
The derivation of Tolstoy’s fiction from the Classical School
of Russian Realism begun by Pushkin can hardly be doubted.
However, this colossus of a genius, who took all knowledge for
his province, read omnivorously in foreign literatures as well as
in Russian, and one may trace in the rich unrolling tapestry of
his art threads from the works of English eighteenth-century
writers, especially Sterne, and, in the nineteenth century,
Thackeray and Dickens, whom he regarded as the greatest
novelist of the age, and also the French realists, particularly
Stendhal. If literature is the memory of culture, Tolstoy seems
to have remembered it all, but so original was his artistic nature
that anything he may have borrowed, he completely assimilated
and made his own. The realistic tradition he inherited he greatly
expanded and enriched in practice so that the finished product
became the despair of imitators.
No novelist was more acutely aware of the realitv around
him than Tolstoy or more exhaustively absorbed, through the
intellect and senses, in all its manifestations. Unlike Dostoevskv,
who creates a world of his own in the image of the real world,
Tolstoy accepts the real world, and his picture of it is fresh and
interesting because he secs so much more of it than his readers,
but its commonplaces, observed through the prism of his imagi­
nation, take on new meaning. That is, he is able to perceive
genuine poetry in the average which so often embodies the
reality of man’s dreams and hopes. Man needs hope as much or
more than he needs knowledge, Tolstov declared in answer to a
speech of Zola who advised a group of French students to ac­
cept science as the road to a new faith rather than build their
living faith on the debris of dead ones, for, he warned, realitv
 Tolstoy—"‘My Hero is Truth” 137
becomes a school of perversion which must be killed or denied
since it will lead to nothing but ugliness and crime. Tolstoy
countered: “It is commonly said that reality is that which exists,
or that only what exists is real. Just the contrary is the case:
true reality, that which we really know, is what has never
existed.”*
That reality is so often different from what men and women
hope and dream, that life often disappoints them because they
have confused the imagined with the real, is a central problem
with Tolstoy’s more reflective characters. In The Cossacks
Olenin’s conception of the romantic existence of these people
in the Caucasus is shattered by the reality of it; in War and
Peace Prince Andrew’s exaggerated notions of a career in the
army and in politics are harshly corrected by experience; and
in Anna Karenina Levin’s idealistic hopes about marriage are
soon disillusioned. In such cases Tolstov usually demonstrates
that the reality of things is richer, more affirmative and life­
giving than the reality imagined bv such characters. But he does
this through their active experiences, although reflection plays
its part, for he never forgets that realistic literature should por­
tray human beings in action. Disillusionment with reality is not
resolved in metaphysical quests as in Dostoevsky’s fiction and
in that of not a few novelists today. Tolstov’s alienated man
does not ask himself the everlasting question: Who am I? but
rather: Why am I here and where am I going? At least the
matter of self-identification is already resolved. The different
emphasis is fundamental and it is a quality of Tolstoy’s realism.

* Quotations of belles lettres and essays are from Tolstoy Centenary

Edition, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (21 vols.; London: Ox­
ford University Press, 1928-37): “Sevastopol in May,” vol. 4, p. 152; War
and Peace, vol. 6, pp. 13-14, 516; War and Peace, vol. 7, pp. 8, 59; War and
Peace, vol. 8, pp. 321, 486; Anna Karenina, vol. 9, p. 127; Anna Karenina,
vol. 10, p. 357; “Non-Acting,” vol. 21, p. 166.
138 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

2
The great poet Pushkin and not Tolstoy stands as the bright­
est and foremost symbol of Russian literature in that country
very much as Shakespeare does in English literature. However,
if Tolstoy is regarded, not only as a literary artist, but also as a
religious philosopher and modern reformer, then he was pos­
sibly the greatest single moral force in the world in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Certainly no Russian writer is
better known outside his country than Tolstoy. Yet it is prob­
ably true that his various religious, moral, and philosophical
works would never have received the wide hearing they did if
Tolstoy ✓ had not already« been the author of llznr and Peace and
Anna Karenina.
During his lifetime the tremendous popular impact of these
novels and other purely literary works placed him at the head
of all Russian writers. Even his two chief rivals acknowledged
his supreme position. Dostoevsky, with his feeling of inferiority
about Russian culture, joyfully hailed Anna Karenina as greater
than any Western European novel in the nineteenth century.
Turgenev, who could never get along with Tolstoy as a man
and on one occasion narrowly avoided fighting a duel with him,
profoundly admired his genius and on his deathbed pleaded
with him, in the famous phrase, “great author of the Russian
land,” to return to writing belles lettres.
By the last two decades of the nineteenth century what might
be called the “saturation realism” of Tolstov encountered a
mixed reception in Western Europe. The current French na­
turalist dicta in criticism, and perhaps also some of Tolstov’s
extreme religious and moral views which had begun to filter
into the West, hindered an unprejudiced appreciation of his
fiction. Upon reading a French translation of War and Peace,
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 139

Flaubert wrote Turgenev: “It is of the first rank! What painting

and what psychology! ... It seemed to me at times that there
were things worthy of Shakespeare! I uttered cries of admira­
tion during the reading!”
In general, however, French critics compared Tolstoy’s
works, especially Anna Karenina, unfavorably with Madame
Bovary and its impeccable form, tailored style, and naturalistic
detail. Their tendency was to express bewilderment over the
vast mass of reality reflected in Tolstoy’s major novels and to
regard them as peculiarly formless and artless—the chaotic out­
pourings of some super-reporter of life. Nor did Matthew Ar­
nold in England clarify the situation much by basing his prefer­
ence of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary partly on the
conviction that Tolstoy’s novel was not really a work of art
at all but a piece of life, and that what it lost in art it gained
in reality. And Henry James’ nearsighted discovery of “large
loose baggy monsters” in Tolstoy’s fiction, his lament over the
absence of “a deep-breathing economy of an organic form,” and
later E. M. Forster’s comment on War and Peace as an “untidy
book” have contributed to this notion of formlessness and art­
lessness which has clung to so much Western criticism of
Tolstoy. In its application to serious fiction, Arnold’s dichot­
omy of life and art is a spurious conception. Not “a piece of
life” but life in all its manifestations crowds the huge canvas of
Tolstoy’s masterpieces. Their patterns of human relationships
are always carefully planned, and plot is a poetic form of re­
flecting reality rather than a contrived frame on wrhich to
stretch events. If the transformation of reality into art has been
effected with equal skill in, let us say, Stendhal’s The Red and
the Black or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in no novel has so
much realitv been transformed into art as in War and Peace.
In the Soviet Union Tolstov is venerated and his works have
been published in millions of copies. The ninety-volume Jubilee
140 INT H O DUCTION TO I< U S S I A N B E A LIS.M

Edition of all his writings is in completeness, textual accuracy,

and scholarly annotation one of the most magnificent tributes
ever paid to a great author. Soviet scholarship on Tolstoy is ex­
tremely copious and much of it of high quality, but where in­
terpretation is required, it is more often than not dominated by
Lenin’s Marxian formulations, especially by his article, “Leo
Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution.” Lenin, more
modest than Stalin as a literary critic, made the sharpest dis­
tinction between Tolstoy the artist, whom he praised in the
highest terms, and Tolstoy the thinker whose doctrines of moral
perfectibility and nonresistance to evil he contemptuously dis­
missed. Lenin did laud Tolstov’s stubborn opposition to tsarist
oppression and viewed such activities as an important factor in
the developing revolutionary movement. Tolstoy, of course,
abhorred the violence of revolution, and he once declared in
his diary that “Socialists will never destroy poverty and the in­
equality of capacities. The strongest and most intelligent will
always make use of the weaker and more stupid. . . . Even if
that takes place which Marx predicted, then the only thing
that will happen is that despotism will be passed on.”
Such a statement, and others like it, have not discouraged
Marxian investigations of Tolstoy’s fiction. An outstanding one,
illustrative of most in interpretation but differing from those
of Soviet critics in the author’s deep knowledge of Western
European literature as well as Russian, was contributed by
George Lukacs, the brilliant Hungarian Marxist literary critic
who spent a number of years in the Soviet Union.
* Despite his
wide and illuminating frame of reference, Lukacs, like Lenin,
narrowly' argues that Tolstoy created his literary’ masterpieces
on the basis of an essentially false philosophy, but as a political
reactionary he unconsciously dramatized the revolutionary’

* “Tolstov and the Development of Realism,” Studies in European

Realinn, translated by' Edith Bone (London: Hilhvay Publishing Co.,
1950).
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 141
forces of his time. It is hard to imagine Tolstoy ever doing any­
thing unconsciously, particularly in his writings. He would
fully have agreed with Chekhov that nothing happens by
chance in art.
In order to overcome the unpoetic nature of a society per­
meated by capitalism, Lukâcs maintains, Tolstoy makes the ex­
ploited peasant, either consciously or unconsciously, the central
problem of his fiction. “The poetic starting-point in the presen­
tation of each character by Tolstoy,” Lukâcs writes, “was the
question: in what way was their life based on the receipt of
ground-rents and on the exploitation of the peasants and what
problems did this social basis produce in their lives.”
In these terms Anna Karenina’s fatal passion for Vronsky,
which is not unlike many great love stories in literature, be­
comes for Lukâcs another tragedy growing out of “the con­
tradictions latently present... in every bourgeois love and mar­
riage.” Even the famous mowing scene in this novel, when
viewed in terms of Levin’s un-Marxian attitude toward the
peasants, is set down as “a sentimental attitude to physical
labor.” In a review of Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky, unlike
Lukâcs, censures Tolstoy for making the central problem of
all his writing not the exploited peasantry, but the landed
gentrv. The ineptness of this kind of criticism is unwittingly
limned by D. H. Lawrence in his poem, “Now It’s Happened”:

But Tolstoy was a traitor

to the Russia that needed him most,
the clumsy, bewildered Russia
so worried by the Holy Ghost.
He shifted his job on to the peasants
and landed them all on toast.

The vital point missed by Lukâcs is that Tolstoy, whenever

he dwells upon man’s inhumanity to man in his fiction, is never
directly attacking a political system, but rather man in general
142 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

for placing his own egotism ahead of the common needs of hu­
manity. Even toward the end of his life, when he excoriated the
tsar’s government for its abuses, he was in effect denouncing all
governments whose abolition he devoutly hoped for in terms
of his doctrine of Christian anarchism. The radical democrats
of the 1860’s, such as Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, and the
revolutionists who followed were all profoundly distasteful to
Tolstoy. He was an aristocrat by birth and never ceased to be
one in temperament however much his humanitarian instincts
led him to advocate the cause of underprivileged peasants and
workers. Actually peasants play a relatively small part in the
total corpus of his fiction and he rarely stresses their feelings of
class opposition to the landed gentry. Anticipating the objec­
tions of readers of War and Peace to his concentration on mem­
bers of his own class, he wrote in the draft of an unused fore­
word: “The lives of officials, merchants, seminarists, and peas­
ants do not interest me and are only partly understandable to
me; the lives of the aristocrats of that time, thanks to the docu­
ments of the period and other reasons, arc understandable, in­
teresting, and dear to me.” He is more forthright on his preju­
dices in a note to himself in one of the draft versions of War and
Peace where he flatly states that the lives of all people not in his
class, including peasants, seem boring and monotonous and all
their actions stem from the same motives: envy of their supe­
riors, self-interest, and material passions. And he concludes: “I
am an aristocrat because I cannot believe in the lofty intellect,
the fine taste, or the complete honesty of a man who picks his
nose and whose soul communicates with God.”

3
All four of Russia’s most celebrated novelists began their lit­
erary careers with short stories and novelettes, and in Tolstoy’s
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 143

case these early tales are important, not only for their intrinsic
worth, but also for an understanding of the development of a
realistic narrative art which found its fullest expression in the
great novels. Tolstoy really began his apprenticeship at the age
of eighteen when he started his diary which he continued, with
interruptions, during the rest of his life. An intense interest in
hidden motives of behavior characterizes entries dealing with
his youthful experiences, and a fondness for classifying all man­
ner of human attributes suggests his later talent for conquering
the subconscious by an application of penetrating analysis.
These techniques are carried over in Tolstoy’s first piece of
fiction, A History of Yesterday, a short fragment written when
he was twenty-two and unpublished during his lifetime. It is
an account of an evening with friends, the drive home, and the
hero’s thoughts as he falls asleep—a youthful exercise in style
and narrative form. Like so many authors, Tolstoy had to strug­
gle for clear expression and was often ungrammatical as his wife
testified later, for she frequently corrected mistakes in recopy­
ing his manuscripts. In general, he labored to purge his prose of
stereotyped bookish language and to create a style that would
approximate as closely as possible the speech of his own cultured
class. Eventually he developed the capacity to adapt his prose to
the subject at hand and, in dialogue, to catch the idiom of the
speaker. It is therefore all the more surprising to find him, in A
History of Yesterday, imitating the mannered style and ana­
lytical method of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey which he had
been reading and soon partly translated. Sterne’s influence is
obvious hot only in the young Tolstoy’s language, but also in
his concentration on odd details, in his posturings and digres­
sions, and in the analysis of conscious and subconscious thoughts
and feelings of characters reacting to particular situations. Per­
haps aware of his imitativeness, Tolstoy never returned to this
exuberant abandon in fiction.
The next year (1852) appeared his first published work, the
144 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

delightful short novel Childhood, to which he later added the

sequels Boyhood and Youth. In this effort sure instinct rather
than trial and error seemed to guide his early encounter with
the exacting demands of art. As he labored over the manuscript,
repeated diary entries record the fact that the writing goes
badly and the rewriting worse. “Without regret,” he reminds
himself, “I must destroy all unclear places, prolix, irrelevant, in
a word, all things that are unsatisfactory even though they may
be fine in themselves.” Without compunction he adhered to his
rule, in the course of accumulating four separate drafts of
Childhood, that no addition however talented could improve a
work as much as a deletion.
Tolstov’s skill in evoking forgotten childhood memories,
which, when recalled with feeling seem infallibly true and
charming, is quite original. The quality of realistic descriptions,
especially of nature, and his subtle analysis of the actions and
thinking of characters arc nothing short of miraculous in a
young man of twenty-four. Although Childhood draws heavily
upon his recollections, there is a great deal of sheer invention in
the work. This divided concentration underscores the fact that
perhaps more so than other major novelists Tolstoy’s fiction is
unusually autobiographical. Such a generalization must not be
construed as a reflection on his imaginative powers, but the
reality he transformed into art was largely his own life of re­
corded experience and observation rendered doubly effective
by acute psychological analysis and meticulous selection of sig­
nificant detail. In many respects the convincing realism of his
fiction is rooted in autobiography.
In addition to Childhood, for example, nearly every one of
the Caucasian group of short stories, written or conceived dur­
ing his two-year stav in that region, is an outgrowth of personal
experience in fighting with the Russian forces against the hill
tribes or some adventure on his furloughs. Within the limita-
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 145

tations of the short-story form, the principal characterizations

of military figures are studies of varying depth, and the signifi­
cant action is often narrated with a realism quite fresh for that
time. The rightness or wrongness of war, a subject which
played a large part in his future thinking, is at least touched
upon, and in The Raid, and to a certain extent in The Wood-
Felling, there is more than a suggestion of his later ruthless an­
alysis of the conventional worship of military glory.
On the wav home from the Caucasus, ultimately to join the
Russian forces in the Crimean War at Sevastopol, he encoun­
tered a fierce blizzard which inspired his memorable story, The
Sno'w Storm. Repeated motifs of snow and wind have almost the
quality of incremental repetition of a folk ballad, and the
theme of the storm is so vividly realized that it takes on the
human attributes of an intensely imagined character. Tolstoy is
rarely content with the realistic perfection of a still-life in vis­
ualizing inanimate objects of nature, for he nearly always draws
sentient overtones from such descriptions in stressing the rela­
tion of nature to man or man’s environment. At the end of The
Sno'w Storm the elements seem to retreat and glower in the face
of man’s indomitable courage in struggling against them. In
Three Deaths the moral beauty of the death of the ancient tree,
in perfect harmony with nature’s law, is contrasted with the
stubborn, ugly death of the querulous old lady. And the gnarled
oak in War and Peace, described first in its leafless, autumn
state and then in its spring greenery, is clearly connected with
a deep psychological change going on in Prince Andrew. Some­
thing of the same emphasis is manifested in Tolstoy’s treatment
of animals. Even the dogs in War and Peace, exclaimed one
critic, are individualized. The realistic manner in which he pro­
jects himself into the consciousness of the poor, old piebald
gelding in Strider: the Story of a Horse gains in effectiveness by
the implied conclusion that the animal is more dignified and
146 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

useful than its owners. These extra effects extended the limits
of earlier realism in Russian fiction.
The three Sevastopol “sketches,” as they arc sometimes er­
roneously labeled, arc not merely a reporter’s narration of what
Tolstoy saw and experienced during the terrible siege of that
city, for he immeasurably enhances their appeal by employing
fictional devices. In short, they are often deftly contrived art.
The first one, with its swiftly limned portraits of typical inhabi­
tants of the city and its moving accounts of the self-sacrificing
heroism of the Russian defenders, raised Tolstov to a position
of popular fame as a writer. Patriotism had claimed him in his
first contact with the siege, and he entered in his diary: “Have
now reached a period of real temptation through vanity. I could
gain much in life if I wished to write without conviction.”
He turned his back on this temptation in the second Sevas­
topol piece when he points out the human folly of the war and
indulges in forthright criticism of those Russian officers whose
“patriotism” is translated into terms of personal gain. And at the
end he added the famous statement which may be regarded as
his credo for the rest of his long life as a writer and thinker:
“The hero of my tale—whom I love with all the power of my
soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has
been, is, and will be beautiful—is Truth.” The piece was hope­
lessly mangled by the censor, and the outraged editor wrote
Tolstoy: “You are right to value that side of vour gifts most
of all. Truth—in the form you have introduced it into our lit­
erature—is something entirely new among us.” The treatment
of war and the characterization of military figures in the Sevas­
topol pieces anticipate War and Peace.
After Tolstov’s return to civilian life and during his first trip
to Western Europe, his literary interests shifted from war to
moral problems. The change was brought about not only by a
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 147

new order of experiences, but also by his negative reaction to

demands of Petersburg liberals and radical democrats connected
with The Contemporary, the magazine he had been publishing
in, for political and social significance in literature. In 1856, he
jotted down in his diary: “How I long to have done with
magazines in order to write the wav I’m beginning to think
about art—awfully loftv and pure.” But efforts in this new vein,
such as the fragment of a novel, A Landlord's Morning, and the
short stories, Lucerne, Albert, and Three Deaths, took on the
aspect of fictionalized moralistic tracts, in which the voice of
Rousseau is heard in Tolstoy’s determination to argue the bale­
ful influence of political laws and organized government on
nature and art.
A return to his former autobiographical manner in the novel­
ette Family Happiness (1859), the first part of which is a beau­
tiful evocation of romantic love in a girl whom he might have
married, and the second part his rationalization that the mar­
riage, if it had taken place, would have failed through no fault
of his, did no more than the previous moral tales to improve his
literary image with public and critics, who now began to write
about his failing powers.
Discouraged and out of sympathy with the current literary
taste, for the next three years Tolstoy turned his incredible
energies to the exciting field of educational theory and practice.
In a speech, in 1859, to the Moscow Society of Lovers of Rus­
sian Literature, he deplored those who believed that the only
concern of literature was to denounce and correct evil, and to
promote the growth of civic feeling in society. On the contrary,
he concluded, “There is another literature, reflecting eternal
and universal human interests, the most precious, sincere con­
sciousness of the people, a literature accessible to every people
and to all times. . . .”
148 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

Marriage in 1862 brought an end to Tolstov’s educational

experiments and reawakened the urge to resume creative writ­
ing. The next year he brought out his brilliant novelette,
PoPikttshka, where he reveals the hard features of peasant life,
but in a tone of refined humor that aims to ridicule the false and
insincere in art—a new note in his fiction. This same year ap­
peared his short novel The Cossacks which he had been work­
ing on for some time. It is undoubtedly the finest masterpiece of
this early period. The hero Olenin, a cultured, highly civilized
man front the city, is if anything less interesting than the Cos­
sacks, the natural men with whom he is so strikingly contrasted.
Tolstov was fond of the natural man, and such Cossacks as the
young daredevil Lukashka, the untamed girl Marianka, and the
incorrigible old reprobate Eroshka are among his truly memo­
rable characterizations. The natural beauty of Cossack existence
transforms Olenin in the end into a philosophical reasoner
searching for personal happiness, a kind of Rousseauistic “nat­
ural man,” a type that became a favorite of Tolstov in later
fiction.
The Cossacks helped to win back some of Tolstov’s popular­
ity with the reading public, but the radical-democratic critics,
sensing the implied condemnation of all modern societv in the
story, gave it only grudging praise. This work brought to a
superb close Tolstoy’s first literary period. Sometimes charac­
ters in these earlv talcs come close to being mcrelv emanations
of himself, and only the best of them are psychologically alive.
Whether he is treating war, family happiness or exemplifying
moral truths, both in subject matter and in his method of con­
quering realitv bv a fresh, uninhibited analysis of human
thought and action, Tolstoy moved artisticallv in the direction
of the famous novels to come. He was ready, in 1863, for the
long, hard task that led to his greatest contribution to Russian
literature— War and Peace.
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 149

4
The desire to write a novel about the historical past occurred
to Tolstoy shortly before his marriage. Its hero was to be a
participant in the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 who, in 1856, re­
turned to Russia from exile. Tolstoy took up this theme in 1863
and wrote three vivid chapters and then put them aside because
he felt it necessary to study the period of his hero’s youth. The
realization that the Decembrist conspiracy had its roots in events
connected with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, historical ac­
counts of which had long interested Tolstoy, brought about a
new concentration on this earlier period. For in the autumn of
1863 he wrote a close friend that he was absorbed in a novel
“covering the years from 1810 to 1820” (actually War and
Peace extends chronologically from 1805 to 1820). A discarded
early foreword suggests that originally Tolstoy may have had a
trilogy in mind, in which War and Peace would be followed by
a sequel focused on the events of 1825 and another on 1856. As
additional support for this conjecture, one may cite the “open”
ending of War and Peace where Pierre Bezukhov has already
begun to manifest an interest in the political movement which
five years later culminated in the Decembrist Revolt.
From the outset of the work Tolstoy was concerned with
Napoleon’s struggle against Russia and its relation to historical
problems, as well as with the peaceful elements of family life,
but early drafts and notes fail to indicate that at this stage he
had worked out a comprehensive plan that would involve the
vast epic sweep and elaborate philosophy of history of War and
Peace. Nor did the publication, in a magazine in 1865, of the first
thirty-eight chapters under the simple title 1805, corresponding
roughly to the first twenty-five chapters of the definitive text,
suggest that he had hit upon his larger and final design. By the
150 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

next year, when a second installment appeared which took the

story only through 1805, Tolstoy’s design docs not seem to
carry the action beyond Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.
Notes at this point hint that the ending was to be a happy
one—Prince Andrew, who recovers from his wound, nobly
gives up his love for Natasha in order that she may marry
Pierre whose changed outlook on life is uninfluenced by Platon
Karataev’s simple philosophy; and Sonya, inspired by Prince
Andrew’s renunciation, gives way to Princess Mary’s love for
Nicholas. Pierre and Nicholas marry on the same dav and
Nicholas and Prince Andrew leave to rejoin their army units.
In fact, in 1866 Tolstoy was confident he would finish the novel
the next year and publish it as a whole under the title, All's
Well That Ends Well!
*
We have no certain knowledge of just when Tolstoy’s pre­
liminary and inconclusive plans were brought into focus on a
final vision of vaster design and inner harmony, the details of
which were undoubtedly developed as the writing continued.
At least one clear indication of the kind of insight that fired his
imagination and illuminated the huge potentiality of his subject
while at the same time giving it some direction and aim is an
entry in his diary, March 1865: “I read with delight the history
of Napoleon and Alexander. At once I was enveloped in a cloud
of joy; and the consciousness of the possibility of doing a great
thing took hold of my thoughts—to write a psychological novel
of Alexander and Napoleon, and of all the baseness, empty
words, folly, all the contradictions of these men and of the
people surrounding them.” Further jottings in his diary reaffirm
his delight with this purpose and his determination to carry it
out. At about this same time and later Tolstoy attended evening
* For some facts on the chronology of the composition of War and
Peace and supporting evidence drawn from the drafts and notes on the
novel, I am indebted to the excellent study of R. F. Christian, Tolstoy’s
War and Peace (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 151

gatherings of Moscow intellectual friends where the subject of

philosophy of history was much discussed. Two problems often
debated were the relation of individual freedom to historical
necessity and the factor of causality in history. It is very likely
that Proudhon’s works, which Tolstoy knew, especially La f
guerre et la paix, were also talked about at these meetings. In
any event, by March 1867 the final plan and title, War and
Peace, had been decided, but the expanded design prevented
Tolstoy from finishing the novel until 1869, almost seven years
after he began it.
The common complaint that War and Peace is devoid of
form recalls eighteenth-century criticism of the shapelessness
of the Alps. In the first place such a complaint overlooks the
unique totality of life indigenous, so to speak, to the novel.
Given this fact, one naturally asks: What other form, or what
changes in the present one, would have resulted in greater aesthe­
tic unity of design in so huge a work? Of course, the logical
answer is that Tolstoy surrendered the possibility of satisfac­
tory form by attempting to do too much in a single novel. How­
ever, if he had radically reduced its scope, the work would not
be the War and Peace which so many modern writers of stature
have acclaimed as the greatest novel in the world.
A close examination of the structure reveals that a unifying
design was worked out once Tolstoy had settled upon the scope
and purpose of the novel, although this may be form in the sense
that Percy Lubbock defines it: “The best form is that which
makes the most of its subject. . . Interestingly enough, Tol­
stoy was convinced that in a work of art form will be deter­
mined by the subject, and he believed that this was true of War
and Peace.
But what is the subject of Tolstoy’s great novel? Many have
remarked that it has no subject other than life itself and no
single hero. The work has such an immediacy for us that we
152 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

tend to forget what Tolstoy never forgot, that he was writing

a historical novel. He makes this abundantly clear from the be­
ginning in his notes, early drafts of chapters, and in abandoned
prefaces. In one projected introduction to the novel in 1864, he
declares: “I shall write a history of people more free than
statesmen . . . ,” people, he pointedly asserts, whose faults go
unmentioned in the chronicles of history. A little later he re­
peats in one of the draft versions: “I have been trying to write
a history of the people.” Then, in replying to criticism of his
friend, the poet A. A. Fet, of early published chapters of the
novel, he explains that, apart from his conception of the con­
flict of characters, “I have another conception, a historical one,
which complicates my work in an extraordinary way. . . .” This
special concern he also mentioned to the historian M. P.
Pogodin in 1868: “My thoughts about the limits of freedom and
independence, and my views on history are not a mere paradox
that has occupied me in passing. These thoughts are the fruits of
all the intellectual efforts of my life, and they are an inseparable
part of that philosophy which I have achieved, God alone
knows with what striving and suffering, and it has given me
complete calm and happiness.” In short, to write a history of
the people, understanding history both as a theory of knowl­
edge and the principal integrating factor in a vast wealth of
material, is the real subject of War and Peace.
The difficulty is that Tolstoy had his own ideas, which had
begun to spawn as early as his student days in Kazan Univer­
sity, on the so-called truth of history and of historians and on
the relations of people and their leaders to the historical pro­
cess. Aware of the significance of his views for the whole course
of the novel, he tried to anticipate both objections and misun­
derstanding on this score by publishing an article almost a vear
before War and Peace finally appeared. There he defends the
artist’s treatment of history as contrasted with that of the his-
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 153

torian. There are two kinds of actions, he explains, those that

depend on the individual will and those that do not. In the his­
torical process, he asserts, there is a minimum of freedom of ac­
tion. That is, the so-called makers of history are fundamentally
dependent upon the actions of countless other people and hence
to that extent their actions are predetermined.
Among these countless people are the scores of character
types of War and Peace, often simple individuals like Tushin
or Karataev, and all of them are connected in one way or an­
other with the famous historical events described. The sum
total of their individual actions, so often fortuitous or inde­
pendent of their own will, contributes more to the determina­
tion of these events than the actions of celebrated makers of
history. It is important to realize that Tolstoy’s theory of his­
tory applies to the activities of these numerous fictional charac­
ters as well as to the purely historical ones. To paraphrase his
lengthy and rather involved statement in the novel, he contends
that in order to understand the process of history, one must be­
gin not with a consideration of the deeds of supposed great
men, but with the integration of an infinitely large number of
infinitesimally small actions, what Tolstoy calls “the differen­
tial of history.”
If Tolstoy tends to deflate the historical reputations of those
who are credited with shaping great events by insisting that the
events themselves are beyond their active control, the actions
of his fictional characters are conditioned by the same lack of
freedom. But these tremendously vital, well-rounded, and in­
tensely real men and women enjoy the illusion of freedom, the
full consciousness that they arc directing their own destinies.
Yet fate, chance, accident, lady-luck, or decisions thrust upon
them by others often determine crucial events in the lives of
Natasha, Nicholas, Sonya, Pierre, Princess Mary, Prince An­
drew, and others. Tolstoy wisely avoids arguing his thesis on
 154 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

' the limitations of man’s conscious will in connection with his

fictional characters, which may be one reason why its perva­
siveness in the total design is often overlooked.
However, the integration of the Napoleonic campaign into
the expansive design of the novel, whose subject is the history of
the people, is accompanied by lengthy sections of theorizing
about war, its leaders, and the historical implications of their
actions. Though opinions differ sharply on the necessity of this
extensive theorizing, and on its intellectual quality and connec­
tion with major and minor fictional characters, Tolstov ob­
viously regarded it as of the utmost consequence in the defini­
tive plan of JPirr and Peace. In this sense these sections arc not
extraneous and may be considered as necessary and extremely
informative. To convey knowledge was for Tolstoy an es­
sential concomitant of the novel.
If it is possible to accept all this theorizing as a vital part of
the novel’s structure, it is something else again to regard it as a
convincing philosophy of history. Tolstov knew war at first
hand and no one would denv that the battle scenes arc mag­
nificently described and the characterizations of active figures
from plain soldiers to marshals and emperors are unforgettable.
Who does not recall the boyish, irrepressible Petya Rostov,
full of life and desire for glory in the fury of the cavalry
charge, and the next moment lying dead on the field. As the
gruff Denisov tenderly turns over the bloodstained body, he
remembers Petya’s words while generously giving awav raisins
to his comrades a short time before the charge: “I am used to
something sweet. Raisins, fine ones . . . take them all!”
Can such a deed be satisfactorily explained in terms of Tol­
stoy’s conviction that man lives consciously for himself but is
an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historical,
universal aims of humanity? A deed done, Tolstoy argues, is
irrevocable, and its results, coinciding in time with the actions
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 155

of millions of other men, assumes a historic importance. In his­

tory, he maintains, the so-called great men are merely labels,
giving names to events, and like labels, they have only the small­
est connection with the events themselves. In the novel Prince
Andrew remarks that the best generals he had known were
either stupid or absentminded. If Tolstoy can be said to have
made a hero of any of the famous generals he treats in the novel,
it is the Russian commander-in-chief Kutuzov. In his simplicity,
intuitive wisdom, lack of hypocrisy and affectation, and in his
conviction of the impossibility of controlling events, Kutuzov
takes his place with the innumerable simple and patriotic mem­
bers of the gentry and peasantry as a representative of the un­
conscious spirit of the nation which Tolstoy identifies as the
true historical force at a time of national crisis. Kutuzov admir­
ably illustrated Tolstoy’s theory of war, for his strategy, in so
far as he can be said to have had any, is based on the assumption
that everything comes to him who waits in war. “Patience and
time,” declares Kutuzov, are the things that win wars. When
in doubt, do not act—that is his great military axiom. And in
effect Tolstoy defends this position when he writes toward
the end of the novel: “If we admit that human life can be ruled
by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.”
What particularly troubled Tolstov was the prevailing prac­
tice of historians to fix responsibility for what occurs in life
upon individuals whom they call great men and endow with
heroic virtues. He insists that history is not a science, that no
acceptable laws of history have ever been discovered, and that
attempts to explain people and events in terms of causes, genius,
or chance are simply the result of ignorance. On the contrary,
he says, there is a natural law which determines the lives of
human beings no less than all the processes of nature itself; all is
ruled by an inexorable historical determinism.
Lapses in factual information and substantial distortions in
 156 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM
characterizations of great figures of the past, which in some
eases can possibly be excused as artistic license, reflect badly on
Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in War and Peace. But a more
significant flaw in his theorizing may be discerned by relating
his views to the ambivalence that dominated his whole emo­
tional, intellectual, and aesthetic life. As Sir Isaiah Berlin has
pointed out, the contrast between the universal but neverthe­
less delusive experiences of free will and historical determinism
corresponds to an inner conflict in Tolstoy between two sys­
tems of value—a public system and a private one. At times his
irrational depreciation of greatness in TEzzr and Peace seems
r ' psychologically to have been motivated by his private set of
1 values—a feeling of personal envy of the historical fame of
Napoleon—just as his later depreciation of revealed Christianity
may have been inspired by a feeling of envy of the historical
perfection of Christ.
Though Tolstov regarded his theorizing as essential to the
development of the main subject of the novel, he was too great
a literary artist not to anticipate the difficulties it would present
to the average reader. He rather humorously pictures such
readers in a draft version of the Second Epilogue as exclaiming,
after repeated doses of historical and philosophical argumenta­
tion: “What again! How dull.” And he whimsically adds that
this sort of reader is most precious to him, the kind whose criti­
cism he most admires. A second type of reader, he says, pri­
marily interested in the historical sections, will blame him for
impugning reputations of great men. But he defends himself
by pointing out that he is writing a history of the people in­
volved in a past that has been misrepresented. Eor Tolstov there
could be no compromise between art and truth or what he be­
lieved to be the truth. The vaunted higher truth of art he would
not accept if he found it to be at variance with what he con­
sidered the truth of life.
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 157

Once the main theme of the novel is grasped, a history of the

people and the manner in which all the elements involved in
it are integrated by Tolstoy’s theory of history, the basic struc­
ture becomes apparent and stands as a refutation to the notion
that the work is formless. A history of the people is told in terms
of the two broad areas of human experience identified in the
title—war, symbolizing the vast world of public affairs, and
peace, the private manifold activities of the family. A careful
examination of the amazingly rich thematic multiplicity of the
novel reveals a deliberate and meaningful series of juxtaposi­
tions and alternating contrasts, first between war and peace, and
then, within this framework, series of alternating contrasts of
scenes, situations, events, and characters under each of these
two divisions. In war we have the contrasts between Alexander
I and Napoleon; good and bad generals; those who think they
can direct the course of events and those who make no pretense
at doing so; cowardly braggarts among the officers and selfless,
unconsciously brave fellows like Tushin. In the division of
peace there are the contrasts between the bureaucracy, cultural
snobbery, and cynicism of city life and the simple pleasures of
country existence; the cold aristocratism of the Bolkonskys and
the gay, simple, indulgent Rostovs; or between these two fami­
lies with their true patriotism and tradition of unselfish service
and the Kuragins and Drubetskovs who place their own ad­
vancement, financial or career-wise, above everything. So at­
tached is-Tolstoy to this device of antithesisywhich he regards
as a touchstone of the reality of things, that he creates a series
of contrasting characters, and in a few individual characters,
such as Pierre and Natasha, he stresses their contrasting moods
and thoughts as important traits in their natures. This elaborate
pattern of juxtapositions and alternating contrasts serves to
create an illusion of ceaseless movement involving an endless
variety' of action, people, moods, and thought.
158 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

5
It is this incredibly rich variety of life rather than the histori­
cal forces integrating it in the grand design of War and Peace
that primarily interests the reader, and one suspects that this
was also true of Tolstoy. The aim of an artist, he once said, is
not to resolve a question irrefutably, but to compel one to love
life in all its manifestations. With his belief in the timelessncss
of human experience, he did not hesitate to project his own
into the historical past of the novel. When he read several early
chapters in manuscript to a circle of in-laws—the Bers family—
and their mutual friends, some in the audience looked furtively
at each other as they recognized, among those present, models
of a few of the characters. When Natasha Rostova was intro­
duced, a friend winked at the blushing Tanya Bers, Tolstoy’s
young sister-in-law, known in the family as the Imp. And
Tanya was delighted to hear the description of her doll Mimi
and the true story of how she asked a young lover to kiss the
doll and made him kiss her instead. The exquisitely wrought
scene of Natasha’s first ball must also have recalled to Tanya
her own first ball at which Tolstov had been her escort. Al­
though his wife jealously insisted that she had served as the
model of the unforgettable heroine, and perhaps she did in cer­
tain traits, one has only to read the published diary of Tanya
Bers to observe the striking correspondences between her image
and youthful experiences and those of Natasha Rostova. But the
perceptive reader will wonder at how completely the model is
transposed, for the realism, vitality, and pure beauty and poetry
Tolstoy imparts to his heroine belong only to the witchery of
art.
In general, Tolstoy drew upon the Bers family and their
friends, as well as upon his own parents and forebears, for a
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 159

number of the characters in the Rostov and Bolkonsky families.

In early drafts the name Tolstoy is for a time used in place of
Rostov. In several characters it was a matter of borrowing
prominent features, in others, of forming composite portraits
from such sources. Though research in the 1812 period pro­
vided most of the historical background and local color he
used, which was not extensive, he also depended on family
archives, the existence of his own family on their estate at
Yasnaya Polyana, and on the Moscow life of the Bers family for
city scenes and situations of the Rostovs and Bolkonskys. On
the whole, he distrusted writers who invented “reality” by
seeking material outside their own range of experience. When
necessity compelled him, he used his imagination, and there is
much of this in War and Peace, but he always contended that
it was more difficult to portray real life artistically than to in­
vent it.
In Prince Andrew may be found some of the characteristics
of Tolstoy—family pride, deep loyalty, and a profound sense of
honor belong to both. Andrew’s sister says of him: “You are
good in every way, but you have a kind of intellectual pride,”
an observation that could be made of Tolstoy. In fact, the moral
conflict between Prince Andrew and his intellectual foil and un­
witting deus ex machina of the novel, the easygoing, generous,
and noble Pierre Bezukhov, reflects an important phase of the
inner struggle that had been going on in Tolstoy since his
vouth and would in a few years plunge him into a profound
spiritual crisis. The debate between them reaches its climax in
that impressive scene on the ferrv which is steeped in the soft
counterpoint of nature’s twilight beauties. Andrew, embittered
by disappointments in his pursuit of fame and glory and con­
science-stricken over the death of his young wife in childbirth,
sees no further purpose in life. Pierre opposes his despondency:
“If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and
160 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

man’s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We

must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not
only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live
forever. . . .” Tolstoy, after his religious revelation, attempted
to resolve the dualism of his nature—to cease living for himself as
Prince Andrew had done, and accept the moral credo of Pierre.
A Western critic once said that if life could write it would
write just as Tolstoy did. Surely some such impression is con­
veyed by innumerable scenes, especially in War and Peace,
where the reader’s awareness of the author vanishes and life
itself seems to take the pen in hand. One thinks of such scenes
as that of the impish sixtccn-year-old Natasha stealing into her
mother’s bed at night and smothering her with kisses while she
charmingly argues her right to encourage Boris’s visits even
though she is not going to marry him; the inexpressible joy of
the whole Rostov household upon Nicholas’ first return from
the front, with Natasha shrieking piercingly as she prances up
and down in one place like a goat, and his little brother Petya
clinging to his leg, shouting for his kiss: “And me too”; Prince
Andrew’s involuntary eavesdropping on Natasha’s ecstasy at
the open window of the bedroom above his over the enchant­
ment of a lovely' moonlit spring night: “I feel like sitting down
on my heels,” she exclaims to Sonya, “putting my' arms around
myr knees like this, straining tight, as tight as possible, and fly­
ing away!”; or the captivating episode of the young Rostovs,
as Christmas maskers, on an evening sleigh ride to their neigh­
bors where the joyous festivities lead the hesitating Nicholas
into the arms of Sonya.
Such scenes arc not designed for bravura effects. They ad­
vance the action in important ways and add something to the
characterizations of major participants. Natasha’s talk that night
with her mother results in the rejection of Boris as a suitor;
Nicholas on his return home brings Denisov with him yvhich
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth’’ 161

sets the stage for his falling in love with Natasha; Prince An­
drew’s eavesdropping puts in motion the long train of events
that will lead to his proposal to Natasha; and the maskers’
Christmas party initiates a scries of significant complications in
the lives of Nicholas and Sonya.
Tolstoy’s techniques in characterization are part of the secret
of his extraordinary realism, for one of the most difficult things
for a novelist is to reveal the total personality of a character as a
person in real life reveals himself. The revelation of personality
in real life comes about over a period of time by slow accre­
tions, by the accumulation of much detailed information and
understanding through innumerable small actions and intima­
cies. This is the logical, the natural way, and a close approxima­
tion of it is pursued in Tolstoy’s novels. We become acquainted
with his men and women as we would become acquainted with
real people whom we meet for the first time and about whom
our knowledge and understanding increase as our intimacy in­
creases over time and space.
Tolstoy does not confront us at the outset with the familiar
lengthy description of a character, nor does he take refuge in
the awkward flashback of a character’s past. We are introduced
to Prince Andrew, Pierre, Natasha, or Nicholas in a customary
setting, as we might in the case of a future friend in real life.
Our first impression of the external appearance of the character
is only that which we would see ourselves, conveyed by the
author’s few brief descriptive sentences. We learn next to
nothing of his past or personality at this point. But from the
reactions and remarks of others—this indirect method is a favor­
ite of Tolstov—and eventually through the conversation, self­
examination, behavior, and actions of the character, spread out
over many pages and years, our knowledge of him grows until
finally we obtain a complete image. There are no startling or
abrupt revelations. Each thought or emotion develops out of
162 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

another. And in the case of characters with a pronounced moral

and spiritual bent, like Prince Andrew and Pierre, their dissatis­
faction with life is resolved, if ever, not by the author’s philos­
ophizing, but bv a combination of prolonged self-examination,
reflection, and extensive experiences on the part of the charac­
ters. As Percy Lubbock affirms, these men and women never
inhabit a world of their own, they seem to inhabit our world.
That is, their world never strikes us as an abstract one. They
stand forth fully defined with all their limitations of time, place,
and circumstance. Tolstoy y docs not hover over the destinies of
his men and women; they appear to exercise free choice in
working out their fate so that what they do seems to be psycho­
logically necessary, even though their consciousness of free­
dom, in the Tolstoyan sense, is illusory. His psychological in­
sights, like his style, create in the reader a sense of intimacy with
the characters, for in his analysis of thoughts, feelings, and
actions Tolstoy’s points of reference arc nearly always the
reality of life and not abstractions. “You can invent anything
you please,” he once said of Gorky’s fiction, “but it is impos­
sible to invent psychology. .. .”
Such an approach goes beyond conventional realism and sug­
gests not only Tolstov’s complete identification with his charac­
ters, but a genuine love for them. Even in negative characters
he nearly always discovers some good, which was his abiding
principle in real life. The reprehensible Dolokhov is tenderly
devoted to his mother, and the obnoxious Anatole Kuragin is
apparently a brave officer in combat. The artist, Tolstoy be­
lieved, is called upon to portray his men and women, not to
judge them. It almost seems as though he lived among the
characters he created very much as he wanted to live among his
friends and neighbors. “The best wav to obtain true hap­
piness,” he wrote in his diary, “is, without any rules, to throw
out from oneself on all sides, like a spider, an adhesive web of
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 163
love to catch in it all that comes: an old woman, a child, a girl,
or a policeman.”
It has been noted more than once that characters actually
grow and develop in War and Peace. The vivacious child Na­
tasha who runs breathlessly into the living room with her doll
at the beginning of the novel, and at the formal dinner boldly
demands to know what the dessert will be, is the same Natasha
who fifteen years later at the end of the book appears as Pierre’s
wife, noticeably plumpish and sloppy, anxiously scanning the
diapers of her newest born. That is, they are really one and the
same person at two different ages and not merely two different
ages attributed to a single person, a familiar fault with novelists
who project development of a character over a long stretch of
years. And Tolstoy shows us all the intermediary stages of this
growth as he does with other major figures of the novel.
Though one criterion of the realistic novel is truthfulness to
individual experience, what writer, when truth is dull, gray, or
commonplace, has not garnished it with the illusion of bright
exaggeration. There is a suspicion of this in that appealing and
unusual peasant, Platon Karataev, who personifies the slow,
patient but indomitable will of the people that must triumph
because its cause is just and its life entirely one of service. Yet
Tolstoy rarely deals in illusion. He deals with life itself, and no
matter how ordinary it may be, he makes it interesting without
the aid of exaggeration. There are no overtly psychopathic
cases in War and Peace, no lost weekends, no snakepits, and no
undue emphasis upon melodramatic, impressionistic effects to
titillate the reader’s sensibilities. What could be simpler and
more unimpressive than the figures of Nicholas Rostov and
Princess Mary. They have no particular brilliance, no special
abilities, and they do not stand out among the ordinary level of
people of their social class. Yet they are evidently admirable
souls, they gain our sympathy, and we identify ourselves with
164 I nT H O II U C T 1 O N TO H USS 1 A N REALISM

them. Tolstov achieves this effect by bringing out in such char­

acters what he calls the common sense of mediocrity which, at
crucial moments in their lives, is manifested as a spiritual power
that enables these ordinary people to act nobly.
In an uncanny way Tolstov adapts his art to meet every
exigency of the human natures he describes. For example, in the
case of Princess Hélène, he wishes to convey the impression of a
soulless nature, of a woman who dazzles all by her beauty but is
devoid of any inner passion or moral substance. The method he
uses to create this effect is one of brilliant externalization. At
Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s soiree at the beginning of the novel,
the vicomte is about to tell one of his stories and the hostess
calls Hélène over:

“The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile
with which she had first entered the room—the smile of a perfectly
beautiful woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed
with moss and ivy, with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and
sparkling diamonds, she passed between the men who made way
for her, not looking at any of them but smiling on all, as if graciously
allowing each the privilege of admiring her beautiful figure and
shapely shoulders, back, and bosom—which in the fashion of those
days were very much exposed—and she seemed to bring the glamor
of a ballroom with her as she moved toward Anna Pavlovna. Hélène
was so lovely that not only did she not show any trace of coquetry,
but on the contrary she even appeared shy of her unquestionable and
all too victorious beauty. She seemed to wish, but to be unable, to
diminish its effect.
“ ‘How lovely!’ said everyone who saw her; and the vicomte lifted
his shoulders and dropped his eyes as if startled by something extra­
ordinary when she took her scat opposite and beamed upon him also
with her unchanging smile.
“ ‘Madame, I doubt my ability before such an audience,’ said he,
similingly inclining his head.
“The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and con­
 Tolstoy—"My Hero is Truth” 165

sidered a reply unnecessary. She smilingly waited. All the time the
story was being told she sat upright, glancing now at her beautiful
round arm, altered in shape by its pressure on the table, now at her
still more beautiful bosom, on which she readjusted a diamond neck­
lace. From time to time she smoothed the folds of her dress, and
whenever the story produced an effect she glanced at Anna Pav­
lovna, at once adopted just the expression she saw on the maid of
honor’s face, and again relapsed into her radiant smile.”

Here, with these few strokes, Princess Hélène’s nature is com­

pletely revealed. And her beautiful white shoulders continue to
gleam throughout most of the novel. When she appears at
Natasha’s first ball, however, Tolstoy used this feature to draw
a significant characterizing comparison. Natasha’s “slender
bare arms and neck were not beautiful—compared to Hélène’s,
her shoulders looked thin and her bosom undeveloped. But
Hélène seemed, as it were, hardened by a varnish left by thou­
sands of looks that had scanned her person, while Natasha was
like a girl exposed for the first time, who would have felt very
much ashamed had she not been assured that this was absolutely
necessary.” Special features, such as Hélène’s gleaming white
shoulders, Princess Bolkonskaya’s pretty upper lip, and Napo­
leon’s white hands, are frequently repeated not only to fix the
character’s appearance, but sometimes to suggest a moral facet
of the individual’s nature.
This method of externalization used in the case of Princess
Hélène contrasts with the internal psychological analysis em­
ployed in the characterization of Princess Mary. Her deep
spiritual qualities lend themselves to such an approach, for she
never appears on the scene without Tolstoy making us feel the
peculiar inwardness, the moral goodness, softness, and pity of
this woman, whose soul, like her eyes, seems always to illumine
her pale and unattractive face with the light of moral grandeur.
In the novelist’s business of creating life as Tolstoy envisaged
166 I NTH OD U CT I O N TO RUSSIAN REALISM

it in and Peace, to convey the ceaseless ebb and flow was

central to his purpose. At the end of the book the old order,
represented primarily by mother Rostova in her dotage, has
passed or is passing. The present generation, Nicholas and
Pierre with their wives Princess Mary and Natasha, gathered at
Bald Hills with their children, is set in the ways of married peo­
ple approaching middle-age. Then, of the new generation,
young Nicholas, son of the dead Prince Andrew, after listening
to his Uncle Pierre’s warm defense of political liberals in the
capital, murmurs to himself in bed that night: “Oh, what a
wonderful man he is! And my father? Oh, Father, Father! Yes,
I will do something with which even he would be satisfied. . . .”
Tolstoy indicates by dots that this last sentence of the novel is
unfinished. And so is life, he implies. It will go on and on just as
it had in War and Peace.

6
Turgenev once remarked that the hounds of thought hunted
Tolstoy’s head to exhaustion. He had hardly finished War and
Peace when he plunged into a study of German philosophy.
Hegel’s works he dismissed as a “collection of empty phrases”
and he preferred Schopenhauer. But his wife informs us that he
soon dropped German philosophy for it literally gave him a
headache. He next turned to a formal study of classical Greek
which he learned in three months, a claim certified by his Mos­
cow professor in the subject, and like an arrogant schoolboy
he boasted of his prowess in letters to friends. Then for some
time a vast epic novel on Peter the Great claimed his attention,
but after months of research he abandoned the project because
of an inability to enter fully into the spirit of the people of this
remote period. Besides, as he said, he had come to the conclu-
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth" 167

sion that Peter was a “drunken fool” and a “syphilitic,” which

dampened his original enthusiasm for the subject.
As early as 1870, however, Tolstoy had told his wife that he
had a new theme for a novel which would concern a married
woman in high society who had lapsed morally. “His problem,”
he explained, “was to represent this woman as not guilty but
merely pathetic.” An intense and prolonged reversion to his
earlier pedagogical interests prevented him from beginning
Atina Karenina until 1873. By the next year he had the first of its
eight parts ready for print. Then the whole thing suddenly be­
came disgusting to him and he again took up his educational
work, declaring to a friend: “I cannot tear myself away from
living creatures to bother about imaginary ones.” An additional
factor that interfered with progress on the novel was his mount­
ing spiritual illness so clearly reflected in the last part of Anna
Karenina published in 1878.
The working drafts of the novel, as in the case of War and
Peace, underscore Tolstoy’s infinite concern far artistic ques­
tions of form, style, and the realistic presentation of charac­
ters. The theme that had deeply concerned Prince Andrew and
Pierre—the function of moral responsibility—encompasses the
whole action of Anna Karenina. And the planned thematic
juxtapositions and alternating contrasts of the earlier novel
recur in the new one. The central alternating contrast, of
course, is the love story of Anna and Vronsky and that of Kitty
and Levin. Within this framework the action involves alter­
nately contrasting scenes of Petersburg high society and that of
Moscow, of city life and rural life.
Unlike War and Peace, Anna Karenina, despite its consider­
able length, is limited in scope and subject matter, has a definite
beginning and end, and preserves an inner unity. All the action
is securely tied to the main theme from the opening, when Anna
168 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

arrives at the station platform in Moscow and hears of the rail­

road worker’s death under a train, murmuring that it is a bad
omen, to the end when she commits suicide under the wheels
of a train, the helpless victim of a fate foretold by the novel’s
epigraph: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.”
In an interesting letter to a critic who failed to discern the
novel’s architecture, Tolstov seemed deliberately to avoid indi-
eating the main theme of the work: “Quite the contrary. I’m
proud of the architecture—the arches have been built in such a
wav that it is impossible to discover the keystone. That is what
I most of all wished to achieve. The structural connection is
not the plot or the relationship of the characters (friendship),
but an inner link.” This link, which is really the main theme, is
not hard to guess against the background of Tolstov’s experi­
ences shortly before and during most of the writing of the
novel. It is the link that connects the opposing situations of
Anna’s tragic experience with marriage and the relatively
happy one of Kittv and Levin. The whole storv of Kitty and
Levin—courtship, marriage, the birth of their first child, and
their family existence—is in many respects the story of Tolstov’s
first years of happy married life. The theme is that the sanctity
of the family can be preserved only bv the mutuality of pure
love of husband and wife which is achieved, as Kitty and Levin
demonstrate, by sacrifice, pardon, and the desire to make each
other happy. On the other hand, the family is destroyed when
either husband or wife indulges in the egotistic love of affinity
which leads to complete preoccupation with one’s personal
happiness and, as in Anna’s case, to the ruin of her life as well as
that of her lover Vronsky. It is the worst of all tragedies, the
tragedy of the bedroom, as Tolstoy remarked to Gorky many
years later.
Anna’s tragedy unfolds slowly, naturally, remorselessly be­
fore a large audience of the social worlds of two capitals, of the
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth" 169

countryside, and elsewhere. But nearly all the fully realized

characters, including the brilliantly portrayed Oblonsky and
Shcherbatskv families, are involved in one way or another with
the fate of these two star-crossed lovers. For Tolstoy, himself
a bit in love with his heroine’s large, generous, radiant nature,
endeavors to show that she is as much a victim of the hypocrisy
of this high society as of her own passion. If Anna had had an
affair with a handsome, socially desirable army officer, high
society would not have condemned her provided she was dis­
creet and abided by conventions that were supposed to make
such affairs permissible. The only one hurt would have been
her husband, but this was the generally accepted order of
things. Above all, appearances must be kept up. Vronsky’s
mother thought it entirely cowmie il faut that her son should
have a liaison with a charming woman such as Anna; it added
a degree of social polish to a rising young careerist. Anna, how­
ever, is no casual adulteress. Her love for Vronsky is a deep
and lasting passion for which she is prepared to flout conven­
tion, sacrifice her security, leave her husband’s home, and com­
promise him openly. She places herself beyond the pale of her
social class, but only because of the manner in which she trans­
gresses its hypocritical moral code. Her real suffering begins not
when she deserts her husband, but when she receives the snubs
of her friends. It is a measure of the moral balance Tolstov
preserves in his portrayal of Anna that he persuades his readers
to judge-her severely7 but with compassion.
Some critics assert that the one flaw in the characterization of
Anna is Tolstoy’s failure to motivate her seemingly sudden pas­
sion for Vronsky. The charge is that he fails to tell readers any­
thing about her emotional nature before she arrives in Moscow
to mediate the family quarrel caused bv her brother Stiva’s
adultery7 only to be caught in the web of circumstances that
leads to her own adultery. Her falling in love, however, is not
170 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

sudden and a careful reading reveals how what Anna regards as

a harmless flirtation slowly develops into an irresistible passion,
a process which in no sense contradicts anything we know of her
character up to that point. The process, as in War and Peace,
involves the use of subtle details that advance the action and
psychologically suggest the emotional transformation taking
place in Anna. The first real sign of attraction is seen at the
Moscow ball indirectly through the eyes of Kitty who is in­
fatuated with Vronsky. On the train back to Petersburg Anna
firmly rejects Vronsky’s expression of devotion. She treats the
matter lightly but, significantly, she is vaguely disturbed. Then
on arrival she notices for the first time the large ears of her hus­
band waiting for her on the platform, and a strange feeling of
dissatisfaction comes over her as she introduces Vronskv. That
first day home she contemplates telling her husband of Vron­
sky’s declaration, but recalling her rejection of it she decides
she has nothing to tell, again a refined psychological detail. That
night, however, as she hears the familiar measured tread of the
slippered feet of her stiff and pompous husband approaching
their bedroom, annoyed with herself she begins to wonder what
right Vronsky had to look at him the way he did at the station.
But as she went to bed, Tolstoy pointedly remarks: “there was
not a trace of that animation which during her stay in Moscow
had sparkled in her eves and smile, but on the contrary the fire
in her now seemed quenched or hidden somewhere very far
away.”
Though the seed had been sown, the affair might have ended
there if it had not been for the fact that from the very begin­
ning Vronsky’s love for Anna is represented as profound and
entirely sincere, and it is made clear that he has dedicated his
whole existence to securing her love. Nurtured bv his endless
attention the seed slowly grows and eventually flowers. Yet
Anna’s passionate capitulation comes only after long heart-
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 171

searching into the lost cause of a conventional marriage to a

man whose colossal egoism is matched by his utter unrelated­
ness to the human factors involved in the daily business of

If there is nothing abrupt or illogical in Tolstoy’s handling of

the early stages of Anna’s love for Vronsky, neither is there any­
thing inconsistent with her total personality in the disintegra­
tion of their love, so aggravated by her unreasonable but under­
standable jealousy. In the midst of a reconciliation, another of
those small details signals the hopelessness of going on: “She
took her cup, sticking out her little finger, and raised it to her
mouth. After a few sips she glanced at him, and from the expres­
sion of his face clearly realized that her hand, her movement,
and the sound made by her lips were repulsive to him.” Nor is
there much point in arguing that Vronsky is inadequate to his
allotted destiny of creating so powerful an impression on a
woman as fine as Anna. Love after all is neither rational nor
analytical, and besides the story of the novel is Anna’s and not
Vronsky’s.
Although' Anna Karenina is one of the great love stories of
the world, it is a tribute to Tolstoy’s infallible instinct for reality
that he so successfully keeps overt manifestations of love out of
the novel. For profound love between two such mature and
refined people as Anna and Vronsky is a secret thing, expansive
only in hidden ways. The moral and physical effects of their
guilty passion are constantly before the eyes of their world, but
verbal expression of it is carefully restrained. Their affection for
each other is suggested by some kind of mental telepathy in
their chats on indifferent topics, or it is conveyed by hints or
implications, but rarely by direct declarations.
Tolstoy’s art of individualizing his numerous characters, so
evident in War and Peace, loses none of its effectiveness in
Anna Karenina. If anything, he adds to his psychologizing a
172 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

deeper, more searching moral probing. And even more so than

in War and Peace, Tolstoy creates in Anna Karenina the baf­
fling impression, which is the quintessence of his realism, that
somehow the characters are telling their own stories without
the author’s interposition beyond that of acting as an occasional
commentator. At times this effect seems to be something less
than illusory. Tolstoy relates how once a visitor remarked that
he had been too harsh on Anna in letting her be run over by a
train at the end. Tolstov replied: “Pushkin once said to some
friends: ‘What do you think has happened to my Tatvana [the
heroine of Eugene Onegin}? She has gone and got married! I
should never have thought it of her!’ So it was with my Anna
Karenina; in fact, my heroes and heroines are apt to behave quite
differently from what I could wish them to do!”
And on another occasion he warned critics of the inadvisabil­
ity of concentrating on separate thoughts in a work of art with­
out taking into account their essential connection. An obvious
proof of this, he pointed out in a letter, was the suicide attempt
of Vronsky: “The chapter describing how Vronsky accepted
his part after the interview had long since been written. I began
to correct it, and quite unexpectedly for me, but beyond any
doubt whatever, Vronsky prepared to shoot himself. Then it
appeared to me that this was organically indispensable for what
followed.”
In the novel no deviations are made from human nature’s
exacting and often cruel demands. Anna has a premonition that
she will die in childbirth. Bv her bedside at this solemn and
crucial time her sour, formal husband and her lover are recon­
ciled. Karenin’s forgiveness has an air of finality and Vronsky’s
conscience seems deeply moved by the realization of the sin he
had committed. At this point another novelist might have made
a concession to the public’s fondness for a happy ending. Dos­
toevsky thought it the greatest scene in the novel, one in which
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 173

guilt is spiritualized and mortal enemies are transformed into

brothers before the spectre of death. Had he been writing the
story, this experience would no doubt have profoundly altered
the lives of the participants for the rest of the novel.
But Tolstoy knew that life does not resolve intense human
passions in this manner. Karenin returns to his office routine
and his big ears continue to stick out as before. Vronsky con­
veniently forgets the still small voice of conscience. As for
Anna, who had already sacrificed so much for her illicit love, it
was too late to turn back. She had already closed the door to
her past life, and besides a woman with her pride could never
have permitted herself to knock at that door.
Though each of the contrasting couples, Anna and Vronsky
and Kitty and Levin, pursues its separate existence, their stories
are closely interwoven and from the contrast emerges the moral
repudiation of the society marriage of convenience. This con­
trast involves still another one, with moral implications already
broached in War and Peace—the superiority of the natural life
of the country over the unnatural life of the city. Levin has in
him Nicholas Rostov’s passion for the land and agricultural ac­
tivity plus a large increment of the soul-searching and questing
mind of Pierre Bczukhov. Kitty is the patient, tolerating wife
who accepts life’s blessings and sorrows as something ordained
by heaven. Though she generously sympathizes with Anna’s
cruel situation, she believes that there are conventional limits
beyond which a married woman could not go without risking
the condemnation of society.
On the land Levin’s complex nature flowers, and the urgent
language of the description of his activities could have emerged
only from Tolstoy’s remembered similar experiences. Indeed,
one has merely to read his Confession, written shortly after
Anna Karenina, to observe how much of himself and his life at
Yasnaya Polyana are reflected in the characterization of Levin
174 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

—his dislike of hypocritical high society and government bu­

reaucracy, his love of outdoor work, and his brooding search
for spiritual truth. Levin’s strident argument with Koznishev
and Katavasov at the end of the novel, in which he roundly
blames the government for forcing the Russo-Turkish war on
the people who know nothing of the issues, was also Tolstoy’s
position in this struggle. However, there is a patent incom­
pleteness about the characterization of Levin, for his persistent
self-examination, guided by a rejection of conventional moral
values, seems at the conclusion of the work to be leading him
along the path of a new way of life. And his premises indicate
quite clearly that his solution was tending in the direction of
Tolstoyan Christianity, the path that Tolstoy himself was strug­
gling to find in the spiritual crisis that overtook him about the
time he finished Anna Karenina.

7
Though Tolstoy never regarded himself as a professional
writer, nor art as an end in itself, he did not turn his back on art,
as is sometimes said, after his spiritual revelation in 1880. This
erroneous impression was partly inspired bv statements in his
treatise What is Art?, a work unfortunately more maligned than
read. It is difficult to take exception to the conviction expressed
there, that art is a human activity and as such must have a clear
purpose and aim which arc discernible with the aid of reason
and conscience. What distinguishes art from its counterfeit, he
asserts, is its communication, its infcctiousncss, and the stronger
the infection the better is the art as art. Although he allows for
various gradations and kinds of feeling transmitted by art,
where he is fundamentally at fault is in supplying a set of arbi­
trary touchstones to differentiate between the highest art—
 Tolstoy—"My Hero is Truth” 175

legends, parables, folktales, or religious art appealing to the

masses by invoking love of God and one’s neighbor—and low
or even bad art which is created solely to satisfy the tastes of
sophisticated people. If he excluded from the category of high
art plays of Shakespeare and some of the music of Beethoven
and Wagner, with that maddening consistency, which is as
much the hallmark of pride as of humility, he also relegated
War and Peace and Anna Karenina to the category of bad art
because they did not conform to the moral purpose of his new

If a moral purpose is apparent in much of his fiction before

his conversion, after it a moral purpose tends to be the reason for
writing at all. However, there is no diminution of artistic power
and some of the works on which he exercises it are among his
best. With very few exceptions, the uninhibited style and narra­
tive manner of the earlier novels are put aside. In their place we
have a simpler prose, almost classical in its severity, and a more
direct, restricted, and sharper method of narration. Realistic
effects are achieved with an economy of effort that recalls the
practice of Pushkin in his best tales. But so consummate is Tol­
stov’s art that his new moral emphasis is rarely allowed to
obtrude in such stories as Master and Man, the folktales, legends,
and fables, for he manages to universalize the moral in an al­
legorical vision of life.
The new approach is brilliantly exemplified in one of his
finest tales, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is essentially fo­
cused on the Christian theme of the challenge of mortality. Here
the precise realistic description of the process of physical decay
of the stricken judge is designed to strip away layers of self­
deception from the life of Ivan Ilyich and expose the horrible
nudity of its utter senselessness. Tolstoy’s irony reaches a point
of cruel but effective revelation when, in answer to the patient’s
timid request to be told whether or not his illness is dangerous,
176 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

the doctor jokingly replies: “If you do not restrict yourself to

the questions allowed, prisoner, I shall be compelled to haye
you put out of the court.” The reply could hardly fail to remind
the dying judge of the callous bureaucratic manner he always
employed in his court when he unfeelingly subjected the ac­
cused to the exact letter of the law. This kind of unpitving
rigidity from family, friends, and doctors awakens in Iyan
Ilyich an agonizing desire for any measure of that human un­
derstanding he had valued so little in his own climb to success.
He eventually finds it in the tender ministrations of his faithful
young servant Gerasim, one of those humble characters, like
Platon Karataev, whom Tolstov obviously loved because of
their selflessness and simple moral dignity. Gerasim’s sendee
during the long hours of dying helps Ivan Ilvich to discover
the human beauty of caring for others. “There was light instead
of death,” Tolstoy comments. “ ‘So that’s it,’ Ivan Ilvich sud­
denly said out loud. ‘What happiness!’ ”
In The Kreutzer Sonata, however, a work that aroused more
public controversy than any of his writings, Tolstov tried to
preach a moral ideal—absolute chastity—through the medium
of artistic narrative. It is saved, though not entirely, from being
turned into a didactic tract bv the sheer force of his art. Noth­
ing could be more realistically and psychologically convincing
than the half-mad hero’s account of his moral and spiritual
struggle. Though the critically sensitive Chekhov scoffed at
Tolstoy’s exhibition of ignorance on medical matters in The
Kreutzer Sonata, he praised its design, beauty of execution, and
its provocative thought.
Of two longer works of fiction after his conversion, Hadji
Murad, the moving tragic story of a renegade Caucasian chief­
tain, is perhaps Tolstov’s best example of that “good universal”
secular art embodying his new prescription for a realism pruned
of superfluous detail and a narrative manner devoid of all com-
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 177

plexities. On the other hand, his last full-length novel, Resur­

rection, represents a return to the popular fictional manner of
War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and probably because he
wrote it to raise money to aid the emigration to Canada of the
Dukhobors, a persecuted Russian sect. In this story, based on a
real incident, of the seduction of Katyusha
y Maslova by✓ a noble-
man Nekhlyudov, her subsequent exile to Siberia for a crime she
did not commit, and the conscience-stricken hero’s attempt to
repair his transgression, are some of the most memorable char­
acterizations and scenes that Tolstoy ever wrote. The first pure
love of Katyusha and Nekhlyudov, certainly the finest section of
the novel, is all compounded of the same wonderfully elusive
quality that transformed the girlish love of Natasha in War and
Peace into the incommunicable poetry of youthful dreams.
There is much of the old master in the abundant realistic de­
tails which convey the appearance of indubitable actuality to
imagined situations, as well as a roundness, a completeness, and
vitality to characterizations, in his handling of the trial scene,
the portrayals of high society in Moscow and Petersburg, and
in the remarkable realistic treatment of the brutal march of the
convicts to Siberia.
Resurrection, however, is badly marred as a work of art by
Tolstoy’s insistence on turning it into a frankly didactic novel
of purpose in terms of his new faith. Forthright condemnation
of the violence of government, the injustice of man-made laws,
the hypocrisy of the Church, and his special pleading of the
Biblical injunction to judge not that you be not judged obtrude
throughout the novel. In fact, Resurrection is in many respects
an account of Tolstoy’s spiritual biography, for much that he
thought and suffered before and after his conversion is con­
densed in these pages. Though this purely subjective matter
serves to neutralize the artistic achievements of Resurrection,
it does provide authoritative material for those who wish to
i78 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM
understand the tremendous moral and religious struggle of one
of the foremost thinkers of the latter half of the nineteenth
century.
Nevertheless, truth, which in fiction had been Tolstoy’s hero
from the beginning, remained his hero to the end. For even
after his conversion he never ceased to be a great realist in all
questions related to art. His fiction marks the culmination of
that development of Russian realism which began with Push­
kin and included such great writers as Gogol, Turgenev, and
Goncharov. Though Turgenev was known earlier in Western
Europe, his works lacked the impact there of those of Dostoev­
sky and Tolstoy. By the turn of the second half of the nine­
teenth century7, French realism had begun to drift in the direc­
tion of Flaubert’s conception of impartiality and the scientific
theories of Zola and his followers. In 1850 Flaubert had alreadyJ
begun to complain that French realists lacked a comprehension
of the inner life, of the soul of things.
It was just this comprehension that Tolstoy possessed and it
enabled him to extend the horizon of the tradition of realism
which he had inherited. He perceived clearly7 that the inner
truth of a novel must come from life itself. In the real world
where everything for him was part of existence, he saw the
danger that realistic fiction would lose its connections with the
great problems of life and degenerate into the dehumanization
of art, into extremes of arid naturalism or excessive and mean­
ingless formalism and symbolism. Further, as he maintained in
his introduction to the Russian translation of Maupassant’s
works, he felt it the moral duty of the artist to distinguish be­
tween right and wrong in his preoccupation with the truth of
life. However, in observing the human condition in fiction, he
wisely understood that man docs not go through the wringer of
life and emerge all white. “Every man,” he declares in Resurrec­
tion, “carries in himself the germ of every human quality, but
 Tolstoy—“My Hero is Truth” 179

sometimes it is one quality that manifests itself and sometimes

another; a man sometimes is quite unlike himself, while still re­
maining the same man.”
It is a measure of Tolstoy’s integrity as a literary artist that
after his conversion the views of imaginary characters are pre­
sented with fidelity to the circumstances of their lives and the
psychological truth of their personalities, even though they
may contradict or disprove his own views. A remarkable ex­
ample of this triumph of artistic objectivity is the unfinished
play, The Light Shineth in Darkness, which he frankly admitted
was an autobiographical drama. Tolstoy appears as the hero
Saryntsov, and like some Pippa in reverse, he passes through his
world and everything he touches he blights. Here, in the sincer­
ity of his art, he depicts himself unmercifully, for with devas­
tating reality he reveals the harmful effects of his spiritual strug­
gle on those who surround him, especially the members of his
family to whom he often appears in the play as an aggravating,
uncomprehending husband and father.
If a valid test of realistic fiction, which is supposed to give a
private view of those individual experiences which are the
source of reality and truth, is the authenticity of its report, then
Tolstoy’s fiction must be regarded as among the most convinc­
ing in world literature. And if the timelessness and universality
of appeal of imaginary men and women are taken as further
tests, then Tolstoy’s artistic accomplishment must again be
singled out as supremely great, for his characters are as much
alive today as ever, and among all classes of society, and in many
countries.
To have life and meaning, remarked Galsworthy, art must
emanate from one possessed by his subject, and Tolstoy’s finest
novels seem to convey this utter absorption on the part of their
author. Much of our pleasure in reading his stories arises from
the feeling that our own sense of reality is enhanced and en-
18o INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM
riched by the workings of an imagination and perception that
probe beneath the ordinary surface of life in an effort to explain
the unknowable and clarify the obscure in the infinite com­
plexity of human relations. This is reality immeasurably inten­
sified in which art becomes more real than nature and more liv­
ing than life.
V•CHEKHOV

“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art”

Ln 1874 Turgenev wrote a friend: “The reign of mediocrity
has started.” He was a bit premature. However, in 1881 the
assassination of Alexander II, who had freed the serfs, and the
accession of his reactionary successor, Alexander III, ushered in
a period of extreme social and political stagnation. And it was
during the stagnant eighties that a new literary star arose in
Russia—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.
In a litcrarv sense the times were anything but propitious.
Dostoevsky died in 1881, Turgenev two years later, and
Tolstoy, in the midst of his spiritual upheaval, had turned away
from belles lettres. Chekhov, as the grandson of a serf and a
wretchedly poor student struggling to put himself through
medical school and help support his mother, sister, and brothers,
was far removed from the social and cultural world of these
great writers, although he had read their masterpieces. In fact,
at the outset of his career he was little concerned with the lofty
traditions of contemporary Russian literature and lacked per­
sonal associations with its finest representatives.
His arrival on the litcrarv scene also coincided with a scries of
political, social, and economic changes markedly accelerating
i8i
182 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

the deterioration of the dominant gentry way of life which had

been the main concern of writers belonging to the Classical
School of Russian Realism. Since the Emancipation Act of 1861,
the “monarchy of the landed gentry” had begun to be trans­
formed into a “bourgeois monarchy” because of the continued
impoverishment of the estates and the rapid advance of capitalist
enterprises throughout the country. Urban population doubled
with the flight of poorer peasants to cities and towns to fill the
constantly growing demand for factory workers. Soon a large
new proletariat sprang up, often disgruntled because of harsh
labor conditions and a bare subsistence level of living. And in­
tellectuals among many ruined members of the landed gentry,
who were now employed in city jobs, became part of the com­
posite intelligentsia which had begun to displace the gentry as
an important directive force in the body politic.
Strident demands for reforms growing out of these altered
conditions, climaxed by the emperor’s assassination, provoked
the government to set in motion an energetic campaign of sup­
pression after 1881. The virile revolutionary wave of the sixties
and seventies collapsed as its leaders were jailed and its publica­
tions silenced. People settled back into an existence of humdrum
boredom or frustrated aspirations. Literature, which had been
the advance guard of Russian progressivism, soon turned against
the tendentiousness and “teaching” aspects of writers of the
sixties and seventies and sought escape in aestheticism and
hedonism. It began to be interested in “eternal” rather than real
problems, and in its timid conservatism, to which of course
there were exceptions, it declared in various ways that the pur­
pose of art was not to teach, but to make people happy by pro­
viding them with one of life’s highest pleasures.
If Chekhov was the unwitting victim of a generation of ar­
rested progress, he was also its greatest literary artist in fiction
and drama, a writer who faithfully and movingly portrayed
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 183

all the inhumanity of these years but never lost sight of their
human values and future hopes. Though he belongs to the tradi­
tion of realism begun by Pushkin, he understood the necessity
of adapting it to conditions of life considerably different from
those which had confronted his famous predecessors in fiction.
In fact, he appears to have been indebted to them hardly at all
in the formative stages of his art. Although he once acclaimed
Gogol as the greatest Russian writer and at one time was some­
what influenced by Dead Souls, he appears to have learned little
from him unless it be some of the typical effects of his humor.
Chekhov admired Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, but he had little
good to sav about his other novels. His heroines, nearly always
regarded by critics as Turgenev’s finest creations, Chekhov dis­
missed as insufferably artificial, crystal-ball gazers filled with
high-flown notions out of harmony with their place in society.
“When you recall Anna Karenina,” he wrote his friend, the
publisher Suvorin, “all these ladies with their seductive shoul­
ders are not worth a damn.” Dostoevsky he thought “pretty
good but too long-winded and too indelicate. There is much
that is pretentious.” His shrill morbidity and involved psycho­
logical analysis were distasteful to Chekhov, and he poked arch
fun at the devious mental and emotional torments of his saints
and sinners. Nor could Chekhov tolerate Goncharov’s cele­
brated Obloviov. The hero, he wrote, “is a far-fetched charac­
ter, not nearly big enough to make it worth while writing a
whole book about him.”
Of Tolstoy, who was more than twice his age, Chekhov said:
“I have never loved a man as I do him; I am an unbeliever, but
of all the faiths I consider his the closest to my heart and the
one most suited to me.” It was more Tolstoy’s beliefs rather
than his literary example that sum up his influence on Chekhov
who, in the early years of his career, wrote several tales that re­
flect Tolstovan moral doctrines. But just as he suspected the pre-
184 I N T H O 1) U CT I O N TO H U S S I A N II E A L I S M

tcntious messianism of Dostoevsky, Chekhov soon turned

against the omniscient spirituality of Tolstoy’s preaching. Pru­
dence and justice told him, he remarked, that there was more
love for man in steam and electricity than in chastity and absten­
tion from meat. Though he never lost his awe of Tolstoy, the
famous literary artist, lie did not hesitate to criticize what lie
considered faults in I Par and Peace and Resurrection.
On his side, Tolstov had great admiration for Chekhov the
man and writer, and unlike nearly all critics of the eighties and
nineties, he was quite aware of Chekhov’s originality in adapting
traditional realistic methods in fiction to serve the needs of por­
traying the changing times. “As an artist,” lie wrote, “Chekhov
cannot even be compared with the old Russian writers—Tur­
genev, Dostoevsky, or myself. Chekhov has his own manner,
like the Impressionists. You see a man daubing on whatever
paint happens to be near at hand, apparently without selection,
and it seems as though these paints bear no relation to one an­
other. But if you step back a certain distance and look again,
you will get a complete over-all impression. Before you there
is a vivid, unchallengeable picture of nature. And there is another
sign—the truest—that Chekhov is a real artist: lie can be read
over and over again. . .
At the time this was a very acute observation, for it recog­
nized the essence of Chekhov’s innovation in traditional Russian
realism in fiction. Somewhat like the Impressionist painters, he
insisted upon reacting to a changing world in a fresh way; to
represent its realities by a particular arrangement of selected
scenes, situations, and emotions rather than by an exact, detailed
linear drawing, so that the total realistic impression conveyed
would have greater depth and meaning. He wanted to get be­
hind the appearances of conventionalized society and reveal its
’ Ilya Ehrenburg, Chekhov, Stendhal, and other Essays, edited by Har­
rison E. Salisbury (New York: Knopf, 196.1), p. 58.
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 185

inner substance, and to this end lie developed a form of the short
story which he made peculiarly his own. The “teaching” aspect
of the fiction of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy was alien
to the artistic metabolism of Chekhov, and so were lengthy in­
troductions and detailed biographies of heroes and heroines.
From Chekhov’s point of view these features, including also
long descriptions and excessive use of metaphor and simile, were
impedimenta in the art of fiction. In general, his approach may
best be summed up in his terse statement: “To write with talent
is to write with brevity, to talk briefly about big things.”
In his own day, and even later, many critics, unlike Tolstoy,
created a false image of Chekhov as a sad singer of tender mel­
odies, a gloomy and pessimistic writer who never understood
the depths of his own soul and peered into those of his charac­
ters in order to reveal how flabby, sour, and dull were the
times in which they lived. For such critics he was “the writer
of sunset,” “the poet of twilight,” or “the poet of stagnant
years.” Yet nearly all these critics agreed that lie portrayed the
world in which he lived with complete faithfulness.
If he is loved today, if some fifty million copies of his works
have been published in the Soviet Union and many more mil­
lions abroad, it is not because he faithfully depicted an age on
which history’s verdict has long since been rendered. It is
because his characters, as is true of those other great Russian
realists, arc still vital and alive and speak to us in a way that never
ceases to stir our conscience.

The beginning of Chekhov’s literary career, so different from

that of any of the famous writers before him in Russia, was in
itself a measure of the changing times. The humor magazines in
which he got his start sprang up in response to the needs of a
186 I NT H O D U C T I O N TO R US S I A N REALISM

growing urban middle class for whom the literature of the

landed gentry, with its old concern for vital questions of the
day, had become irrelevant. They wanted a new kind of reading
matter which would reflect the values, interests, and way of life
of the “little people” of the city.
Chekhov began to contribute to these cheap magazines quite
simply because he urgently needed money, and they also offered
an obvious market for a vein of fun in him which he had begun
to exploit as a schoolboy. While he was still a full-time medical
student, between 1880 and 1884, he published, under various
pseudonyms, close to three hundred pieces in the humor maga­
zines. Most were miniature stories, two or three pages long,
and written often at a single sitting. He called them “trifles,”
“a chewed rag,” “junk,” or “literary excrement.” Incidents and
characters were drawn from nearly every corner of Moscow
life—clerks, minor government officials and their wives and
daughters, clergy, army officers, writers, actors, doctors, musi­
cians, lawyers, merchants, artisans, coachmen, janitors, apothe­
caries, schoolboys, and soon he added peasants and landowners.
The primary7 ingredient was the humor demanded by his me­
dium.
Most of this is hack work which he rigorously excluded from
the later collected edition of his tales. Yet among these efforts
of his apprenticeship, often mere anecdotes, are at least a dozen
little masterpieces that display an innovating artistic power­
sharp realistic dialogue and a groping for the frustrated human
being beneath the stereotyped surface of the drunken merchant
or the forlorn old maid anxious for marriage. Life is not always
funny, he defended himself to the exacting editor of the lead­
ing humor magazine. Misery and sadness, he wrote, arc also
a real part of life. Chekhov had dimly begun to realize that the
short-story form, of which he eventually became one of the
world’s greatest masters, was capable of compressing the whole
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art" 187
life of a man within its tiny compass. In the best of these early
tales, a faintly dawning social conscience compelled him to
mingle the comic with the ugly side of life where humor be­
comes accusatory rather than purely farcical. The funny situa­
tion in A Chameleon exposes abuses of power by people of
rank, and there is the wry humor of The Death of a Govern­
ment Clerk where the important general, insensitive to the ob­
sequiousness which his lofty position forces upon subordinates,
angrily fails to understand why a minor official feels it neces­
sary to apologize for sneezing in his presence.
The marked change of tone and emphasis between the rol­
licking, laughing quality of these early stories and Chekhov’s
later mature tales depicting the cruelty, greed, and stupidity
of life is often explained by the existence in him of a kind of
creative dualism. This is hardly necessary. For despite his essen­
tially happy temperament, one may discern in the finest of his
beginning stories that even then he was an acute observer of
life’s serious moments and responsive to its tragedies.
Chekhov’s first visit to Petersburg, really the literary capital,
at the age of twenty-five was an electrifying experience. With
his unfailing modesty he was overwhelmed to discover that
important literary and publishing figures were actually reading
and praising some of his stories in the humor magazines. And
the distinguished owner of the powerful newspaper New
Times, Suvorin, sought him out and invited him to contribute
longer tales for considerably more than the wretched rates he
was being paid. Chekhov wrote a friend: “Formerly, when I
didn’t know that they read my tales and passed judgment on
them, I wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes; now I’m
afraid when I write.”
Though humor was hardly ever absent from his new efforts,
he felt freer to handle serious themes and at greater length. As
a consequence in the best tales written between 1885 and 1886
188 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

his range of observation, emotion, and satire expanded and

deepened and the quality of his descriptions and dialogue began
to approach the perfection of his later writing. The officious
busybody in Sergeant Prishebeyev is not only laughable in
insisting upon his outrageous notion of law and order, but he is
also a dark universal symbol of all the noxious killjoys in life
who demand that there be no more cakes and ale. On the other
hand, a typical aspect of peasant mentality is delightfully re­
vealed in The Malefactor where Denis stubbornly argues with
the magistrate his right to remove nuts from the bolts of railroad
tracks because after all there are so many of them and they make
excellent sinkers for fishing lines! Then Chekhov moves to the
wonderful artlessness of Grief, the old cabby’s story. Since
none of his passengers will listen to the sorrow that weighs
heavily upon him—the death of his son—after he has stabled his
little mare that night he turns to her: “Supposing, now, you had
a foal. . . . And supposing suddenly that little foal were to
die. . . . You’d be sorry, wouldn’t you?” The horse chews as its
master feeds it, breathes on his hand, and listens to the story.
The same amazing brevity pinpoints a human frustration of
another kind in The Hunter—the hopeless contradiction be­
tween a peasant girl’s passionate longing for her man and his
love of freedom to wander the woods and the fields with gun
on his shoulder.
But among the hundred or more stories Chekhov wrote
during these two years, few contain the enduring qualities of
those mentioned. He was now a busy practicing physician
who, in his well-known phrase, regarded medicine as his lawful
wife and literature as his mistress. No writer of his future emi­
nence ever undervalued his talent more than Chekhov, and
especially in his early years. The few masterpieces that had
emerged seemed almost like the accidental fruit of undiscovered
genius. Though his visit to Petersburg had given him a fleeting
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 189
vision of recognized literary success, he still possessed no sense
of dedication to art and lacked the advice and encouragement
of older authors of distinction who might have aroused him to
adopt a serious attitude toward his writing and to develop what
he most needed—a sense of self-criticism.

3
One may attribute Chekhov’s artistic awakening, his sudden
awareness of a newly discovered destiny, to a long letter of
exalted praise and sharp criticism which he received three
months after his first visit to Petersburg from the old and na­
tionally known novelist Grigorovich. To be told by so dis­
tinguished an author that he had “real talent” and powers of
originality which placed him in the front rank of writers in
the new generation, and that above all he must esteem his talent,
caused an emotional explosion in Chekhov. “Your letter, my
kind, warmly beloved herald of glad tidings,” he replied,
“struck me like a thunderbolt. I nearly wept, I was profoundly
moved, and even now I feel that it has left a deep imprint on my
soul.” He would not try to justify the faults Grigorovich had
pointed out, he said. “I do not recall a single tale of mine over
which I have worked more than a day, and The Hunter, which
pleased you, I wrote in the bathhouse!” And he concluded: “All
my hopes lie entirely in the future. I am only twenty-six. Per­
haps I shall manage to do something, although time passes
quickly.” Indeed, time was passing quickly, for he knew then
that he was afflicted with tuberculosis.
Chekhov’s response to Grigorovich’s critical strictures was
prompt. At first it took the form of improving his working
habits and dwelling seriously on the technique of the short
story. In a letter to his brother Alexander, who also aspired to
igO INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

be an author, he warned him against hasty writing and added:

“Do not invent sufferings you’ve never experienced, and do
not paint pictures you’ve never seen, for a lie in a tale is even
more boring than in a conversation.” Shortly after this, when
Alexander informed him that he planned a long, descriptive
piece, Chekhov’ offered him a literary formula of success: avoid
emphasizing political, social, and economic factors; strict ob­
jectivity, absolute brevity, boldness, and originality; complete
sincerity, no triteness, and veracity in descriptions. “In my
opinion,” he wrote, “a true description of nature must be very
brief and have the character of relevance. Commonplaces, such
as ‘the sinking sun, bathing in the waves of the darkening sea,
sheds a light of purple gold,’ and so forth, or ‘the swallow’s, fly­
ing over the surface of the water, twittered merrily’—such com­
monplaces must be excluded. In descriptions of nature one
ought to seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such
a way that when you close your eyes after reading you see a
picture. For example, you will get the effect of a moonlit night
if you write that a glow like a light from a star flashed from a
broken bottle on the mill dam, and the round black shadow' of
a dog or a wolf appeared, etc. Nature becomes animated if you
are not squeamish about employing comparisons of its phe­
nomena with human activities.”
Here Chekhov moves close to Tolstov’s sentient descriptions
of nature but without his kind of realistic saturation of detail.
He once told Bunin that he found the most beautiful description
of the sea in a schoolboy’s copybook: “The sea was huge.” He
w'ould never have agreed with Flaubert’s advice to the young
Maupassant to single out a tree and then seek words which
would adequately distinguish that particular tree from all
others. Chekhov' would have felt that this kind of realism, em­
phasizing solely the unique character of the tree, isolates it from
nature and its relationship with man, amounting to nothing
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” îgi

more than the originality of a still life. Grigorovich, in his let­

ter, had commented on the plasticity of Chekhov’s nature de­
scription when, in a swift stroke, he projects a complete picture
—the clouds above the setting sun are “like ashes over dying
coals.” Chekhov brought to his admiration of nature a spon­
taneous quality of enchantment with all of God’s wonders. His
imagination fully possessed nature, and he came home from
a contemplation of its beauties with an exhilaration—as he effec­
tively put it—of a lover returning from a rendezvous. It is little
wonder that Levitan, Russia’s greatest landscape painter and an
intimate friend of Chekhov, remarked that the landscapes in
his stories were the height of perfection.
In this same letter to his brother Alexander, Chekhov also
stressed the matter of psychology. “Details,” he wrote, “are
also the thing in the sphere of psychology. God preserve us
from generalizations. Best of all, avoid depicting the hero’s
state of mind; you ought to try to make it clear from the hero’s
actions. It is not necessary to portray many active figures. The
center of gravity should be two persons—he and she.”
Problems that went deeper than those of form and technique
were thrust upon Chekhov by the time his third collected vol­
ume of tales appeared in 1887. Criticism of the book brought
home to him that writing fiction was not just a means to a ma­
terial end but an end in itself and one that involved a debt of
duty and conscience to humanity. Critics and readers alike were
compelling him to face the central problem of the relation of
art to society. As a coming new force in Russian letters, he was
expected to provide answers to moral and spiritual questions
which now absorbed the most thoughtful members of the in­
telligentsia. However, to use literature as a medium for express­
ing his personal views ran counter to Chekhov’s conviction
that art must remain purely objective. Though he was already
sensitive to the moral obtuseness, hypocrisy, and mediocrity of
ig2 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

society, his artistic response was to reflect these failings in fic­

tion, sometimes with a profound sense of pity, but not with a
crusading anger or disgust. He disliked emotionalism, exaggera­
tion, and lack of restraint both in real life and in his writing. His
whole nature as a man and artist made him recoil from self-asser­
tion and preaching in any form.
At this stage of his development Chekhov was not sure that
art should have a purpose or that writers, in their works, should
try to solve the problems of life. He felt that to formulate them
correctly in the spirit of objective realism should be the writer’s
aim and that the reader should be allowed to make up his own
mind about solutions. When one reader at this time protested
the frank objective realism of his story, Mire, and wondered
why he did not concentrate upon the “pearls” of life in his fic­
tion, he answered that realistic writers were very often more
moral than archimandrites, and that anyway you could not
make a man, who had already gone through a whole barrel,
drunk on a glassful. “Indeed,” he added, “to think that litera­
ture bears the responsibility of digging up ‘pearls’ from the
muck heap would amount to rejecting literature itself. Litera­
ture is called artistic because it depicts life as it actually is. Its
aim is truth, unconditional and honest. To narrow its function
to such a specialty as digging for a ‘pearl’ would be as fatal to it
as if you were to require Levitan to paint a tree and omit the
dirty bark and withered leaves. I agree that the ‘pearl’ idea is a
fine thing, but surely a man of letters is not a confectioner, or
a dealer in cosmetics, or an entertainer; he is a responsible person
bound by the realization of his duty and conscience. ... A man
of letters must be as objective as a chemist; he has to abandon
worldly subjectivity and realize that dung heaps play a very
respectable role in a landscape and that evil passions arc as in­
herent in life as good ones.”
An objective revelation of “truth, unconditional and honest”
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art" 193

characterizes the finest short stories Chekhov wrote in 1886-87,

such as Volodya, The Enemies, Polinka, The Kiss, On the
Road, Happiness, and Verochka. Even the group of tales about
and for children, such as The Runaway, Vanka, Kashtanka, the
famous story of the performing dog, and the later Sleepy, re­
flect this same quality. It is perhaps erroneous to describe any
of them as “children’s stories,” for he condemned the practice
of writing specifically for youngsters, maintaining that it was
better to select something truly artistic that has been written
for adults. The wisps of humor that brighten Vanka, the story
of the maltreated little shoemaker’s apprentice who yearns to
return to grandfather and his village, are entirely lacking in
the unrelieved misery of the orphan girl in Sleepy who strangles
her cruel mistress’ ailing and crying infant in a last desperate
effort to secure the sleep she has been deprived of for nights
on end.
The inhumanity described in such stories—and Chekhov
wrote many others like them—recalls his statement that “One
must not humiliate people—that is the chief thing. It is better
to sav to man ‘Mv Angel!’ than to hurl ‘Fool’ at his head,
although men are more like fools than angels.” And he never
loses a wistful affection for the fools who are victimized by
life’s tragic ironies, for he perceived that humor and tragedy,
like love and hate, are often only the separate sides of the same
coin. This subtle mingling of pathos and humor, an outgrowth
of the disharmony between people’s hopes and the reality of
things, is apparent in Polinka where the young girl’s tearful
efforts in the draper shop to obtain sympathy from the sales­
man who loves her is muted in the small talk of the prices and
descriptions of dress goods which she is purchasing for her
mother.
Readers and critics were also beginning to speak of a typical
"Chekhovian mood” which had begun to pervade his finest
194 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

tales, a compound of gentle sorrow and a deep feeling that

something of importance has been lost and will never be found
again. The mood is poetically fused with the substance of the
story and is echoed in the background of nature in these tales,
as in Verochka, where the young scholar’s realization of a love
irrevocably lost is poignantly synthesized in the whole atmo­
sphere of the story. And the mood of that exquisite poem in
prose, Happiness, is saturated with man’s nostalgic search for
meaning in life in the conviction that there is happiness enough
in the world if we only know where to find it. Unlike Tolstoy’s
characters, whose illusions are eventually dissipated by experi­
ence, Chekhov’s men and women often retain their illusions,
for in the end they still seem to be lost in the jumble of life in
which the profound exists along with the trivial, the great with
the insignificant, the tragic with the ridiculous. He does not try
to explain this away. If asked, he would simply say: that’s how
life is.

4
By 1888 the pressure on Chekhov to do something “big” in
literature mounted. The full-length novel of his famous prede­
cessors was the traditional form for coping with those weighty
moral and social problems of which he was still very suspicious.
Extensive practice of the short story with its single incident, few
characters, and swiftly realized denouement tended to inhibit
mastering the long and complicated form of the novel. How­
ever, at this time and on several occasions later he seriously
attempted to write a novel. In its conception he appears to have
had Gogol’s Dead Souls and its protagonist Chichikov in mind,
for Chekhov’s hero was to wander over the country and become
involved in various adventures. He characteristically' wrote a
friend about the work in progress: “Although in places I do
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 195

stray into conventional types, I shall try to avoid faithless wives,

suicides, kulaks, virtuous peasants, devoted slaves, moralizing
old ladies, kind old nurses, rustic wits, red-nosed captains, and
the ‘new people.1 ” And significantly he mentions that the whole
will consist of a series of separate but thematically connected
short stories, a concession to his favorite form which perhaps
boded ill for the novel.
After several beginnings he abandoned the work. The prin­
cipal reason for his failure may be found in the following state­
ment about one of his attempts: “My purpose is to kill two birds
with one stone: to draw life faithfully and at the same time show
how far this life diverges from the norm. The norm is unknown
to me, as it is to any of us. We all know what a dishonorable act
is, but what honor is we do not know.” Unable to envisage the
norm of life, he could not show how certain of his characters
deviated from it. As a dispassionate observer of life as it is, he had
yet failed to develop a focus in life, a moral and social symbol of
faith which he could apply artistically as the unifying principle
in the extensive canvas of the novel. Such a vision of life was to
come later, but by then death was lurking around the corner
and besides his major creative energies were being expended
on plays.
In a way his four-act play Ivanov, Chekhov’s first full-length
drama to be performed on the stage, was a compensation at this
time for his failure to write a novel. And so was The Steppe
which he wrote for the Northern Herald, the first of a brillant
series of lengthy tales which Chekhov called his “little novels,”
an ambitious effort to break into the so-called “thick” or high­
brow magazines that published the works of the most distin­
guished authors. But to avoid the superfluous was as much his
concern in these long tales as it had been in the short ones, and
in them by exercising an artistic economy of means and apply­
ing his favorite touchstones of truthfulness, objectivity, original-
196 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

ity, boldness, and simplicity, he eventually achieved a classical

refinement of expression and an illusion of reality that seemed
quite complete.
Though he worried excessively over his initial bid in the
great world of letters for the serious attention of those who read
Tolstoy, Leskov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Steppe was ac­
claimed everywhere. In this lyrical hymn to the endless expanse
of the steppe, Chekhov contributed something ffesh and new
to Russian literature, a kind of tone poem of nature in which
the sights and sounds and smells of all visible and living things
on these boundless grassy plains are caught in their ceaseless ebb
and flow. The work contains a series of adventures which break
up into several short stories, but some unity is introduced by
the sustained account of the boy Yegorushka who travels in his
uncle’s cart across the steppe to be delivered to a family friend
in a distant town for schooling. The tale is packed with color,
life, and characters—peasants, traders, drivers, innkeepers—who
are portrayed with memorable realism despite their short stay
upon the scene. The brief description of the storm over the
steppe, which cost Chekhov a week of solid effort, takes on a
preternatural foreboding as the threatening forces of nature,
thunder and lightning, are observed through the wondering
imagination of the child Yegorushka: “To the left someone
seemed to strike a match in the sky—a pale, phosphorescent
streak gleamed and went out. There was a distant rumble as
though someone were walking barefoot over a metal roof which
gave off a hollow sound.”
The praise heaped upon The Steppe did not alter Chekhov’s
growing conviction of the lack of effective literary criticism in
Russia. “If we had any criticism,” he wrote Suvorin, “I would
know that I provide material—good or bad, it doesn’t matter—
and that to people who devote themselves to the study of life,
 Chekhov—“Zt is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 197

I am as necessary as a star to an astronomer. Then I would work

hard and would know for what I worked.” What particularly
annoyed him was the continued charge, now directed against
the long stories that followed The Steppe in 1888, that he was
indifferent to social problems and a “high priest of objectivity.”
In these new tales he believed that he was dealing with just such
problems, but in his own way which seemed to evade the
critics. The sensitive, detailed account of a student’s traumatic
experiences in his first visit to a brothel, in An Attack of Nerves,
amounts to a deep studv of society’s personal guilt for the vic­
tims of its social order. When the progressive editor of the
Northern Herald accused him of indifference or misplaced
objectivity in The Name-Day Party, whose central character,
a rank conservative, rails against the evils of liberalism, Chekhov
replied: “But I do not balance conservatism against liberalism,
which for me are not the chief things at all, but rather lying
against truthfulness in the characters. . . . When I present such
types or speak of them, I don’t think of conservatism or liberal­
ism, but of the stupidity and pretensions of the characters.”
In a country where moral and social problems were almost
inevitably defined in terms of political allegiances, Chekhov
was determined to remain free of any affiliations in both his
personal life and his art. With passionate sincerity he insisted on
this in another letter to the editor of the Northern Herald: “I
fear those who look between the lines for tendencies and want
to regard me precisely as a liberal or conservative. I’m not a
liberal or a conservative, an evolutionist, a monk, or indifferent
to the world. I should like to be a free artist—and that is all. . . .
Pharisaism, stupidity, and idle whims reign not only in homes of
merchants and in prison; I see them in science, in literature, and
among young people. ... I regard trademarks or labels as preju­
dices. My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelli-
198 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

gence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom

—freedom from violence and falsehood in whatever form they
may be expressed.”
In his insistence at this time upon depicting life objectively in
a spirit of noninvolvement, Chekhov failed to realize that if art
has any definitive answers to the eternal disharmony of life,
they must be the purely subjective responses of the artist him­
self. When Suvorin protested that in The Lights, a long story
that concerns the decisive relations between man’s philosophy
and his actions, Chekhov had failed to solve the problem of
pessimism, he replied that the writer’s task is not to settle such
questions as God or pessimism, “but to depict only who, how,
and in what circumstances people have spoken or thought about
God or pessimism. The artist must not be a judge of his charac­
ters or of what they say, but only an objective observer.” The
reader must make his own evaluation of what is said, he ex­
plained; the author’s job was to throw some light on his charac­
ters and speak their language.
Another friend objected to the concluding sentence of this
same story ✓ which reads: “You cannot make head nor tail of any- y
thing in this world.” It seemed to the critic an admission of de­
feat, for the reader is unprepared for such a conclusion in terms
of his knowledge of the leading character. The artist-psychol­
ogist, he wrote, must analyze especially the soul of his hero.
Chekhov replied: “It is not the psychologist’s business to pre­
tend that he understands what no one understands. Then we
will not be charlatans and will frankly declare that we can’t
make head nor tail of anything in this world. Only fools and
charlatans know and understand everything.”
The absolutism of this approach struck a new note in Russian
realistic fiction. In their psychological probing into the human
condition, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had assumed an attitude
almost of omniscience. The scientific training of a physician,
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art" 199
Chekhov admitted, influenced his literary development and it
obviously played a part in his emphasis upon objectivity in art.
“Familiarity with natural sciences and scientific method has
always kept me on my guard,” he declared, “and I have tried,
whenever possible, to take scientific data into consideration, and
where that was impossible, I’ve preferred not to write at all.”
This training also led him to accept a materialistic view of life,
for he believed that outside matter there was no experience, no
knowledge, no absolute truths. In criticizing the eminent
French writer, Paul Bourget, whose novel, The Disciple, in­
dicts determinism and the evils of science, Chekhov declared
that to compel man to turn his back on the material world
meant to forbid him to seek truth. Such authors, with their infi­
nite talk about freedom, love, honor, and morality, contribute
to the degeneration of man, as they do in Russia, Chekhov
maintained, where they “help the devil to beget the wood lice
and mollusks we call the intelligentsia. The drowsy, apathetic,
lazy, philosophizing, cold intelligentsia, who cannot even in­
vent for themselves a decent design for paper money; who are
patriotic; who, sad and colorless, get drunk on a glass and visit
brothels for fifty kopecks; who grumble and blithely negate
everything, since it is easier for a lazy brain to deny than to
assert. . ..”
At this time Chekhov was willing to admit only that if one
denies problems and purpose in creative work, then one must
recognize that the artist creates without design, under the in­
fluence of some aberration. But, he insisted, the artist must re­
main objective, free from any tendentiousness, and not confuse
the solution of a problem with its presentation. An enemy of
everything romantic, metaphysical, and sentimental, he pre­
ferred to diagnose life as it is, the way a physician might diag­
nose a disease, but in his tales he refused to offer prescriptions
for the moral and social ills of mankind.
200 I N T H O I) U C T I O N TO H USS! A N REALISM

Shortly before he turned thirty, however, Chekhov began

seriously to wonder whether his insistence upon noninvolvc-
ment in questions of the day was not somehow connected with
not having developed strong philosophical convictions of his
own. The matter deeply disturbed him and is most cogently
and effectively reflected in one of his outstanding long talcs,
/I Dreary Story, written in 1889. (In typical fashion he said
that lie did not fear the scamps who would indulge in poor jokes
about the title, and if by chance some good ones were invented,
lie would be happy to have provided the opportunity.) The
work represents a new departure for him in conception and
treatment, and is more subjective than he had allowed himself
to be in any talc up to this point. It is the story of an old pro­
fessor, a celebrated scientist, who, on the threshold of the grave,
reviews the whole course of his life and comes to the terrible
conclusion that he is a spiritual bankrupt, that his life has had no
meaning, is devoid of any “general idea” which might have
served as “the God of a living man.” The narrative reaches its
climax in a poignant final scene where the professor’s beloved
ward, Katya, who might have brought him some comfort in his
disillusionment, seeks his aid. Though he fully understands the
tragedy of her hopeless drifting, lie is unable to help her because
lie lacks any focus in his own life.
In a sense the old professor in his lengthy analysis defends
one of Chekhov’s main contentions that the democratic intel­
lectuals, lacking a ruling idea, arc unable to know themselves
and lienee arc incapable of offering solutions to the “accursed
questions” that confront their backward country. Some critics
compared A Dreary Story to Tolstov’s The Death of Ivan
Ilyich. Both protagonists perceive the tragic emptiness of their
lives, but unlike the old professor who can discover no hope for
himself, Ivan Ilyich finds faith and love before his death. Per­
haps the most perceptive critical article on the story was that of
 Chekhov—"It is Impossible to Deceive in Art" 201

the well-known populist leader Mikhailovsky, who had not

been too kind to Chekhov’s previous writings. He concluded his
review: “From time to time talent ought to feel with horror the
anguish and dullness of ‘reality,’ it ought to erase such anguish
by ‘what is called a general idea or the God of a living man.’ A
Dreary Story is the begetter of such anguish. That is why this
talc is so fine and lifelike, for the author has put into it his
own pain.”
Mikhailovsky was right; Chekhov was experiencing mental
and spiritual pain in his personal life and in his writing. The
problem of the relation of literature to life still greatly troubled
him. This and other disappointments, the exact nature of which
is unclear became of his extreme reticence about everything
connected with his private affairs, brought about an acute
spiritual crisis by the end of 1889. “There is a stagnation in my
soul,” he wrote Suvorin. “I want passionately to hide myself
somewhere for five years and engage in serious, painstaking
work.” A few months later lie was on his wav to the Island of
Sakhalin, a tortuous journey of some six thousand miles to the
Pacific Ocean, to conduct a lengthy sociological investigation
of the convict colony there.

5
At the end of 1890 Chekhov returned to Moscow after an
absence of eight months. Varied and unusual experiences in the
penal colony and extensive study of its inmates, from which
eventually came his notable but purely scholarly book. The
Island of Sakhalin, clearly helped to bring about a catharsis of
the incessant inner agitation that had driven him to undertake
the venture. He recognized the effort as an important salutary
experience in a transition period of his life and a significant in­
fluence on both his social outlook and his future writing. Upon
202 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

his arrival he wrote Suvorin: “God’s world is good. It is only

we who are bad.... One must work, and to hell with everything
else. The important thing is that we must be just, and all the
rest will come as a matter of course. . . . My soul is in an up­
heaval.”
He lived the remainder of his life in this spirit. These years,
despite remorseless inroads of tuberculosis, were crammed with
an intense kind of civic activity; endless hours of unpaid medi­
cal practice among poor workers and peasants, designing and
building rural schools, working at village improvements, famine
relief, fighting cholera epidemics, aiding libraries, and service on
many district committees. Added to this, as his fame spread,
was personal aid to numerous petitioners, untold hours spent on
manuscripts of struggling authors, and activity in various public
cultural endeavors. Meanwhile he led a staggering social life,
ceaselessly entertaining hordes of admiring visitors, and he en­
gaged in extensive travel over Russia and Western Europe,
remodeled estates, built homes for himself and family, and de­
veloped into an expert gardener. On top of all this was his writ­
ing; the finest of his stories and the greatest of his plays had yet
to come. Yes, he worked, and he was just.
Among the stories that Chekhov wrote in 1891, after his
return from Sakhalin, The Peasant Wives is somethin? of an
exception, an impressive study in the evil-begetting power of
evil in two village women who plan to commit a monstrous
crime. As in a number of his stories, one is struck bv the realistic
effectiveness of presenting inhumanity in an entirely human
way. However, The Duel, of novella length, involves a new and
more imaginative treatment of the problems of the intelligentsia.
If A Dreary Story marked a maturer and psychologically
denser period in his writing, The Duel mav be considered a
continuation of this trend. Here he probes deeper into factors
of emotional disharmony that contribute to the mutual isolation
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art’’ 203

of characters, a familiar situation in later tales and much em­

phasized in the great plays. It is now interesting to observe
Chekhov introducing what appears to be a su bjective note
human conciliation which he would not allow himself in the
mutual isolation of leading characters in A Dreary Story. For
at the end of The Duel the parasitic Laevsky does not take the
customary defeatist intelligentsia way out in his failure with his
mistress. He realizes that his isolation and harsh treatment are
responsible for the weakness that led her into temptation, and he
is determined to try to begin their life anew. “In the search for
truth,” he speculates, “men make two steps forward and one
step back. Suffering, mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them
back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on.
And who knows? Perhaps at the end they will arrive at the real
truth.”
In The Wife, which is steeped in Chekhovian poetic atmo­
sphere as lyrical as that of a Chopin nocturne, the mutual isola­
tion of husband and wife is partly resolved by a kind of spiritual
experience when he learns the hard lesson that giving should
come from the heart. Quite different is the famous story The
Grasshopper which Chekhov seems to have designed as a satire
on one level of the Moscow artistic world. He stresses the tragi­
comic aspect of the grasshopper, that vulgar lover of the arts,
who in her philistine pursuit of beauty is blind to the beauty of
her physician-husband’s self-sacrificing death on behalf of
science. '
The new country sights and sounds, landscapes and people of
the little estate and its surroundings, not far from Moscow,
where Chekhov settled in 1892 spurred his imagination and
filled his mind with fresh subjects for his pen. Of the twenty-
one pieces that he published in 1892-93, the most celebrated is
the long story Ward No. 6 where Chekhov’s social awareness,
aroused in part by the government’s cruelty to convicts on
204 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

the Island of Sakhalin, is now reflected in his treatment of the

shocking conditions that exist in the mental ward of a provin­
cial hospital. The kind and gentle head of the hospital Dr. Ragin,
who has long since lost his reforming zeal in the face of local
indifference, takes refuge in the conviction that man must seek
happiness, not in the world outside him but in his inner self.
This comforting philosophy enables him to rationalize away all
the filthiness and mismanagement of the hospital as well as the
regular beatings which the brutish watchman of the mental
ward administers to its patients. Finally, an ambitious assistant,
scheming to supplant Dr. Ragin, has him locked up in Ward No.
6. There he is soon convinced, by the watchman’s huge fists, of
the years of suffering and indignity his quietist philosophy has
inflicted on unfortunate patients of the mental ward. The de­
liberately understated realism of the narrative only serves to
magnify the horror of human degradation.
Though liberal-minded critics, sensing a new social emphasis
in Chekhov, enthusiastically placed the talc at the top of his
fiction, they were frankly puzzled by its symbolic significance.
Did the ward and its sadistic watchman symbolize the “mental
prison” of Russia and its autocratic tsar? .And was the philo­
sophical Dr. Ragin a satire on well-intentioned members of the
intelligentsia who offered pious rationalizations of the govern­
ment’s oppressive measures and its violence? The critic A. M.
Skabichevsky, who predicted in a review of an early volume of
Chekhov’s talcs that he would “die completely forgotten in a
ditch,” saw in this symbolic uncertainty a manifestation of in­
effable art. For it was supremely difficult, he pointed out, to say
who were the healthy and who the spiritually ill people in the
stupid society of this provincial town, or where Ward No. 6
ended and the region of sane thinking began.
A letter from Suvorin, complaining that the talc lacked an
“alcoholic kick,” elicited a significant reply which unquestion-
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art" 205
ably indicates that Chekhov had at last rejected his belief in the
complete objectivity of art and its corollaries of portraying
only life as it is and eschewing the introduction of any subjec­
tive purpose, an altered position which had been encouraged no
doubt by his moral and social experiences of the last few years.
What contemporary Russian writers, he asks Suvorin, have
given the world even one drop of alcohol? They are all lemon­
ade, he asserts, and with his usual modesty he includes himself
in this group of failures. “Let me remind you,” he continues,
“that the writers whom we dub immortal or just simply good
and who intoxicate us have one very important trait in com­
mon: they are going somewhere and summon you to go with
them, and you feel, not with your mind, but with your whole
being, that they have a purpose. Looking at some of them in
terms of their caliber, they have immediate aims—the abolition
of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty . . .
God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so
on. The best of them are realistic and paint life as it is, but since
every line is saturated with a consciousness of purpose, as
though it were a juice, you feel, in addition to life as it is, life as
it should be, and you are captivated.”
In the rest of the letter, again because of his almost patho­
logical modesty, Chekhov lists himself with those writers of his
generation who lack purpose, a fault which he describes as a
disease of the feckless times in which they live, but his tales and
plays after his return from Sakhalin contradict this avowal.
Further, his real position is plainly revealed in a follow-up to this
letter. For Suvorin showed his reply to a friend, Madame
Sazonova, a contributor to his newspaper, and sent on her re­
action to Chekhov. Madame Sazonova, Chekhov answers,
argues that the purpose of life is life itself; that the artist ought
to value only what is, and that all his misfortunes come from
seeking lofty and remote aims. Here is real insincerity, Chekhov
206 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

declares: “She believes in ‘life,’ and that means that she does not
believe in anything if she’s intelligent. ... I write that aims are
lacking, and you realize that I consider aims necessary, and that
I would willingly go in search of them; but Sazonova writes that
man must not be lured by delights he can never attain.... If this
is not a hag’s logic, then surely it is a philosophy of despair.”
Chekhov’s tales from this point on, including many of his
greatest, reflect his altered views on the relation of art to life,
although the beginning of the change may be observed as early
as A Dreary Story. Taken altogether, they present an unusually
comprehensive analysis of Russian society in which a social
purpose is nearly always implicit, although it is never allowed to
obtrude on the essential unity of the tales. That is, he never falls
into overt preaching. Individual characters are as realistically
portrayed as ever, but in general the emphasis is on the social
pattern of a group—peasants, workers, merchants, the intelli­
gentsia, the growing bourgeoisie. The gentry, largely absent
from these tales, is treated in a similar fashion in the plays. The
themes, with some exceptions such as the rare supernatural sub­
ject in The Black Monk, concern problems of readjustment by
members of a group or class to an old order that is changing,
but changing into what is never quite certain. Usually the
atmosphere is one of mingled doubt and faith in the future.
If by now Chekhov has developed an integral view of life,
the fantastically mounting number of characters in his tales are
more often than not at variance with it—hundreds of them,
grown men and women, youths, children, coming from all
walks of life, all classes, representing every conceivable employ­
ment, and all with their special claims on the turn of fortune’s
wheel. Yet nearly every one of them is magically individualized,
whether it be a ninc-vear-old boy or a seventy-year-old man.
Thomas Mann marvelled at this faculty and wondered how
Chekhov, not yet thirty, could so convincingly think the
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 207
thoughts and enter into the psychology of the old scientist in
A Dreary Story. Yet Chekhov, whose empathy for human be­
ings passes all accounting, never stoops to caricaturing them,
perhaps because he loved life and people, especially the lonely
ones who crowd the vast patchwork quilt of his short stories.
Among the tales written between 1894-95, in A Woman's
Kingdom the personal story of Anna, who had inherited a fac­
tory and considers marrying into the working class from which
she has emerged, is subordinated to realistic scenes in the fac­
tory, workers’ hovels, and in Anna’s kitchen on Christmas Eve.
It is a tale revealing Chekhov’s new interests. Rothschild's
Fiddle, on the other hand, is a perfect study in the harmony of
mood and tone like the best of the early miniature tales which it
resembles. And so is The Student, a simple narrative of how a
poor seminary student encounters two people by a campfire on
the eve of Good Friday and moves them to tears by telling in
an artless manner the Biblical story of Peter denying Christ
thrice when the Savior was bound and taken before the high
priest. It is pure universal art, like a limpid lyric of Pushkin, and
one likes to think that Tolstoy had in mind the exquisite har­
mony of all its effects when he described Chekhov as the Rus­
sian Pushkin in prose. Chekhov regarded this brief story as his
favorite and most finished piece, and he once cited it as a refuta­
tion of those critics who considered him a pessimist. As the stu­
dent parts with the listeners, his soul is filled with joy, for he
suddenly realizes that the truth and beauty which guided life
there by the campfire and in the yard of the high priest had con­
tinued without end to the present. And Chekhov concludes,
“the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of an un­
known, mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by
little, and life seemed to him rapturous, marvelous, and full of
lofty meaning.”
But in other stories of this period, such as The Teacher of
2o8 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

Literature, At a Country House, Ariadne, and The Helpmate,

Chekhov is mostly concerned, and often with irony and humor,
in exposing the crass vulgarity and morals of petty provincial
officialdom and bourgeois types. His intention, perhaps, is more
directly expressed by what he condemns in The Polaniecki
Family, a novel of the popular Polish writer Henryk Sienkie­
wicz which was much admired by Suvorin. It consists of a dev­
ilish heap of scenes of family happiness, Chekhov wrote his
friend, and the result is sickeningly cloying and clumsy, just as
though one had received a wet, slobbery kiss. “The novel’s aim,”
he continued, “is to lull the bourgeoisie by its golden dreams.
Be faithful to your wife, pray beside her at the altar, make
money, love sport—and your affairs are all set, both in this and
the next world. The bourgeoisie admire so-called positive types
as well as novels with happy endings which calm their thoughts
so that they can accumulate capital, maintain their innocence,
behave like beasts, and be happy all at the same time.”
Russian variants of such characters with their vulgarity and
false moral values appear in Chekhov’s well-known tale, Anna
on the Neck, but they are treated with integrity, insight, and
complete sincerity. The whole social machinery which enables
the new pretty young wife to turn the tables on her pompous
bureaucrat of a husband in obtaining for him the Order of Anna
is also used to expose the venality and immorality of all this
petty bourgeois officialdom. But Chekhov does not stop there.
He drives home the real pathos of life in this milieu by letting
us see how the young wife, once she had achieved social suc­
cess, turns her back on the poverty of her brothers as well as on
her father who has taken to drink.
Yet in this tale as in many others, it is Chekhov’s compassion­
ate understanding of the human weaknesses of such characters
rather than his condemnation of them that strikes the reader. It
is a special essence of Chekhov’s art. He indirectly reminds a
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 209
young disciple of it when he observes that the women in a story
are allowed to regard syphilis as something unspeakable.
“Syphilis is not a vice,” he writes the disciple, “not the result
of wicked excesses, but an illness, and those afflicted with it re­
quire sympathetic and understanding treatment. It is not a good
trait if your wife deserts her sick husband because he has an in­
fection or loathsome disease. She, of course, may take what
attitude she likes toward it, but the author must be humane to
the tips of his fingers.”
The major literary effort of this period, a very long story en­
titled Three Years, can possibly be regarded as Chekhov’s last
attempt at a novel, for the ending plainly suggests the continua­
tion which he never wrote. For Chekhov it is a leisurely paced
tale concentrated on the deterioration of a wealthy Moscow
family portrayed against a background of city life which is
described with rich realistic detail. There are autobiographical
elements and a complexity of plot consistent with the length
of the story, features yet unique in his fiction. Further, there
are more characters than he allows himself in his tales. Some of
them, especially Laptev, the younger son of the old merchant,
who has become a captive of the very wealth he detests, are
profound psychological studies in the making. Three Years has
more of the flavor of a novel than anything Chekhov wrote, and
the unresolved ending of the dawning love of Laptev’s wife and
his close friend carries the promise of further intriguing but
unfulfilled developments.

6
A detailed analysis of Chekhov’s plays would be out of place
here, but the extent to which thcv reflect his theory of art and
conception of realism has some relevance. Although he once as­
serted that writing plays was not in his character, the focus,
210 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

incident, treatment, and dialogue of many of his tales, especially

the early ones, are essentially dramatic. In fact some of the
highly successful one-act plays are dramatized versions of these
stories. All of Chekhov’s youthful dramatic efforts have been
lost with the exception of the incredibly long and rather melo­
dramatic Platonov, written at the age of twenty-one and never
performed in his lifetime. It contains a gallery of realistically
portrayed characters taken from different strata of Russian
society which is represented in the throes of transition from the
decaying old order to the rapacious greed of the new. Such lines
of dialogue as Osip’s “The common people have no guts now­
adays,” and Platonov’s observation on his father: “To be a
blackguard and at the same time refuse to recognize it—that’s
the fearful characteristic of the Russian scoundrel,” are surpris­
ing as coming from the youthful Chekhov, but it must be re­
membered that this play was never passed on by the censorship
commission.
Ivanov, his first staged plav, is a more or less conventional
drama. The hero, whom Chekhov satirizes, is an entirely be­
lievable image of the disillusioned intellectual of the eighties
obsessed by the emptiness of his life. But in the unsuccessful
Wood Demon in 1889, which he later transformed into Uncle
Vanya, Chekhov consciously moved in the direction of the
“inner action” plays of his great period of dramatic writing.
However, its theme of the struggle between good and evil is
lost in the welter of melodramatic effects, and instead of cre­
ating life as it is, he failed to create life at all.
By 1895, when he began work on The Sea Gull, observations
in his notebooks indicate that Chekhov intended to approach
this play in the spirit of his recently revised thinking about art.
Without losing sight of artistic objectivity, he was then willing
to believe that the litcrarv artist must also have a purpose and
be prepared to pass moral judgment on the endless disharmony
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art" 211

between life as it is and life as it should be. The poetic power

to evoke man’s vision of life, even his idealizing flights into the
realm of the irrational, and to convey all this, as he had done in
his tales, by creating an emotional mood with which the theater
audience will identify itself—this was the new direction he
wished to impart to The Sea Gull. He now realized, as he had
not in the case of The Wood Demon, that in order to reveal
people as they really are and not as they appear to be, he must
concentrate on their inner substance. In short, what he sought
was a realism that stressed not the events of life, but a character’s
inner reaction to them, a process which in turn must be articu­
lated by dialogue that reflected inner rather than outer action.
The resounding failure of the first performance of The Sea
Gull was a crushing blow to Chekhov. Though various adventi­
tious factors contributed to the debacle, all evidence indicates
that directors, actors, and audience failed to appreciate or inter­
pret correctly the play’s innovations: the significance of its
symbolism, the indirect appeal of the emotionally evocative
dialogue, the eloquent implication of the silences, the effective
mood of fused lyricism and wit, or the unanticipated truth that
emerges from a group of characters disappointed by life. Some
critics even assumed that the two writers in the play, Trigorin
and Treplev, were mouthpieces for Chekhov’s ideas on art, al­
though in real life he would have condemned the personalities
and artistic achievements of both. If any character reflects
Chekhov’s ideas on art, it is Dr. Dorn in his brief statements
that there is no beauty without seriousness; that an author must
always have a sincere purpose; and that every work of art
should express a great idea.
Though Chekhov never ceased to be grateful for the superb
success of the new Moscow Art Theater’s performance of The
Sea Gull two years later, the event also marks the beginning of
his prolonged disagreement with that theater’s famous director
212 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

Stanislavsky who insisted upon tragic interpretations of what

Chekhov had intended as comedy in his plays and substituted
naturalistic effects for his realism. He accused Stanislavsky of
turning his characters into crybabies. “I desired something
other,” he informed a young writer. “I wished only to tell peo­
ple honestly: ‘Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly
you live!’ The principal thing is that people should understand
this, and when they do, they will surely create for themselves
another and better life.”
When Chekhov was attending a rehearsal of The Sea Gull,
one of the actors told him that Stanislavsky J intended to have
frogs croaking, the sound of dragonflies, and dogs barking on
the stage.
“Why?” Chekhov asked.
“It is realistic,” the actor replied.
“Realistic,” Chekhov repeated laughingly. “The stage is art.
There is a canvas of Kramskoi
* in which he wonderfully depicts
human faces. Suppose he eliminated the nose of one of these
faces and substituted a real one. The nose will be ‘realistic,’ but
the picture will be spoiled.”
When another actor informed him that Stanislavsky would
introduce a woman with a weeping baby at the end of the third
act, Chekhov objected: “It is just like playing a pianissimo at the
very moment the lid of the piano drops.” In life it often happens
that a forte, entirely unexpectedly, becomes a pianisshno, a third
actor commented. Chekhov answered: “True, but the stage is
subject to known conventions. You have no fourth wall. Apart
from this, the stage is art, the stage reflects in itself the quintes­
sence of life, so one must not introduce on it anything that is
superfluous.”
Characters in the plays, like those in his tales, arc not copies
of real people, but an amalgam of real people plus Chekhov’s
* A celebrated Russian painter.
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 213
imagination and personal experience of life. No matter how
spiritually healthy they may seem to be, in his own conception
he stressed their social loneliness and requested that it be
brought out in the acting which, he said, should avoid any
naturalistic emphasis, stage conventions, or nonessential effects
that might destroy the typicality of a portrayal. If it was an
innovation to have his characters make puzzlingly swift transi­
tions from the comic to the sad, so also was their seemingly dis­
connected dialogue. But the dialogue does not really bear the
central burden of the plays; their striking fullness is concen­
trated rather on the silences and on the sense of life.
These and other innovations in The Sea Gull, Uncle Vmy a,
The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard somewhat bewil­
dered their first audiences, but once fully comprehended and
expertly interpreted, they contributed to Chekhov’s interna­
tional fame as a dramatist. When he told his brother that morals
do not purify plays any more than flies purify the air, he had in
mind the stereotype love-and-duty situations of conventional
drama of the times. Chekhov’s moral values in his plays are
something else again. The lovely idealistic Nina in The Sea Gull
rises above the anguish of her seduction by Trigorin, her dead
baby, and her bitter experiences in provincial theaters in her
consuming ambition to become a great actress. “I now know, I
understand, Kostya,” she tells the young author Treplev who is
in love with her, “that in our work, whether it is acting or writ­
ing, what matters is not fame, not glory, which I used to dream
about, but the power to endure. Know how to bear your cross
and have faith.”
Uncle Vanya, Sonya, and Astrov, in a play where the realism
is raised to heights of inspired symbolism, are not overwhelmed
when they finally discover the cruel truth that they have been
working for years to sustain the false fame of the old professor.
Astrov speaks for the others when he declares: “In man every-
214 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

thing should be beautiful: his face and his clothes, his soul and
his thoughts.” And courage born of defeat in a group of human
beings dedicated to work and service to others rings out in
Sonya’s wonderful declaration to Uncle Vanya at the end of
the play.
In The Three Sisters, where the subtle interaction of symbol
and reality creates an atmosphere of unusual psychological
depth, Chekhov once again distills from frustration positive
values that amount to a renewed faith in life and its purpose.
The passionate hope of the sisters to get to Moscow fades. Irina
had placed hope in her lover Tuzcnbach who identifies himself
with her doctrine of work and eagerly looks forward to the time
when labor will be cheerfully accepted by all. The practical
Masha, who believes that life is all right if you don’t waste it,
had some hope in Vershinin who loves her and drcams of the
glorious future when the world, led by cultured people, will be
a better place. But Tuzenbach is killed in a duel, and Vershinin
has to leave this dull provincial town on a new military assign­
ment. As the band plays and the troops march off, Masha refuses
to surrender the illusion of happiness. They must begin life
anew, she tells her sisters. Irina agrees and rcdedicatcs herself to
work and service to others. Olga embraces them both and gal­
lantly declares: “Oh, my dear sisters, our life is not yet at an end.
Let us live! The music plays so gaily and joyfully, and it seems
that in a little while we shall know why we live and why we
suffer. If only we knew! If only we knew!”
The values of The Cherry Orchard were considerably dis­
torted in the production of Stanislavsky who regarded it as a
social tragedy of the passing of the old gentry order, symbolized
bv the sale of the orchard, and the arrival of a new order of
commercialism represented by Lopakhin. Though there arc
serious sequences, Chekhov characteristically mingles them
with humorous incidents, action, and dialogue, for he definitely
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 215
designed the play as a comedy. There is no contradiction here:
the comic effects are as life-affirming as they are accusatory.
That is, Chekhov compels these characters, who pose as ideal­
ists, liberals, lovers of beauty, and victims of fate, to ridicule
themselves by word and action while at the same time arousing
the sympathy of the audience because of their inability to see
themselves as others see them. In short, by dwelling on their
inner substance, he shows them as they actually exist and not
as they appear to be in real life.
The values inherent in The Cherry Orchard resemble those
of the other plays. Hard work, Trofimov declares, is the only
solution for Russia’s ills. Indeed, he and Anya, who answer for
the hope of the young generation, rejoice over the cutting down
of the cherry orchard, for it creates for them exciting possibili­
ties of a new life elsewhere. “All Russia is our orchard,” Trofi­
mov tells Anya. “Our land is vast, and beautiful; there are many
wonderful places in it.” These words convey the real symbolism
of the loss of the cherry orchard—Chekhov’s favorite theme of
the destruction of beauty by those who are blind to it.

7
Chekhov, however, always felt much more at home in fiction
than in drama, and during the last few years of his life he con­
tinued happily to write stories as well as plays. When admirers
appealed to him as a celebrated author to pass judgment on the
merits of his own tales or those of others, in his shy way he
would usually fob them off with a joking reply. Like most crea­
tive writers he tended to dislike critics, who, he said, were like
horseflies that plague a horse while it is ploughing. When he was
queried about the art, tendencies, or realism of this or that
literary work, he confessed that he would become lost and hesi-
216 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

tantly endorse anything. “I divide all works into two kinds,” he

once remarked, “those I like and those I don’t. I have no other
criterion. . . .”
Nevertheless, when he was asked by a younger writer for
advice, Chekhov usually gave it with critical penetration and
candor. This was particularly true of Gorky who worshiped
Chekhov and said that in his presence everyone involuntarily
felt in himself a desire to be simpler and more truthful. No one
could write so simply about simple things as Chekhov could,
Gorky declared, and on one occasion he told him: “Your tales
are exquisite phials filled with all the smells of life. . . .” The
main burden of Chekhov’s strictures was Gorky’s typical
visceral abandonment so alien to his own artistic restraint. In
his writing, Chekhov told him, Gorky was like a spectator in a
theater who expresses his rapture so unreservedly that he pre­
vents himself and others from hearing. Gorky lacked what
Chekhov called “grace” in fiction, that is, the ability to expend
the least possible movement in coping with scenes and the ac­
tions of characters. In commenting on the proofs of Gorky’s
novel Foma Gordeyev, Chekhov urged him to delete as many
superfluous words as possible because the reader finds it hard
to concentrate on them. “You understand it at once,” he in­
structed Gorky, “when I write: ‘The man sat on the grass.’ You
understand because it is clear and makes no demand on the at­
tention. On the other hand, it is not easily understood and it is
difficult for the mind if I write: ‘A tall, narrow-chested, middle-
sized man, with a red beard, sat on the green grass, trampled by
passersby, sat silently, looking around him timidly and fear­
fully.’ This is not immediately grasped by the mind, whereas
good writing should be grasped at once, in a second”—an artis­
tic principle, incidentally, that seems to have lost its force in a
good deal of literature written over the last forty years.
Yet there was much about contemporary writing, including
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 217
that of Gorky and Leonid Andreyev, which Chekhov casti­
gated because of its political tendentiousness, and the popular
Decadents he described as knaves dealing in spoiled goods. He
detected a lack of sincerity and truthfulness in such writers. One
must not lie, he told a young author: “In this respect art is
especially precious, for it is impossible to lie in it. One may lie in
love, and in politics, and in medicine one may deceive people
and the good Lord Himself—there have been such cases—but it
is impossible to deceive in art.”
Chekhov has sometimes been charged with adopting an atti­
tude of restraint and coldness toward his characters, but this
impression derives more from deliberate artistry rather than
personal temperament. “One may weep and groan over one’s
own tale,” he wrote a correspondent, “one may suffer with one’s
heroes, but I believe this should be done in such a way that the
reader does not notice it.” He answered more whimsically to
the complaint that his heroes were gloomy: “Alas, I’m not at
fault in this! It happens involuntarily, and when I write, it
doesn’t seem to me that I’m being gloomy; at any rate, I’m al­
ways in a good mood when I work.” He was harsher on those
who accused him of avoiding positive heroes in his tales: “But
where am I to get them? I would be happy to have them!
Our life is provincial, cities are unpaved, villages poor, the
masses abused. In our youth we all chirp, rapturously like spar­
rows on a dung heap, but when we are forty, we are already old
and begin to think of death. Fine heroes we are!”
On several occasions Chekhov insisted that he never wrote
his stories directly from nature but rather from memory. He
had to let the subject first filter through his memory, he ex­
plained, until only what was important and typical in it re­
mained in the filter. The process is concretely illustrated in the
short story On the Cart, a crushing indictment of country
schools. In his notebook are observations drawn from real life
218 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

about a particular rural school and its teacher, his heroine,

whom he knew well. One may study the important and typical
features that remained in the artistic filter and appear in the
story enhanced in their artistic presentation.
Among these tales of Chekhov’s last period, The House With
the Attic is one of his most poetically conceived and executed.
The rather anarchistic views of the artist in his arguments with
the harsh, reformist older sister may well be a satire on sweep­
ing verbal panaceas for social improvement among certain ele­
ments of the intelligentsia. But these ideological debates are
really a device for working out the destinies of two of Chek­
hov’s most charming lovers. The moonlit, fairy-tale atmosphere
that presides over the secret meetings of the artist and the
younger sister, a wraith of feminine loveliness, loses nothing of
its enduring enchantment because of the realistic note of inter­
vention which the stern older sister injects into the romance.
There is not a drop of poetry in the long tale My Life, a
searing, realistic indictment of the social pattern of provincial
towns, with all their bribery, vulgarity, and cruel inequality.
Of the two central characters, a son and daughter who revolt
against their father whose meanness is typical of leading inhabi­
tants of the town, the son takes a Tolstoyan way out. He be­
comes a common worker and argues that the strong and the
weak, the rich and the poor should share equally in the strug­
gle for existence. At the end, however, one gathers that the
main characters, enlightened by their sorrows, are moving to­
ward the Chekhovian conviction that progress and happiness
arc not to be found in the Tolstoyan doctrine of the golden rule,
but in truth.
No work in this last period created such a public furor as the
long storv Peasants. There were violent polemics in the press
and a flood of laudatory letters from enraptured liberal readers
and critics. Chekhov and his publisher lost a battle with the
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art” 219
censor before permission was granted to print the tale. There is
no plot and no truly central characters; the story concentrates
on a particular family in the village. It is a picture, drawn with
unsparing realism, of peasants—living ten or twelve in a family,
in a one-room hovel, dirty, stinking, swarming with flies, their
food consisting largely of black bread soaked in water, with a
herring added on feast days. They are depicted as Chekhov had
come to know them as a country doctor and a rural district
official. Drunkenness and immorality are endemic, and so are
cruelty and bribery among themselves and their overseers. The
presentation seems like a truthful, realistic answer to idealized
pictures of peasantry found in some of the writings of Turge­
nev and Tolstoy. In the bestiality of their savage existence, how­
ever, Chekhov searches out the humanity of those few who at­
tempt to lead more Christian and helpful lives. Genre pictures
are drawn with impeccable detail, and several of the characters,
especially Olga and her little girl who are forced by relatives
to beg on the highway, are portrayed with beautifully re­
strained pathos. In keeping with Chekhov’s artistic principles,
there are no denunciations or preaching. He simply seems to be
suggesting that light be brought into the darkness of peasant
life and that some relief be accorded them in their hopeless
poverty.
Chekhov is a bit more forthright in social protest, at least
through the medium of his characters, in the brilliant series of
tales The Man in a Shell, Gooseberries, and About Love, unique
for him in that they are connected by a common framework in­
volving two characters who appear in all three stories. Belikov,
the wonderfully realized image of the petty man made arro­
gantly servile by the impossible bureaucracy that enslaves him,
is a symbol of countless men in shells, the monochrome end­
products of the Russian social system of the time. The veteri­
nary Ivan Ivanych was no doubt intended to be the spokesman of
220 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

thinking people when he says of the system that produces the

Belikovs: “To see and hear how they lie. . . . and they call you
a fool for putting up with these lies; to endure insult, humilia­
tion, not dare to declare openly that you are on the side of
honest, free people, and to lie and smile yourself, and all for a
crust of bread, for the sake of a warm corner, for some lowly
rank in the service that is not worth a kopeck—no, one cannot
go on living like this.”
In Gooseberries Ivan Ivanych tells the story of a man who
half starves himself to buy a bit of property in the country
where he can at last be his own master and eat his own goose­
berries. In this monasticism without self-denial Ivan Ivanych
sees a corollary to Tolstoy’s gloomy parable that a man needs
only the six feet of earth that his corpse will require. On the
contrary, he declares, undoubtedly echoing Chekhov’s own
thirst for life: “Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but
the whole of the globe, all of nature, where he will have room
for the full play of all the capacities and peculiarities of his free
spirit.”
Love is a great mystery, Chekhov remarks in the last tale of
the trilogy, and everything written or said about it is not a solu­
tion, but only a statement of questions that have remained un­
answered. Here he is concerned with another variant of per­
sonal freedom. Month after month the hesitant lovers allow
life’s uncertainties to erode their passion, and at last, when it is
too late, the anguished man declares “that when you love, you
must, in your reasoning about love, start from what is higher
and more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or vir­
tue, in their usual meaning, or you must not reason at all.”
In truth love rarely succeeds in an ideal sense in Chekhov’s
stories. The Darling is an exception, and perhaps this is the
reason why Tolstov made it his favorite and included it in his
 Chekhov—“It is Impossible to Deceive in Art’’ 221
compilation Readings for Every Day in the Year. With delicate
insistence Chekhov emphasizes Olenka’s need to love somebody
and we arc not disillusioned when circumstances rather humor­
ously compel her to transfer her affections often until finally
they are bestowed on a little boy—a last measure of love for one
who can offer least in return.
Chekhov comes back to his more familiar emphasis upon un­
happy love in the beautiful tale, The Lady with the Dog, the
first to make use of the captivating scenery of the resort town
of Yalta where Chekhov, because of illness, was compelled to
spend the last years of his life. In this tale, as in others with the
same general theme, his sympathy is obviously on the side of the
illicit lovers whose unhappy separation is ordained by factors
beyond their control.
Of the last three talcs that Chekhov wrote, The Bishop and
The Betrothed are relatively short pieces. Chekhov, who was
himself a nonbeliever, treats the life and death of the bishop,
the monastery and its priests and visitors with more religious
feeling than the believer Dostoevsky in handling somewhat
similar subject matter in The Brothers Karamazov. There is no
frenetic fussiness about saints and sinners in The Bishop. Chek­
hov’s quiet, objective realism, manifested in a series of exqui­
sitely narrated homely impressions, movingly evokes the faith
of the old bishop and at the same time creates the hallowed
atmosphere of the Church that gives meaning to his faith. The
Betrothed does not have quite this memorable quality. But its
leading character is the first Chekhovian heroine to have the
courage to break away from her bourgeois environment. Unlike
the three sisters, we know that this emancipated woman will
participate in the realization of the drcam that haunted Chekhov
in a number of his tales and plays. For she declares at the end:
“Oh, if that new, brighter life would only come quickly, then
222 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

one would be able to look one’s fate boldly in the face, to know
that one was right, and to be happy and free! And sooner or
later such a life will come!”
Much more formidable than cither of these two stories is the
long tale hi the Ravine which created almost as much public stir
as Peasants. At the time of its publication Chekhov wrote
Suvorin that Russian society “is weary, hatred is making it as
rank and sour as grain in a bog, and it has a longing for some­
thing fresh, free, and light—a desperate longing.” All the ugly
intrigues and uncontrolled passions of a typical merchant fam­
ily are starkly revealed but without direct criticism. Chekhov
invented nothing, most of the reviews pointed out, but neither
did they miss the fact that he treated these sinning men and
women with a compassion born of a love of life. The arresting
peasant girl Lipa, sacrificed in marriage to the merchant’s
noisome son, embodies that desperate longing for something
fresh, free, and light about which Chekhov had written his
friend. As she wanders home from the hospital, cradling in her
arms her dead infant horribly scalded by a jealous rival, crazed
with grief she carries on a dialogue with the strange voices of
the night. The old carter, who gives her a lift, provides the
peasant’s simple, fatalistic answer to her plaintive query why
her innocent child should have been so painfully tormented be­
fore its death: “Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long,
there will be more good and there will be more bad, there is
everything yet to come. Great is Mother Russia!”
In a sense realism as a word explains nothing, but we all un­
derstand what is meant when we say that a writer imitates or
mirrors life. And though one may insist on the fictiveness of
fiction or the oblique relation of the writer’s world to the real
world, of all Russian realists Chekhov’s own world seems to be
most closely identified with his world of fiction. He portrayed
the world in which he lived with fastidious accuracy, and the
 Chekhov—"It is Impossible to Deceive in Art" 223

extraordinary thematic scope and unexampled richness in situ­

ations and characters in the many volumes of his tales testify to
an imaginative power rarely equalled by other writers.
Although Chekhov finally realized that no writer whose sub­
ject is human life can be purely objective, that all is inevitably
colored by what he has enjoyed and suffered, the special quality
of his realism and its unique contribution to the Russian realistic
trend he inherited lies precisely in the degree of objectivity he
achieved. Unlike Scott Fitzgerald, he never had to wonder
whether he was real or a character in his fiction. If the artist
declares the intensity of his rejection of certain phases of reality
by the kind of treatment he imposes upon it, Chekhov hardly
ever betrays overtly his approval or disapproval of life’s con­
dition. He knew that moral values are aspects of time, culture,
and adjustment, and though he hated hypocrisy, self-interest,
and the power of money, in these respects he let his art speak
for him; his message never lies in any teaching but in his art. If
his tales ever echo him directly, it is only in that quality of his
nature that stirred him most—his pronounced affirmation of life.
This is perhaps one reason why his realism seems so vital and
modern, whereas the realism of Hemingway, let us say, which
seemed so poignantly intense in 1927, is beginning to be con­
sidered somewhat romantic and even a bit sentimental today.
That is, though the Russian world of the 1880’s and 1890’s has
lost relevance for both natives and foreigners, all still feel close
to the emotional world of Chekhov’s characters who help us to
understand ourselves and our contemporaries.
If the profound depth of conscience in Russian fiction is what
appeals most to foreign readers, then it must be said that no
Russian writer was ever more truthful or more guided bv con­
science than Chekhov. Conscience was his highest arbiter. At a
party once a guest asked him to write in his album which was ar­
ranged in the form of a calendar, with printed epigraphs at the
224 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

head of each page. Under an epigraph taken from a poem of

Lermontov,
Believe me,—happiness is there only
Where we are loved, where we are believed. . . .
Chekhov wrote: “Where we are loved, where we are believed,
there it is dull for us; but we arc happy there where we ourselves
love and where we ourselves believe.” And he signed his name.
VI • SHOLOKHOV

Literary Artist and Socialist Realist

The morning after the 1917 Revolution was a tragically diffi­
cult yet excitingly challenging time for Russian writers. Two
centuries of struggle for freedom had been climaxed by a tre­
mendous explosion that rocked the whole vast country from
one end to the other. And for a few short years, before the in­
tellectual and artistic rigor mortis of Stalinism set in, writers
enjoyed the freedom and creative élan of the only revolutionary
period of Soviet literature. Numerous contending movements
sprang up and the radical artistic aims of their strident manifes­
toes belabored the dead past and called for fresh beginnings.
Innovation was the watchword, and particularly in poetry, tra­
ditional muse of revolution, the degree of blatant experimenta­
tion trumpeted the determination of poets to preserve their in­
dividual values in a world in revolt.
In fiction as well there was also widespread demand for
change. New forms of prose narrative were sought in which to
cast the different content of revolutionary life. Some innovators
even argued for the total abolition of the novel. After all, they
declared, the novel was obviously the creation of bourgeois
225
226 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM
capitalism and its favorite literary form for propagandizing
middle-class individualism and false liberal ideas.
Even if new forms of literary expressions had been possible,
this revolutionary fervor for experimentation in the arts was
not allowed to exist long enough to develop them. From Lenin
down the early Bolshevik leaders were often men of consider­
able culture and, of course, radicals in political, social, and eco­
nomic matters, but they were largely conservatives in the arts.
They vaguely hoped that writers would embody the new life
in old literary forms but in a context of values inspired by de­
votion to Marxian socialism. Moderate critics, such as the able
Alexander Voronskv, saw the problem in terms of the “living
man,” actually a variant of Russian classical realism, which
would require the writer to treat everything objectively—the
Communist with all his faults and the class enemy with all his
virtues. And the brilliant Trotsky, who knew more about liter­
ature than any of his colleagues on the Politburo, declared as
late as 1924 in his book, Literature and Revolution: “Art mus?
make its own wav and bv its own means. Marxian methods are
not the same as artistic methods. The Party leads the proletariat
but not the historic processes of history. . . . The domain of art
is not one in which the Party is called upon to command. It can
and must protect and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly.”
Heaping scorn on young radicals who demanded a repudiation
of the great artistic achievements of the Russian past in an
effort to build an entirely new proletarian culture, Trotsky
called for creative repossession of the artistic heritage, envisag­
ing the future development of Soviet literature as one in which
collective interests and passions and individual competition
would have the widest scope, and the human personality, “with
its invaluable basic trait of continual discontent,” would grow
and become polished at all points.
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 227
In this early climate of relative tolerance, it was only natural
that Soviet novelists should have sought their models in nine­
teenth-century Russian realism. That is, the supreme literary
form of the middle class was taken over and became the favorite
one in the Soviet Union which in the meantime was struggling
to achieve a classless society. In the complex pattern of change
and continuity between old and new, in literature the aspect of
continuity has dominated the Soviet scene. This was true not
only of the early period but has persisted right up to the present
time. In fiction, Tolstov and Dostoevsky have been major in­
fluences, but Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, and at one point the
prose ornamentalists among Symbolists at the end of the cen­
tury have also played a part. At times, especially during and
immediately after the Second World War, critics made a virtue
of this continuity for nationalistic reasons, professing to see
Russian literature of the past and Soviet literature of the present
as a single, unified stream of development moving majestically
upwards across the decades from the classical realism of Pushkin
to its transformation into the highest art in the Soviet Union—
the art of socialist realism.
Without commenting on whether a movement upward or
downward has taken place, it may be said that this so-called
transformation is really a fusion, at least among the best Soviet
novelists of the middle and later period. In the fusion another
aspect of continuity has been involved. For the doctrine of
socialist realism, initially formulated at the First Congress of
the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, has its roots in critical
controversies between radical democrats and liberals of the
1860’s. The “new Soviet man,” the politically oriented positive
hero of socialist realism, is an infinite extension in Communist
Party terms of the finite “new man” whom the radical demo­
crats of the sixties called for in fiction and for which Rakhme-
228 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

tov, in Chernyshevsky’s novel. What Is to Be Done?, was an

early model.
*
Socialist realism insists on the complete identification of lit­
erature and politics. The primary justification of its literary
products is to offer ideological and practical instruction to read­
ers and to subscribe to the moral that the Communist Party
knows best. Its positive heroes have taken on lineaments of the
all-conquering knights of medieval romance, with the differ­
ence that the Soviet hero commits no mortal sin because his
heart is socialistically pure. Though Marx and Engels, with
their rather humanistic views on literature, would hardly have
sanctioned this Soviet debasement of it, their authority has fre­
quently been invoked and distorted to support the Soviet ver­
sion of socialist realism. In practice socialist realism seems to
result in the union of revolutionarv romanticism and revolu­
tionary realism, in which the author appears to see tomorrow as
the basis of today. That is, he writes as if ideals were already
facts. Or put another way, he starts with a version of idealized
life as he thinks it will be in the Communist future and then
adapts it to Soviet reality today. In these circumstances, there is
perhaps much point in the excellent article on socialist realism,
published abroad by the Soviet pseudonymous Abram Tertz,
who suggests in one place that the irreality of Soviet life, espe­
cially in the days of Stalin, could be more effectively rendered
by a phantasmagoric art than bv socialist realism. However that
may be, the mechanical fusion of Russian classical realism with
Soviet socialist realism docs violence to the honesty and sin­
cerity of the former and serves to expose the shallow artistic
pretensions of the latter. Ninctccnth-ccnturv realism also cn-

' For a convincing and perceptive study of this thesis, as well as of

much related matter, sec Rufus \V. Mathewson, Jr., The Positize Hero in
Russian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 229
countered governmental repression, though never in the manner
of Soviet total literary manipulation, but its posture always re­
mained a libertarian one. The difference is that Soviet leaders
have come to regard literature as a tremendously important
ideological weapon, whereas the tsars took little notice of it
provided writers refrained from attacking any fundamental
feature of the autocracy. To this extent artistic individualism,
so necessary to the free functioning of genuine realism, found
elaborate expression in great Russian novels of the nineteenth
century whose enduring and vast popularity today in the So­
viet Union reflects unfavorably on the fiction of socialist real­
ism.
Some earlier Soviet fiction, before the curtain of socialist
realism came down, was written in the full tradition of nine­
teenth-century realism, and often with originality and on a high
artistic level. One thinks of the early short stories and novels of
Zamyatin, Fedin, Leonov, Olesha, Pilnyak, and Babel. A preva­
lent theme in much of this fiction is the tragic struggle of al­
legiances between old and new which revolution always thrusts
upon a population. The complex tensions of this cruel dilemma
are psychologically analyzed in terms of the desperate choices
that confront men and women compelled to reject or furtively
compromise with a past life, which they sometimes loved, and
adjust to a new existence which often seemed incomprehensible.
Perhaps the realism of novels concerned with this problem,
such as Fedin’s Cities and Years and The Brothers and Leonov’s
The Badgers and The Thief, gained in convincingness and emo­
tional impact because their authors were undergoing the same
agonv of adjustment or alienation as their characters.
Individual values, however, were still more violently
wrenched in the physical aspect of the struggle between old
and new—the bloody fratricidal strife of civil war. The ter-
23° INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

rible urgency of shattering social change was enforced by gun,

dagger, and sabre over hundreds of battlefields by millions of
kith and kin, who maimed, killed, despoiled, and ravaged one
another. Here was the richest material for fiction, not only
horror-haunted situations of mortal strife between master and
man, father and son, brother and brother, but also the love and
hate, tenderness and cruelty which the violence of civil war
mysteriously spawns in a world of sudden change where the
hard choices between old and new may often be choices be­
tween life and death.
On this theme the one Soviet novel that can take its place be­
side all but the greatest of nineteenth-century fiction, and
which has long since won for itself the reputation of a classic,
is Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don. To be sure, as an ex­
emplar of the best in this respect one may prefer Doctor Zhi­
vago, which is also concerned with the struggle between old
and new in war and civil war and is likewise written in the tra­
dition of nineteenth-centurv Russian realism, although Paster­
nak has brought to it his own increment of originality. Pas­
ternak’s masterpiece, however, though steeped in the tragedy
of Soviet life, is really devoid of the typicalness of Soviet liter­
ature, for it rises above the battle into the clear air of universal
art.
The Quiet Don, on the other hand, represents with near
perfection that fusion of traditional Russian realism with Soviet
socialist realism, and was written by ✓ a Communist who, because
of his artistic integrity, all but refused to sacrifice either the
logic of his design or—in the Tolstoyan sense—the truth of his
hero to extraneous demands of Party doctrine. If there is any
point in the old cliche that all literature is propaganda, but not
all propaganda is literature, then it mav be said that propaganda
is brilliantly sublimated in The Quiet Don.
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 231

2
In a society determined to encourage the collectivist spirit of
man, nature seems to have endowed Sholokhov with the tem­
perament of a pronounced individualist. Perhaps the fabled in­
dependence of the Cossack may account somewhat for his
aloofness. His fame in the Soviet Union is legendary, his books
have sold in millions of copies, and he has received every honor
a grateful country can bestow on him, nevertheless, he prefers
to shun writers and the literary turmoil of Moscow for his
simple Cossack neighbors on the Don and his quiet homestead
there. He loves this river and the rolling steppes expanding
from its banks, and he intensely enjoys living through the
changing seasons of his picturesque region, observing its ani­
mate and inanimate life. It is the throbbing heart of his fiction
and he draws from it his strength and tenderness as a literary
artist.
Unlike a number of immediate contemporaries who achieved
fame as writers, Sholokhov appears never to have had any
fellow-traveler inclinations. After a little formal education and
some experience in fighting on the side of the Reds in the Don
region, he joined the Communist Party at the age of twenty-
five. He has always been an indubitable Soviet writer, un­
troubled by memories of Russia’s cultural past. If he has learned
from its great fiction in a literary way, and he has learned much,
he has been impervious to its libertarian ethos. As for the cul­
ture of the West, he regards it as rather effeminate, scorns it,
and also any Soviet art that is influenced by it.
When he came up to Moscow for a short time in 1923, at the
age of eighteen, to obtain more education, the loner instinct
insulated him from contending writers’ groups and exciting lit-
2%2 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

erary controversies. He went his own way, made very few

friends, and has persisted in this practice ever since.
In 1925 Don Tales, later augmented in a second volume, un­
obtrusively began Sholokhov’s long literary career. In the mass
of Soviet civil-war literature, these short stories fall somewhere
between the notable documentary novel, Chapayev, of Furma­
nov and Babel’s collection of tales, Red Cavalry, but they avoid
the sententious political harangues of the first and the incredibly
cruel yet meaningful detachment of the second. Sholokhov sets
out to counter mistaken romantic notions of Don Cossack fight­
ing in the civil war, but he does not labor the point. Some of
these stories tell of bitter political enmities in families whose
members are torn between loyalty to the Reds or the Whites,
but their grimness is nearly always relieved by passages of ten­
derness and warm human sympathy. In others humor domi­
nates, as in The Impudent Brat where the boy’s idealized
notion of an heroic-sized Lenin is amusingly debunked, or in
the tale about the fire-eating chairman of a village revolutionary
war council with his comic use of hard words and malaprop-
isms. Every so often manifestations of little acts of common­
place kindness, like spring flowers pushing through the
blood-drenched soil of a battlefield, reveal Sholokhov’s larger
humanity: the sentimental Cossack who sacrifices his life in
combat to save a beloved horse, or the old father in another tale
who, heartbroken over his son’s death in the cause of the Whites,
transfers his affections to a badly wounded Red Army youth
whom he nurses back to health. Left-wing Soviet critics stig­
matized such deviations from the fictional pattern of civil-war
harshness as the lubricating humanism of middle-class con­
sciousness. However, this concern for the gentler attributes of
man in the midst of cruel fratricidal strife, an understanding
that man’s need to love and be loved will often rise above doc­
trinal hate, is part of Sholokhov’s wisdom of life.
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 233

One thinks of the youthful Tolstoy’s early Caucasian army

tales with their refined reasoning about such problems as brav­
ery, why men fight, and the uselessness of war. There is none of
this in Sholokhov’s short stories, only a curious combination of
psychological realism and his own ideological empathy with the
moral rightness of the Red cause. Yet he has some glimmering
of the impartiality of art, for if his sympathies are with the
Reds, he does not spare their failings.
Clearly Sholokhov is not entirely at home with the short story
and he rarely turned to it later. Its confining form inhibits the
revelation of his heroes, for he is primarily a writer of expansive
action which he employs in subtle ways to illuminate the con­
scious and unconscious world of his characters. Then, too, he
favors extensive descriptions for which he has positive gifts.
Nevertheless, these first tales, despite occasional faults of im­
maturity, convincingly announce the emergence of a highly
talented artist.' He obviously understands realism in the meaning
of the Russian classical tradition, that is, a lifelike representation
of character, and fidelitv, through style, to details of objects,
manners, and speech which he carefully orchestrates in scenes
and dialogue?His use of language is already impressive, especially
in nature descriptions which are suffused with striking poetic
qualities. And bold dramatic situations arc most effectively han­
dled with a narrative skill that combines the sharpest realistic
detail with qualities of humor and feeling. Only characteriza­
tion in these early stories, which is in no sense unskillful, fails
to suggest fully the brilliance which he later achieved in this
respect.

3
The Quiet Don appeared serially, and then separately in four
volumes, over a period of twelve years (1928-40). Though
234 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

reasons for the long delay of seven years between publication of

the third and last volumes are not definitely known, the terrible
purges of the thirties no doubt played a part, as well as objec­
tions of officials in the Union of Soviet Writers and of Stalin
himself to certain political aspects of the novel.
Cossacks had been portrayed, somewhat idealistically, by
previous writers, notably bv Gogol and Tolstoy, but never be­
fore had thev been treated so fullv and so realistically as in this
work of some fifteen hundred pages. The Qtiiet Don, essentially
a historical novel of a tragic decade (1912-20) in the life of the
Cossacks, tells the story of how world war, revolution, and
civil war cruelly uprooted this proud, liberty-loving people and
finally brought them under the power of the Soviets.
Like Tolstov’s Hz<rr and Peace, with which it has so fre-
quently been compared, The Quiet Don concentrates on the
histories of five families, of which the principal one is the Melek-
hovs, belonging to the social category of middle Cossacks and
consisting of the irascible father Pantaleimon, the wonderful old
mother Ilinichna, and three children—the attractive daughter
Dunya, the older brother Pyotr and his wayward wife Darya,
and the younger son and hero of the novel, the nineteen-year-
old Gregor. In addition to these families, scores of other char­
acters are introduced, types drawn from lower and upper
classes of Cossacks, and also a number of historical figures of
the period.
No greater contrast can be imagined than that between the
social milieux of War and Peace and The Quiet Don. Tolstoy’s
cultured families and their sophisticated city life and idyllic
existence on country estates have nothing in common with the
three hundred peasant households of the Cossack village of
Tatarsk. There, existence was often unbelievably harsh. Man­
ners and customs, guided bv age-old superstitions, were almost
primitive. In the winter months animals of the barnyard vied
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 235
with humans for space in the tiny thatched huts with their
earthen floors; hands, greasy from being dipped into the com­
mon family stew bowl for meat, were wiped on the hair. War,
which was waged with some of the civilized amenities of no­
bility and honor in Tolstoy’s classic, was fought with incredible
ferocity and horrifying cruelty in Sholokhov’s novel. Troubled
over the impact such a rude order of life would have on for­
eigners, Sholokhov wrote a foreword, which was never pub­
lished, for the English translation, in which he explained that
readers should take into account the dislocation of existence and
human psychology among Don Cossacks caused by revolution
and civil warlFor he passionately loves his Cossacks, and if he
faithfully reveals their uncultured manners, primitive customs,
and moments of savagery, he also brings out their sterling vir­
tues and spiritual strength under human stress, their humor and
kindness, their love of nature, and their deep sense of honor |
A novelist of action, Sholokhov is not a particularly reflective
writer, a limitation often adversely commented on by Western
critics. The varied substance of his masterpiece is not illumi­
nated by the intellectual brilliance and profound philosophical
and moral probing of a Tolstoy. Such qualities, without beg­
ging the question of Sholokhov’s artistic limitations, would be
singularly irrelevant in coping with the simple life and behavior
patterns of artless Cossacks of The Quiet Don. Sholokhov’s
characters live in the chaos of action and what they do and not
why is the focus of their being.
Gregor’s nature, for example, is devoid of any sophistication
of thought and he is incapable of resolving in his own interests
the bitter conflicts of political and human values that confront
him in the course of revolution and civil war. Pride, injustice,
love, or hatred trigger his impetuous actions. Like the elemental
and headstrong Dmitri Karamazov, Gregor’s actions and feel­
ings are the best measure of his nature. The tragedy that breaks
236 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

over his head, however, is no less compelling and moving than

that which has engulfed the great tragic heroes of literature.
As the novel opens, the happy young Gregor, an accom­
plished Cossack in riding, hunting, and fishing, and also a hard
worker in the fields, has not a care in the world except his pas­
sionate love for the beautiful Aksinya, his neighbor’s wife.
Gregor’s first disturbing experiences in bloody combat at the
front in 1914, war scenes which Sholokhov describes with un­
surpassed vigor and verisimilitude, are neutralized by Cossack
conformitv to martial glorv and he soon learns to fight and kill
with exceptional bravery. However, a sensitivity to acts of
cruelty, to any form of violence visited upon the weak and
defenseless, and, as the war wears on, a feeling of rebellion
against its horror and stupidity tend to differentiate him from
his comrades in arms. Then the revolutionary propagandizing
of Garanzha in the hospital, where Gregor is recovering from
a wound, forces him to question his devotion to tsar, country,
and military duty.
When the 1917 Revolution comes, Gregor’s confused, tor­
mented groping for certainty symbolizes the divided loyalties
of the Don Cossacks at this time of turmoil. “It is hard for me
to make head or tail of it,” he mumbles. “I’m all over the place,
like drifting snow in the steppe.”* His search for political truth
in a world of swiftly shifting values is guided by appearances
rather than substance. He fights for the Reds at first, but an in­
cident of their slaughter of unarmed captives sickens him, and
when the Bolsheviks invade his beloved Don region, looting and
raping in the villages, he turns against them in cold fury.
In Gregor’s anguished struggle for a way out of his uncer-
* Quotations arc from The Silent Don, translated by Stephen Garry
(2 vols, in one; New York: Knopf, 1943): And Quiet Flotvs the Don, pp.
123, 409; The Don Flou't Home to the Sea, pp. 113, 142, 653, 662-63, 763,
772, 774, 777. In a few cases the translation has been slightly altered on the
basis of comparison with the original Russian.
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 237
tainties, which(are endlessly complicated for him by contradic­
tions between political truth and the truth of nature^) it is part
of Sholokhov’s scheme of things to represent him as a man op­
posed to history .(On the level of socialist realism Gregor’s trag­
edy is that he defies historical necessity and hence becomes its
victim. In Communist terms the individual cannot rebel against
the immanence of political and social change and hope to sur­
vive. Historical necessity, as it were, takes the place of the
Greek Nemesis in the resolution of a hero’s fate. One is dealing
with a new moral order in which sympathy for man’s doubts
and vacillations in the face of life’s major decisions and his
eternal right to change allegiances on the basis of principles
must be surrendered to the imperatives of history’s assumed
laws. The individual’s right to rebel, the celebrated virtue of so
many great figures of literature, now becomes his tragic flaw if
the rebellion is against forces of history preordained to estab­
lish the dictatorship of the proletariat. And Sholokhov leaves
no doubt about his view that history is the matrix enveloping
Gregor’s destiny, for the events which ultimately bring about
the hero’s downfall are carefully documented with footnotes
and quotations from official reports.
Throughout most of the novel, however, the cards do not
appear to be stacked against Gregor. Sholokhov turns his search
for truth into a tremendous human drama of a man perplexed
in the extreme by agonizing choices. Gregor’s deepest instincts
urge him to reject both Whites and Reds. They are all alike, he
protests to Communistically inclined boyhood friends, for they
are a yoke on the necks of the Cossacks. And when he hears
that revolt is spreading among Cossacks in the Upper Don prov­
ince against the occupying Red Army, he gladly joins the in­
surgents and leads several thousand troops in the struggle. For
now he can fight for something he holds dear, and his thoughts
on this occasion provide the clearest image of his nature: “It
238 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

was as though those days of search for the truth had been lifted
from his shoulders, those stumblings, transitions, and painful
inner struggles. Those days had passed like the shadow of a
cloud and now his searchings seemed aimless and empty. What
had there been to think about? Why had his spirit twisted and
turned, like a hunted wolf seeking to escape, in search of a reso­
lution of his contradiction? Life seemed absurdly, wisely
simple. Now he believed that there never had been any such
truth beneath whose wings all might shelter; now he believed
each had his own truth, his own furrow. For a piece of bread,
for a strip of earth, for the right to live, men had always fought
and would fight so long as the sun shone on them, so long as
their blood flowed warmly through their veins. Those who
wanted to deprive him of his life, of his right to live, must be
fought resolutely and with no wavering, but steeled in hatred.”

4
The disharmony of political loyalties in Gregor finds one
kind of resolution in his faith in Aksinya. It is the greatest love
story in Soviet literature, and the deep sympathy its tragic
course arouses is some measure of Sholokhov’s acute under­
standing of the simplicity of passion in simple people. Aksinya
is a natural woman, beautiful, free, and proud in her movements,
contemptuous of local gossip, and capable of any sacrifice for
the sake of her love and her lover. Her life has been harsh: raped
at sixteen by her father and then married off to the dour, sadistic
Stepan Astakhov who regularly beats her, compels her to slave
in the fields, and locks her up at night while he plavs around
with other women. Yet it is not just escape from the futility of
existence that brings her to Gregor, but a kind of destined
affinity written in the very stars that shine down on their nightly
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 239
trysts in the comforting emptiness of the steppe. Their illicit
love survives Gregor’s marriage, thrust upon him by his wor­
ried parents, to the shy, attractive Natalya Korshunova, and
also Aksinya’s understandable lapse with the well-born Cossack
officer Listnitsky. Unlike Gregor’s wife, Aksinya offers no pro­
test over his debauchery on a campaign when he seeks to forget
in drink and loose women the political doubts that torment him
and his revulsion to the endless slaughter of war.
Aksinya, however, really fears the devoted, religious, and
highly moral Natalya, who possesses strength of will and inner
beauty and has also borne Gregor twins whom he adores. Two
confrontation scenes between wife and mistress are executed
with consummate art. One’s sympathy goes out to the crushed,
abandoned wife, but in the second meeting Aksinya’s simple
dignity contrasts strikingly with Natalya’s bitter moral recti­
tude. Aksinya quietly declares that if the Queen of Heaven
saves Gregor from death and he comes back, then he’ll choose
for himself. She is diseased with love, Gregor laughingly tells
the passionate Aksinya. And when he asks her if she will go
away with him, she instantly replies: “I’ll sleep with the cattle
to be with you, Grisha. Anything to be with you.” And Gregor,
during long periods of separation, sees Aksinya in his dreams,
and he realizes in moments of deep dissatisfaction with his mar­
ried life and the whole senseless business of fighting that he still
loves her “with all his old exhausting love; he felt that he loved
her with all his body, with every beat of his heart.”
There can be little doubt that Misha Koshevoi, Gregor’s boy­
hood friend, was designed as his ideological foil, but on these
terms or any others one may well question the successful reali­
zation of the portrayal. Won over to the Communist cause by
the shadowy and unconvincing agitator Stockman, Misha’s
gentle and genial personality is completely changed into that of
a stern and uncompromising Bolshevik, a fantastic transforma-
240 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

tion that can be neither explained nor vindicated by his lowly

class origin or the indignities and perils he is subjected to by
the enemy. As a Red fanatic he has his prisoners shot down and
personally executes his old friend Pyotr, Gregor’s brother, mur­
ders in cold blood the ancient Bible-reading Grishatka Korsh­
unov, orders the houses of well-to-do Cossacks in the village to
be burned, and in the course of informing Gregor’s mother that
he intends to marry her daughter, he warns the old lady that his
first business as chief Soviet official in Tatarsk will be to catch
and hang her son. In a judgment that must be regarded as some­
what official, although one hesitates to conjecture that Sholo­
khov would have entirely concurred, a prominent Soviet critic
declared: “The behavior of Koshevoi is justified on the whole
both politically and psychologically. The very image of Koshe­
voi is conceived with great sensitivity and in places achieves
beauty and the perfection of poetry.”*
This monster of Party loyalty, who justifies his actions by
Communist doctrine and the terrible exigencies of civil war,
falls infinitely below Gregor in anv scale of human values. On
one occasion, when Gregor hears that Misha Koshevoi, as a
Red, is in danger of being beaten to death by infuriated Cos­
sacks, at some personal risk to himself he iminediatelv gallops
off to save him, murmuring: “There’s bad blood between us,
but after all there’s our old friendship.” If Gregor everlastingly
vacillates in the political struggle and is unable to achieve the
doctrinal forthrightness of Misha Koshevoi, it is because he is
loyal to himself, to human dignity, decency, and justice, and
because he values his individual freedom higher than submission
to any cause.
Whatever may have been Sholokhov’s intention in the char­
acterization of Misha Koshevoi, he hardly emerges as a sym-
• I. G. Lezhnev, Mikhail Sholokhov (Moscow: Soviet Writer, 1948),
p. 222.
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 241
pathetic, shining image of the new Soviet man. No Western
reader would prefer his company to that of Gregor, and it is
hard to imagine that many Soviet readers would. He is less
believable, psychologically speaking, than the patently idealized
Party member Bunchuk whose love for Anna Pogoodka—one
Communist in the novel who seems to have been born with a
conscience and retained it—is beautifully and movingly told.
It may be that in the image of Misha Koshevoi we have an
example of artistic “intentional fallacy” in the sense that what
Sholokhov intended in the characterization was never realized
in the novel. Of course, the same reasoning in reverse could be
applied to the image of Gregor—he has probably turned out to
be much more attractive to readers than Sholokhov had ever
intended. Or one could explain the unpalatableness of Koshevoi
and his Bolshevik cause in a novel written by a Communist the
way Soviet critics, following the lead of Engels, explain the
artistic achievement of Balzac. That is, Balzac, despite his royal­
ist aspirations, was compelled bv the integrity of his art to
reflect in fiction the truth of what he did not want to believe—
the successful bourgeois development of progressive social
change in France.

5
Long before the ending of The Quiet Don had been written,
there was widespread expectation that Sholokhov would bring
his hero into the Communist fold or have him die in a last glor­
ious act of bravery in the ranks of the Red Army in expiation
for his sins in siding with the Cossack insurgents and the Whites.
Such a resolution of Gregor’s fate would have been false to the
whole psychological meaning of the portrayal up to that point.
Whatever one may think of the actual conclusion Sholokhov
fashioned, its realistic and artistic relevance is unassailable.
242 I NTH ODUCT IO .V TO RUSSIAN REALISM

The likelihood that the officer class will lord it over the Cos­
sacks as of old if the White Guard is victorious is as distasteful
to the liberty-loving Gregor as the possibility of the imposition
of Red rule on the Don. In the last volume of the novel demo­
tion because of insubordination to a White General, the death of
his wife Natalya, who had come to hate him, from an abortion
attempt on herself, and the final dispersal of the White Army
bring Gregor to a point of utter despair. He eventually joins
Budyonny’s Red cavalry and fights the Poles bravely, imagin­
ing this service as a purging of his offenses against the Bolshe­
viks. Nevertheless, when he returns to his village after demobil­
ization the unrelenting Misha Koshevoi, who has married
Gregor’s sister and become chairman of the Revolutionary
Committee of Tatarsk, makes it clear that he will still have to
stand trial before a military tribunal. “I’ve served my time,”
Gregor frankly tells him. “I don’t want to serve anybody any
more. I’ve fought more than enough for my age. I’m fed up
with everything, with the Revolution and the counter-revolu­
tion. Let all that—let it all go to hell! I want to live the rest of
my life with my children, to return to the farm, that's all.”
But there was no escape for Gregor in a Soviet world where
even neutrality was regarded as heresv. Wryly, Gregor remarks
to his old orderly that he has always been envious of the Red,
Koshevoi, and the White, Listnitsky. “Everything was clear to
them from the very’ beginning, but nothing is clear to me even
now. Both saw straight roads before them; but since 1917 I’ve
been going round and round in a circle, reeling like a drunken
man.”
One night at Aksinya’s hut (her husband had disappeared in
the fighting), Gregor’s sister runs in to warn him that Koshevoi
and his men are on their way to arrest him. Aware that this
probably means execution, he flees. After months of hiding out,
he yearns for his children and Aksinya, who is taking care of
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 243
them, and secretly returns. She clasps him around the legs,
presses her face to his wet greatcoat, and sobs through her tears:
“Kill me, but don’t leave me again.” After persuading his sister
to take the children, he and Aksinya steal away in the night,
hoping to reach the Kuban and begin a new life.
Riding by his side a rapturous joy fills the soul of this pas­
sionate woman as she exults over the thought that she is with
her Gregor once again. But at one point they are confronted by
guards, and as Gregor lashes her horse and they gallop off shots
ring out in the night. Later, in the safety of a ravine, he dis­
covers that Aksinya is fatally wounded and realizes that the
most terrible thing that could happen to him has come to pass.
Gregor buries his Aksinya in the early morning light. The
author writes: “With his palms he diligently pressed down the
damp yellow clay over the mound and remained long on his
knees beside the grave, his head bowed, his body swaying a
little.
“Now he had nothing to hurry for. Everything was finished.
“The sun rose above the ravine through the smoky haze of
the burning wind from the east. Its rays silvered the mass of
gray hair on Gregor’s head and slipped over his pale and ter­
ribly immobile face. As though awakening from an oppressive
sleep, he raised his head and saw above him the black sky and the
blindingly glittering, black disc of the sun.”
Weeks of refuge in a deep forest only intensify Gregor’s
longing to see, as he puts it, “the old spots once more, to feast
my eyes on the children; and then I can die.” He returns to
Tatarsk, and Sholokhov, after touchingly narrating Gregor’s
meeting with his young son, concludes his long novel: “And
now that little thing of which Gregor had dreamed during so
many sleepless nights had come to pass. He stood at the gate
of his own home, holding his son by the hand. This was all life
had left to him, all that for a little longer gave him kinship with
244 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

the earth and with the spacious world which lay glittering under
the chilly sun.”
In Sholokhov’s words Gregor is to enjoy these pleasures only
“for a little longer.” Obviously he had come home to die. The
Nemesis of Communist historical necessity, personified by
Misha Koshevoi, is waiting for Gregor. In a novel filled with
violence and executions, Sholokhov wisely drew the curtain on
this last one. Perhaps for him, as for many of his readers, the
account of it would have been unbearable.
Though The Quiet Don is not free of tendentiousness, at
least in the first edition of it Sholokhov does not overtlyy abuse
the license accorded the historical novelist, for he does not ap­
pear to manipulate events to conform to a political ideology.
The behavior of both Whites and Reds, with all their cruelty,
ugliness, deception, and occasional nobility, is described with
artistic honesty. If one cares to, in fact, one may read the novel
as the unvarnished narrative of the bloody conquest of the
majority of Don Cossacks by the Red Army. For unlike Tol­
stoy, who in War and Peace argues a philosophy of history to
justify his approach to events and people, Sholokhov can
hardly be accused of offering an exposition of .Marxian histori­
cal materialism in The Quiet Don, although this dogma is im­
plicit throughout the whole novel.
Soviet critics, unhappy over Sholokhov’s failure to subordi­
nate life to political ideology, have supplied a Marxian rational­
ization of the novel and its hero’s fate. As an individualist in an
epoch of socialism, Gregor’s fate was predetermined bv the
class struggle. Caught in the web of contradictions of his own
social class of middle Cossacks, so the explanation runs, he was
unable to perceive that the future lay with the masses of poorer
Cossacks who were supported bv the Soviet Revolution. His
destruction follows as a logical consequence of his failure to
understand the workings of history’s laws at a time of violent
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 245
social change. In the kind of reading of the novel mentioned
above, however, one can easily conclude that the vast majority
of Don Cossacks over these years made their choices, not on the
basis of political conviction or class consciousness, but because
of fear of the naked force of the Red Army, or for calculated
reasons of gain and security.

6
Sholokhov was too fine a literary artist to sacrifice the reality
of living life in The Quiet Don to doctrinal expediency. If he
pays his kopeck’s worth of tribute to socialist realism at the end
by allowing the rigidly righteous, baleful Bolshevik Misha
Koshevoi to triumph over Gregor, Sholokhov, in the best tra­
ditions of nineteenth-centurv Russian realism, preserves the
integrity of the personality of his proud, sensitive hero in terms
of its total development throughout the novel.
It is a remarkable fact that in an epic story of war, in which
so many hundreds of pages are devoted to the dying and the
dead, the dominant flavor of the work is one of unquenchable,
omnipresent life. This quality reflects Sholokhov’s own opti­
mistic zest for life in which he so much resembles Tolstoy.
There are many memorable scenes spanning the whole range of
Cossack domestic and public existence, vivid with vital activity,
humor, and Cossack incongruities. This lively sense of humanity
is garnished by a constant outpouring of Cossack lore—ancient
traditions and customs, colorful sayings, proverbs, and charm­
ing folksongs. And the earthiness of these people, their pas­
sionate love of the land, is wonderfully caught by Sholokhov in
his concentration on nature’s lyric moods which he describes in
abundant detail and often in a poetically symbolic antiphonal
manner as they respond to the joys and sorrows of his charac­
ters. His language pattern, subtly assimilating the special flavor
246 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

of Don Cossack speech, is extremely varied and most effec­

tively adapted to the individualized speech of his characters.
Although Sholokhov once remarked that he was indebted to
all the great Russian writers of the past, as already indicated he
owes most to Tolstoy, for The Quiet Don demonstrably con­
tains many stylistic and structural resemblances to War and
Peace. But the differences are more apparent than the similari­
ties. Sholokhov, of course, lacks Tolstoy’s supreme talent, and
then, as has been pointed out, he is concerned in The Quiet Don
with a totally different order of life and with simple, unreflec-
tive characters. If certain qualities of his realism may be attrib­
uted to Tolstoy’s influence, others are peculiarly his own and
bear analysis from this point of view. Sholokhov’s descriptions,
whether they concern nature, things, the external appearance
of his characters, or the varied action covered in the novel,
derive from the “saturation method” first employed by Gogol
and continued by others in Russian fiction, especially Tolstoy.
Sholokhov accumulates detail, but it is precise, perceptive and
sensuous, and like Tolstoy, in his nature descriptions he often
relates the thoughts and emotions of characters to their environ­
ment. At times an offensive naturalism results from Sholokhov’s
piling up of horrifying, sadistic details in his descriptions of
blood-curdling scenes, such as the execution of Podtielkov and
his band and the harrowing death march of the twenty-five
Red-infected Cossacks through the villages. He tends to dwell
suspiciously long on these scenes and with an almost inhuman
detachment that recalls Babel rather than Tolstoy.
Where Sholokhov’s realism differs most from Tolstoy’s is in
the treatment of characterization. His approach is similar to
that of Chekhov in his early literary7 period—one of complete
objectivity—a most unusual practice for a Soviet writer. But
Sholokhov goes beyond Chekhov7 whose determination to let
his characters speak for themselves did not exclude the omnis-
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 247
cient author’s prerogative of commenting on them. Sholokhov,
as it were, reports on his characters, never appearing to identify
himself with them, and he avoids associating himself with their
actions or philosophizing about their thoughts and feelings. To
expect the half-literate Gregor and Misha Koshevoi to engage
in an intellectual debate on their political and moral differences
in the manner of the highly cultured Prince Andrew and Pierre
on their return to Bald Hills, would be both absurd and un­
realistic. But there is less excuse for the almost complete absence
in The Quiet Don of what is one of the glories of Tolstoy’s art
—the self-communing of either author or character, that expres­
sive dialogue of the mind constantly illuminating the darkness
of thought and feeling. If Sholokhov has a higher Communist
vision of life, it seems to be beyond debate and therefore no
cause of tension within the consciousness of himself or his
characters. The divided soul of Gregor is revealed, and quite
realistically, in his actions rather than in his thinking. Sholokhov
is simply a profoundly interested observer of men and events,
and he sets down his record of them objectively but without
any deep concern for the inner turmoil of human beings forced
by circumstances to make agonizing choices. In this avoidance
of analysis of feelings and thought, he retreats behind Russian
classical realism to that of the eighteenth century.
If we fail to learn much about the inner world of Sholokhov’s
men and women, his brilliant descriptions of them and of their
outer world of activities, and his sensitive handling of the mani­
fold experiences that form their characters bring them thor­
oughly to life. Gregor, for example, is perhaps the most fully
realized and sympathetically portrayed tragic figure in Soviet
literature, and it is a striking commentary on the impartiality of
Sholokhov’s art that his hero remains in the end a complete in­
dividualist, essentially hostile to the political cause that destroys
him.
248 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

7
Sholokhov interrupted work on The Quiet Don in 1930 to
start another long novel, Virgin Soil Upturned, the first volume
of which appeared two years later. If he had begun his great
masterpiece with an unfettered mind, he undertook this second
novel in the spirit of the Party directive encouraging literature
to propagandize a huge national endeavor—the First Five-Year
Plan. His response to this “social command” may also have been
connected with the fact that he joined the Communist Party
in 1930 and, for the first time, met Stalin with whom he talked
about agricultural problems. Further, he had acquired some ex­
perience in the Don region as a worker in the drive for agricul­
tural collectivization.
Although this new novel, which is the story of how a collec­
tive farm was started in the Cossack village Gremyachy Log,
anticipates the credo of socialist realism in its optimism and
political correctness, editors of the magazine New World re­
fused to publish the first volume of Virgin Soil Upturned unless
Sholokhov removed certain passages regarded as ideologically
suspect. He remained adamant, appealed to the Central Com­
mittee of the Party, and, according to one account, only Stalin’s
intervention brought about the publication of the novel.
Once again, Sholokhov’s insistence on truth as he sees it is in
the best tradition of the great nineteenth-century Russian
novelists. Truth required that there be no prettifying of the
often ugly means employed to achieve what he himself thought
was a justifiable Party goal. The heartless dispossession of kulak
families at Gremyachy Log, scenes which editors of New
World particularly objected to, is told with unsparing detail.
Some of the kulaks had reached positions of relative well-being
only after years of hard labor and sacrifice on their farms which
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 249

were now to be turned over to the collective. The cruelty of

the action arouses the sympathy of some of the poorest peasants
who stand to gain most by the dispossession: “He’s saved and
saved,” mutters one of them as she watches the eviction of a
kulak family, “and now it is out into the steppe with him.”* Be­
fore it is over the Communist chairman of the village Soviet,
Razmyotnov, comes dangerously close to rebelling against this
form of official tyranny.
In fact, Sholokhov’s special emphasis on the element of op­
position to the Party effort to introduce collectivization in the
village intensifies the reality of the struggle and adds immeasur­
ably to the excitement of the narrative in this first volume of
Virgin Soil Upturned. When the hero, Davydov, the stocky,
gap-toothed ex-sailor and locksmith, arrives from Leningrad as
one of the many “shock workers” sent out by the Party in 1930
to push the lagging collectivization drive, he simply cannot
understand, because of his proletarian prejudices, why all these
Cossack peasants, whose forebears had lived on the soil for
generations and knew only individual farming, hesitate to merge
their land and livestock in one large collective farm. Davydov
soon discovers the staggering extent of the opposition and its
main cause—the peasant’s “cancerous yearning for his own prop­
erty”—at the village meetings he calls, scenes which Sholokhov
handles with consummate realism, bringing out the character­
istic virtues and foibles and the rough humor and colorful
speech of these Cossack peasants.
The struggle is on and it is mercilessly waged by both sides
in the course of a series of dynamic events filled with tension
and surprise. Davydov emerges from the contest a rather suc­
cessful precursor of the Soviet positive hero, but more human-
• Mikhail Sholokhov, Virgin Soil Upturned, translated by Robert Dag-
lish (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.). All quotations
are from this translation, but they have been checked with the original
Russian and in a few cases slightly altered.
250 INTHODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

ized than the grim, two-dimensional Party organization men and

ideological puppets among the numerous positive heroes in later
fiction. As a proletarian and non-Cossack, he presented Sholo­
khov with obvious difficulties in characterization which are not
always effectively overcome. Instead of the racy Cossack
speech, of which Sholokhov is a master, Davydov speaks a
rather unnatural, contrived language. His personality is brought
out more by his actions and by what other people say about
him. He lives by Party dogma and when absorbed in reading its
dull preachments he forgets to eat. There is no doubt a touch
of sly and amusing caricature in this and other foibles of Davy­
dov. So exacting is he in following the Party line that at times
he overreaches himself as in his illegal exiling of kulaks and his
insistence on socializing the village fowls in the collective. In
fact, he feels self-conscious and guilty, after Stalin’s well-known
March 1930 speech, “Dizziness from Success,” because he has
used force instead of persuasion in compelling peasants to join
the collective farm.
One element of Sholokhov’s conception of this Party votary
is his fallibility, a human dimension not frequently encoun­
tered in positive heroes of Soviet fiction. Through harsh experi­
ences he grows in self-knowledge in the course of the first vol­
ume of Virgin Soil Upturned, although his acquired wisdom
rarely leads him beyond an understanding of his duties as a good
Communist. His fortitude in overcoming every discouragement
and his capacity to learn from his mistakes eventually recom­
mend him to the good graces of the hostile villagers.
Davydov’s most serious deviation perhaps is love, an emotion
sternly frowned upon in Soviet positive heroes whose whole-
souled devotion to the collective good is supposed to leave no
room for personal indulgences of any sort. If weakness for the
alluringly raffish Lukeriya, the estranged wife of his close com­
rade Nagulnov, lowers his Communist stature by a cubit, it is
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 251

the most human thing about this positive hero whose only ambi­
tion in life is that when he dies the inhabitants of Gremyachy
Log will name their collective farm after him. Sholokhov, with
sure realistic instinct, sees all the comic incongruities of a love
afFair pursued in terms of Davydov’s established character. As
might be expected, it is Lukeriya who does the seducing. At an
appropriate moment during a moonlit walk, she sweetly coos to
her practical-minded, expository companion: “Enough of the
grain and the collective farm! This isn’t the time to talk about
them. Can you smell the scent of the young leaves on the
poplars?”
Of Davydov’s two chief aides in the collectivization drive,
Razmyotnov, head of the village Soviet, is an uncomplicated
and even kindly disposed Party worker, memory-haunted by
the loss of his young wife who killed herself during the civil
war after being raped by Whites. But Nagulnov, secretary of
the tiny village’s Communist cell, is a complex individual driven
by the Furies of world revolution to the edge of doctrinal mad­
ness. As a humorless, left-wing deviationist who has the temerity
to criticize Stalin’s “Dizziness from Success” speech, Nagulnov
becomes an object of satire while at the same time remaining a
symbol of utter selfless loyalty to the Party. Though in his
strange way he deeply loves his anti-Soviet wanton of a wife
Lukeriya, whom he has driven from his house, he has come to
the conclusion that marriage should be forbidden Communists.
If Sholokhov is driving home a patent propaganda lesson in the
characterization of Nagulnov, he is also at pains to indicate that
his political errors can be corrected, for such passionate zeal for
the cause of Communism is unexpendable.
There is an unintentional comic-opera flavor to the organized
opposition to collectivization in the village which is centered in
a White Guard conspiracy headed by an improbable former
Cossack officer, Captain Polovtsev, who for months hides unde-
252 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

tected in Ostrovnov’s farmhouse, receives mysterious visitors,

and at night rides out over the countryside on his great black
charger to persuade kulaks and middle peasants to join an immi­
nent rebellion against Soviet power which, he promises, will
receive aid from abroad.
The unwilling conspirator Ostrovnov, however, is one of the
most interesting characters in the novel. Originally a poor peas­
ant, he has worked his way up to the comfortable position of a
middle peasant by herculean labors and tireless self-education in
scientific agriculture. Faced with the loss of his land and all his
stock whether or not he enters the new collective farm, he
finally joins it with instructions to sabotage from within. Davy­
dov, impressed by his skill, makes him director of the collective,
and henceforth Ostrovnov is torn between the challenge to
exercise his farming abilities on a much larger scale and his con­
viction that the hated Soviet government has deprived him of
the opportunity to live his own life and accumulate wealth.
As in the case of Gregor Melekhov, the honesty of Sholo­
khov’s realism and perhaps his natural affinity for a human per­
sonality in conflict with itself tend to transform the villain
Ostrovnov into a sympathetic portrayal, at least, in this first
volume of the novel. In his driving individualism and fervent
desire to get ahead by his own self-sacrificing efforts, Ostrovnov
represents the incarnation of the peasant instinct for property
and acquisitiveness which still continues to bedevil the whole
Soviet structure of agricultural collectivization.
There is nothing of the tragic grandeur of The Qtiiet Don in
this first volume of Virgin Soil Upturned, which is essentially
the story of how Party-directed agricultural collectivization
wins out over greedy individualism. Though the poetry of na­
ture reappears in the lyrically described landscapes and in the
fine ploughing scene, man’s unity with nature and the sense of
its biological and historic importance in the lives of these Cos­
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 253

sacks, effects so all-pervasive in The Quiet Don, are not stressed

in the second novel. But there is the compensation of abundant
humor, involving often language, incident, and caricature in
comic combinations that convey the flavor of picaresque exag­
geration. A good deal of this humor is concentrated in the
character and adventures of the garrulous, boasting, lying
Daddy Shchukar, a much-derided and much-loved inhabitant
of Gremyachy Log and a creation of pure fun.
The major artistic achievement of the first volume of Virgin
Soil Upturned rests on Sholokhov’s brilliant realism which
brings so vividly to life the whole social pattern of Gremyachy
Log and its striking personalities. It is little wonder that this
work soon became a fixture on the reading lists of Soviet
schools, for some critics pretended to value it higher than The
Quiet Don because of its propaganda effectiveness, ideological
correctness, and its positive hero Davydov. Quite apart from
these dubious qualifications, there can be no doubt that the
artistic worth of the novel places it far ahead of the abundant
Five-Year Plan fiction devoted to the theme of agricultural col­
lectivization.

There is substantial evidence that Sholokhov originally de­

signed Virgin Soil Upturned to be a kind of epic of agricultural
collectivization in which he would carry his story well beyond
1930, the year of action of the first volume. However, the pub­
lication of the completed second volume (1959-60) was delayed
almost thirty years after the appearance of the first. The reasons
vary, but basically they seem to turn on political obstacles.
Stalin’s violent reprisals against peasant opposition to collectiv­
ization, which brought about the devastating famine of 1932-33,
made it impossible for Sholokhov to cover this period in the
254 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

novel’s sequel in the spirit of the relatively objective realism of

the first volume. The misery inflicted on his own Don region
by these harsh events profoundly depressed Sholokhov and
drove him into literary silence which continued through the
terrible purges of the later years of the thirties. During the
Soviet Union’s struggle with Nazi Germany he was largely
preoccupied with his still unfinished war novel, They Fought
for Their Country. And in the period of severe literary regi­
mentation that followed the war, it would have been unthink­
able to attempt to publish a work that involved an outspoken
treatment of enforced collectivization. Although he may have
worked on the continuation earlier, it was not until after Stalin’s
death that Sholokhov resumed writing the second volume of
Virgin Soil Upturned with the certain hope of publication.
Khrushchev, in his speech at the meeting of writers and
artists on March 7, 1963, in which he excoriated those who
failed to follow the Party line in the arts, revealed an interesting
fact connected with Sholokhov’s difficulties in continuing
Virgin Soil Upturned. By way of heaping scorn on Ehrenburg’s
admission in his recent memoirs that he had been aware of
Stalin’s iniquities but remained silent, Khrushchev declared that
in April 1933 Sholokhov wrote Stalin to protest the Party’s re­
pression of peasants in the Don region, and he praised the
author for his denunciation of “scandalous injustice” and for
rebelling against “the illegality going on at that time.” Then,
with a bewildering illogicality that defies the dialectic, Khrush­
chev pointed out for the benefit of defiant angry young men of
Soviet literature, that the Party orientation and Communist
spirit of Sholokhov, their greatest writer, did not prevent him
from expressing his artistic individuality.
There is both truth and falsehood in this assertion. The Party
line was largely responsible for delaying the sequel to Virgin
Soil Upturned, and it also held up the publication of parts of
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 255

The Quiet Don—according to one Soviet account, the last part

was held up for two years because of Stalin’s insistence that the
hero be transformed into a loyal Red Cossack at the end. And
it was the Party line again before Stalin’s death that forced many
artistically unfortunate changes, some of them deliberate his­
torical falsifications, in the 1953 edition of The Quiet Don and
the first volume of Virgin Soil Upturned. These changes could
hardly be regarded as free expressions of Sholokhov’s artistic
individuality, especially since the original readings in most cases
were restored in the 1957 edition after Stalin’s death. However,
there can be no question of Sholokhov’s courage over the years
in insisting that his works be published as he wrote them, de­
spite frequent ideological objections, although some of his suc­
cess in this respect must be attributed to his immense fame and
widespread popularity.
On the other hand, the Party line is followed so rigidly in the
continuation of Virgin Soil Upturned that a kind of determinis­
tic inevitability takes the place of the excitement and tense ex­
pectancy in events that characterized the first volume. It is
hardly a sequel in an epic of collectivization, for Sholokhov re­
stricts the action to two summer months of 1930, the year in
which the first volume was centered, thus avoiding any con­
sideration of the important and bitter events in agricultural
planning in the years immediately following. The sense of his­
tory is further lost in its updating to the present, for the con­
tinuation portrays the goals of the Party in 1930 as identical
with those of peasants who find their interests cheerfully
merged with Communists in a triumph of socialism. In short, in
ideological terms at least, socialist realism seems to have taken
over entirely in Sholokhov’s writing.
The continuation is loosely constructed and excessively epi­
sodic, with a disproportionately large part of it devoted to in­
serted stories, often of an anecdotal nature. Sholokhov’s gift for
256 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

humor is reflected more fully than in any of his previous writ­

ings. Sometimes these tales advance the action or the character­
ization of the narrator, at others they are told simply as comic
interludes such as those of old Daddy Shchukar, whose inimi­
table language is a marvelous invention of Sholokhov.
The political conspiracy lumbers on to its inevitable debacle
as the leaders, in anticipated cowardly fashion, shamefully vie
with each other in betraying their comrades. One thinks of the
distance Sholokhov has come since The Quiet Don when in the
cause of truthful realism he recognized virtues and even quali­
ties of nobility in the enemy. In particular the image of the
peasant conspirator Ostrovnov is morally debased in a horrify­
ing sequence where he starves his old mother to death because
he feels she might unwittingly reveal his part in the conspiracy.
The three main characters of the first volume, Davydov,
Nagulnov, and Razmyotnov, still hold the center of the stage in
the continuation. Their Party bickerings are over. They work
in complete harmony for the good of Gremyachy Log collec­
tive farm, and for the most part they have by now won the
hearts of the formerly recalcitrant peasants.
The earlier interesting love affair of Davydov and Nagulnov’s
debauched wife Lukeriya turns out to be simply an object
lesson on how not to be a good Communist. Davydov’s passion
leads him into neglecting the business of the collective farm and
arouses the ire of some of its members. While seeking to forget
Lukeriya in hard physical labor on the farm, his emotional dis­
turbance is conveniently sublimated in a developing affection
for a scventecn-ycar-old girl who worships him. The early
stages of this new feeling are sensitively and, in places, charm­
ingly handled, but once Davydov’s love turns serious and he
thinks of marrying the girl, it becomes stiff and unnatural,
caught up in a variant of socialist realism’s stuffy moralism and
the faithfulness of the Soviet worker in love.
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 257
Nagulnov, who still believes—as he tells Razmyotnov—that
“Wenches for us revolutionists, brother, are pure opium for the
people!” has lost his left-wing deviationism in the continuation
of the novel but not his deep love for his erring wife. After
shooting her kulak lover Timofei, he orders her to leave
Gremyachy Log forever, but this totally unsatisfactory con­
clusion of their relations ofFers no resolution of Nagulnov’s
psychological difficulties which had been so effectively posed
in the first volume. In general, Sholokhov, who had depicted
love so powerfully and movingly in The Quiet Don, seems to
have been content in Virgin Soil Upturned to channel all its
manifestations into the rut of the politics and morality of social­
ist realism.
In the last chapter of the continuation, after Davydov and
Nagulnov have been killed by conspirators whom they seek to
apprehend, Sholokhov reverts to the theme of love with all the
exquisite sensitivity and human feeling of his earlier writing.
But like the scene of the death of Aksinya which it echoes, it is
in the cause of a tragic lost love, the dead wife whose memory
the kindly Razmyotnov cannot efface. Sholokhov evokes the
memory with that expressive lyricism in which the dead and the
living are fused with nature in the irrevocability of a love never
to be forgotten. Razmyotnov, after the death of his two com­
rades, visits his wife’s grave and softly says:

“I don’t look after your last home at all well, Yevdokia. . . .” He

bent down, picked up a dry clod of clay, rubbed it into dust between
his hands, and added in a thick undertone: “And yet I love you even
now, my unforgettable one, the only one in my life. . . . You see. I’ve
never any time. . . . We rarely see each other. ... If you’re able to
forgive me for all the evil I did you. ... For all the ways in which
I have done you wrong, you . . . the dead. . . .”
He stood there a long time with bared head, as though listening
and waiting for an answer. He stood without stirring, his back bowed
258 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

like an old man’s. A warm wind blew in his face, a warm rain
drizzled. Beyond the Don, sheet lightning flashed white over the
sky; and now Razmyotnov’s stem, joyless eyes gazed not downward,
not at the sunken edge of his wife’s grave, but beyond the invisible
line of the horizon where half the sky lit up suddenly with a lurid
light. Awakening all sleeping nature, majestic and vehement as in the
heat of mid-summer, the last thunder of the year rolled overhead.
*

9
Method and not madness has dictated the selection of Sholo­
khov as the subject of the concluding essay of this introductory
study of developments in Russian realism over the last hundred
years or more. For his total artistic achievement in fiction dem­
onstrates better than that of any other Soviet novelist both a
continuation of Russian classical realism of the nineteenth cen­
tury and the change to socialist realism in the twentieth. Rus­
sian literature, past and present, has been the product of an
endless struggle between authors who strove to remain autono­
mous in their art and the state which has insisted on manipulat­
ing them, in one way or another, for its own purposes. If the
Soviet state is far more rigid in its controls than that of the
tsars, it has also tried to justify them by a political system that
provides both a faith and a way of life. In the nineteenth cen­
tury, creative writers and critics, with the possible exception of
the radical democrats, would have agreed with Tolstoy that the
political excludes the artistic because, in order to prove, it must
be one-sided. Not a few Soviet writers, including some of the
finest, have come to accept the identification of Communist
politics and literature. In such cases subscribing to socialist real-
• Mikhail Sholokhov, Harvest on the Don, translated from the Russian
by H. C. Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1961), pp. 366-67. Some slight
alterations have been made on the basis of a comparison with the original.
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 259
ism, the aesthetic credo of Soviet Communism, has usually fol­
lowed as a matter of course.
For example, Sholokhov’s position today on the Party’s rela­
tion to art is not essentially different from that of the more
talented writers of his own generation, such as Fedin and
Leonov, although they have all reached their conclusions
through a variety of disparate experiences and express them in
terms of conflicting artistic personalities. The Soviet Union’s
incredible struggle to survive and then grow strong, a struggle
that involved members of this older generation of writers in its
bitter hardships, cruelties, and wrenched allegiances, has finally
claimed from them a devotion that transcends ordinary patri­
otism. It is a kind of Soviet mystique deeply rooted in a com­
munity of suffering.
Out of devotion to the Soviet Union has come devotion to the
Communist Party that leads it. It would be a mistake to question
the reality of this loyalty of the older writers, among whom
must be included the late Boris Pasternak. However much they
may differ on the extent to which the Party ought to interfere in
literature, they do not question its right to be deeply concerned
with it. Few of them perhaps would go quite so far as Sholo­
khov who declared at the Second Congress of the Union of So­
viet Writers: “Malicious enemies abroad say of us Soviet writers
that we write according to the dictates of the Party. Matters are
somewhat different.fEach of us writes according to the dictates
of his own heart, but our hearts belong to the Party and to our
people whom we serve with our art.,rJ
Loyalty rather than rational conviction may prompt such
views, but both tend to merge when older writers are con­
fronted by a barrage of criticism from the West on the propa­
ganda nature, regimentation, and dull uniformity of content and
style in Soviet literature. Such attacks provoke rejoinders such
as Sholokhov’s who said in an interview in 1934: “Capitalism
2Ô0 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

domesticates writers and makes them mercenary; it destroys

honest literature. The bourgeois writer is placed in such finan­
cial circumstances that attributes of individualism are nurtured
in him, forcing into the background the significance of literary
art.” These writers would also point out that readers in demo­
cratic countries are as much protected from some issues as are
those in the Soviet Union. They look askance at the literature
of violence and sex in the West and at writers who, convinced
that existence is meaningless and absurd, concern themselves
with the anxieties and conflicts of a character’s inner life which
are more important to them than either the individual’s actual
behavior or the community’s well-being.
Through necessity, habit, and a shared devotion to their
country, the older writers, with some few exceptions, make a
virtue of the Party’s vigorous interest in the arts and in all who
practice them, an official interest so different from that of po­
litical parties of the West. And they have come to believe that
there is nothing incompatible between the development of a
thriving literature and the authoritarianism of a Communist
state. They tolerate the official doctrine of socialist realism, but
they would prefer not to have their loyalty to the regime tested
by any artistic credo. Actually their roots are still deep in
nineteenth-century Russian realism which gives an old-fash­
ioned flavor to their fiction. For example, the recent fine trilogy
of Fedin, except for those parts concerned with Soviet subject
matter, could well have been written before the 1917 Revolu­
tion.
The new generation of writers, not excluding the so-called
“angry young men,” express the same devotion to their country
and Party. Indeed, they are often fiercely patriotic and scorn
Western charges that they are being regimented in practicing
their art. There is an element of truth in this despite official at­
tacks on them during the last three years, for the naked compul­
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 261

sion of the Stalin period seems to have been supplanted by the

persuasion of the Khrushchev regime. Not long ago the well-
known young fiction writer Yuri Nagibin declared in the
Nation: “Nobody in our country can boss a writer either from
above or below.” And he went on to add, by way of informing
Americans that young Soviet authors prefer their own approach
to art: “Faith in the future has delivered us from dejection, let
alone hopelessness, which many in the West consider an indica­
tion of good literary taste.”
These are brave words and top Party leaders would probably
approve of them without in any way relinquishing their deter­
mination to insist that it is the duty of all writers to adhere to
the Party line in literature. But progressive writers among the
young are impatient with Party paternalism and doctrinal shib­
boleths of socialist realism. They desire to express their loyalty
to the regime in creative spontaneity rather than be guided by
Party nostrums. They look back with envy to the early Soviet
pre-Stalinist period when experimentation in the arts was pos­
sible, and they make heroes of its victims who were later perse­
cuted under Stalin. Their movement, both in prose and poetry,
should not be dismissed simply as a current manifestation of the
de-Stalinization process, for it has deeper implications which the
Party clearly and anxiously perceives. The movement’s con­
scious or unconscious aim is to reestablish an independent hu­
manist tradition, to make Soviet literature the conscience of the
nation as Russian literature was in the nineteenth century.
Certainly it is man’s conscience in the struggle between good
and evil in Soviet life that now primarily interests progressive
fiction writers such as Nekrasov, Tendryakov, Antonov,
Aksenov, Kazakov, and Nagibin, to mention some of the bet­
ter-known names. Contemporary Western writers with their
highly individualistic perception of reality have made an im­
pression on them, but they appear to seek inspiration in the
2Ô2 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

fiction of Turgenev, Chekhov, and Bunin in their revolt against

the systematic cant of socialist realism with its undiscriminating
emphasis upon Soviet achievements and virtues. In numerous
short stories, their favorite genre, these emotionally literate
writers strive for a deeper realism which will faithfully reflect
moral crises in the lives of simple, “little” people who in these
tales always seem to be untouched by the mythical joys of
Soviet collective existence. The certainties of human behavior
do not impress them as much as the incommunicable mono­
logues of the minds of people who live, love, and suffer to no
purpose. In underground literature in the Soviet Union, and in
some published anonymously abroad, there is evidence of ex­
perimentation in nonrcalistic form and content in an effort to
reveal more adequately the submerged substance of Soviet
reality.
One may detect in all this a continuation of the libertarian
spirit of nineteenth-century Russian writers in their struggle
for some measure of autonomy in the practice of literature.
Quite clearly some of the experimentally minded new genera­
tion of writers regard art as a means of defining and sharing
their responses to a Soviet reality that has little in common
with the make-believe work of socialist realism. But it is unlikely
that these efforts, under present Party controls in the arts, how­
ever much they may have been lessened since Stalin’s death, can
be considered harbingers of a full-fledged return to Russian clas­
sical realism of the past or some Soviet variant of it.
The Party leaders, of course, are aware that a subservient
literary bureaucracy produces lifeless books, but they have
never discovered any way to compel people to read them. And
they also realize that thought control must leave a margin of
freedom of expression if it is to be even partly effective. Fur­
ther, because of the shattering of the monolithic nature of the
Communist world, Soviet leaders now evince a new sensitivity
 Sholokhov—Literary Artist and Socialist Realist 263
to opinion beyond their borders, especially among allied foreign
Communist parties, as was plainly indicated in the recent unsuc­
cessful attempt of Soviet Party officials to whip young progres­
sive artists and writers back into the happiness of socialist
realism.
In this situation, however, it would amount to wishful think­
ing to imagine that the Soviet hierarchy is slowly moving in the
direction of allowing writers freedom of expression as long as
they do not indulge in overt criticism of the Party, its leaders,
and the government, somewhat as in the autocratic days of the
old regime writers were permitted freedom of expression pro­
vided they refrained from attacking the tsar, the government,
and the Church. The Soviet leaders are hardly prepared to
grant even this limited freedom which, in the nineteenth century,
did not prevent the creation of a magnificent body of literature.
However, the present fluid and promising situation in the arts
in the Soviet Union does suggest a rethinking of our unvarying
criticism of its literature from the point of view of our own
artistic values as though there were no room left in the world
for other values. This may be regarded as an argument for
ideological coexistence which the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union adamantly rejects. But should we reject it? The
official Soviet position is that peaceful coexistence between
states is desirable, but coexistence of different ideologies, that is,
the free interchange of different approaches to life, art, and
politics, is impermissible. This unnatural relationship has under­
standably compelled Western critics to regard all Soviet litera­
ture and art in a somewhat distorted light. Our critical standards
tend to alter and become infected with a stereotyped contempt
which is political in origin.
Though it is true that official Soviet literary criticism is also
political, recent steadv pressure among some writers and critics,
if not among Partv pundits, for a more open policy toward
264 INTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN REALISM

“bourgeois” literature and art should not be cynically disre­

garded. Unless physical coercion is once again employed,
writers are unlikely to lose permanently the small measure of
freedom they have achieved. Such a development demands
greater openness on our part, a willingness to appraise Soviet
literary works with the tolerance and detachment which have
always been hallmarks of the best criticism in the West. This
docs not mean that differences and tensions between two po­
litical systems must be ignored, but they should not be allowed
to dominate evaluations of artistic differences between, let us
say, the fiction of Soviet socialist realism and the more or less
abstract realism of the Western anti-novel today. That is, an
effort to respond objectively to Soviet artistic values mav,
hopefully, inspire a similar response there to Western values
and eventually encourage free literary discussion across the
frontiers.
 INDEX

About Love (Chekhov), 219 Antonov, Sergei, 261

Academy of Sciences, 10, 12; Arabesques (Gogol), 56, 58
Soviet, 83 Ariadne (Chekhov), 208
Adventures from the Sea of Life Arnold, Matthew, 139
(Veltman), 93 Artamène (Scudéry), 12
Aksenov, I.A., 261 At a Country House (Chekhov),
Albert (Tolstoy), 147 208
Alexander I, Emperor, 17, 18, 19, An Attack of Nerves (Chekhov),
20, 25, 35, 50, 150, 157 197
Alexander II, Emperor, 94, 96, An Atithor's Confession (Go­
181 gol), 58, 80, 82
Alexander III, Emperor, 181
All's Well That Ends Well
(Tolstoy), 150 Babel, Isaac, 229, 232, 246
Ammalet Bek (Bestuzhev-Mar- The Badgers (Leonov), 229
linsky), 22 Bakunin, M.A., 125
Andreyev, Leonid, 217 Balzac, Honoré de, 22, 24, 53,
And Quiet Flows the Don 66, 92, 95, 241
(Sholokhov), 236n Baratynsky, Y.A., 19
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 32, Betyushkov, C., 19
86, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, Beethoven, Ludwig van, 175
167-74, 175, 183 Belinsky, V.G., 10, 16-17, 19, 22,
Anna on the Neck (Chekhov), 26, 33, 45, 46, 52, 53, 61-62,
208 80, 91, 92, 93-94, 95, 98, 100
Anton Goremyka (Grigoro­ Bely, Andrei, 45
vich), 93 Bennett, Arnold, 7
265
266 Index
Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 156 Caucasus, 22, 25, 137, 144, 145,
Bers family, 158, 169 176, 233
Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Alexan­ Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de,
der, 20, 21-22 6, 43, 55, 66
The Betrothed (Chekhov), 221- A Chameleon (Chekhov), 187
22 Chapayev (Furmanov), 232
The Bible, 63, 107-8 Chekhov, Alexander, 189, 190,
The Bishop (Chekhov), 221 191, 213
The Black Monk (Chekhov), Chekhov, A.P., 27, 93, 98, 141,
206 176, 181-224, 227, 246, 262
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 10 Chekhov, Stendhal and other Es­
Boris Godunov (Pushkin), 28 says (Ehrenburg), 184n
Botkin, V.P., 92, 93 Chernyshevsky, N.G., 45, 46,
Bourget, Paul, 199 62, 95, 96, 97, 142, 228
Boyhood (Tolstoy), 105, 144 The Cherry Orchard (Che­
The Brigadier (Fonvizin), 9-11 khov), 213, 214-15
The Brothers (Fedin), 229 Childe Harold (Byron), 25
The Brothers Karamazov (Dos­ Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
toevsky), 102, 110, 111, 112, (Tolstoy), 105, 144
122, 124, 129-34, 221; “Pro Cities and Years (Fedin), 229
and Contra,” 131 Clarissa (Richardson), 8, 13, 15,
Bryusov, V.Y., 45 17
Budyonny, General S., 242 Classical School of Russian Real­
Bulgarin, Faddei, 21, 66, 91 ism, 43, 98, 99, 136, 182, 226,
Bulwer-Lytton. See Lytton 227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 245,
Bunin, I.A., 190, 262 247, 248, 258, 260
Byron, Lord G.G.N., 21, 25, 28, A Common Story (Goncharov),
29, 127 93
Confession (Tolstoy), 173
Camus, Albert, 5, 6, 102 The Contemporary (magazine),
The Captain's Daughter (Push­ 147
kin), 41-42, 135 Corneille, Pierre, 10
The Captive of the Caucasus Cossacks. See Don Cossacks
(Pushkin), 25 The Cossacks (Tolstoy), 25, 55,
Carus, C.G., 111 56, 137, 148
Cassandre (La Calprencde), 12 Count Nulin (Pushkin), 28, 33
Catherine I, Empress, 9 Crime and Punishment (Dos­
Catherine II (the Great), Em­ toevsky), 89, 106, 110, 111,
press, 10, 11-12, 13, 14, 17, 117-21
19, 29, 41, 51; Charter of Crimean War, 94, 145
1785, 29
Caucasian army tales (Tolstov), Dante Alighieri, 81
144-45, 233 The Darling (Chekhov), 220-21
 Index 267

Dead Souls (Gogol), 45, 46, 47, sion of Stavrogin,” 127;

48, 51, 54, 61, 62, 63, 65-90, “Pro and Contra,” 131
91, 183, 194; first part, 65- Dostoyevski in Russian Literary
78, 79, 90; fragmentary sec­ Criticism, 1846-1956 (Se-
ond part, 79-90 duro), lOOn
The Death of a Government The Double (Dostoevsky), 99,
Clerk (Chekhov), 187 109, 112
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tol­ A Dreary Story (Chekhov), 200-
stoy), 175-76, 200 1, 202, 203, 206, 207
Decembrist Revolt, 20, 24, 49, Druzhinin, A*V., 93
51, 149 Dubrovsky (Pushkin), 39, 40
Defoe, Daniel, 7, 13 The Duel (Chekhov), 202, 203
Delvig, Baron Anton, 38 Dukhobors, 177
Derzhavin, G.R., 11
The Diary of a Writer (Dos­
toevsky), 103, 105, 132 “Eastern Verse Tales” (Byron),
Dickens, Charles, 53, 64, 135, 136 25
Diderot, Denis, 12 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 184n, 254
The Disciple (Bourget), 199 1805 (Tolstoy), 149
Divine Comedy (Dante), 81 Eliot, T.S., 49
Dobrolyubov, N., 45, 95, 97, 109, Elizabeth, Empress, 12
142 Emancipation Act (1861), 94,
Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), 27, 182
230 The Enemies (Chekhov), 193
Don, river, 231, 236, 237, 242, Epoch (Dostoevsky’s magazine),
248, 254 103, 115
Don Cossacks, 231, 232, 234-36, Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), 29-
237, 242, 244, 245-46, 248, 35, 36, 37, 43, 84, 97, 98, 127,
249, 254 172
The Don Flows Home to the Sea Etigénie Grandet (Balzac), 92
(Sholokhov), 236n Evenings on a Farm Near Di-
Don Juan (Byron), 29 kanka (Gogol), 53-54
Don Quixote (Cervantes), 6, 66,
75, 123 Fables (Krylov), 18-19
Don Tales (Sholokhov), 232 A Faint Heart (Dostoevsky), 106
Dostoevsky, F.M., 6, 24, 27, 39, The False Dmitri (Bulgarin), 21
41, 62, 74, 82, 83, 84, 89, 91- Family Happiness (Tolstoy), 147
134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, Faramond (La Calprenède), 12
172, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, Fathers and Sons (Turgenev),
198, 221, 227; brother of, 100, 183
115; and Time and Epoch, Fedin, C., 229, 259
103, 115; wife of, 115; second Fet, A.A., 152
wife of, 121; “The Confes­ Feuerbach, L.A., 52
268 Index
Fichte, J.G., 52 Grief (Chekhov), 188
Fielding, Henry, 7, 8, 13, 14, Grigorovich, D.V., 93, 189, 191
18, 29 La guerre et la paix (Proudhon),
Fitzgerald, Scott, 223 151
Flaubert, Gustave, 92, 133, 139, The Gypsies (Pushkin), 25-27, 33
178, 190
Foma Gordayev (Gorky), 216
Fonvizin, D.I., 10, 11 Hadji Murad (Tolstoy), 176
Forster, E.M., 7, 139 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 48
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai Happiness (Chekhov), 193, 194
(Pushkin), 25 Harvest on the Don (Sholo­
“Frenchmen,” 52 khov), 258n
Freud, Sigmund, 58, 59, 110, 112 The Heart of Midlothian
Furmanov, D., 232 (Scott), 41
Hegel, G.W.F., 52, 166
The Helpmate (Chekhov), 208
Galsworthy, John, 179 Hemingway, Ernest, 223
The Gambler (Dostoevsky), 41 Herzen, A.I., 51, 52, 93, 97
Gargantua (Rabelais), 6 The History of the Pugachev
A Gentle Creature (Dostoev­ Rebellion (Pushkin), 41
sky), 106 The History of the Russian
“Germans,” 52 People (Polevoi), 39
Gil Blas (Lc Sage), 66 The History of the Village of
Gippius (Hippius), Z., 46 Goryukhino (Pushkin), 39-
Goethe, J.W., 13, 39 40
Gogol, N.V., 19, 39, 41, 44-90, A History of Yesterday (Tol­
91, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 135, stoy), 143
178, 183, 194,227,234,246 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 41, 55
Gogol, Nikolai (Nabokov), 47n Homer, 55
Goncharov, I.A., 84, 93, 96, 97, L'Homme révolté (Camus), 5,
98, 104, 178, 183 102
Gooseberries (Chekhov), 219, The Honest Thief (Dostoev­
220 sky), 110
Gorky, Maxim (A.M. Peshkov), The House of the Dead (Dos­
96-97, 102, 162, 168, 216, 217 toevsky), 108, 109
The Government Inspector The House with the Attic
(Gogol), 45, 47, 51, 54, 61- (Chekhov), 2 18
65, 66, 70, 78, 80 Hugo, Victor, 92
Granovsky, T.N., 126 The Human Comedy (Balzac),
The Grasshopper (Chekhov), 22, 66
203 Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 7,
Grech, N.I., 18 13
Griboyedov, A.S., 19 The Hunter (Chekhov), 188, 189
 Index 269

The Idiot (Dostoevsky), 6, 83, The Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy),

110, 111, 122-25, 130, 132 176
Iliad (Homer), 55, 56 Krylov, Ivan, 18-19
The Impudent Brat (Sholo­
khov), 232 La Calprenède, Gautier de
In the Ravine (Chekhov), 222 Costes, Seigneur de, 12
Incursions (Bestuzhev-Marlin- The Lady with the Dog (Che­
sky), 21 khov), 221
The Insulted and Injured (Dos­ The Lady-Rustic (Pushkin), 37
toevsky), 108 La Fayette, Madame (Marie-
The Island of Sakhalin (Che­ Madeleine Pioche de la
khov), 201 Vergne, comtesse de), 12
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and The Landlady (Dostoevsky),
His Aunt (Gogol), 54 109
Ivan Vyzhigin (Bulgarin), 21, 66, A Landlord’s Morning (Tol­
91 stoy), 84, 147
Ivanov (Chekhov), 195, 210 The Last Novik (Lazhechni­
kov), 22
Lawrence, D.H., 53, 141
James, Henry, 4, 66, 139 Lazhechnikov, Ivan, 22
Jonathan Wild (Fielding), 13 Lenin, Nikolai (V.I. Ulyanov),
Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 13 102, 140, 226, 232; “Leo Tol­
J°>rce, James, 8 stoy as a Mirror of the Rus­
Jung, C.G., 110 sian Revolution,” 140
Leonov, Leonid, 229, 259
Lermontov, M.Y., 97, 98, 127,
Kafka, Franz, 6 224
Kant, Immanuel, 52 Le Sage, Alain René, 55, 66
Kantemir, Prince Antiokh, 10 Leskov, N.S., 196
Karamzin, Nikolai, 15, 17-18, 62 Lesser, S.O., 110
Kashtanka (Chekhov), 193 Letters of a Russian Traveler
Katkov, M.N., 118, 119, 120, 125, (Karamzin), 17
126, 127, 134 Levitan, Isaak, 191, 192
Kazakov, Yury, 261 “The Life of a Great Sinner”
Kazan University, 152 (Dostoevsky), 122, 125, 126,
Khrushchev, Nikita, 254, 261 127, 129
Kierkegaard, Soren, 115 The Light Shineth in Darkness
The Kiss (Chekhov), 193 (Tolstoy), 179
A Knight of Our Times (Ka­ The Lights (Chekhov), 198
ramzin), 18 Literary Encyclopedia, Soviet,
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 114n 46
Kotlyarevsky, Ivan, 45 Literattire and Revolution
Kramskoi, I.N., 212 (Trotsky), 226
270 Index
Lomonosov, M.V., 10 of Lovers of Russian Litera­
Lubbock, Percy, 151, 162 ture, 147; University, 52
Lucerne (Tolstoy), 147 My Life (Chekhov), 218
Lukâcs, George, 140-41
Lvov, P., 15 Nabokov, Vladimir, 47-48
Lytton, Edward George Earle Nagibin, Yuri, 261
Lytton, Bulwer-Lytton, first The Name-Day Party (Che­
baron, 37 khov), 197
Napoleon I (Bonaparte), 149,
150, 154, 156, 157, 165;
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 139 wars, 17; invasion of Russia,
Maikov, V.N., 99-100 17, 149-50, 154
The Malefactor (Chekhov), 188 Narezhny, Vasily, 18
The Man in a Shell (Chekhov), Nation (U.S. magazine), 261
219 “Natural School,” 91-92, 93, 94,
Mann, Thomas, 6, 206 98
Marx, Karl, 140, 228 Nechaev, S.G., 125, 126
Master and Man (Tolstoy), 175 The Negro of Peter the Great
Maupassant, Guy de, 4, 178, 190 (Pushkin), 36-37
Mazepa (Bulgarin), 21 Nekrasov, Viktor, 261
Melmoth the Wanderer (Ma­ Netochka Nezvanova (Dostoev­
turing 59 sky), 106
The Memoirs of a Madman Neufeld, J., 110
(Gogol), 59 The Nevsky Prospect (Gogol),
Mikhailovsky, N., 201 56-58
Milhailovskoe (Pushkin’s estate), New Times (newspaper), 187
33 New World (magazine), 248
Mire (Chekhov), 192 Nicholas I, Emperor, 20, 24, 39,
Mirgorod (Gogol), 55, 56 49-50, 52, 60, 63, 78, 80, 93,
Mirsky, Prince D.S., 27 94
Mr. Prokharchin (Dostoevsky), Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101-2, 117
99 Night Thoughts (Young), 17
Molière (Jean Baptiste Poque­ “Non-Acting” (Tolstoy), 137n
lin), 10, 29, 55 Northern Herald (magazine),
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de 195, 197
Secondât, Baron de la Brcde The Nose (Gogol), 58-59
et de, 12 Notes from the Underground
Moscow, Russia, 10, 21, 27, 33, (Dostoevsky), 114-17, 119
47, 51, 106, 125, 151, 159, Notes of a Young Man (Herzen),
166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 177, 51
186, 201, 203, 209, 214, 231; “Notes on the Petty Bourgeoisie”
Art Theater, 211; Society (Gorky), 96-97
 Index 271

Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau), 8, Pogodin, M.P., 152

13, 17, 30 The Polaniecki Family (Sienkie­
“A Novel in Letters” (Pushkin), wicz), 208
37 Polevoi, Nikolai, 39
Novikov, Nikolai, 14 Polikushka (Tolstoy), 148
Polinka (Chekhov), 193
Polinka Saks (Druzhinin), 93
Oblomov (Goncharov), 84, 97, Poor Folk (Dostoevsky), 91, 93,
183 99, 100, 106, 109
Old Wives' Tale (Bennett), 7 Poor Liza (Karamzin), 15, 17
Old-World Landowners (Go­ The Portrait (Gogol), 41, 59, 66
gol), 56 The Positive Hero in Russian
Olesha, Yuri, 229 Literattire (Mathewson),
Omsk, Siberia, 107 228n
On the Cart (Chekhov), 217-18 The Possessed (Dostoevsky),
On the Road (Chekhov), 193 102 111, 122, 124, 125-29;
Orthodox Church, 9, 107, 121, “Confession of Stavrogin,”
124, 129, 177, 221, 263 127-28
The Overcoat (Gogol), 39, 45, Prévost, Antoine François, 12
48, 59-61, 74, 91, 99 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 151
Ovsyanikovo-Kulikovsky, D.N., Proust, Marcel, 8, 110
46 Psyche: Zur Entwicklungsge-
schichte der Seele (Carus),
Pamela (Richardson), 13, 14, 15 111
Pantagruel (Rabelais), 6 Pushkin, Alexander, 19, 20, 23-
Pasternak, Boris, 27, 230, 259 43, 47, 51, 53, 54-55, 59, 61,
The Peasant Wives (Chekhov), 62, 63, 69, 78, 84, 97, 98, 99,
202 127, 135, 136, 138, 172, 175,
Peasants (Chekhov), 218-19, 222 183, 207, 227
Pelham (Lytton), 37
Peter I (the Great), Emperor, 9,
16, 36, 95, 166, 167 The Queen of Spades (Pushkin),
Petrashevskv Circle, 106 41, 59
“Psychological Analysis and Lit­ The Quiet Doti (Sholokhov),
erary Form” (Kohlberg), 230, 233-47, 248, 253, 254,
114n 256, 257
Pickwick (Dickens), 64, 73, 123
Pierre et Jean (Maupassant), 4
Pilnyak (B.A. Vogau), 229 Rabelais, François, 6, 71
Platonov (Chekhov), 210 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 10, 27
Poems of Ossian (J. Macpher­ Radishchev, Nikolai, 14
son), 17 Raevsky, Nikolai, 28
272 Index
The Raid (Tolstoy), 145 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de
The Rape of Lucrece (Shake­ Rouvroy, comte de, 52
speare), 28 Sakhalin, Island of, 201, 204,
A Raw Youth (Dostoevsky), 205
112-13, 124 Saltvkov-Shchedrin, M.E., 96,
Readings for Every Day in the '196
Year (Tolstoy), 221 Sand, George (Amandine Au­
The Red and the Black (Sten­ rore Lucie Dudevant), 92
dhal), 41, 139 Sartre, Jean Paul, 6, 102, 115, 116
Red Cavalry (Babel), 232 Sazonova, Madame, 205, 206
Resurrection (Tolstov), 177-79, Schelling, F.W.J., 52
184 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 166
Richardson, Samuel, 8, 13, 14, 15, Scott, Sir Walter, 20, 21, 22-23,
30, 37, 43 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 53, 55,
The Robber Brothers (Pushkin), 56
25 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 12
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 7, 13 The Sea Gull (Chekhov), 210-
Roderick Random (Smollett), 13 12, 213
Rothschild’s Fiddle (Chekhov), The Seasons (Thomson), 17
207 Selected Passages from a Corre­
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 8, 12, spondence with Friends
13, 30, 37, 43, 147, 148 (Gogol), 62, 80
Rozanov, Vasili, 45 Selected Philosophical Works
The Runaway (Chekhov), 193 (Belinsky), 22n, 93n
Russian civil war, 229-30, 232, Sentimental journey (Sterne),
234, 235, 237, 240 13, 17, 143
A Russian Gil Blas (Narezhny), Sergeant Prisbebeyev (Che­
18 khov), 188
A Russian Pamela (Lvov), 15 Sevastopol, 145, 146
“A Russian Pelham” (Pushkin), “Sevastopol in Mav” (Tolstoy),
37 137n
Russian Realism, Classical School Sevastopol “sketches” (Tolstov),
of, 43, 98, 99, 136, 182, 226, 145-46
227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 245, Shakespeare, William, 9, 11, 27-
247, 248, 258, 260 28, 48, 134, 138, 139, 175
Russian Revolution, 49, 225, 234, Sholokhov, Mikhail, 230-60
236, 242, 244, 260 Scholokhov, Mikhail (Lezhnev),
240n
“Shop Talk” (Gorky), 102
St. Petersburg, Russia, 10, 31, 33, The Shot (Pushkin), 37, 38
54, 57, 58, 59, 68, 71, 107, Siberia, 14, 85, 106, 107, 108, 110,
147, 167, 168, 170, 177, 187, 177
188, 189; Universit}’, 10, 55 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 208
 Index 273
The Silent Don (Sholokhov), The Story of How Ivan Ivano­
236n vich Quarreled with Ivan
Sir Charles Grandison (Richard­ Nikiforovich (Gogol), 56
son), 13, 15 Strakhov, N.N., 122
Skabichevsky, A.M., 204 Strider: the Story of a Horse
Slavophils, 86, 94, 95, 110 (Tolstoy), 145
Sleepy (Chekhov), 193 The Student (Chekhov), 207
Smollett, Tobias G., 7, 13, 18 Sue, Eugene, 92
The Snowstorm (Pushkin), 37, Sumarokov, A.P., 10
38 Suslova, Polina, 115
The Snow Storm (Tolstoy), 145 Suvorin, A.S., 183, 187, 196, 198,
Socialist realism, 24, 46, 92, 227- 201, 202, 204-5, 208, 218, 222
29, 230, 237, 244, 245, 248,
249, 250, 251, 255, 258-59, Tales of Belkin (Pushkin), 37-39
260, 261, 262, 263, 264; Tales of My Landlord (Scott),
critical realism, 46 38
“Southern Verse Tales” (Push­ Taras Bulba (Gogol), 55, 56, 80
kin), 25, 28 The Teacher of Literattire
Spectator (English journal), 11 (Chekhov), 207-8
Sportsman's Sketches (Tur­ Tendryakov, V.F., 261
genev), 93 The Terrible Vengeance (Go­
Squires, P.C., 110 gol), 54
Stalin, Joseph (J.V. Dzhugash­ Tertz, Abram (pseud.), 228
vili), 140, 224, 225, 234, 248, Thackerav, William Makepeace,
250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 261, 73, 136
262; and purges of 1930’s, They Fought for Their Country
234, 254, 261; and agricul­ (Sholokhov), 254
tural collectivization, 248- The Thief (Leonov), 229
55; “Dizziness from Success” Thomson, James, 17
speech of, 250, 251; and Three Deaths (Tolstoy), 145,147
famine, 253; and war with The Three Sisters (Chekhov),
Nazis, 254 213, 214, 221
Stanislavsky (C.S. Alexiev), 212, Tieck, Ludwig, 55
214 Time (Dostoevsky’s magazine),
The Stationmaster (Pushkin),37, 103, 115
38-39, 99 Tolstov, Count Leo, 6, 24, 25, 27,
Stekel, W., 110 32' 39, 59, 74, 82, 84, 86. 96,
Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle), 97, 98, 104, 105, 108, 135-80,
41, 92, 136, 139 181, 183, 184, 185, 190, 194,
The Steppe (Chekhov), 195, 196, 196, 198, 200, 207, 218, 220,
197 221, 227, 230, 234, 235, 244,
Sterne, Laurence, 8, 13, 17, 46, 245, 246, 247, 258; wife of,
55, 58-59, 72, 136, 143 143, 166, 167
274 Index
“Tolstoy and the Development A Voyage from St. Petersburg to
of Realism” (Lukacs), 140n Moscow (Radishchev), 14
Tolstoy Centenary Edition, 137n Vyazcmskv, Prince Peter, 21, 25,
Tolstoy's War and Peace (Chris­ 29, 36
tian), 150n
Tom Jones (Fielding), 7, 13, 29
Trcdyakovsky, Vasili, 10 Wagner, Richard, 175
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 8, 13, War and Peace (Tolstoy), 32,
46, 59 86, 137, 138, 139, 142, 145,
Trotsky, Leon (L.D. Bronstein), 146, 148, 149-66, 167, 175,
226 184, 234, 235, 244, 246
Turgenev, I.S., 6, 31, 50-51, 62, Ward No. 6 (Chekhov), 203-4
84, 93, 96, 97, 98, 104, 126, Werther (Goethe), 13, 17
138, 139, 166, 178, 181, 183, Western literature, 6-8, 11, 12-13,
184, 185, 219, 227, 262 14-16, 17, 18, 27, 28, 29, 30,
37, 41, 43, 47, 55, 79, 116,
Ukraine, 46, 55 136, 138-39, 140, 151, 160,
Ukrainian talcs (Gogol), 53-54 178, 260, 261, 264; novel as
Uncle Vanya (Chekhov), 210, bourgeois art, 7, 8, 13, 92, 94,
213 225-26, 227, 241, 260, 264;
Uncle's Dream (Dostoevsky), cult of sensibility, 7-8, 14,
108 15, 43; French neoclassicism,
The Undertaker (Pushkin), 37 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
Union of Soviet Writers, 234; 24-25, 26-28, 30; romanti­
First Congress, 227; doctrine cism, 20, 21, 24, 26, 28, 30, 40,
of socialist realism, 227; Sec- 41, 43, 52, 53, 55, 59; Scott’s
on Congress, 259 influence, 20, 21, 22-23, 35,
36, 38, 40, 41-42; Gothic
tales, 54, 106, 107; French
Vanka (Chekhov), 193 realism, 92, 94, 95, 96, 178;
Vcltman, A.F., 93 naturalism, 92, 138, 178;
Verochka (Chekhov), 193, 194 existentialism, 102, 115; “in­
The Village (Grigorovich), 93 tentional fallacv,” 111, 131,
The Village of Stepanchikovo 241
(Dostoevsky), 100, 108 Westernizers, 94, 95
Virgin Soil Upturned (Scholo- What is Art? (Tolstov), 135,
khov), 248-53; first volume, 174-75
254, 255; second volume, What Is to Be Done? (Cherny­
253, 254, 255, 258 shevsky), 96, 228
Volodya (Chekhov), 193 Who is to Blame? (Herzen), 93
Voltaire (François Marie Arou- The Wife (Chekhov3, 203
ct), 10, 12 “Winter Notes on Summer Im­
Voronskv, Alexander, 226 pressions” (Dostoevsky), 116
 Index 275
Woe from Wit (Griboyedov), Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s es­
19 tate), 159, 173
A Woman's Kingdom (Che­ Young, Edward, 17
khov), 207 Youth (Tolstoy), 105, 144
The Wood Demon (Chekhov), Yury Miloslavsky, or the Rus­
210, 211 sians in 1612 (Zagoskin), 21
The Wood-Felling (Tolstoy),
145 Zagoskin, Mikhail, 21, 22
Zamyatin, Eugene, 229
Zhukovsky, V.A., 19, 27
Yalta, Crimea, 221 Zola, Emile, 92, 95, 136, 178