Russian Culture Lexicon

Sunday, February 16th, 2014

Russian Culture Lexicon

Russian Primary Chronicle, The

▪ Russian literature

also called Chronicle of Nestor or Kiev Chronicle , Russian Povest vremennykh let (“Tale of Bygone Years”)

medieval Kievan Rus historical work that gives a detailed account of the early history of the eastern Slavs to the second decade of the 12th century. The chronicle, compiled in Kiev about 1113, was based on materials taken from Byzantine chronicles, west and south Slavonic literary sources, official documents, and oral sagas; the earliest extant manuscript of it is dated 1377. While the authorship was traditionally ascribed to the monk Nestor, modern scholarship considers the chronicle a composite work.

▪ Russian monk

born c. 1056, Kiev [now in Ukraine]

died Oct. 27, 1113, Kiev

a monk in Kievan Rus of the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev (from about 1074), author of several works of hagiography and an important historical chronicle.

Nestor wrote the lives of Saints Boris and Gleb, the sons of St. Vladimir of Rus, who were murdered in 1015, and the life of St. Theodosius, abbot of the Monastery of the Caves (d. 1074). A tradition that was first recorded in the 13th century ascribes to him the authorship of the Povest vremennykh let (“Tale of Bygone Years”; The Russian Primary Chronicle (Russian Primary Chronicle, The)), the most important historical work of early medieval Rus. Modern scholarship, however, regards the chronicle as a composite work, written and revised in several stages, and inclines to the view that the basic (though not final) version of the document was compiled by Nestor about 1113. The chronicle, extant in several medieval manuscripts, the earliest dated 1377, was compiled in Kiev. It relates in detail the earliest history of the eastern Slavs down to the second decade of the 12th century. Emphasis is laid on the foundation of the Kievan state—ascribed to the advent of Varangians (a tribe of Norsemen) in the second half of the 9th century, the subsequent wars and treaties between Rus and Byzantium, the conversion of Rus to Christianity about 988, the cultural achievements of the reign of Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev (1019–54), and the wars against the Turkic nomads of the steppe.

Written partly in Old Church Slavonic (Old Church Slavonic language), partly in the Old Russian language based on the spoken vernacular, The Russian Primary Chronicle includes material from translated Byzantine chronicles, west and south Slavonic literary sources, official documents, and oral sagas. This borrowed material is woven with considerable skill into the historical narrative, which is enlivened by vivid description, humour, and a sense of the dramatic.

Old Church Slavonic language

also called Old Church Slavic

Slavic language based primarily on the Macedonian (South Slavic) dialects around Thessalonica (Thessaloníki). It was used in the 9th century by the missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius (Cyril and Methodius, Saints), who were natives of Thessalonica, for preaching to the Moravian Slavs and for translating the Bible into Slavic. Old Church Slavonic was the first Slavic literary language and was written in two alphabets known as Glagolitic (Glagolitic alphabet) and Cyrillic (Cyrillic alphabet) (the invention of Glagolitic has been ascribed to St. Cyril). Old Church Slavonic was readily adopted in other Slavic regions, where, with local modifications, it remained the religious and literary language of Orthodox Slavs throughout the Middle Ages.

The language as it appeared after the 12th century in its various local forms is known as Church Slavonic; this language has continued as a liturgical language into modern times. It continued to be written by the Serbs and Bulgarians until the 19th century and had significant influence on the modern Slavic languages, especially on the Russian literary language that grew out of a compromise style incorporating many Church Slavonic elements into the native Russian vernacular.

Cyril and Methodius, Saints

▪ Christian theologians

Respectively,

born c. 827, Thessalonica, Macedonia

died Feb. 14, 869, Rome

born c. 815, Thessalonica

died April 6, 884, Moravia; feast day for both, Western Church February 14; Eastern Church May 11

brothers who for christianizing the Danubian Slavs and for influencing the religious and cultural development of all Slavic peoples received the title “the apostles of the Slavs.” Both were outstanding scholars, theologians, and linguists. They were honoured by Pope John Paul II in his 1985 encyclical Slavorum Apostoli.

In 860, Cyril (originally named Constantine), who had gone on a mission to the Arabs and been professor of philosophy at the patriarchal school in Constantinople, worked with Methodius, the abbot of a Greek monastery, for the conversion of the Khazars northeast of the Black Sea. In 862, when Prince Rostislav of Great Moravia asked Constantinople for missionaries, the emperor Michael III and the patriarch Photius named Cyril and Methodius. In 863, they started their work among the Slavs, using Slavonic in the liturgy. They translated the Holy Scriptures into the language later known as Old Church Slavonic (or Old Bulgarian) and invented a Slavic alphabet (Cyrillic alphabet) based on Greek characters that in its final Cyrillic form is still in use as the alphabet for modern Russian and a number of other Slavic languages.

The brothers accepted Pope St. Nicholas I's invitation to Rome (867) to explain their conflict with the German archbishop of Salzburg and bishop of Passau, who claimed control of the same Slavic territory and who wanted to enforce the exclusive use of the Latin liturgy. Cyril and Methodius arrived in Rome (868), where the new pope, Adrian II, took their side, formally authorizing the use of the Slavic liturgy. When Cyril died, Adrian sent Methodius back to the Slavs as his legate and archbishop of Sirmium.

Methodius' ecclesiastical province included all of Moravia. When Rostislav's nephew and successor, Svatopluk, failed to support Methodius, he was tried in 870 by the German clergy, brutally treated, and jailed until liberated by the intervention of Pope John VIII. In 880 Methodius was again summoned to Rome about the Slavic liturgy, obtaining once more papal approval of his use of the vernacular.

When Methodius' suffragan bishop, Wiching, continued to make trouble, Methodius tried to strengthen his position in the Eastern Church by visiting Constantinople in 882. After Methodius' death, Pope Stephen V forbade the use of the Slavonic liturgy; and Wiching, as successor, forced the disciples of Cyril and Methodius into exile. The posthumous influence of Cyril and Methodius reached distant Kiev in Russia and left traces among the Slavs of Croatia, Bohemia, and Poland. Soon canonized by the Eastern church, they were celebrated by the Roman Catholic church in 1880.

Cyrillic alphabet

writing system developed in the 9th–10th century AD for Slavic-speaking peoples of the Eastern Orthodox faith; it is the alphabet currently used for Russian and other languages of the republics that once formed the Soviet Union and for Bulgarian and Serbian. Based on the medieval Greek uncial script, the Cyrillic alphabet was probably invented by later followers of the 9th-century “apostles to the Slavs,” St. Cyril (or Constantine), for whom it was named, and St. Methodius. As the Slavic languages were richer in sounds than Greek, 43 letters were originally provided to represent them; the added letters were modifications or combinations of Greek letters, or (in the case of the Cyrillic letters for ts, sh, and ch) they were based on Hebrew. The earliest literature written in Cyrillic was a translation of the Bible and various church texts.

The modern Cyrillic alphabets—Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Serbian—have been modified somewhat from the original, generally by the loss of some superfluous letters. Modern Russian has 32 letters (33, with inclusion of the soft sign—not strictly a letter), Bulgarian 30, Serbian 30, and Ukrainian 32 (33). Modern Russian Cyrillic has also been adapted to many non-Slavic languages, sometimes with the addition of special letters.

Igor's Campaign, The Song of

▪ Russian literature

also translated Lay of Igor's Campaign , Russian Slovo o polku Igoreve

masterpiece of Old Russian literature, an account of the unsuccessful campaign in 1185 of Prince Igor (Igor Svyatoslavich) of Novgorod-Seversky against the Polovtsy (Kipchak, or Cumans). As in the great French epic The Song of Roland, Igor's heroic pride draws him into a combat in which the odds are too great for him. Though defeated, Igor escapes his captors and returns to his people. The tale was written anonymously (1185–87) and preserved in a single manuscript, which was discovered in 1795 by A.I. Musin-Pushkin, published in 1800, and lost during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812.

The tale is not easily classified; neither lyric nor epic, it is a blend of both, with a suggestion of the political pamphlet as well. It is the product of a writer familiar with oral poetry, chronicles, and historical narratives. It is distinguished principally by its modernity. The author's worldview is secular; Christianity is incidental to events.

The Song alone of all Old Russian literature has become a national classic, one that is familiar to every educated Russian. An English translation of it by Vladimir Nabokov was published in 1960.

Kurbsky, Andrey Mikhaylovich, Prince

▪ Russian military commander

born 1528, Russia

died 1583, Poland-Lithuania

Russian military commander who was a close associate and adviser to Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible of Russia during the 1540s and '50s.

A member of the princely house of Smolensk-Yaroslavl, Kurbsky became attached to the special advisory council (Izbrannaya Rada, or “Chosen Council”), which Ivan formed in 1547 to assist him in the preparation of internal reforms and the formulation of foreign policy. At the age of 21, Kurbsky was appointed groom-in-waiting to the tsar and also began his military career, participating in the 1549 campaign against the khanate of Kazan. Although he was wounded while storming the city in 1552, he later took part in consolidating Russian power over the newly conquered Kazan (1553–56). During that period Kurbsky also became one of the tsar's intimate associates and in 1553 demonstrated his loyalty to Ivan, who was then seriously ill, by pledging to support Ivan's infant son Fyodor as heir, although many nobles refused to do so.

In 1556 Kurbsky was promoted to the rank of boyar, the aristocratic order just below the rank of ruling princes. After fighting the Crimean Tatars in the south (1556), he was named by Ivan to be one of the Russian commanders in the campaign to conquer Livonia and was sent to the western frontier (1557). Although militarily successful, after 1563 Kurbsky lost Ivan's favour and was effectively confined to Dorpat (now Tartu). When Ivan failed to renew his appointment, Kurbsky fled (April 30, 1564) to the camp of King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland-Lithuania, who granted him large estates and gave him a commission in his army to fight Ivan (September 1564).

Later Kurbsky defended the interests of the Orthodox population of Lithuania against encroachments from Catholics and Protestants. He also wrote religious works and an account of Ivan's reign (Istoriya o velikom knyaze moskovskom; “History of the Grand Duke of Muscovy”), in which he attacked Ivan's reign of terror. Kurbsky's letters are also interesting—the most famous being those he wrote to Ivan after his flight. From his correspondence it is evident that the Russian nobles—who until recently had been independent rulers of their principalities—found a spokesman in Kurbsky to voice their disapproval of Ivan's absolutist tendencies.

Avvakum Petrovich

▪ Russian priest

born 1620/1621, Grigorovo, Russia

died April 14, 1682, Pustozersk

archpriest, leader of the Old Believers (Old Believer), conservative clergy who brought on one of the most serious crises in the history of the Russian church by separating from the Russian Orthodox church to support the “old rite,” consisting of many purely local Russian developments. He is also considered to be a pioneer of modern Russian literature.

In 1652 he went to Moscow and joined in the struggle against Patriarch Nikon, whose high-handed methods and brutal treatment of dissidents made unpopular his reforms of adopting Greek Orthodox church customs in an effort to unite the entire Orthodox church. Under Nikon's regime, Old Believers were excommunicated and severely persecuted. Avvakum himself was twice banished and finally imprisoned. It was during his imprisonment in Pustozersk that he wrote most of his works, the greatest of which is considered to be his Zhitiye (“Life”), the first Russian autobiography. Distinguished for its lively description and for its original, colourful style, the Zhitiye is one of the great works of early Russian literature. A council of 1682 against the Old Believers condemned Avvakum to be burned at the stake, and the sentence was carried out.

Old Believer

▪ Russian religious group

Russian Starover,

member of a group of Russian religious dissenters who refused to accept the liturgical reforms imposed upon the Russian Orthodox church by the patriarch of Moscow Nikon (1652–58). Numbering millions of faithful in the 17th century, the Old Believers split into a number of different sects, of which several survived into modern times.

Patriarch Nikon faced the difficult problem of deciding on an authoritative source for the correction of the liturgical books in use in Russia. These books, used since the conversion of Rus to Christianity in 988, were literal translations from the Greek into Old Slavic. In the course of centuries, manuscript copies of the translations, which were sometimes inaccurate and obscure at the start, were further mutilated by the mistakes of the scribes. Reform was difficult, for there was no agreement as to where the “ideal” or “original” text was to be found. The option taken by Patriarch Nikon was to follow exactly the texts and practices of the Greek Church as they existed in 1652, the beginning of his reign, and to this effect he ordered the printing of new liturgical books following the Greek pattern. His decree also required the adoption in Russia of Greek usages, Greek forms of clerical dress, and a change in the manner of crossing oneself: three fingers were to be used instead of two. The reform, obligatory for all, was considered “necessary for salvation” and was supported by Tsar Alexis Romanov.

Opposition to Nikon's reforms was led by a group of Muscovite priests, notably the archpriest Avvakum Petrovich. Even after the deposition of Nikon (1658), who broached too strong a challenge to the Tsar's authority, a series of church councils culminating in that of 1666–67 officially endorsed the liturgical reforms and anathematized the dissenters. Several of them, including Avvakum, were executed.

The dissenters, sometimes called Raskolniki, were most numerous in the inaccessible regions of northern and eastern Russia (but later also in Moscow itself) and were important in the colonization of these remote areas. Opposed to all change, they strongly resisted the Western innovations introduced by Peter I, whom they regarded as Antichrist. Having no episcopal hierarchy, they split into two groups. One group, the Popovtsy (priestly sects), sought to attract ordained priests and were able to set up an episcopate in the 19th century. The other, the Bezpopovtsy (priestless sects), renounced priests and all sacraments, except Baptism. Many other sects developed out of these groups, some with practices considered extravagant.

The Old Believers benefitted from the edict of toleration (April 17, 1905), and most groups survived the Russian Revolution of 1917. Numerous branches of both the Popovtsy and the Bezpopovtsy succeeded in becoming registered and thus officially recognized by the Soviet state. The membership of one Moscow-centred Popovtsy group, the convention of Belaya Krinitsa, was estimated in the early 1970s at 800,000. Little is known, however, of the Old Believer settlements supposed to exist in Siberia, the Urals, Kazakhstan, and the Altai. Some groups exist elsewhere in Asia and in Brazil and the United States.

In 1971 the Council of the Russian Orthodox Church completely rescinded all the anathemas of the 17th century and recognized the full validity of the old rites.

Russian Orthodox church

largest autocephalous, or ecclesiastically independent, Eastern Orthodox church in the world. Its membership is estimated at more than 85 million.

Christianity was apparently introduced into the East Slavic state of Kievan Rus by Greek missionaries from Byzantium in the 9th century. An organized Christian community is known to have existed at Kiev as early as the first half of the 10th century, and in 957 Olga, the regent of Kiev, was baptized in Constantinople (Istanbul). This act was followed by the acceptance of Christianity as the state religion after the baptism of Olga's grandson Vladimir (Vladimir I), prince of Kiev, in 988. Under Vladimir's successors, and until 1448, the Russian (Russia) church was headed by the metropolitans of Kiev (who after 1328 resided in Moscow) and formed a metropolitanate of the Byzantine patriarchate.

While Russia lay under Mongol (Golden Horde) rule from the 13th through the 15th century, the Russian church enjoyed a favoured position, obtaining immunity from taxation in 1270. This period saw a remarkable growth of monasticism. The Monastery of the Caves (Pechersk Lavra) in Kiev, founded in the mid-11th century by the ascetics St. Anthony (Anthony of Kiev) and St. Theodosius, was superseded as the foremost religious centre by the Trinity–St. Sergius monastery, which was founded in the mid-14th century by St. Sergius of Radonezh (in what is now the city of Sergiyev Posad). Sergius, as well as the metropolitans St. Peter (Peter) (1308–26) and St. Alexius (1354–78), supported the rising power of the principality of Moscow. Finally, in 1448 the Russian bishops elected their own patriarch without recourse to Constantinople, and the Russian church was thenceforth autocephalous (autocephalous church). In 1589 Job, the metropolitan of Moscow, was elevated to the position of patriarch with the approval of Constantinople and received the fifth rank in honour after the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

In the mid-17th century the Russian Orthodox patriarch Nikon came into violent conflict with the Russian tsar Alexis. Nikon, pursuing the ideal of a theocratic state, attempted to establish the primacy of the Orthodox church over the state in Russia, and he also undertook a thorough revision of Russian Orthodox texts and rituals to bring them into accord with the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Nikon was deposed in 1666, but the Russian church retained his reforms and anathematized those who continued to oppose them; the latter became known as Old Believers and formed a vigorous body of dissenters within the Russian Orthodox church for the next two centuries.

In 1721 Tsar Peter I (the Great) abolished the patriarchate of Moscow and replaced it with the Holy Governing Synod, which was modeled after the state-controlled synods of the Lutheran church in Sweden and Prussia and was tightly controlled by the state. The chief procurator of the synod, a lay official who obtained ministerial rank in the first half of the 19th century, henceforth exercised effective control over the church's administration until 1917. This control, which was facilitated by the political subservience of most of the higher clergy, was especially marked during the procuratorship (1880–1905) of the archconservative K.P. Pobedonostsev.

In November 1917, following the collapse of the tsarist government, a council of the Russian Orthodox church reestablished the patriarchate and elected the metropolitan Tikhon (Tikhon, Saint) as patriarch. But the new Soviet government soon declared the separation of church and state and nationalized all church-held lands. These administrative measures were followed by brutal state-sanctioned persecutions that included the wholesale destruction of churches and the arrest and execution of many clerics. The Russian Orthodox church was further weakened in 1922, when the Renovated Church, a reform movement supported by the Soviet government, seceded from Patriarch Tikhon's church, restored a Holy Synod to power, and brought division among clergy and faithful.

After Tikhon's death (1925) the government forbade patriarchal elections to be held. In 1927, in order to secure the survival of the church, Metropolitan Sergius formally expressed his “loyalty” to the Soviet government and henceforth refrained from criticizing the state in any way. This attitude of loyalty, however, provoked more divisions in the church itself: inside Russia, a number of faithful opposed Sergius, and abroad, the Russian metropolitans of America and western Europe severed their relations with Moscow. Then, in 1943, benefiting from the sudden reversal of Joseph Stalin's (Stalin, Joseph) policies toward religion, Russian Orthodoxy underwent a resurrection; a new patriarch was elected, theological schools were opened, and thousands of churches began to function. Between 1945 and 1959 the official organization of the church was greatly expanded, although individual members of the clergy were occasionally arrested and exiled. The number of open churches reached 25,000. A new and widespread persecution of the church was subsequently instituted under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev (Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich) and Leonid Brezhnev (Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich). Then, beginning in the late 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbachev, Mikhail), the new political and social freedoms resulted in many church buildings being returned to the church, to be restored by local parishioners. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 furthered the spiritual progress, and in 2000 Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian emperor who had been murdered by the Bolsheviks (Bolshevik) after the October Revolution of 1917, and members of his family were canonized by the church.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 had severed large sections of the Russian church—dioceses in America, Japan, and Manchuria, as well as refugees in Europe—from regular contacts with the mother church. A group of bishops who had left their sees in Russia gathered in Sremski-Karlovci, Yugos., and adopted a clearly political monarchist stand. The group further claimed to speak as a synod for the entire “free” Russian church. This group, which to this day includes a sizable portion of the Russian emigration, was formally dissolved in 1922 by Patriarch Tikhon, who then appointed metropolitans Platon and Evlogy as ruling bishops in America and Europe, respectively. Both of these metropolitans continued intermittently to entertain relations with the synod in Karlovci, but neither of them accepted it as a canonical authority.

After World War II the patriarchate of Moscow made unsuccessful attempts to regain control over these groups. In 1970 it finally recognized an autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, thereby renouncing its former canonical claims in the United States and Canada; it also acknowledged an autonomous church established in Japan that same year. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, discussions concerning the reunification of the churches were initiated. In 2007 the churches were reunited when canonical communion was restored between the Russian Orthodox church and the church outside Russia.

Anthony of Kiev

▪ Russian monk

also called Anthony of Pechersk

born , Ukraine

died 1073, Kiev

founder of Russian monasticism through the introduction of the Greek Orthodox ideal of the contemplative life.

Seeking a solitary life, Anthony became a monk about 1028 at the Greek Orthodox monastery of Esphigmenon on Mount Athos, in Greece. According to an account contained in the 12th-century The Russian Primary Chronicle (Russian Primary Chronicle, The) (Povest vremennykh let), Anthony was counseled by his abbot to carry the Athonite monastic tradition to Russia. He consequently returned to his Ukrainian homeland, where he settled in a cave on the side of Mount Berestov, overlooking the Dnieper River. His fame as a holy hermit and wonder worker spread throughout the region, and by the mid-11th century the number of his disciples warranted a larger cave on the same site to house them. When the community of hermits had grown to 15, requiring the construction of a church and refectory, Anthony resigned as spiritual leader and retired to another grotto. Soon the prince of Kiev, Izyaslav, ceded Mount Beretsov to the monks, and Anthony laid the foundation for the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), an institution that later acquired a reputation as the cradle of Russian monasticism. Reverting to his Athonite training, he sent to Constantinople (modern Istanbul) for architects to construct the new monastery complex at the mountain.

By such a foundation Anthony established the basis for the Russian assimilation of the three elements of Byzantine (Byzantine Empire) monasticism: the writings of the early Egyptian and Palestinian monks, the eremitical practices of Mount Athos, and the communal spirituality in the rule of Constantinople's Stoudion monastery. As described by The Russian Primary Chronicle, he favoured the solitary life, marked by superhuman efforts to suppress human passions in a demon-haunted world. Reflecting the Byzantine ascetic tradition, Anthony expressed the basic tension, never fully resolved, between the contemplative's search for God through asceticism and the social responsibilities of the hermit. He realized the moral and psychological pitfalls of solitude and consequently provided hermitages near the monastery. Anthony's institution exerted a wide influence on the Russian Orthodox church and later evolved into the cenobitic (community life) ideal out of which some 50 monks became bishops by the year 1250.

The latter part of Anthony's life was marked by a strained relationship with Izyaslav, who suspected him of conspiring with a rival lord during the stormy years following the death, in 1054, of the forceful grand prince of Kiev, Yaroslav I the Wise.

Moscow school

▪ art

major school of late medieval Russian icon and mural painting that flourished in Moscow from about 1400 to the end of the 16th century, succeeding the Novgorod school as the dominant Russian school of painting and eventually developing the stylistic basis for a national art. Moscow began a local artistic development parallel to that of Novgorod and other centres as it rose to a leading position in the movement to expel the Mongols, who had occupied most of Russia since the mid-13th century. The autocratic tradition of the city fostered from the beginning a preference for abstracted spiritual expression over practical narrative.

The first flowering of the Moscow school occurred under the influence of the painter Theophanes The Greek, who was born and trained in Constantinople (Istanbul), assimilated the Russian manner and spirit at Novgorod, and moved from Novgorod to Moscow about 1400. Theophanes went far beyond contemporary models in complexity of composition, subtle beauty of colour, and the fluid, almost impressionistic rendering of his deeply expressive figures. His achievements instilled in Muscovite painting a permanent appreciation of curving planes. Theophanes' most important successor was the most distinguished of Russia's medieval painters, a monk, Andrey Rublyov (Rublyov, Saint Andrey), who painted pictures of overwhelming spirituality and grace in a style that owes almost nothing to Theophanes except a devotion to artistic excellence. He concentrated on delicacy of line and luminous colour; he eliminated all unnecessary detail to strengthen the impact of the composition, and he constructed remarkably subtle and complex relationships among the few forms that remained. Elements of Rublyov's art are reflected in most of the finest Moscow paintings of the 15th century.

The period from the time of Rublyov's death, about 1430, to the end of the 15th century was marked by a sudden growth in Moscow's prestige and sophistication. The grand dukes of Moscow finally drove out the Mongols and united most of the cities of central Russia, including Novgorod, under their leadership. With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Moscow, for some time the centre of the Russian Orthodox church, became the virtual centre of Eastern Orthodoxy. An artist whose career reflected the new sophistication was the major painter Dionisy, a layman. Dionisy's compositions, based more on intellect than on an instinctive expression of spirituality, are more arresting than either Theophanes' or Rublyov's. His figures convey an effect of extreme elongation and buoyancy through a drastic reduction, by simplified drawing, to silhouette and through a disparate spacing that spreads them out in a processional effect, breaking with the earlier Russian predilection for tight composition. There is a subtle colour scheme of turquoise, pale green, and rose against darker blues and purples. Perhaps the most significant quality of Dionisy's painting was his ability to emphasize the mystical over the dramatic content of narrative scenes.

The new prestige of the Russian Orthodox church led to an unprecedented seriousness in the mystical interpretation of traditional subject matter; by the mid-16th century there were specific directives from the church based on a new didactic iconography that expounded mysteries, rites, and dogmas. The general stylistic traditions already established were followed throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but icons became smaller and crowded in composition and steadily declined in quality. By the late 16th century much of the former spirituality had been lost, replaced by decorative enrichment and often insipid elegance.

At the beginning of the 17th century the so-called Stroganov school (q.v.) of accomplished Moscow artists assumed the leadership of the last phase of Russian medieval art.

Theophanes The Greek

▪ Byzantine painter

born c. 1330, /40

died 1405

one of the leading late Byzantine painters of murals, icons, and miniatures who influenced the 15th-century painting style of the Novgorod school (q.v.) and the Moscow school (q.v.). His early career was spent in Constantinople and the Crimea, but after c. 1370 he worked in Russia. Although he painted hundreds of works, the only ones that can be certainly attributed to him are frescoes in the Church of the Transfiguration in Novgorod (1378).

Rublyov, Saint Andrey

▪ Russian painter

born c. 1360–70

died c. 1430; canonized 1988; feast day January 29

one of the greatest medieval Russian painters, whose masterpiece is a magnificent icon of “The Old Testament Trinity,” now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Little is known of his life except that he was the assistant of another great painter called Theophanes the Greek, who came to Russia from Constantinople. Fairly late in life, Rublyov became a monk, first at Trinity-St. Sergius at Sergiyev Posad and then at the Andronikov monastery in Moscow (Moscow school). Russian painters did not sign their works until the 17th century, so paintings can be assigned to him only on the basis of written evidence or of style. Written evidence associates with his name wall paintings at Vladimir and Moscow and the panel, or icon, of “The Old Testament Trinity.” By analogy of style a number of other icons can also be attributed to him, the chief of these being panels of St. John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. Peter and the Ascension, done in 1408 for the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Virgin at Vladimir, and others of the Archangel Michael and the Saviour from Zvenigorod, now in the Tretyakov Gallery.

Rublyov was trained wholly in the Byzantine (Byzantine art) tradition, in which the spiritual essence of art was regarded as more important than naturalistic representation. The hieratical character of the mid-Byzantine style had, with the 14th century, given way to a more intimate, humanistic approach, but to this Rublyov was able to add an element that was truly Russian, a complete unworldliness, and it is this that distinguishes his work from that of his Byzantine predecessors. Nor was any later Russian painter ever quite able to equal Rublyov either in his handling or in the interpretation of his subject. See also Moscow school.

Stroganov school

▪ Christian art

school of icon painting that flourished in Russia in the late 16th and 17th centuries. The original patrons of this group of artists were the wealthy Stroganov family, colonizers in northeastern Russia; but the artists perfected their work in the service of the tsar and his family in Moscow. Representing the last vital stage of Russian medieval painting before the westernization of Russian art at the end of the 17th century, the so-called Stroganov school produced not so much a coherent style as a type of icon. Designed specifically for private use, this type was characterized by its small size, its miniature technique, and its exquisite refinement of detail. The icons of the Stroganov school, while retaining Byzantine-inspired Russian forms, nevertheless represent a radical departure from most of what had been valued in the long tradition of Russian painting; monumentality was replaced by precious virtuosity and deep emotion by decorative elegance. The preoccupation with style and technique over content was, perhaps, typical of the end of a cultural phase.

In its richness and refinement, the art of the Stroganov school reflected the tastes of royal and noble patrons. Working in a muted colour range dominated by golden brown, the Stroganov masters substituted for the colouristic brilliance of the earlier Russian tradition a lavish use of gold and silver linear highlights whose strongly abstract patterns matched the mannered fragility of the figures. They embellished their icons with frames and halos of beaten gold and silver. The naturalism proscribed by the church for major representations was ingeniously introduced by the Stroganov school in background details of architecture, vegetation, and even atmospheric effects. Finally, the Stroganov masters excelled at composition; though their works are very small and sometimes include many figures, they never appear crowded.

The Stroganov school remained influential until the end of the 17th century, but after about 1650 it gradually declined and lost its refinement. The foundation of the new capital of St. Petersburg in 1703 by Tsar Peter I the Great marked a turning point in Russian art: although icon painting continued to follow the Russo-Byzantine tradition throughout the 19th century, the major artistic activity shifted to secular art and Europe's Baroque style.

Novgorod school

▪ art

important school of Russian medieval icon and mural painting that flourished around the northwestern city of Novgorod from the 12th through the 16th century. A thriving merchant city, Novgorod was the cultural centre of Russia during the Mongol occupation of most of the rest of the country in the 13th and 14th centuries. During that period it preserved the Byzantine traditions that formed the basis of Russian art and at the same time fostered the development of a distinct and vital local style, a style which, though provincial, contained most of the elements of the national Russian art that eventually developed in Moscow in the 16th century.

The first important phase of the Novgorod school lasted through the 12th century and the first half of the 13th, a period during which the Byzantine tradition spread from southern Kiev, the first capital and cultural centre of Russia, to the northern centres of Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal. In this period fresco painting was the dominant art form. In the second half of the 12th century the hieratic, aristocratic artistic tradition of Kiev was abandoned in favour of a more informal approach that combined Byzantine severity of style with a tenderness of gesture and an anecdotal picturesqueness. This spirit was matched in the beginning of the 13th century by a shift toward lighter, brighter colours and flatter forms, a softening of facial types, and an increasing definition of form by means of a graceful, rhythmic line. The progressive importance of line over modeled form in Novgorod painting brought about a gradual change in the Byzantine image. Strongly modeled Byzantine figures were characterized by a direct and penetrating gaze that in turn engaged that of the viewer. But as the predominance of line flattened the figures and faces in Novgorod painting, the direct gaze receded into a dreamy, abstracted, introspective look. In addition, the line invited a contemplation of its abstract patterns; Novgorod painting began to emphasize the lyricism of these patterns rather than the immediate presence of the figures.

In the early 14th century, a new artistic impetus was provided by the introduction of the iconostasis, a screen standing before the sanctuary on which icons, formerly scattered over the walls of the church, could be hung in a prescribed arrangement. The stylistic tendencies of the previous period of artistic activity, which had been dominated by fresco painting, were brought to bear on the visual problems created by the iconostasis and coalesced into a definitive Novgorod style. The complex of paintings on the iconostasis demanded a coherent overall impression. This overall effect was achieved through the use of strong, rhythmic lines and colour harmonies in each icon. Novgorod painters used jewellike juxtapositions of brilliant yet delicately balanced colours, dominated by yellow, emerald green, and fiery vermilion. The silhouette became all-important, as did the line, which assumed unprecedented grace with an elongation of the figure that became standard in Russian art. A number of Greek artists who arrived from Constantinople at the end of the 14th century brought a more varied subject matter to the Novgorod school and introduced the use of more complex architectural backgrounds. The most influential of these Byzantine immigrants was a mural painter, Theophanes The Greek. Theophanes contributed a greater understanding of the human form and a subtler use of colour and design to later Novgorod painting.

At the end of the 15th century Novgorod painting became somewhat repetitive, and, although works of outstanding quality continued to be produced, they lacked the freshness of the earlier paintings. The leadership in Russian painting passed in the 16th century to the more cosmopolitan art of the Moscow school (q.v.), and the final dissolution of the Novgorod school came with the forcible transfer of Novgorod artists to Moscow after a fire in the capital in 1547.

iconostasis

▪ architecture

in Eastern (Eastern Orthodoxy) Christian churches of Byzantine tradition, a solid screen of stone, wood, or metal, usually separating the sanctuary from the nave. The iconostasis had originally been some sort of simple partition between the altar and the congregation; it then became a row of columns, and the spaces between them were eventually filled with icons. In later churches it extends the width of the sanctuary, though the height may vary, and is covered with panel icons. The iconostasis is pierced by a large, or royal, door and curtain in the centre, in front of the altar, and two smaller doors on either side. It always includes the icon of the Incarnation (mother with child) on the left side of the royal door and the second coming of Christ the Pantocrator (Christ in majesty) on the right. The sacrament of the Eucharist, revealed through the doors between the two main icons, is thus the manifestation of Christ in the church during the time between his two comings. Icons of the four Evangelists, the Annunciation, and the Last Supper are set over the royal doors themselves. Representations of the archangels Gabriel and Michael, the 12 Apostles, the feasts of the church, and the prophets of the Old Testament are arranged on the iconostasis in complicated patterns, with all figures facing the royal doors.

The veneration of icons came under attack during the Iconoclastic Controversy of 725–843, but the Eastern church finally recognized icons as the main form of representing divine revelation and as a pictorial history of the Christian mystery to be contemplated by the faithful while being performed behind the screen in the eucharistic sacrament.

The Church of Russia (1448–1800)

The “third Rome”

Origin of the Muscovite patriarchate

At the Council of Florence, the Greek “metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia,” Isidore (Isidore Of Kiev), was one of the major architects of the Union. Having signed the decree, he returned to Moscow in 1441 as a Roman cardinal but was rejected by both church and state, arrested, and then allowed to escape to Lithuania. In 1448, after much hesitation, the Russians received a new primate, Jonas, elected by their own bishops. Their church became autocephalous, administratively independent under a “metropolitan of all Russia,” residing in Moscow. In territories controlled by Poland, (Poland) Rome (in 1458) appointed another “metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia.” The tendencies toward separation from Moscow that had existed in the Ukraine since the Mongol invasion and that were supported by the kings of Poland thus received official sanction. In 1470, however, this metropolitan broke the union with the Latins and re-entered—nominally—the jurisdiction of Constantinople, by then under Turkish control.

After this, the fate of the two churches “of all Russia” became quite distinct. The metropolitanate of Kiev (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) developed under the control of Roman Catholic Poland. Hard pressed by the Polish kings, the majority of its bishops, against the will of the majority of their flock, eventually accepted union with Rome at Brest-Litovsk (Brest-Litovsk, Union of) (1596). In 1620, however, an Orthodox hierarchy was reestablished, and a Romanian nobleman, Peter Mogila, was elected metropolitan of Kiev (1632). He created the first Orthodox theological school of the modern period, the famous Academy of Kiev. Modelled after the Latin seminaries of Poland, with instruction given in Latin, this school served as the theological training centre for almost the entire Russian high clergy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1686 the Ukraine was finally reunited with Muscovy, and the metropolitanate of Kiev was attached to the patriarchate of Moscow, with approval given by Constantinople.

Muscovite Russia, meanwhile, had acquired the consciousness of being the last bulwark of true Orthodoxy. In 1472 Grand Prince Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) married Sofia (Zoë), the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. The Muscovite sovereign began to use more and more of the Byzantine imperial ceremonial, and he assumed the double-headed eagle as his state emblem. In 1510 the monk Philotheus of Pskov addressed Vasily III as “tsar” (or emperor), saying: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be.” The meaning of the sentence was that the first Rome was heretical, the second—Byzantium—was under Turkish control, and the third was Moscow. Ivan IV, the Terrible, was crowned emperor, according to the Byzantine ceremonial, by the metropolitan of Moscow, Makary, on January 16, 1547. In 1551 he solemnly presided in Moscow over a great council of Russian bishops, the Stoglav (“Council of 100 Chapters”), in which various issues of discipline and liturgy were settled and numerous Russian saints were canonized. These obvious efforts to live up to the title of the “third Rome” lacked one final sanction: the head of the Russian Church was lacking the title of “patriarch.” The “tsars” of Bulgaria and Serbia did not hesitate in the past to bestow the title on their own primates, but the Russians wanted an unquestionable authentication and waited for proper opportunity. It occurred in 1589 when the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II, was on a fund-raising tour of Russia. He could not resist the pressure of his hosts and established the metropolitan Job (Job, Saint) as “patriarch of Moscow and all Russia.” Confirmed later by the other Eastern patriarchs, the new patriarchate obtained the fifth place in the honorific order of the Oriental sees, after the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

Relations between patriarch and tsar (church and state)

After the 16th century, the Russian tsars (tsar) always considered themselves as successors of the Byzantine emperors and the political protectors and financial supporters of Orthodoxy throughout the Balkans and the Middle East. The patriarch of Moscow, however, never pretended to occupy formally the first place among the patriarchs. Within the Muscovite Empire, many traditions of medieval Byzantium were faithfully kept. A flourishing monastic movement (monasticism) spread the practice of Christian asceticism in the northern forests, which were both colonized and Christianized by the monks. St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314–92) was the spiritual father of this monastic revival. His contemporary, St. Stephen of Perm (Stephen of Perm, Saint), missionary (mission) to the Zyryan tribes, continued the tradition of SS. Cyril and Methodius, the “apostles to the Slavs” in the 9th century, in translating the Scripture and the liturgy into the vernacular. He was followed by numerous other missionaries who promoted Orthodox Christianity throughout Asia and even established themselves on Kodiak Island off the coast of Alaska (1794). The development of church architecture, iconography, and literature also added to the prestige of the “third Rome.”

The Muscovite Empire, however, was quite different from Byzantium both in its political system and in its cultural self-understanding. The Byzantine “symphony” (harmonious relationship) between the emperor and the patriarch was never really applied in Russia. The secular goals of the Muscovite state and the will of the monarch always superseded canonical or religious considerations, which were still binding on the medieval emperors of Byzantium. Muscovite political ideology was always influenced more by the beginnings of western European secularism and by Asiatic despotism than by Roman or Byzantine law. Though strong patriarchs of Constantinople were generally able to oppose open violations of dogma and canon law by the emperors, their Russian successors were quite powerless; a single metropolitan of Moscow, St. Philip (metropolitan 1566–68), who dared to condemn the excesses of Ivan IV, was deposed and murdered.

A crisis of the “third Rome” ideology occurred in the middle of the 17th century. Nikon (reigned 1652–58), a strong patriarch, decided to restore the power and prestige of the church by declaring that the patriarchal office was superior to that of the tsar. He forced the tsar Alexis Romanov (Alexis) to repent for the crime of his predecessor against St. Philip and to swear obedience to the church. Simultaneously, Nikon attempted to settle a perennial issue of Russian church life: the problem of the liturgical books. Originally translated from the Greek, the books suffered many corruptions through the centuries and contained numerous mistakes. In addition, the different historical developments in Russia and in the Middle East had led to differences between the liturgical practices of the Russians and the Greeks. Nikon's solution was to order the exact compliance of all the Russian practices with the contemporary Greek equivalents. His liturgical reform led to a major schism in the church. The Russian masses had taken seriously the idea that Moscow was the last refuge of Orthodoxy. They wondered why Russia had to accept the practices of the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy in Florence and had been justly punished by God, in their view, by becoming captives of the infidel Turks. The reformist decrees of the patriarch were rejected by millions of lower clergy and laity who constituted the Raskol, or schism of the “Old Believers.” (Old Believer) Nikon was ultimately deposed for his opposition to the tsar, but his liturgical reforms were confirmed by a great council of the church that met in the presence of two Eastern patriarchs (1666–67).

The reforms of Peter the Great (Peter I) (reigned 1682–1725)

The son of Tsar Alexis, Peter the Great, changed the historical fate of Russia by radically turning away from the Byzantine heritage and reforming the state according to the model of Protestant Europe. Humiliated by his father's temporary submission to Patriarch Nikon, Peter prevented new patriarchal elections after the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700. After a long vacancy of the see, he abolished the patriarchate altogether (1721) and transformed the central administration of the church into a department of the state (caesaropapism), which adopted the title of “Holy Governing Synod.” An imperial high commissioner (Oberprokuror) was to be present at all meetings and, in fact, to act as the administrator of church affairs. Peter also issued a lengthy Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovny Reglament) that served as bylaws for all religious activities in Russia. Weakened by the schism of the “Old Believers,” the church found no spokesman to defend its rights and passively accepted the reforms.

With the actions of Peter, the Church of Russia entered a new period of its history that lasted until 1917. The immediate consequences were not all negative. Peter's ecclesiastical advisers were Ukrainian prelates, graduates of the Kievan academy, who introduced in Russia a Western system of theological education; the most famous among them was Peter's friend, Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Pskov. Throughout the 18th century, the Russian Church also continued its missionary work in Asia and produced several spiritual writers and saints: St. Mitrofan of Voronezh (died 1703), St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (died 1783)—an admirer of the German Lutheran Johann Arndt and of German Pietism—as well as other eminent prelates and scholars such as Platon Levshin, metropolitan of Moscow (died 1803). All attempts at challenging the power of the tsar over the church, however, always met with failure. The metropolitan of Rostov, Arseny Matsiyevich, who opposed the secularization of church property by the empress Catherine the Great, was deposed and died in prison (1772). The atmosphere of secularistic officialdom that prevailed in Russia was not favourable for a revival of monasticism, but such a revival did take place through the efforts of a young Kievan scholar, Paissy Velichkovsky (1722–94), who became the abbot of the monastery of Neamts in Romania. His Slavonic edition of the Philocalia contributed to the revival of Hesychast traditions in Russia in the 19th century.

Saint Basil the Blessed

▪ church, Moscow, Russia

also called Pokrovsky Cathedral, Russian Svyatoy Vasily Blazhenny, or Pokrovsky Sobor,

church constructed on Red Square in Moscow between 1554 and 1560 by Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible, as a votive offering for his military victories over the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. The church was dedicated to the protection and intercession of the Virgin, but it came to be known as the Cathedral of Vasily Blazhenny (St. Basil the Beatified) after Basil, the Russian holy fool who was “idiotic for Christ's sake” and who was buried in the church vaults during the reign (1584–98) of Tsar Fyodor I.

The church was designed by two Russian architects, Posnik and Barma (who may in fact have been one person). According to popular legend, however, it was built by an Italian architect who was blinded so that he could never create anything that was similar or equal.

icon

▪ literature

in literature, a description of a person or thing, usually using a figure of speech. To semioticians, icons are signs, verbal or otherwise, with extra-systemic resemblances to the persons or things they denote. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954) by W.K. Wimsatt is an important New Criticism text on the subject.

▪ religious art

in Eastern (Eastern Orthodoxy) Christian tradition, a representation of sacred personages or events in mural painting, mosaic, or wood. After the iconoclastic controversy of the 8th–9th century, which disputed the religious function and meaning of icons, the Eastern Church formulated the doctrinal basis for their veneration: since God had assumed material form in the person of Jesus Christ, he also could be represented in pictures. Icons are considered an essential part of the church and are given special liturgical veneration. They also serve as mediums of instruction for the uneducated faithful through the iconostasis (q.v.), a screen shielding the altar, covered with icons depicting scenes from the New Testament, church feasts, and popular saints. In the classical Byzantine and Orthodox tradition, iconography is not a realistic but a symbolical art; its function is to express in line and colour the theological teaching of the church.

Additional Reading

Kurt Weitzmann, The Icon: Holy Images—Sixth to Fourteenth Century (1978).

Tretyakov Gallery

▪ museum, Moscow, Russia

in full State Tretyakov Gallery, Russian Gosudarstvennaya Tretyakovskaya Galereya,

Moscow art museum founded by Pavel M. Tretyakov in 1856. It contains the world's finest collection of 17th- and 18th-century Russian icons, having more than 40,000 of them.

There are also 18th-century portraits, 19th-century historical paintings, and works of the Soviet period. The museum is organized into Early Russian Art, Art of the 18th Century, Art of the First Half of the 19th Century, Art of the Second Half of the 19th Century, Art of the Early 20th Century, and Soviet Art.

Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich

▪ Russian author

born Dec. 12 [Dec. 1, Old Style], 1766, Mikhaylovka, Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk] province, Russia

died June 3 [May 22], 1826, St. Petersburg

Russian historian, poet, and journalist who was the leading exponent of the sentimentalist school in Russian literature.

From an early age, Karamzin was interested in Enlightenment philosophy and western European literature. After extensive travel in western Europe, Karamzin described his impressions in his Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790), the most important of his contributions to a monthly review, Moskovsky zhurnal (1791–92; “Moscow Journal”), that he founded on his return. Written in a self-revealing style influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Laurence Sterne, the “Letters” helped introduce to Russia the sentimental style then popular in western Europe. Karamzin's tale Bednaya Liza (1792; “Poor Liza”), about a village girl who commits suicide after a tragic love affair, soon became the most celebrated work of the Russian sentimental school.

In 1803 Karamzin's friendship with the emperor Alexander I resulted in his appointment as court historian. The rest of his life was devoted to his 12-volume Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo (1816–29; “History of the Russian State”). Though based on original research, this first general survey of Russian history was conceived as a literary rather than an academic work. The history is, in effect, an apology for Russian autocracy. It is the first such Russian work to have drawn on a great number of documents, including foreign accounts of historical incidents. Uncompleted at his death, the work closes with the accession of Michael Romanov (1613). As history it has been superseded, but it remains a landmark in the development of Russian literary style; it provided a main source for Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov. His History is also considered to have contributed much to the development of Russian literary language, for in it he sought to bring written Russian—then rife with cumbrous locutions—closer to the rhythms and conciseness of educated speech and to equip the language with a full cultural vocabulary.

borsch

▪ food

also spelled Borscht, Borsht, or Bortsch,

beet soup of the Slavic countries. Although borsch is important in Russian and Polish cuisines, the Ukraine is frequently cited as its place of origin. Borsches are eaten hot or cold; some are clear and light, others thick and substantial.

Ukrainian borsch is a hearty soup of beef and a variety of vegetables in which root vegetables and cabbage predominate, and the soup takes its characteristic colour from beets. The soup is often eaten with a sour cream garnish and with pirozhki, turnovers filled with beef and onions. A meatless beet soup is made with a stock flavoured with forest mushrooms; this Polish barszcz is served with tiny mushroom-filled dumplings, uszka. Some Russian borsches are made with kvass, a mild beer fermented from grain or bread.

vodka

▪ distilled liquor

distilled liquor, clear in colour and without definite aroma or taste, ranging in alcoholic content from about 40 to 55 percent. Because it is highly neutral, with flavouring substances mainly eliminated during processing, it can be made from a mash of the cheapest and most readily available raw materials suitable for fermentation. Potatoes were traditionally employed in Russia and Poland but have largely been supplanted there and in other vodka-producing countries by cereal grains.

Vodka originated in Russia during the 14th century, and the name is a diminutive of the Russian voda (“water”). The beverage was mainly popular in Russia, Poland, and the Balkan states until soon after World War II, when consumption began to increase rapidly in the United States and then in Europe. Most producers purchase previously distilled and purified neutral spirits that are extremely high in alcohol content, with almost no flavouring substances remaining. Such spirits are then additionally purified by a filtration process, usually employing charcoal, and are then reduced in strength with distilled water and bottled without aging.

In Russia, where fairly low alcohol content of 40 percent by volume (80 U.S. proof) is preferred, and in Poland, where 45 percent is more common, vodka is usually consumed unmixed and chilled, in small glasses, and accompanied by appetizers. In other countries it is popular for use in mixed drinks because of its neutral character. It may be combined with other beverages without imparting flavour of its own and substituted for other spirits in cocktails not requiring the specific flavour of the original spirit. Popular vodka drinks include the screwdriver, made with orange juice; the bloody Mary, with tomato juice; vodka and tonic, a tall drink; and the vodka martini, with vodka substituted for gin.

Vodkas are sometimes flavoured. Zubrówka, yellowish in colour, highly aromatic, and with a somewhat bitter undertone, is produced by steeping several stalks of Zubrówka, or buffalo grass, in vodka. Other flavoured vodkas are made with such ingredients as lemon peel, berries, peppercorns, and caraway.

Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich

▪ Russian poet

born Jan. 29 [Feb. 9, New Style], 1783, Tula province, Russia

died April 12 [April 24], 1852, Baden-Baden, Baden [Germany]

Russian poet and translator, one of Aleksandr Pushkin's most important precursors in forming Russian verse style and language.

Zhukovsky, the illegitimate son of a landowner and a Turkish slave girl, was educated in Moscow. He served in the Napoleonic War of 1812 and in 1815 joined the tsar's entourage, becoming tutor to the heir to the throne in 1826. In 1841 he retired to Germany.

Zhukovsky was a follower of Nikolay Karamzin (Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich), the head of a Romantic literary movement that countered the classical emphasis on reason with the belief that poetry should be an expression of feeling. Zhukovsky was a founder of the Arzamas society, a semihumorous, pro-Karamzin literary group established to oppose the classicists. Like Pushkin, Zhukovsky was interested especially in personal experience, Romantic conceptions of landscape, and folk ballads. His first publication was a translation of Thomas Gray's An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1802), and the bulk of his work consists of free translations. He introduced into Russia the works of such German and English contemporaries as Gottfried Bürger, Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Robert Southey, as well as such classic works as Homer's Odyssey (1849).

His collected works were published in four volumes in 1959–60.

Arzamas society

▪ Russian literary society

Russian literary circle that flourished in 1815–18 and was formed for the semiserious purpose of ridiculing the conservative “Lovers of the Russian Word,” a group dominated by the philologist Aleksandr S. Shishkov (Shishkov, Aleksandr Semyonovich), who wished to keep the modern Russian language firmly tied to Old Church Slavonic. The Arzamas circle included the poets Vasily A. Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich), Konstantin Batyushkov (Batyushkov, Konstantin Nikolayevich), and the youthful Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich), who were all advocates of recent Westernized language reforms. Though the activities of the club members were limited to composing burlesques of the archaic Slavonic style, their adoption of the new style in their subsequent works had a permanent effect on the formation of the modern Russian literary language.

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich

▪ Russian author

Introduction

born May 26 [June 6, New Style], 1799, Moscow, Russia

died Jan. 29 [Feb. 10], 1837, St. Petersburg

Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.

The early years.

Pushkin's father came of an old boyar family; his mother was a granddaughter of Abram Hannibal, who, according to family tradition, was an Abyssinian princeling bought as a slave at Constantinople (Istanbul) and adopted by Peter the Great, whose comrade in arms he became. Pushkin immortalized him in an unfinished historical novel, Arap Petra Velikogo (1827; The Negro of Peter the Great). Like many aristocratic families in early 19th-century Russia, Pushkin's parents adopted French culture, and he and his brother and sister learned to talk and to read in French. They were left much to the care of their maternal grandmother, who told Aleksandr, especially, stories of his ancestors in Russian. From Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva, his old nurse, a freed serf (immortalized as Tatyana's nurse in Yevgeny Onegin), he heard Russian folktales. During summers at his grandmother's estate near Moscow he talked to the peasants and spent hours alone, living in the dream world of a precocious, imaginative child. He read widely in his father's library and gained stimulus from the literary guests who came to the house.

In 1811 Pushkin entered the newly founded Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo (later renamed Pushkin) and while there began his literary career with the publication (1814, in Vestnik Evropy, “The Messenger of Europe”) of his verse epistle “To My Friend, the Poet.” In his early verse, he followed the style of his older contemporaries, the Romantic poets K.N. Batyushkov and V.A. Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich), and of the French 17th- and 18th-century poets, especially the Vicomte de Parny.

While at the Lyceum he also began his first completed major work, the romantic poem Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Ludmila), written in the style of the narrative poems of Ludovico Ariosto and Voltaire but with an old Russian setting and making use of Russian folklore. Ruslan, modeled on the traditional Russian epic hero, encounters various adventures before rescuing his bride, Ludmila, daughter of Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev, who, on her wedding night, has been kidnapped by the evil magician Chernomor. The poem flouted accepted rules and genres and was violently attacked by both of the established literary schools of the day, Classicism and Sentimentalism. It brought Pushkin fame, however, and Zhukovsky presented his portrait to the poet with the inscription “To the victorious pupil from the defeated master.”

St. Petersburg.

In 1817 Pushkin accepted a post in the foreign office at St. Petersburg, where he was elected to Arzamás (Arzamas society), an exclusive literary circle founded by his uncle's friends. Pushkin also joined the Green Lamp association, which, though founded (in 1818) for discussion of literature and history, became a clandestine branch of a secret society, the Union of Welfare. In his political verses and epigrams, widely circulated in manuscript, he made himself the spokesman for the ideas and aspirations of those who were to take part in the Decembrist rising of 1825, the unsuccessful culmination of a Russian revolutionary movement in its earliest stage.

Exile in the south.

For these political poems, Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province. Sent first to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), he was there taken ill and, while convalescing, traveled in the northern Caucasus and later to the Crimea with General Rayevski, a hero of 1812, and his family. The impressions he gained provided material for his “southern cycle” of romantic narrative poems: Kavkazsky plennik (1820–21; The Prisoner of the Caucasus), Bratya razboyniki (1821–22; The Robber Brothers), and Bakhchisaraysky fontan (1823; The Fountain of Bakhchisaray).

Although this cycle of poems confirmed the reputation of the author of Ruslan and Ludmila and Pushkin was hailed as the leading Russian poet of the day and as the leader of the romantic, liberty-loving generation of the 1820s, he himself was not satisfied with it. In May 1823 he started work on his central masterpiece, the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (1833), on which he continued to work intermittently until 1831. In it he returned to the idea of presenting a typical figure of his own age but in a wider setting and by means of new artistic methods and techniques.

Yevgeny Onegin unfolds a panoramic picture of Russian life. The characters it depicts and immortalizes—Onegin, the disenchanted skeptic; Lensky, the romantic, freedom-loving poet; and Tatyana, the heroine, a profoundly affectionate study of Russian womanhood: a “precious ideal,” in the poet's own words—are typically Russian and are shown in relationship to the social and environmental forces by which they are molded. Although formally the work resembles Lord Byron's (Byron, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron) Don Juan, Pushkin rejects Byron's subjective, romanticized treatment in favour of objective description and shows his hero not in exotic surroundings but at the heart of a Russian way of life. Thus, the action begins at St. Petersburg, continues on a provincial estate, then switches to Moscow, and finally returns to St. Petersburg.

Pushkin had meanwhile been transferred first to Kishinyov (1820–23; now Chişinău, Moldova) and then to Odessa (1823–24). His bitterness at continued exile is expressed in letters to his friends—the first of a collection of correspondence that became an outstanding and enduring monument of Russian prose. At Kishinyov, a remote outpost in Moldavia, he devoted much time to writing, though he also plunged into the life of a society engaged in amorous intrigue, hard drinking, gaming, and violence. At Odessa he fell passionately in love with the wife of his superior, Count Vorontsov, governor-general of the province. He fought several duels, and eventually the count asked for his discharge. Pushkin, in a letter to a friend intercepted by the police, had stated that he was now taking “lessons in pure atheism.” This finally led to his being again exiled to his mother's estate of Mikhaylovskoye, near Pskov, at the other end of Russia.

At Mikhaylovskoye.

Although the two years at Mikhaylovskoye were unhappy for Pushkin, they were to prove one of his most productive periods. Alone and isolated, he embarked on a close study of Russian history; he came to know the peasants on the estate and interested himself in noting folktales and songs. During this period the specifically Russian features of his poetry became steadily more marked. His ballad “Zhenikh” (1825; “The Bridegroom”), for instance, is based on motifs from Russian folklore; and its simple, swift-moving style, quite different from the brilliant extravagance of Ruslan and Ludmila or the romantic, melodious music of the “southern” poems, emphasizes its stark tragedy.

In 1824 he published Tsygany (The Gypsies), begun earlier as part of the “southern cycle.” At Mikhaylovskoye, too, he wrote the provincial chapters of Yevgeny Onegin; the poem Graf Nulin (1827; “Count Nulin”), based on the life of the rural gentry; and, finally, one of his major works, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov (1831).

The latter marks a break with the Neoclassicism of the French theatre and is constructed on the “folk-principles” of William Shakespeare's (Shakespeare, William) plays, especially the histories and tragedies, plays written “for the people” in the widest sense and thus universal in their appeal. Written just before the Decembrist rising, it treats the burning question of the relations between the ruling classes, headed by the tsar, and the masses; it is the moral and political significance of the latter, “the judgment of the people,” that Pushkin emphasizes. Set in Russia in a period of political and social chaos on the brink of the 17th century, its theme is the tragic guilt and inexorable fate of a great hero—Boris Godunov, son-in-law of Malyuta Skuratov, a favourite of Ivan the Terrible, and here presented as the murderer of Ivan's little son, Dmitri. The development of the action on two planes, one political and historical, the other psychological, is masterly and is set against a background of turbulent events and ruthless ambitions. The play owes much to Pushkin's reading of early Russian annals and chronicles, as well as to Shakespeare, who, as Pushkin said, was his master in bold, free treatment of character, simplicity, and truth to nature. Although lacking the heightened, poetic passion of Shakespeare's tragedies, Boris excels in the “convincingness of situation and naturalness of dialogue” at which Pushkin aimed, sometimes using conversational prose, sometimes a five-foot iambic line of great flexibility. The character of the pretender, the false Dmitri, is subtly and sympathetically drawn; and the power of the people, who eventually bring him to the throne, is so greatly emphasized that the play's publication was delayed by censorship. Pushkin's ability to create psychological and dramatic unity, despite the episodic construction, and to heighten the dramatic tension by economy of language, detail, and characterization make this outstanding play a revolutionary event in the history of Russian drama.

Return from exile.

After the suppression of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the new tsar Nicholas I, aware of Pushkin's immense popularity and knowing that he had taken no part in the Decembrist “conspiracy,” allowed him to return to Moscow in the autumn of 1826. During a long conversation between them, the tsar met the poet's complaints about censorship with a promise that in the future he himself would be Pushkin's censor and told him of his plans to introduce several pressing reforms from above and, in particular, to prepare the way for liberation of the serfs. The collapse of the rising had been a grievous experience for Pushkin, whose heart was wholly with the “guilty” Decembrists, five of whom had been executed, while others were exiled to forced labour in Siberia.

Pushkin saw, however, that without the support of the people, the struggle against autocracy was doomed. He considered that the only possible way of achieving essential reforms was from above, “on the tsar's initiative,” as he had written in “Derevnya.” This is the reason for his persistent interest in the age of reforms at the beginning of the 18th century and in the figure of Peter the Great (Peter I), the “tsar-educator,” whose example he held up to the present tsar in the poem “Stansy” (1826; “Stanzas”), in The Negro of Peter the Great, in the historical poem Poltava (1829), and in the poem Medny vsadnik (1837; The Bronze Horseman).

In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin poses the problem of the “little man” whose happiness is destroyed by the great leader in pursuit of ambition. He does this by telling a “story of St. Petersburg” set against the background of the flood of 1824, when the river took its revenge against Peter I's achievement in building the city. The poem describes how the “little hero,” Yevgeny, driven mad by the drowning of his sweetheart, wanders through the streets. Seeing the bronze statue of Peter I seated on a rearing horse and realizing that the tsar, seen triumphing over the waves, is the cause of his grief, Yevgeny threatens him and, in a climax of growing horror, is pursued through the streets by the “Bronze Horseman.” The poem's descriptive and emotional powers give it an unforgettable impact and make it one of the greatest in Russian literature.

After returning from exile, Pushkin found himself in an awkward and invidious position. The tsar's censorship proved to be even more exacting than that of the official censors, and his personal freedom was curtailed. Not only was he put under secret observation by the police but he was openly supervised by its chief, Count Benckendorf (Benckendorff, Aleksandr Khristoforovich, Count). Moreover, his works of this period met with little comprehension from the critics, and even some of his friends accused him of apostasy, forcing him to justify his political position in the poem “Druzyam” (1828; “To My Friends”). The anguish of his spiritual isolation at this time is reflected in a cycle of poems about the poet and the mob (1827–30) and in the unfinished Yegipetskiye nochi (1835; Egyptian Nights).

Yet it was during this period that Pushkin's genius came to its fullest flowering. His art acquired new dimensions, and almost every one of the works written between 1829 and 1836 opened a new chapter in the history of Russian literature. He spent the autumn of 1830 at his family's Nizhny Novgorod estate, Boldino, and these months are the most remarkable in the whole of his artistic career. During them he wrote the four so-called “little tragedies”—Skupoy rytsar (1836; The Covetous Knight), Motsart i Salyeri (1831; Mozart and Salieri), Kamenny gost (1839; The Stone Guest), and Pir vo vremya chumy (1832; Feast in Time of the Plague)—the five short prose tales collected as Povesti pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (1831; Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin); the comic poem of everyday lower-class life Domik v Kolomne (1833; “A Small House in Kolomna”); and many lyrics in widely differing styles, as well as several critical and polemical articles, rough drafts, and sketches.

Among Pushkin's most characteristic features were his wide knowledge of world literature, as seen in his interest in such English writers as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and the Lake poets; his “universal sensibility”; and his ability to re-create the spirit of different races at different historical epochs without ever losing his own individuality. This is particularly marked in the “little tragedies,” which are concerned with an analysis of the “evil passions” and, like the short story Pikovaya Dama (1834; The Queen of Spades), exerted a direct influence on the subject matter and techniques of the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Last years.

In 1831 Pushkin married Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova and settled in St. Petersburg. Once more he took up government service and was commissioned to write a history of Peter the Great. Three years later he received the rank of Kammerjunker (gentleman of the emperor's bedchamber), partly because the tsar wished Natalya to have the entrée to court functions. The social life at court, which he was now obliged to lead and which his wife enjoyed, was ill-suited to creative work, but he stubbornly continued to write. Without abandoning poetry altogether, he turned increasingly to prose. Alongside the theme of Peter the Great, the motif of a popular peasant rising acquired growing importance in his work, as is shown by the unfinished satirical Istoriya sela Goryukhina (1837; The History of the Village of Goryukhino), the unfinished novel Dubrovsky (1841), Stseny iz rytsarskikh vremen (1837; Scenes from the Age of Chivalry), and finally, the most important of his prose works, the historical novel of the Pugachov Rebellion, Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The Captain's Daughter), which had been preceded by a historical study of the rebellion, Istoriya Pugachova (1834; “A History of Pugachov”).

Meanwhile, both in his domestic affairs and in his official duties, his life was becoming more intolerable. In court circles he was regarded with mounting suspicion and resentment, and his repeated petitions to be allowed to resign his post, retire to the country, and devote himself entirely to literature were all rejected. Finally, in 1837, Pushkin was mortally wounded defending his wife's honour in a duel forced on him by influential enemies.

Assessment.

Pushkin's use of the Russian language is astonishing in its simplicity and profundity and formed the basis of the style of novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. His novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin, was the first Russian work to take contemporary society as its subject and pointed the way to the Russian realistic novel of the mid-19th century. Even during his lifetime Pushkin's importance as a great national poet had been recognized by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, his successor and pupil, and it was his younger contemporary, the great Russian critic Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), who produced the fullest and deepest critical study of Pushkin's work, which still retains much of its relevance. To the later classical writers of the 19th century, Pushkin, the creator of the Russian literary language, stood as the cornerstone of Russian literature, in Maksim Gorky's words, “the beginning of beginnings.” Pushkin has thus become an inseparable part of the literary world of the Russian people. He also exerted a profound influence on other aspects of Russian culture, most notably in opera.

Pushkin's work—with its nobility of conception and its emphasis on civic responsibility (shown in his command to the poet-prophet to “fire the hearts of men with his words”), its life-affirming vigour, and its confidence in the triumph of reason over prejudice, of human charity over slavery and oppression—has struck an echo all over the world. Translated into all the major languages, his works are regarded both as expressing most completely Russian national consciousness and as transcending national barriers.

Dimitry Dimitriyevich Blagoy Ed.

Additional Reading

Janko Lavrin, Pushkin and Russian Literature (1947, reprinted 1969), discusses Pushkin's place and significance in the development of Russian literature. Samuel H. Cross and Ernest J. Simmons (eds.), Centennial Essays for Pushkin (1937, reissued 1967), collects essays published on the centenary of Pushkin's death. Detailed biographical and critical studies of Pushkin in English are Ernest J. Simmons, Pushkin (1937, reissued 1971); Walter N. Vickery, Pushkin: Death of a Poet (1968), and Alexander Pushkin, rev. ed. (1992); Robin Edmonds, Pushkin: The Man and His Age (1995); Henri Troyat, Pushkin, trans. by Nancy Amphoux (1970; originally published in French, 2 vol., 1946); John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (1971); A.D.P. Briggs, Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (1983, reissued 1991); Abram Lezhnev, Pushkin's Prose (1983); Paul Debreczeny, The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin's Prose Fiction (1983); Stephanie Sandler, Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989); Sam Driver, Puškin: Literature and Social Ideas (1989); and Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (1994).

Decembrist

▪ Russian history

Russian Dekabrist,

any of the Russian revolutionaries who led an unsuccessful uprising on Dec. 14 (Dec. 26, New Style), 1825, and through their martyrdom provided a source of inspiration to succeeding generations of Russian dissidents. The Decembrists were primarily members of the upper classes who had military backgrounds; some had participated in the Russian occupation of France after the Napoleonic Wars or served elsewhere in western Europe; a few had been Freemasons, and some were members of the secret patriotic (and, later, revolutionary) societies in Russia—the Union of Salvation (1816), the Union of Welfare (1818), the Northern Society (1821), and the Southern Society (1821).

The Northern Society, taking advantage of the brief but confusing interregnum following the death of Tsar Alexander I, staged an uprising, convincing some of the troops in St. Petersburg to refuse to take a loyalty oath to Nicholas I and to demand instead the accession of his brother Constantine. The rebellion, however, was poorly organized and easily suppressed; Colonel Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, who was to be the provisional dictator, fled immediately.

Another insurrection by the Chernigov regiment in the south was also quickly defeated. An extensive investigation in which Nicholas personally participated ensued; it resulted in the trial of 289 Decembrists, the execution of 5 of them (Pavel Pestel, Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, Pyotr Kakhovsky, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Kondraty Ryleyev), the imprisonment of 31, and the banishment of the rest to Siberia.

Gogol, Nikolay

▪ Russian writer

Introduction

born March 19 [March 31, New Style], 1809, Sorochintsy, near Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]

died Feb. 21 [March 4], 1852, Moscow, Russia

Ukrainian-born Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist, whose novel Myortvye dushi (Dead Souls) and whose short story “Shinel” (“The Overcoat”) are considered the foundations of the great 19th-century tradition of Russian realism.

Youth and early fame.

The Ukrainian countryside, with its colourful peasantry, its Cossack traditions, and its rich folklore, constituted the background of Gogol's boyhood. A member of the petty Ukrainian gentry, Gogol was sent at the age of 12 to the high school at Nezhin. There he distinguished himself by his biting tongue, his contributions of prose and poetry to a magazine, and his portrayal of comic old men and women in school theatricals. In 1828 he went to St. Petersburg, hoping to enter the civil service, but soon discovered that without money and connections he would have to fight hard for a living. He even tried to become an actor, but his audition was unsuccessful. In this predicament he remembered a mediocre sentimental-idyllic poem he had written in the high school. Anxious to achieve fame as a poet, he published it at his own expense, but its failure was so disastrous that he burned all the copies and thought of emigrating to the United States. He embezzled the money his mother had sent him for payment of the mortgage on her farm and took a boat to the German port of Lübeck. He did not sail but briefly toured Germany. Whatever his reasons for undertaking such an irresponsible trip, he soon ran out of money and returned to St. Petersburg, where he got an ill-paid government post.

In the meantime Gogol wrote occasionally for periodicals, finding an escape in childhood memories of the Ukraine. He committed to paper what he remembered of the sunny landscapes, peasants, and boisterous village lads, and he also related tales about devils, witches, and other demonic or fantastic agents that enliven Ukrainian folklore. Romantic stories of the past were thus intermingled with realistic incidents of the present. Such was the origin of his eight narratives, published in two volumes in 1831–32 under the title Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka). Written in a lively and at times colloquial prose, these works contributed something fresh and new to Russian literature. In addition to the author's whimsical inflection, they abounded in genuine folk flavour, including numerous Ukrainian words and phrases, all of which captivated the Russian literary world.

Mature career.

The young author became famous overnight. Among his first admirers were the poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky, both of whom he had met before. This esteem was soon shared by the writer Sergey Aksakov and the critic Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), among others. Having given up his second government post, Gogol was now teaching history in a boarding school for girls. In 1834 he was appointed assistant professor of medieval history at St. Petersburg University, but he felt inadequately equipped for the position and left it after a year. Meanwhile, he prepared energetically for the publication of his next two books, Mirgorod and Arabeski (Arabesques), which appeared in 1835. The four stories constituting Mirgorod were a continuation of the Evenings, but they revealed a strong gap between Gogol's romantic escapism and his otherwise pessimistic attitude toward life. Such a splendid narrative of the Cossack past as “Taras Bulba” certainly provided an escape from the present. But “Povest o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem” (“Story of the Quarrel Between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich”) was, for all its humour, full of bitterness about the meanness and vulgarity of existence. Even the idyllic motif of Gogol's “Starosvetskiye pomeshchiki” (“Old-World Landowners”) is undermined with satire, for the mutual affection of the aged couple is marred by gluttony, their ceaseless eating for eating's sake.

The aggressive realism of a romantic who can neither adapt himself to the world nor escape from it, and is therefore all the more anxious to expose its vulgarity and evil, predominates in Gogol's Petersburg stories printed (together with some essays) in the second work, Arabesques. In one of these stories, “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (“Diary of a Madman”), the hero is an utterly frustrated office drudge who finds compensation in megalomania and ends in a lunatic asylum. In another, “Nevsky prospekt” (“Nevsky Prospect”), a tragic romantic dreamer is contrasted to an adventurous vulgarian, while in the revised finale of “Portret” (“The Portrait”) the author stresses his conviction that evil is ineradicable in this world. In 1836 Gogol published in Pushkin's (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich) Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) one of his gayest satirical stories, “Kolyaska” (“The Coach”). In the same periodical also appeared his amusingly caustic surrealist tale, “Nos” (“The Nose”). Gogol's association with Pushkin was of great value because he always trusted his friend's taste and criticism; moreover, he received from Pushkin the themes for his two principal works, the play Revizor (The Government Inspector, sometimes titled The Inspector General), and Dead Souls, which were important not only to Russian literature but also to Gogol's further destiny.

A great comedy, The Government Inspector mercilessly lampoons the corrupt bureaucracy under Nicholas I. Having mistaken a well-dressed windbag for the dreaded incognito inspector, the officials of a provincial town bribe and banquet him in order to turn his attention away from the crying evils of their administration. But during the triumph, after the bogus inspector's departure, the arrival of the real inspector is announced—to the horror of those concerned. It was only by a special order of the tsar that the first performance of this comedy of indictment and “laughter through tears” took place on April 19, 1836. Yet the hue and cry raised by the reactionary press and officialdom was such that Gogol left Russia for Rome, where he remained, with some interruptions, until 1842. The atmosphere he found in Italy appealed to his taste and to his somewhat patriarchal—not to say primitive—religious propensity. The religious painter Aleksandr Ivanov, who worked in Rome, became his close friend. He also met a number of traveling Russian aristocrats and often saw the émigrée princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a convert to Roman Catholicism, in whose circle religious themes were much discussed. It was in Rome, too, that Gogol wrote most of his masterpiece, Dead Souls.

This comic novel, or “epic,” as the author labeled it, reflects feudal Russia, with its serfdom and bureaucratic iniquities. Chichikov, the hero of the novel, is a polished swindler who, after several reverses of fortune, wants to get rich quick. His bright but criminal idea is to buy from various landowners a number of their recently deceased serfs (or “souls,” as they were called in Russia) whose deaths have not yet been registered by the official census and are therefore regarded as still being alive. The landowners are only too happy to rid themselves of the fictitious property on which they continue to pay taxes until the next census. Chichikov intends to pawn the “souls” in a bank and, with the money thus raised, settle down in a distant region as a respectable gentleman. The provincial townsmen of his first stop are charmed by his polite manners; he approaches several owners in the district who are all willing to sell the “souls” in question, knowing full well the fraudulent nature of the deal. The sad conditions of Russia, in which serfs used to be bought and sold like cattle, are evident throughout the grotesquely humorous transactions. The landowners, one more queer and repellent than the last, have become nicknames known to every Russian reader. When the secret of Chichikov's errands begins to leak out, he hurriedly leaves the town.

Dead Souls was published in 1842, the same year in which the first edition of Gogol's collected works was published. The edition included, among his other writings, a sprightly comedy titled Zhenitba (Marriage) and the story “The Overcoat.” The latter concerns a humble scribe who, with untold sacrifices, has acquired a smart overcoat; when robbed of it he dies of a broken heart. The tragedy of this insignificant man was worked out with so many significant trifles that, years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was to exclaim that all Russian realists had come “from under Gogol's greatcoat.” The apex of Gogol's fame was, however, Dead Souls. The democratic intellectuals of Belinsky's brand saw in this novel a work permeated with the spirit of their own liberal aspirations. Its author was all the more popular because after Pushkin's tragic death Gogol was now looked upon as the head of Russian literature. Gogol, however, began to see his leading role in a perspective of his own. Having witnessed the beneficent results of the laughter caused by his indictments, he was sure that God had given him a great literary talent in order to make him not only castigate abuses through laughter but also to reveal to Russia the righteous way of living in an evil world. He therefore decided to continue Dead Souls as a kind of Divine Comedy in prose; the already published part would represent the Inferno of Russian life, and the second and third parts (with Chichikov's moral regeneration) would be its Purgatorio and Paradiso.

Creative decline.

Unfortunately, having embarked upon such a soul-saving task, Gogol noticed that his former creative capacity was deserting him. He worked on the second part of his novel for more than 10 years but with meagre results. In drafts of four chapters and a fragment of the fifth found among his papers, the negative and grotesque characters are drawn with some intensity, whereas the virtuous types he was so anxious to exalt are stilted and devoid of life. This lack of zest was interpreted by Gogol as a sign that, for some reason, God no longer wanted him to be the voice exhorting his countrymen to a more worthy existence. In spite of this he decided to prove that at least as teacher and preacher—if not as artist—he was still able to set forth what was needed for Russia's moral and worldly improvement. This he did in his ill-starred Bybrannyye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami (1847; Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends), a collection of 32 discourses eulogizing not only the conservative official church but also the very powers that he had so mercilessly condemned only a few years before. It is no wonder that the book was fiercely attacked by his one-time admirers, most of all by Belinsky, who in an indignant letter called him “a preacher of the knout, a defender of obscurantism and of darkest oppression.” Crushed by it all, Gogol saw in it a further proof that, sinful as he was, he had lost God's favour forever. He increased his prayers and his ascetic practices; in 1848 he even made a pilgrimage to Palestine, but in vain. Despite a few bright moments he began to wander from place to place like a doomed soul. Finally he settled in Moscow, where he came under the influence of a fanatical priest, Father Matvey Konstantinovsky, who seems to have practiced on Gogol a kind of spiritual sadism. Ordered by him, Gogol burned the presumably completed manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls on Feb. 24 (Feb. 11, O.S.), 1852. Ten days later he died, on the verge of semimadness.

Influence and reputation.

Whatever the vagaries of Gogol's mind and life, his part in Russian literature was enormous. Above all, it was from the nature of such works as The Government Inspector, Dead Souls, and “The Overcoat” that Belinsky derived the tenets of the “natural school” (as distinct from the “rhetorical,” or Romantic, school) that was responsible for the trend of subsequent Russian fiction. Gogol was among the first authors to have revealed Russia to itself. Yet in contrast to the simple classical-realistic prose of Pushkin, adopted by Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Goncharov, and Ivan Turgenev, Gogol's ornate and agitated prose was assumed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor). Gogol's realism of indictment found many followers, among them the great satirist Mikhail Saltykov. He was also a champion of the little man as a literary hero. His vexation of spirit, too, was continued (but on a higher level) by both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as was his effort to transcend “mere literature.”

Janko Lavrin

Additional Reading

Biographies include Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (1944, reissued 1989), an astute and rather subjective monograph; Victor Erlich, Gogol (1969), an excellent study; Henri Troyat, Divided Soul (1973, also published as Gogol, 1974); and V.V. Gippius, Gogol (1981). Critical studies may be found in Paul Debreczeny, Nikolay Gogol and His Contemporary Critics (1966); Robert A. Maguire (compiler), Gogol from the Twentieth Century (1974); Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (1976), the definitive study of Gogol and sexuality; Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (1979), which analyzes the author in the context of his times; and Richard Peace, The Enigma of Gogol (1981).

Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich

▪ Russian literary critic

born May 30 [June 11, New Style], 1811, Sveaborg, Fin., Russian Empire

died May 26 [June 7], 1848, St. Petersburg, Russia

eminent Russian literary critic who is often called the “father” of the Russian radical intelligentsia.

The son of a provincial doctor, Belinsky was expelled from the University of Moscow (1832) and earned his living thereafter as a journalist. His first substantial critical articles were part of a series that he wrote for the journal Teleskop (“Telescope”) beginning in 1834. These were called “Literaturnye mechtaniya” (“Literary Reveries”), and they established his reputation. In them he expounded F.W.J. Schelling's Romantic view of national character, applying it to Russian culture.

Belinsky was briefly managing editor of the Moskovsky nablyudatel (“Moscow Observer”) before obtaining a post in 1839 as chief critic for the journal Otechestvennyye zapiski (“National Annals”). The influential essays he published there on such writers as Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Gogol helped shape the literary and social views of other Russian intellectuals for decades to come. By 1840 Belinsky had moved from the idealism of his early essays to a Hegelian view that art and the history of a nation are closely connected. He believed that Russian literature had to progress in order to help the still-embryonic Russian nation develop into a mature, civilized society. His theory of literature in the service of society became an article of faith among Russian liberals and was the distant progenitor of the Soviets' doctrine of Socialist Realism.

In 1846 Belinsky joined the review Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), for which he wrote most of his last essays. In 1847 he wrote a famous letter to Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay), denouncing the latter's Bybrannyye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami (“Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends”) as a betrayal of the Russian people because it preached submission to church and state.

Belinsky's perceptive praise of such writers as Pushkin, Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Ivan Goncharov helped establish their early reputations. He laid the foundation for modern Russian literary criticism in his belief that Russian literature should honestly reflect Russian reality and that art should be judged for its social as well as its aesthetic qualities.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

▪ Russian author

Introduction

in full Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky also spelled Dostoevsky

born November 11, [October 30, Old Style], 1821, Moscow, Russia

died February 9 [January 28, O.S.], 1881, St. Petersburg

Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction.

Dostoyevsky is usually regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived. Literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism have been profoundly shaped by his ideas. His works are often called prophetic because he so accurately predicted how Russia's revolutionaries would behave if they came to power. In his time he was also renowned for his activity as a journalist.

Major works and their characteristics

Dostoyevsky is best known for his novella Notes from the Underground and for four long novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed (also and more accurately known as The Demons and The Devils), and The Brothers Karamazov. Each of these works is famous for its psychological profundity, and, indeed, Dostoyevsky is commonly regarded as one of the greatest psychologists in the history of literature. He specialized in the analysis of pathological states of mind that lead to insanity, murder, and suicide and in the exploration of the emotions of humiliation, self-destruction, tyrannical domination, and murderous rage. These major works are also renowned as great “novels of ideas” that treat timeless and timely issues in philosophy and politics. Psychology and philosophy are closely linked in Dostoyevsky's portrayals of intellectuals, who “feel ideas” in the depths of their souls. Finally, these novels broke new ground with their experiments in literary form.

Background and early life

The major events of Dostoyevsky's life—mock execution, imprisonment in Siberia, and epileptic seizures—were so well known that, even apart from his work, Dostoyevsky achieved great celebrity in his own time. Indeed, he frequently capitalized on his legend by drawing on the highly dramatic incidents of his life in creating his greatest characters. Even so, some events in his life have remained clouded in mystery, and careless speculations have unfortunately gained the status of fact.

Unlike many other Russian writers of the first part of the 19th century, Dostoyevsky was not born into the landed gentry. He often stressed the difference between his own background and that of Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo) or Ivan Turgenev (Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich) and the effect of that difference on his work. First, Dostoyevsky was always in need of money and had to hurry his works into publication. Although he complained that writing against a deadline prevented him from achieving his full literary powers, it is equally possible that his frenzied style of composition lent his novels an energy that has remained part of their appeal. Second, Dostoyevsky often noted that, unlike writers from the nobility who described the family life of their own class, shaped by “beautiful forms” and stable traditions, he explored the lives of “accidental families” and of “the insulted and the humiliated.”

Dostoyevsky's father, a retired military surgeon, served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, where he treated charity cases while also conducting a private practice. Though a devoted parent, Dostoyevsky's father was a stern, suspicious, and rigid man. By contrast, his mother, a cultured woman from a merchant family, was kindly and indulgent. Dostoyevsky's lifelong attachment to religion began with the old-fashioned piety of his family, so different from the fashionable skepticism of the gentry.

In 1828 Dostoyevsky's father managed to earn the rank of a nobleman (the reforms of Peter I the Great had made such a change in status possible). He bought an estate in 1831, and so young Fyodor spent the summer months in the country. Until 1833 Dostoyevsky was educated at home, before being sent to a day school and then to a boarding school. Dostoyevsky's mother died in 1837. Some 40 years after Dostoyevsky's death it was revealed that his father, who had died suddenly in 1839, might have been murdered by his own serfs; however, this account is now regarded by many scholars as a myth. At the time, Dostoyevsky was a student in the Academy of Military Engineering in St. Petersburg, a career as a military engineer having been marked out for him by his father.

Dostoyevsky was evidently unsuited for such an occupation. He and his older brother Mikhail, who remained his close friend and became his collaborator in publishing journals, were entranced with literature from a young age. As a child and as a student, Dostoyevsky was drawn to Romantic and Gothic fiction, especially the works of Sir Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Nikolay Karamzin, Friedrich Schiller, and Aleksandr Pushkin. Not long after completing his degree (1843) and becoming a sublieutenant, Dostoyevsky resigned his commission to commence a hazardous career as a writer living off his pen.

Early works

The first work Dostoyevsky published was a rather free and emotionally intensified translation of Honoré de Balzac's (Balzac, Honoré de) novel Eugénie Grandet; and the French writer's oeuvre was to exercise a great influence on his own fiction. Dostoyevsky did not have to toil long in obscurity. No sooner had he written his first novella, Bednyye lyudi (1846; Poor Folk), than he was hailed as the great new talent of Russian literature by the most influential critic of his day, the “furious” Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich).

Three decades later, in The Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky recalled the story of his “discovery.” After completing Poor Folk, he gave a copy to his friend, Dmitry Grigorovich, who brought it to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov (Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseyevich). Reading Dostoyevsky's manuscript aloud, these two writers were overwhelmed by the work's psychological insight and ability to play on the heartstrings. Even though it was 4:00 AM, they went straight to Dostoyevsky to tell him his first novella was a masterpiece. Later that day, Nekrasov brought Poor Folk to Belinsky. “A new Gogol has appeared!” Nekrasov proclaimed, to which Belinsky replied, “With you, Gogols spring up like mushrooms!” Belinsky soon communicated his enthusiasm to Dostoyevsky: “Do you, you yourself, realize what it is that you have written!” In The Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky remembered this as the happiest moment of his life.

Poor Folk, the appeal of which has been overshadowed by Dostoyevsky's later works, is cast in the then already anachronistic form of an epistolary novel. Makar Devushkin, a poor copying clerk who can afford to live only in a corner of a dirty kitchen, exchanges letters with a young and poor girl, Varvara Dobrosyolova. Her letters reveal that she has already been procured once for a wealthy and worthless man, whom, at the end of the novel, she agrees to marry. The novel is remarkable for its descriptions of the psychological (rather than just material) effects of poverty. Dostoyevsky transformed the techniques Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay) used in "The Overcoat," the celebrated story of a poor copying clerk. Whereas Gogol's thoroughly comic hero utterly lacks self-awareness, Dostoyevsky's self-conscious hero suffers agonies of humiliation. In one famous scene, Devushkin reads Gogol's story and is offended by it.

In the next few years Dostoyevsky published a number of stories, including "Belyye nochi" (“White Nights”), which depicts the mentality of a dreamer, and a novella, Dvoynik (1846; The Double), a study in schizophrenia. The hero of this novella, Golyadkin, begets a double of himself, who mocks him and usurps his place. Dostoyevsky boldly narrates the story through one of the voices that sounds within Golyadkin's psyche so that the story reads as if it were a taunt addressed directly to its unfortunate hero.

Although Dostoyevsky was at first lionized, his excruciating shyness and touchy vanity provoked hostility among the members of Belinsky's circle. Nekrasov and Turgenev (Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich) circulated a satiric poem in which the young writer was called, like Don Quixote, “The Knight of the Doleful Countenance”; years later, Dostoyevsky paid Turgenev back with a devastating parody of him in The Possessed. Belinsky himself gradually became disappointed with Dostoyevsky's preference for psychology over social issues. Always prone to nervous illness, Dostoyevsky suffered from depression.

Political activity and arrest

In 1847 Dostoyevsky began to participate in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism. He eventually joined a related, secret group devoted to revolution and illegal propaganda. It appears that Dostoyevsky did not sympathize (as others did) with egalitarian communism and terrorism but was motivated by his strong disapproval of serfdom. On April 23, 1849, he and the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were arrested. Dostoyevsky spent eight months in prison until, on December 22, the prisoners were led without warning to the Semyonovsky Square. There a sentence of death by firing squad was pronounced, last rites were offered, and three prisoners were led out to be shot first. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered and a messenger arrived with the information that the tsar had deigned to spare their lives. The mock-execution ceremony was in fact part of the punishment. One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write Crime and Punishment.

Dostoyevsky passed several minutes in the full conviction that he was about to die, and in his novels characters repeatedly imagine the state of mind of a man approaching execution. The hero of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, offers several extended descriptions of this sort, which readers knew carried special authority because the author of the novel had gone through the terrible experience. The mock execution led Dostoyevsky to appreciate the very process of life as an incomparable gift and, in contrast to the prevailing determinist and materialist thinking of the intelligentsia, to value freedom, integrity, and individual responsibility all the more strongly.

Instead of being executed, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison labour camp, to be followed by an indefinite term as a soldier. After his return to Russia 10 years later, he wrote a novel based on his prison camp experiences, Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1861–62; The House of the Dead). Gone was the tinge of Romanticism and dreaminess present in his early fiction. The novel, which was to initiate the Russian tradition of prison camp literature, describes the horrors that Dostoyevsky actually witnessed: the brutality of the guards who enjoyed cruelty for its own sake, the evil of criminals who could enjoy murdering children, and the existence of decent souls amid filth and degradation—all these themes, warranted by the author's own experience, gave the novel the immense power that readers still experience. Tolstoy considered it Dostoyevsky's masterpiece. Above all, The House of the Dead illustrates that, more than anything else, it is the need for individual freedom that makes us human. This conviction was to bring Dostoyevsky into direct conflict with the radical determinists and socialists of the intelligentsia.

In Siberia Dostoyevsky experienced what he called the “regeneration” of his convictions. He rejected the condescending attitude of intellectuals, who wanted to impose their political ideas on society, and came to believe in the dignity and fundamental goodness of common people. He describes this change in his sketch "The Peasant Marey" (which appears in The Diary of a Writer). Dostoyevsky also became deeply attached to Russian Orthodoxy, as the religion of the common people, although his faith was always at war with his skepticism. In one famous letter he describes how he thirsts for faith “like parched grass” and concludes: “if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”

Dostoyevsky suffered his first attacks of epilepsy while in prison. No less than his accounts of being led to execution, his descriptions of epileptic seizures (especially in The Idiot) reveal the heights and depths of the human soul. As Dostoyevsky and his hero Myshkin experience it, the moment just before an attack grants the sufferer a strong sensation of perfect harmony and of overcoming time. Freud interpreted Dostoyevsky's epilepsy as psychological in origin, but his account has been vitiated by research showing that his analysis was based on misinformation. In 1857 Dostoyevsky married a consumptive widow, Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva (she died seven years later); the unhappy marriage began with her witnessing one of his seizures on their honeymoon.

Works of the 1860s

Upon his return to Russia, Dostoyevsky plunged into literary activity. With his brother Mikhail, he edited two influential journals, first Vremya (1861–63; “Time”), which was closed by the government on account of an objectionable article, and then Epokha (1864–65; “Epoch”), which collapsed after the death of Mikhail. After first trying to maintain a middle-of-the-road position, Dostoyevsky began to attack the radicals, who virtually defined the Russian intelligentsia. Dostoyevsky was repulsed by their materialism, their utilitarian morality, their reduction of art to propaganda, and, above all, their denial of individual freedom and responsibility. For the remainder of his life, he maintained a deep sense of the danger of radical ideas, and so his post-Siberian works came to be resented by the Bolsheviks and held in suspicion by the Soviet regime.

Notes from the Underground

In the first part of Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the Underground) an unnamed first-person narrator delivers a brilliant attack on a set of beliefs shared by liberals and radicals: that it is possible to discover the laws of individual psychology, that human beings consequently have no free choice, that history is governed by laws, and that it is possible to design a utopian society based on the laws of society and human nature. Even if such a society could be built, the underground man argues, people would hate it just because it denied them caprice and defined them as utterly predictable. In the novella's second part the underground man recalls incidents from his past, which show him behaving, in answer to determinism, according to sheer spite. Dostoyevsky thus makes clear that the underground man's irrationalist solution is no better than the rationalists' systems. Notes from the Underground also parodied the bible of the radicals, Nikolay Chernyshevsky's utopian fiction What Is to Be Done? (1863).

Stay in western Europe

For several reasons, Dostoyevsky spent much of the 1860s in western Europe: he wanted to see the society that he both admired for its culture and deplored for its materialism, he was hoping to resume an affair with the minor author Appolinariya Suslova, he was escaping his creditors in Russia, and he was disastrously attracted to gambling. An unscrupulous publisher offered him a desperately needed advance on the condition that he deliver a novel by a certain date; the publisher was counting on the forfeit provisions, which would allow him nine years to publish all of Dostoyevsky's works for free. With less than a month remaining, Dostoyevsky hired a stenographer and dictated his novel Igrok (1866; The Gambler)—based on his relations with Suslova and the psychology of compulsive gambling—which he finished just on time. A few months later (1867) he married the stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. She at last put his life and finances in order and created stable conditions for his work and new family. They had four children, of whom two survived to adulthood.

Crime and Punishment

Written at the same time as The Gambler, Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment) describes a young intellectual, Raskolnikov, willing to gamble on ideas. He decides to solve all his problems at a stroke by murdering an old pawnbroker woman. Contradictory motives and theories all draw him to the crime. Utilitarian morality suggests that killing her is a positive good because her money could be used to help many others. On the other hand, Raskolnikov reasons that belief in good and evil is itself sheer prejudice, a mere relic of religion, and that, morally speaking, there is no such thing as crime. Nevertheless, Raskolnikov, despite his denial of morality, sympathizes with the unfortunate and so wants to kill the pawnbroker just because she is an oppressor of the weak. His most famous theory justifying murder divides the world into extraordinary people, such as Solon, Caesar, and Napoleon, and ordinary people, who simply serve to propagate the species. Extraordinary people, he theorizes, must have “the right to transgress,” or progress would be impossible. Nothing could be further from Dostoyevsky's own morality, based on the infinite worth of each human soul, than this Napoleonic theory, which Dostoyevsky viewed as the real content of the intelligentsia's belief in its superior wisdom.

After committing the crime, Raskolnikov unaccountably finds himself gripped by “mystic terror” and a horrible sense of isolation. The detective Porfiry Petrovich, who guesses Raskolnikov's guilt but cannot prove it, plays psychological games with him until the murderer at last confesses. Meanwhile, Raskolnikov tries to discover the real motive for his crime but never arrives at a single answer. In a famous commentary, Tolstoy argued that there was no single motive but rather a series of “tiny, tiny alterations” of mood and mental habits. Dostoyevsky's brilliance in part lies in his complex rethinking of such concepts as motive and intention.

Crime and Punishment also offers remarkable psychological portraits of a drunkard, Marmeladov, and of a vicious amoralist haunted by hallucinations, Svidrigailov. Raskolnikov's friend Razumikhin voices the author's distaste for an ideological approach to life; Razumikhin's own life exemplifies how one can solve problems neither by grand ideas nor by dramatic gambles but by slow, steady, hard work.

Quite deliberately, Dostoyevsky made the heroine of the story, Sonya Marmeladova, an unrealistic symbol of pure Christian goodness. Having become a prostitute to support her family, she later persuades Raskolnikov to confess and then follows him to Siberia. In the novel's epilogue, the prisoner Raskolnikov, who has confessed not out of remorse but out of emotional stress, at first continues to maintain his amoral theories but at last is brought to true repentance by a revelatory dream and by Sonya's goodness. Critical opinion is divided over whether the epilogue is artistically successful.

The Idiot

Dostoyevsky's next major novel, Idiot (1868–69; The Idiot), represents his attempt to describe a perfectly good man in a way that is still psychologically convincing—seemingly an impossible artistic task. If he could succeed, Dostoyevsky believed, he would show that Christ-like goodness is indeed possible; and so the very writing of the work became an attempt at what might be called a novelistic proof of Christianity.

The work's hero, Prince Myshkin, is indeed perfectly generous and so innocent as to be regarded as an idiot; however, he is also gifted with profound psychological insight. Unfortunately, his very goodness seems to bring disaster to all he meets, even to the novel's heroine, Nastasya Filippovna, whom he wishes to save. With a remarkably complex psychology, she both accepts and bitterly defies the world's judgment of her as a fallen woman. Ippolit, a spiteful young man dying of consumption, offers brilliant meditations on art, on death, on the meaninglessness of dumb brutish nature, and on happiness, which, to him, is a matter of the very process of living. Columbus, he explains, was happy not when he discovered America but while he was discovering it.

Dostoyevsky's last decade

The Possessed

Dostoyevsky's next novel, Besy (1872; The Possessed), earned him the permanent hatred of the radicals. Often regarded as the most brilliant political novel ever written, it interweaves two plots. One concerns Nikolay Stavrogin, a man with a void at the centre of his being. In his younger years Stavrogin, in a futile quest for meaning, had embraced and cast off a string of ideologies, each of which has been adopted by different intellectuals mesmerized by Stavrogin's personality. Shatov has become a Slavophile who, like Dostoyevsky himself, believes in the “God-bearing” Russian people. Existentialist critics (especially Albert Camus (Camus, Albert)) became fascinated with Kirillov, who adopts a series of contradictory philosophical justifications for suicide. Most famously, Kirillov argues that only an utterly gratuitous act of self-destruction can prove that a person is free because such an act cannot be explained by any kind of self-interest and therefore violates all psychological laws. By killing himself without reason, Kirillov hopes to become the “man-god” and so provide an example for human freedom in a world that has denied Christ (the God-man).

It is the novel's other plot that has earned Dostoyevsky the reputation of a political prophet. It describes a cell of revolutionary conspirators led by Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who binds the group together by involving them in murdering Shatov. (This incident was based on the scheme of a real revolutionary of the time, Sergey Nechayev.) One of the revolutionaries, Shigalyov, offers his thoughts on the emergence of the perfect society: “Starting with unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.” Enforced equality and guaranteed utopia demand the suppression of all individuality and independent thought. In lines that anticipate Soviet and Maoist cultural policy, Pyotr Stepanovich predicts that, when the revolution comes, “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned,” all in the name of “equality.”

Pyotr is the son and Stavrogin the former student of the novel's weak but endearing liberal, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Dostoyevsky suggests that the madness of the radical sons derives from their fathers' liberal skepticism, mockery of traditional morals, and, above all, neglect of the family. The Possessed is a profoundly conservative and Christian work. In contrast to its savage portraits of intellectuals, the novel expresses great sympathy for workers and other ordinary people ill-served by the radicals who presume to speak in their name.

A Writer's Diary and other works

In 1873 Dostoyevsky assumed the editorship of the conservative journal Grazhdanin (“The Citizen”), where he published an irregular column entitled "Dnevnik pisatelya" (“The Diary of a Writer”). He left Grazhdanin to write Podrostok (1875; A Raw Youth, also known as The Adolescent), a relatively unsuccessful and diffuse novel describing a young man's relations with his natural father.

In 1876–77 Dostoyevsky devoted his energies to Dnevnik pisatelya, which he was now able to bring out in the form he had originally intended. A one-man journal, for which Dostoyevsky served as editor, publisher, and sole contributor, the Diary represented an attempt to initiate a new literary genre. Issue by monthly issue, the Diary created complex thematic resonances among diverse kinds of material: short stories, plans for possible stories, autobiographical essays, sketches that seem to lie on the boundary between fiction and journalism, psychological analyses of sensational crimes, literary criticism, and political commentary. The Diary proved immensely popular and financially rewarding, but as an aesthetic experiment it was less successful, probably because Dostoyevsky, after a few intricate issues, seemed unable to maintain his complex design. Instead, he was drawn into expressing his political views, which, during these two years, became increasingly extreme. Specifically, Dostoyevsky came to believe that western Europe was about to collapse, after which Russia and the Russian Orthodox church would create the kingdom of God on earth and so fulfill the promise of the Book of Revelation. In a series of anti-Catholic articles, he equated the Roman Catholic church with the socialists because both are concerned with earthly rule and maintain (Dostoyevsky believed) an essentially materialist view of human nature. He reached his moral nadir with a number of anti-Semitic articles.

Because Dostoyevsky was unable to maintain his aesthetic design for the Diary, its most famous sections are usually known from anthologies and so are separated from the context in which they were designed to fit. These sections include four of his best short stories— "Krotkaya" (“The Meek One”), "Son smeshnogo cheloveka" (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”), "Malchik u Khrista na elke" (“The Heavenly Christmas Tree”), and "Bobok" —as well as a number of autobiographical and semifictional sketches, including "Muzhik Marey" (“The Peasant Marey”), "Stoletnaya" (“A Hundred-Year-Old Woman”), and a satire, "Spiritizm. Nechto o chertyakh Chrezychaynaya khitrost chertey, esli tolko eto cherti" (“Spiritualism. Something about Devils. The Extraordinary Cleverness of Devils, If Only These Are Devils”).

The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoyevsky's last and probably greatest novel, Bratya Karamazovy (1879–80; The Brothers Karamazov), focuses on his favourite theological and philosophical themes: the origin of evil, the nature of freedom, and the craving for faith. A profligate and vicious father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, mocks everything noble and engages in unseemly buffoonery at every opportunity. When his sons were infants, he neglected them not out of malice but simply because he “forgot” them. The eldest, Dmitry, a passionate man capable of sincerely loving both “Sodom” and “the Madonna” at the same time, wrangles with his father over money and competes with him for the favours of a “demonic” woman, Grushenka. When the old man is murdered, circumstantial evidence leads to Dmitry's arrest for the crime, which actually has been committed by the fourth, and illegitimate, son, the malicious epileptic Smerdyakov.

The youngest legitimate son, Alyosha, is another of Dostoyevsky's attempts to create a realistic Christ figure. Following the wise monk Zosima, Alyosha tries to put Christian love into practice. The narrator proclaims him the work's real hero, but readers are usually most interested in the middle brother, the intellectual Ivan.

Like Raskolnikov, Ivan argues that, if there is no God and no immortality, then “all is permitted.” And, even if all is not permitted, he tells Alyosha, one is responsible only for one's actions but not for one's wishes. Of course, the Sermon on the Mount says one is responsible for one's wishes, and, when old Karamazov is murdered, Ivan, in spite of all his theories, comes to feel guilty for having desired his father's death. In tracing the dynamics of Ivan's guilt, Dostoyevsky in effect provides a psychological justification for Christian teaching. Evil happens not just because of a few criminals but because of a moral climate in which all people participate by harbouring evil wishes. Therefore, as Father Zosima teaches, “everyone is responsible for everyone and for everything.”

The novel is most famous for three chapters that may be ranked among the greatest pages of Western literature. In “Rebellion,” Ivan indicts God the Father for creating a world in which children suffer. Ivan has also written a “poem,” "The Grand Inquisitor," which represents his response to God the Son. It tells the story of Christ's brief return to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Recognizing him, the Inquisitor arrests him as “the worst of heretics” because, the Inquisitor explains, the church has rejected Christ. For Christ came to make people free (free will), but, the Inquisitor insists, people do not want to be free, no matter what they say. They want security and certainty rather than free choice, which leads them to error and guilt. And so, to ensure happiness, the church has created a society based on “miracle, mystery, and authority.” The Inquisitor is evidently meant to stand not only for medieval Roman Catholicism but also for contemporary socialism. “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor” contain what many have considered the strongest arguments ever formulated against God, which Dostoyevsky includes so that, in refuting them, he can truly defend Christianity. It is one of the greatest paradoxes of Dostoyevsky's work that his deeply Christian novel more than gives the Devil his due.

In the work's other most famous chapter, Ivan, now going mad, is visited by the Devil (Satan), who talks philosophy with him. Quite strikingly, this Devil is neither grand nor satanic but petty and vulgar, as if to symbolize the ordinariness and banality of evil. He also keeps up with all the latest beliefs of the intelligentsia on earth, which leads, in remarkably humorous passages, to the Devil's defense of materialism and agnosticism. The image of the “petty demon” has had immense influence on 20th-century thought and literature.

In 1880 Dostoyevsky delivered an electrifying speech about the poet Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich), which he published in a separate issue of The Diary of a Writer (August 1880). After finishing Karamazov, he resumed the monthly Diary but lived to publish only a single issue (January 1881) before dying of a hemorrhage on January 28 in St. Petersburg.

Assessment

Dostoyevsky's name has become synonymous with psychological profundity. For generations, the depth and contradictoriness of his heroes have made systematic psychological theories look shallow by comparison. Many theorists (most notably Freud) have tried to claim Dostoyevsky as a predecessor. His sense of evil and his love of freedom have made Dostoyevsky especially relevant to a century of world war, mass murder, and totalitarianism. At least two modern literary genres, the prison camp novel and the dystopian novel (works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four), derive from his writings. His ideas and formal innovations exercised a profound influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, André Gide, Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Mikhail Bulgakov, to name only a few. Above all, his works continue to enthrall readers by combining suspenseful plots with ultimate questions about faith, suffering, and the meaning of life.

Gary Saul Morson

Additional Reading

Biography

The superior biography of Dostoyevsky (in any language) is the still incomplete multivolume study by Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (1976), Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (1983), Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (1986), and Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (1995); these volumes also offer excellent portraits of the Russian intellectual milieu and illuminating readings of Dostoyevsky's works. Another good biography is Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky (1974; originally published in Russian, 2nd ed., 1965). Jessie Coulson, Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait (1962, reprinted 1975), creates a biography out of Dostoyevsky's letters. One may also consult the diary of Dostoyevsky's mistress, Suslova, mentioned above; and the reminiscences of his second wife, Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences (1975; originally published in Russian, 2nd ed., 1971).

Criticism

Several studies survey Dostoyevsky's career with a chapter on each major work. The one to read first is Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1967; originally published in Russian, 1947). Others of note are Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (1964); Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (1977, reissued 1986); and Richard Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (1971, reissued 1992).The most brilliant and most controversial book on Dostoyevsky is Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (1984; originally published in Russian, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged, 1963). Other classics of Russian criticism in English include a study by a prominent existentialist theologian, Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoievsky, trans. by Donald Attwater (1934, reissued 1974; originally published in Russian, 1923). Also available are the studies by the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky (1952, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1932); and an essay originally published in Russian in 1903 by the Russian existentialist and Nietzschean Lev Shestov, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy,” in his Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche (1969), pp. 141–332.Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (1965, reissued 1974), places Dostoyevsky in the context of European literature. On Dostoyevsky's obsessions and creative process, an outstanding, if diffuse, work is Jacques Catteau, Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation (1989). The best study of Dostoyevsky's aesthetics is Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art, 2nd ed. (1978), while his The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (1981), is especially good on The House of the Dead. Robert Louis Jackson (ed.), Dostoevsky: New Perspectives (1984), is a fine critical anthology. Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism is treated in David I. Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews, trans. from French (1981); and in Gary Saul Morson, “Dostoevsky's Anti-Semitism and the Critics,” Slavic and East European Journal, 27(8):302–317 (Fall 1983).The outstanding study of The Idiot is Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (1981). On Crime and Punishment, Robert Louis Jackson (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment (1974), is a superb anthology of pithy extracts. Two divergent interpretations of A Writer's Diary by the same author are Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (1981), and “Dostoevsky's Great Experiment,” an introductory study to the Lantz translation of the Diary mentioned above. There are three outstanding books on The Brothers Karamazov: the reader should begin with Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (1992); and then turn to Robert L. Belknap, The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov (1967, reprinted 1989), and The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Text Making (1990).Gary Saul Morson

Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich

▪ Russian author

Introduction

born October 28 [November 9, New Style], 1818, Oryol, Russia

died August 22 [September 3], 1883, Bougival, near Paris, France

Russian (Russian literature) novelist, poet, and playwright, whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), and Fathers and Sons (1862). These works offer realistic, affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who were attempting to move the country into a new age. Turgenev poured into his writings not only a deep concern for the future of his native land but also an integrity of craft that has ensured his place in Russian literature. The many years that he spent in western Europe were due in part to his personal and artistic stand as a liberal between the reactionary tsarist rule and the spirit of revolutionary radicalism that held sway in contemporary artistic and intellectual circles in Russia.

Early life and works.

Turgenev was the second son of a retired cavalry officer, Sergey Turgenev, and a wealthy mother, Varvara Petrovna, née Lutovinova, who owned the extensive estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. The dominant figure of his mother throughout his boyhood and early manhood probably provided the example for the dominance exercised by the heroines in his major fiction. The Spasskoye estate itself came to have a twofold meaning for the young Turgenev, as an island of gentry civilization in rural Russia and as a symbol of the injustice he saw inherent in the servile state of the peasantry. Against the Russian social system Turgenev was to take an oath of perpetual animosity, which was to be the source of his liberalism and the inspiration for his vision of the intelligentsia as people dedicated to their country's social and political betterment.

Turgenev was to be the only Russian writer with avowedly European outlook and sympathies. Though he was given an education of sorts at home, in Moscow schools, and at the universities of both Moscow and St. Petersburg, Turgenev tended to regard his education as having taken place chiefly during his plunge “into the German sea” when he spent the years 1838 to 1841 at the University of Berlin. He returned home as a confirmed believer in the superiority of the West and of the need for Russia to follow a course of Westernization.

Though Turgenev had composed derivative verse and a poetic drama, Steno (1834), in the style of the English poet Lord Byron, the first of his works to attract attention was a long poem, Parasha, published in 1843. The potential of the author was quickly appreciated by the critic Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), who became Turgenev's close friend and mentor. Belinsky's conviction that literature's primary aim was to reflect the truth of life and to adopt a critical attitude toward its injustices became an article of faith for Turgenev. Despite the influence of Belinsky, he remained a writer of remarkable detachment, possessed of a cool and sometimes ironic objectivity.

Turgenev was not a man of grand passions, although the love story was to provide the most common formula for his fiction, and a love for the renowned singer Pauline Viardot (Viardot, Pauline), whom he first met in 1843, was to dominate his entire life. His relation with Viardot usually has been considered platonic, yet some of his letters, often as brilliant in their observation and as felicitous in their manner as anything he wrote, suggest the existence of a greater intimacy. Generally, though, they reveal him as the fond and devoted admirer, in which role he was for the most part content. He never married, though in 1842 he had had an illegitimate daughter by a peasant woman at Spasskoye; he later entrusted the upbringing of the child to Viardot.

During the 1840s, Turgenev wrote more long poems, including A Conversation, Andrey, and The Landowner, and some criticism. Having failed to obtain a professorship at the University of St. Petersburg and having abandoned work in the government service, he began to publish short works in prose. These were studies in the “intellectual-without-a-will” so typical of his generation. The most famous was “The Diary of a Superfluous Man” (1850), which supplied the epithet “superfluous man” for so many similar weak-willed intellectual protagonists in Turgenev's work as well as in Russian literature generally.

Simultaneously, he tried his hand at writing plays, some, like A Poor Gentleman (1848), rather obviously imitative of the Russian master Nikolay Gogol. Of these, The Bachelor (1849) was the only one staged at this time, the others falling afoul of the official censors. Others of a more intimately penetrating character, such as One May Spin a Thread Too Finely (1848), led to the detailed psychological studies in his dramatic masterpiece, A Month in the Country (1855). This was not staged professionally until 1872. Without precedent in the Russian theatre, it required for its appreciation by critics and audiences the prior success after 1898 of the plays of Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre. It was there in 1909, under the great director Konstantin Stanislavsky, that it was revealed as one of the major works of the Russian theatre.

Sketches of rural life.

Before going abroad in 1847, Turgenev left in the editorial offices of the literary journal Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) a short study, “Khor and Kalinych,” of two peasants whom he had met on a hunting trip in the Oryol region. It was published with the subtitle “From a Hunter's Sketches,” and it had an instantaneous success. From it was to grow the short-story cycle A Sportsman's Sketches, first published in 1852, that brought him lasting fame. Many of the sketches portrayed various types of landowners or episodes, drawn from his experience, of the life of the manorial, serf-owning Russian gentry. Of these, the most important are “Two Landowners,” a study of two types of despotic serf-owners, and “Hamlet of Shchigrovsky Province,” which contains one of the most profound and poignant analyses of the problem of the “superfluous man.” Far more significant are the sketches that tell of Turgenev's encounters with peasants during his hunting trips. Amid evocative descriptions of the countryside, Turgenev's portraits suggest that, though the peasants may be “children of nature” who seek the freedom offered by the beauty of their surroundings, they are always circumscribed by the fact of serfdom.

Turgenev could never pretend to be much more than an understanding stranger toward the peasants about whom he wrote, yet through his compassionate, lucid observation, he created portraits of enormous vitality and wide impact. Not only did they make the predominantly upper class reading public aware of the human qualities of the peasantry, but they also may have been influential in provoking the sentiment for reform that led eventually to the emancipation of the serfs (serfdom) in 1861. He added to the Sketches during the 1870s, including the moving study of the paralyzed Lukeriya in “A Living Relic” (1874).

When the first collected edition appeared, after appearing separately in various issues of the Sovremennik, Turgenev was arrested, detained for a month in St. Petersburg, then given 18 months of enforced residence at Spasskoye. The ostensible pretext for such official harrassment was an obituary of Gogol, which he had published against censorship regulations. But his criticism of serfdom in the Sketches, certainly muted in tone by any standards and explicit only in his references to the landowners' brutality toward their peasants, was sufficient to cause this temporary martyrdom for his art.

First novels.

Although Turgenev wrote “Mumu,” a remarkable exposure of the cruelties of serfdom, while detained in St. Petersburg, his work was evolving toward such extended character studies as Yakov Pasynkov (1855) and the subtle if pessimistic examinations of the contrariness of love found in “Faust” and “A Correspondence” (1856). Time and national events, moreover, were impinging upon him. With the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War (1854–56), Turgenev's own generation, “the men of the forties,” began to belong to the past. The two novels that he published during the 1850s—Rudin (1856) and Home of the Gentry (1859)—are permeated by a spirit of ironic nostalgia for the weaknesses and futilities so manifest in this generation of a decade earlier.

The first of Turgenev's novels, Rudin, tells of an eloquent intellectual, Dmitry Rudin, a character modeled partly on Bakunin, whose power of oratory and passionately held belief in the need for progress so affect the younger members of a provincial salon that the heroine, Natalya, falls in love with him. But when she challenges him to live up to his words, he fails her. The evocation of the world of the Russian country house and of the summer atmosphere that form the backdrop to the tragicomedy of this relationship is evidence of Turgenev's power of perceiving and recording the constancies of the natural scene. The vaster implications about Russian society as a whole and about the role of the Russian intelligentsia are present as shading at the edges of the picture rather than as colours or details in the foreground.

Turgenev's second novel, Home of the Gentry, is an elegiac study of unrequited love in which the hero, Lavretsky, is not so much weak as the victim of his unbalanced upbringing. The work is notable for the delicacy of the love story, though it is a shade mawkish on occasion. More important in terms of the author's thought is the elaborate biography of the hero. In it is the suggestion that the influence of the West has inhibited Turgenev's generation from taking action, forcing them to acknowledge finally that they must leave the future of Russia to those younger and more radical than themselves.

The objectivity of Turgenev as a chronicler of the Russian intelligentsia is apparent in these early novels. Unsympathetic though he may have been to some of the trends in the thinking of the younger, radical generation that emerged after the Crimean War, he endeavoured to portray the positive aspirations of these young men and women with scrupulous candour. Their attitude to him, particularly that of such leading figures as the radical critics Nikolay Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky, N.G.) and Nikolay Dobrolyubov (Dobrolyubov, Nikolay Aleksandrovich), was generally cold when it was not actively hostile. His own rather self-indulgent nature was challenged by the forcefulness of these younger contemporaries. He moved away from an emphasis on the fallibility of his heroes, who had been attacked as a type by Chernyshevsky, using the short story “Asya” (1858) as his point of departure. Instead, Turgenev focused on their youthful ardour and their sense of moral purpose. These attributes had obvious revolutionary implications that were not shared by Turgenev, whose liberalism could accept gradual change but opposed anything more radical, especially the idea of an insurgent peasantry.

The novel On the Eve (1860) deals with the problem facing the younger intelligentsia on the eve of the Crimean War and refers also to the changes awaiting Russia on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. It is an episodic work, further weakened by the shallow portrayal of its Bulgarian hero. Although it has several successful minor characters and some powerful scenes, its treatment of personal relations, particularly of love, demonstrates Turgenev's profound pessimism toward such matters. Such pessimism became increasingly marked in Turgenev's view of life. It seems that there could be no real reconciliation between the liberalism of Turgenev's generation and the revolutionary aspirations of the younger intelligentsia. Turgenev himself could hardly fail to feel a sense of personal involvement in this rupture.

Turgenev's greatest novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), grew from this sense of involvement and yet succeeded in illustrating, with remarkable balance and profundity, the issues that divided the generations. The hero, Bazarov, is the most powerful of Turgenev's creations. A nihilist, denying all laws save those of the natural sciences, uncouth and forthright in his opinions, he is nonetheless susceptible to love and by that token doomed to unhappiness. In sociopolitical terms he represents the victory of the nongentry revolutionary intelligentsia over the gentry intelligentsia to which Turgenev belonged. In artistic terms he is a triumphant example of objective portraiture, and in the poignancy of his death he approaches tragic stature. The miracle of the novel as a whole is Turgenev's superb mastery of his theme, despite his personal hostility toward Bazarov's antiaestheticism, and his success in endowing all the characters with a quality of spontaneous life. Yet at the novel's first appearance the radical younger generation attacked it bitterly as a slander, and the conservatives condemned it as too lenient in its exposure of nihilism.

Turgenev's novels are “months in the country,” which contain balanced contrasts such as those between youth and age, between the tragic ephemerality of love and the comic transience of ideas, between Hamlet's concern with self and the ineptitudes of the quixotic pursuit of altruism. The last of these contrasts he amplified into a major essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860). If he differed from his great contemporaries Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy in the scale of his work, he also differed from them in believing that literature should not provide answers to life's question marks. He constructed his novels according to a simple formula that had the sole purpose of illuminating the character and predicament of a single figure, whether hero or heroine. They are important chiefly as detailed and deft sociopsychological portraits. A major device of the novels is the examination of the effect of a newcomer's arrival upon a small social circle. The circle, in its turn, subjects the newcomer to scrutiny through the relation that develops between the heroine, who always belongs to the “place” of the fiction, and the newcomer-hero. The promise of happiness is offered, but the ending of the relation is invariably calamitous.

Self-exile and fame.

Always touchy about his literary reputation, Turgenev reacted to the almost unanimously hostile reception given to Fathers and Sons by leaving Russia. He took up residence in Baden-Baden in southern Germany, to which resort Viardot had retired. Quarrels with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and his general estrangement from the Russian literary scene made him an exile in a very real sense. His only novel of this period, Smoke (1867), set in Baden-Baden, is infused with a satirically embittered tone that makes caricatures of both the left and the right wings of the intelligentsia. The love story is deeply moving, but both this emotion and the political sentiments are made to seem ultimately no more lasting and real than the smoke of the title.

The Franco-German War of 1870–71 forced the Viardots to leave Baden-Baden, and Turgenev followed them, first to London and then to Paris. He now became an honoured ambassador of Russian culture in the Paris of the 1870s. The writers George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, the young Émile Zola, and Henry James were only a few of the many illustrious contemporaries with whom he corresponded and who sought his company. He was elected vice president of the Paris international literary congress in 1878, and in 1879 he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Oxford. In Russia he was feted on his annual visits.

The literary work of this final period combined nostalgia for the past—eloquently displayed in such beautiful pieces as “A Lear of the Steppes” (1870), “Torrents of Spring” (1872), and “Punin and Baburin” (1874)—with stories of a quasi-fantastic character—“The Song of Triumphant Love” (1881) and “Klara Milich” (1883). Turgenev's final novel, Virgin Soil (1877), was designed to recoup his literary reputation in the eyes of the younger generation. Its aim was to portray the dedication and self-sacrifice of young populists who hoped to sow the seeds of revolution in the virgin soil of the Russian peasantry. Despite its realism and his efforts to give the war topicality, it is the least successful of his novels. His last major work, Poems in Prose, is remarkable chiefly for its wistfulness and for its famous eulogy to the Russian language.

Evaluation.

Turgenev's work is distinguished from that of his most famous contemporaries by its sophisticated lack of hyperbole, its balance, and its concern for artistic values. His greatest work was always topical, committed literature, having universal appeal in the elegance of the love story and the psychological acuity of the portraiture. He was similarly a letter writer of great charm, wit, and probity. His reputation may have become overshadowed by those of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but his own qualities of lucidity and urbanity and, above all, his sense of the extreme preciousness of the beautiful in life endow his work with a magic that has lasting appeal.

Richard H. Freeborn Ed.

Additional Reading

R.A. Gettman, Turgenev in England and America (1941); and R. Yachnin and D.H. Stam (comps.), Turgenev in English (1962), are recommended bibliographies. Useful translations include Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, trans. by David Magarshack, with an essay by Edmund Wilson (1958); and Turgenev's Letters: A Selection, ed. and trans. by E.H. Lehrman (1961). Leonard B. Schapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times (1978, reissued 1982) is a well-researched biography. A. Yarmolinsky, Turgenev the Man: His Art and His Age (1926, rev. ed. 1959); David Magarshack, Turgenev: A Life (1954); and Henri Troyat, Turgenev (1988), are useful complementary biographies. See also H. Granjard, Ivan Tourguénev et les courants politiques et sociaux de son temps (1954), a valuable study of Turgenev's political evolution; R.H. Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist (1960), a guide to Turgenev's novels; and Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and England

Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseyevich

▪ Russian poet

born Dec. 10 [Nov. 28, Old Style], 1821, Nemirov, Ukraine, Russian Empire

died Jan. 8, [Dec. 27, 1877], 1878, St. Petersburg, Russia

Russian poet and journalist whose work centred on the theme of compassion for the sufferings of the peasantry. Nekrasov also sought to express the racy charm and vitality of peasant life in his adaptations of folk songs and poems for children.

Nekrasov studied at St. Petersburg University, but his father's refusal to help him forced him into literary and theatrical hack work at an early age. His first book of poetry was published in 1840. An able businessman, he published and edited literary miscellanies and in 1846 bought from Pyotr Pletnev the magazine Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), which had declined after the death of its founder, Aleksandr Pushkin. Nekrasov managed to transform it into a major literary journal and a paying concern, despite constant harassment by the censors. Both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy published their early works in Sovremennik, but after 1856, influenced by its subeditor, Nikolay Chernyshevski, it began to develop into an organ of militant radicalism. It was suppressed in 1866, after the first attempt to assassinate Alexander II. In 1868 Nekrasov, with Mikhail Saltykov (Shchedrin), took over Otechestvenniye zapiski (“Notes of the Fatherland”), remaining its editor and publisher until his death.

Nekrasov's work is uneven through its lack of craftsmanship and polish and a tendency to sentimentalize his subjects, but his major poems have lasting power and originality of expression. Moroz krasny-nos (1863; “Red-nosed Frost,” in Poems, 1929) gives a vivid picture of a brave and sympathetic peasant woman, and his large-scale narrative poem, Komu na Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, 1917), shows to the full his gift for vigorous realistic satire.

Sovremennik

▪ Russian periodical

(1836–66; “The Contemporary”), Russian literary and political journal founded in 1836 by the poet Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich). In its first year, the journal established its literary prestige by publishing Pushkin's novel Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The Captain's Daughter) and Nikolay Gogol's story “Nos” (1836; “The Nose”). Pyotr Pletnev was editor from 1837 to 1847. Nikolay Nekrasov, editor from 1847 to 1866, published works by Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy and guided the journal into radical politics. Between 1857 and 1860 it was a leading voice in the movement to abolish serfdom. The journal's open criticism of the ruling class led to its suppression by tsarist authorities in 1866.

Dobrolyubov, Nikolay Aleksandrovich

▪ Russian literary critic

born Jan. 24 [Feb. 5, New Style], 1836, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

died Nov. 17 [Nov. 29], 1861, St. Petersburg

radical Russian utilitarian critic who rejected traditional and Romantic literature.

Dobrolyubov, the son of a priest, was educated at a seminary and a pedagogical institute. Early in his life he rejected traditionalism and found his ideal in progress as represented by Western science. In 1856 Dobrolyubov began contributing to Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), an influential liberal periodical, and from 1857 until his death he was chief critic for that journal. He was perhaps the most influential critic after Vissarion Belinsky among the radical intelligentsia; his main concern was the criticism of life rather than of literature. He is perhaps best known for his essay “What is Oblomovism” (1859–60). The essay deals with the phenomenon represented by the character Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov's novel of that name. It established the term Oblomovism as a name for the superfluous man of Russian life and literature.

Chernyshevsky, N.G.

▪ Russian journalist

in full Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky

born July 12 [July 24, New Style], 1828, Saratov, Russia

died Oct. 17 [Oct. 29], 1889, Saratov

radical journalist and politician who greatly influenced the young Russian intelligentsia through his classic work, What Is to Be Done? (1863).

Son of a poor priest, Chernyshevsky in 1854 joined the staff of the review Sovremennik (“Contemporary”). Though he focused on social and economic evils and tried to expound predictable laws of economic change, he followed his fellow journalist Vissarion Belinsky and the English utilitarians in preaching a highly purified egoism as the most natural and desirable mainspring of human conduct. Landowners accused him of stirring up class hatred; and, although the extent to which he was actively subversive is a matter of controversy, he was arrested in 1862 and, after two years' imprisonment, was exiled to Siberia, where he remained until 1883. While in prison he wrote his didactic novel Shto Delat? (1863; A Vital Question or What Is to Be Done?). He was a Westernizer who opposed nationalist Slavophiles. In the U.S.S.R. he was considered by many to be a forerunner of Vladimir Lenin.

serfdom

condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord. The vast majority of serfs in medieval Europe obtained their subsistence by cultivating a plot of land that was owned by a lord. This was the essential feature differentiating serfs from slaves, who were bought and sold without reference to a plot of land. The serf provided his own food and clothing from his own productive efforts. A substantial proportion of the grain the serf grew on his holding had to be given to his lord. The lord could also compel the serf to cultivate that portion of the lord's land that was not held by other tenants (called demesne land). The serf also had to use his lord's grain mills and no others.

The essential additional mark of serfdom was the lack of many of the personal liberties that were held by freedmen. Chief among these was the serf's lack of freedom of movement; he could not permanently leave his holding or his village without his lord's permission. Neither could the serf marry, change his occupation, or dispose of his property without his lord's permission. He was bound to his designated plot of land and could be transferred along with that land to a new lord. Serfs were often harshly treated and had little legal redress against the actions of their lords. A serf could become a freedman only through manumission, enfranchisement, or escape.

From as early as the 2nd century CE, many of the large, privately held estates in the Roman Empire that had been worked by gangs of slaves were gradually broken up into peasant holdings. These peasants of the late Roman Empire, many of whom were descendants of slaves, came to depend on larger landowners and other important persons for protection from state tax collectors and, later, from barbarian invaders and oppressive neighbours. Some of these coloni (colonus), as the dependent peasants were called, may have taken up holdings granted them by a proprietor, or they may have surrendered their own lands to him in return for such protection. In any case, it became a practice for the dependent peasant to swear fealty to a proprietor, thus becoming bound to that lord.

The main problem with the coloni was that of preventing them from leaving the land they had agreed to cultivate as tenant farmers. The solution was to legally bind them to their holdings. Accordingly, a legal code established by the Roman emperor Constantine (Constantine I) in 332 demanded labour services to be paid to the lord by the coloni. Although the coloni were legally free, the conditions of fealty required them to cultivate their lord's untenanted lands as well as their leased plot. This not only tied them to their holdings but also made their social status essentially servile, since the exaction of labour services required the landlord's agents to exercise discipline over the coloni. The threat, or the exercise, of this discipline was recognized as one of the clearest signs of a man's personal subjection.

By the 6th century the servi, or serfs, as the servile peasants came to be called, were treated as an inferior element in society. Serfs subsequently became a major class in the small, decentralized polities that characterized most of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the initial reconstitution of feudal monarchies, duchies, and counties in the 12th century.

By the 14th century, economic conditions in western Europe were favourable to the replacement of serfs by a free peasantry. The growth of the power of central and regional governments permitted the enforcement of peasant-landlord contracts without the need for peasant servility, and the final abandonment of labour services on demesnes removed the need for the direct exercise of labour discipline on the peasantry. The drastic population decline in Europe after 1350 as a result of the Black Death left much arable land uncultivated and also created an acute labour shortage, both economically favourable events for the peasantry. And finally, the endemic peasant uprisings in western Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries also forced more favourable terms of peasant tenure. Although the new peasants were not necessarily better off economically than were their servile forebears, they had increased personal liberties and were no longer entirely subject to the will of the lords whose lands they worked.

This favourable evolution was not shared by the peasants of eastern Europe. Peasant conditions there in the 14th century do not seem to have been worse than those of the west, and in some ways they were better, because the colonization of forestlands in eastern Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary had led to the establishment of many free-peasant communities. But a combination of political and economic circumstances reversed these developments. The chief reason was that the wars that devastated eastern Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries tended to increase the power of the nobility at the expense of the central governments. In eastern Germany, Prussia, Poland, and Russia, this development coincided with an increased demand for grain from western Europe. To profit from this demand, nobles and other landlords took back peasant holdings, expanded their own cultivation, and made heavy demands for peasant labour services. Peasant status from eastern Germany to Muscovy consequently deteriorated sharply. Not until the late 18th century were the peasants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire freed from serfdom, thus recovering their freedom of movement and marriage and the right to learn a profession according to personal choice. The serfs of Russia were not given their personal freedom and their own allotments of land until Alexander II's Edict of Emancipation of 1861.

Throughout Chinese history, land-bound peasants were considered freemen in law but depended entirely upon the landowner for subsistence. In this system of serfdom, peasants could be traded, punished without due process of law, and made to pay tribute to the lord with labour. All serfs were freed, however, upon the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Tolstoy, Leo

▪ Russian writer

Introduction

Tolstoy also spelled Tolstoi, Russian in full Lev Nikolayevich, Count (Graf) Tolstoy

born Aug. 28 [Sept. 9, New Style], 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire

died Nov. 7 [Nov. 20], 1910, Astapovo, Ryazan province

Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world's greatest novelists.

Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written. War and Peace in particular seems virtually to define this form for many readers and critics. Among Tolstoy's shorter works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is usually classed among the best examples of the novella. Especially during his last three decades Tolstoy also achieved world renown as a moral and religious teacher. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil had an important influence on Gandhi. Although Tolstoy's religious ideas no longer command the respect they once did, interest in his life and personality has, if anything, increased over the years.

Most readers will agree with the assessment of the 19th-century British poet and critic Matthew Arnold (Arnold, Matthew) that a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life; the 20th-century Russian author Isaak Babel (Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich) commented that, if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Critics of diverse schools have agreed that somehow Tolstoy's works seem to elude all artifice. Most have stressed his ability to observe the smallest changes of consciousness and to record the slightest movements of the body. What another novelist would describe as a single act of consciousness, Tolstoy convincingly breaks down into a series of infinitesimally small steps. According to the English writer Virginia Woolf (Woolf, Virginia), who took for granted that Tolstoy was “the greatest of all novelists,” these observational powers elicited a kind of fear in readers, who “wish to escape from the gaze which Tolstoy fixes on us.” Those who visited Tolstoy as an old man also reported feelings of great discomfort when he appeared to understand their unspoken thoughts. It was commonplace to describe him as godlike in his powers and titanic in his struggles to escape the limitations of the human condition. Some viewed Tolstoy as the embodiment of nature and pure vitality, others saw him as the incarnation of the world's conscience, but for almost all who knew him or read his works, he was not just one of the greatest writers who ever lived but a living symbol of the search for life's meaning.

Early years

The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy was born at the family estate, about 130 miles (210 kilometres) south of Moscow, where he was to live the better part of his life and write his most important works. His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna, née Princess Volkonskaya, died before he was two years old, and his father Nikolay Ilich, Count Tolstoy, followed her in 1837. His grandmother died 11 months later, and then his next guardian, his aunt Aleksandra, in 1841. Tolstoy and his four siblings were then transferred to the care of another aunt in Kazan, in western Russia. Tolstoy remembered a cousin who lived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya (“Aunt Toinette,” as he called her), as the greatest influence on his childhood, and later, as a young man, Tolstoy wrote some of his most touching letters to her. Despite the constant presence of death, Tolstoy remembered his childhood in idyllic terms. His first published work, Detstvo (1852; Childhood), was a fictionalized and nostalgic account of his early years.

Educated at home by tutors, Tolstoy enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1844 as a student of Oriental languages. His poor record soon forced him to transfer to the less demanding law faculty, where he wrote a comparison of the French political philosopher Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws and Catherine II the Great's nakaz (instructions for a law code). Interested in literature and ethics, he was drawn to the works of the English novelists Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens and, especially, to the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques); in place of a cross, he wore a medallion with a portrait of Rousseau. But he spent most of his time trying to be comme il faut (socially correct), drinking, gambling, and engaging in debauchery. After leaving the university in 1847 without a degree, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana, where he planned to educate himself, to manage his estate, and to improve the lot of his serfs. Despite frequent resolutions to change his ways, he continued his loose life during stays in Tula, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. In 1851 he joined his older brother Nikolay, an army officer, in the Caucasus and then entered the army himself. He took part in campaigns against the native Caucasian tribes and, soon after, in the Crimean War (1853–56).

In 1847 Tolstoy began keeping a diary, which became his laboratory for experiments in self-analysis and, later, for his fiction. With some interruptions, Tolstoy kept his diaries throughout his life, and he is therefore one of the most copiously documented writers who ever lived. Reflecting the life he was leading, his first diary begins by confiding that he may have contracted a venereal disease. The early diaries record a fascination with rule-making, as Tolstoy composed rules for diverse aspects of social and moral behaviour. They also record the writer's repeated failure to honour these rules, his attempts to formulate new ones designed to ensure obedience to old ones, and his frequent acts of self-castigation. Tolstoy's later belief that life is too complex and disordered ever to conform to rules or philosophical systems perhaps derives from these futile attempts at self-regulation.

First publications

Concealing his identity, Tolstoy submitted Childhood for publication in Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), a prominent journal edited by the poet Nikolay Nekrasov (Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseyevich). Nekrasov was enthusiastic, and the pseudonymously published work was widely praised. During the next few years Tolstoy published a number of stories based on his experiences in the Caucasus, including “Nabeg” (1853; “The Raid”) and his three sketches about the Siege of Sevastopol (Sevastopol, Siege of) during the Crimean War: “Sevastopol v dekabre mesyatse” (“Sevastopol in December”), “Sevastopol v maye” (“Sevastopol in May”), and “Sevastopol v avguste 1855 goda” (“Sevastopol in August”; all published 1855–56). The first sketch, which deals with the courage of simple soldiers, was praised by the tsar. Written in the second person as if it were a tour guide, this story also demonstrates Tolstoy's keen interest in formal experimentation and his lifelong concern with the morality of observing other people's suffering. The second sketch includes a lengthy passage of a soldier's stream of consciousness (one of the early uses of this device) in the instant before he is killed by a bomb. In the story's famous ending, the author, after commenting that none of his characters are truly heroic, asserts that “the hero of my story—whom I love with all the power of my soul . . . who was, is, and ever will be beautiful—is the truth.” Readers ever since have remarked on Tolstoy's ability to make such “absolute language,” which usually ruins realistic fiction, aesthetically effective.

After the Crimean War Tolstoy resigned from the army and was at first hailed by the literary world of St. Petersburg. But his prickly vanity, his refusal to join any intellectual camp, and his insistence on his complete independence soon earned him the dislike of the radical intelligentsia. He was to remain throughout his life an “archaist,” opposed to prevailing intellectual trends. In 1857 Tolstoy traveled to Paris and returned after having gambled away his money.

After his return to Russia, he decided that his real vocation was pedagogy, and so he organized a school for peasant children on his estate. After touring western Europe to study pedagogical theory and practice, he published 12 issues of a journal, Yasnaya Polyana (1862–63), which included his provocative articles “Progress i opredeleniye obrazovaniya” (“Progress and the Definition of Education”), which denies that history has any underlying laws, and “Komu u kogu uchitsya pisat, krestyanskim rebyatam u nas ili nam u krestyanskikh rebyat?” (“Who Should Learn Writing of Whom: Peasant Children of Us, or We of Peasant Children?”), which reverses the usual answer to the question. Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya) Andreyevna Bers, the daughter of a prominent Moscow physician, in 1862 and soon transferred all his energies to his marriage and the composition of War and Peace. Tolstoy and his wife had 13 children, of whom 10 survived infancy.

Tolstoy's works during the late 1850s and early 1860s experimented with new forms for expressing his moral and philosophical concerns. To Childhood he soon added Otrochestvo (1854; Boyhood) and Yunost (1857; Youth). A number of stories centre on a single semiautobiographical character, Dmitry Nekhlyudov, who later reappeared as the hero of Tolstoy's novel Resurrection. In “Lyutsern” (1857; “Lucerne”), Tolstoy uses the diary form first to relate an incident, then to reflect on its timeless meaning, and finally to reflect on the process of his own reflections. “Tri smerti” (1859; “Three Deaths”) describes the deaths of a noblewoman who cannot face the fact that she is dying, of a peasant who accepts death simply, and, at last, of a tree, whose utterly natural end contrasts with human artifice. Only the author's transcendent consciousness unites these three events.

“Kholstomer” (written 1863; revised and published 1886; “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse”) has become famous for its dramatic use of a favourite Tolstoyan device, “defamiliarization”—that is, the description of familiar social practices from the “naive” perspective of an observer who does not take them for granted. Readers were shocked to discover that the protagonist and principal narrator of “Kholstomer” was an old horse. Like so many of Tolstoy's early works, this story satirizes the artifice and conventionality of human society, a theme that also dominates Tolstoy's novel Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks). The hero of this work, the dissolute and self-centred aristocrat Dmitry Olenin, enlists as a cadet to serve in the Caucasus. Living among the Cossacks, he comes to appreciate a life more in touch with natural and biological rhythms. In the novel's central scene, Olenin, hunting in the woods, senses that every living creature, even a mosquito, “is just such a separate Dmitry Olenin as I am myself.” Recognizing the futility of his past life, he resolves to live entirely for others.

The period of the great novels (1863–77)

Happily married and ensconced with his wife and family at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy reached the height of his creative powers. He devoted the remaining years of the 1860s to writing War and Peace. Then, after an interlude during which he considered writing a novel about Peter I the Great and briefly returned to pedagogy (bringing out reading primers that were widely used), Tolstoy wrote his other great novel, Anna Karenina. These two works share a vision of human experience rooted in an appreciation of everyday life and prosaic virtues.

War and Peace

Voyna i mir (1865–69; War and Peace) contains three kinds of material—a historical account of the Napoleonic wars, the biographies of fictional characters, and a set of essays about the philosophy of history. Critics from the 1860s to the present have wondered how these three parts cohere, and many have faulted Tolstoy for including the lengthy essays, but readers continue to respond to them with undiminished enthusiasm.

The work's historical portions narrate the campaign of 1805 leading to Napoleon (Napoleon I)'s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz (Austerlitz, Battle of), a period of peace, and Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. Contrary to generally accepted views, Tolstoy portrays Napoleon as an ineffective, egomaniacal buffoon, Tsar Alexander I as a phrasemaker obsessed with how historians will describe him, and the Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov (previously disparaged) as a patient old man who understands the limitations of human will and planning. Particularly noteworthy are the novel's battle scenes, which show combat as sheer chaos. Generals may imagine they can “anticipate all contingencies,” but battle is really the result of “a hundred million diverse chances” decided on the moment by unforeseeable circumstances. In war as in life, no system or model can come close to accounting for the infinite complexity of human behaviour.

Among the book's fictional characters, the reader's attention is first focused on Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, a proud man who has come to despise everything fake, shallow, or merely conventional. Recognizing the artifice of high society, he joins the army to achieve glory, which he regards as truly meaningful. Badly wounded at Austerlitz, he comes to see glory and Napoleon as no less petty than the salons of St. Petersburg. As the novel progresses, Prince Andrey repeatedly discovers the emptiness of the activities to which he has devoted himself. Tolstoy's description of his death in 1812 is usually regarded as one of the most effective scenes in Russian literature.

The novel's other hero, the bumbling and sincere Pierre Bezukhov, oscillates between belief in some philosophical system promising to resolve all questions and a relativism so total as to leave him in apathetic despair. He at last discovers the Tolstoyan truth that wisdom is to be found not in systems but in the ordinary processes of daily life, especially in his marriage to the novel's most memorable heroine, Natasha. When the book stops—it does not really end but just breaks off—Pierre seems to be forgetting this lesson in his enthusiasm for a new utopian plan.

In accord with Tolstoy's idea that prosaic, everyday activities make a life good or bad, the book's truly wise characters are not its intellectuals but a simple, decent soldier, Natasha's brother Nikolay, and a generous pious woman, Andrey's sister Marya. Their marriage symbolizes the novel's central prosaic values.

The essays in War and Peace, which begin in the second half of the book, satirize all attempts to formulate general laws of history (history, philosophy of) and reject the ill-considered assumptions supporting all historical narratives. In Tolstoy's view, history, like battle, is essentially the product of contingency, has no direction, and fits no pattern. The causes of historical events are infinitely varied and forever unknowable, and so historical writing, which claims to explain the past, necessarily falsifies it. The shape of historical narratives reflects not the actual course of events but the essentially literary criteria established by earlier historical narratives.

According to Tolstoy's essays, historians also make a number of other closely connected errors. They presume that history is shaped by the plans and ideas of great men—whether generals or political leaders or intellectuals like themselves—and that its direction is determined at dramatic moments leading to major decisions. In fact, however, history is made by the sum total of an infinite number of small decisions taken by ordinary people, whose actions are too unremarkable to be documented. As Tolstoy explains, to presume that grand events make history is like concluding from a view of a distant region where only treetops are visible that the region contains nothing but trees. Therefore Tolstoy's novel gives its readers countless examples of small incidents that each exert a tiny influence—which is one reason that War and Peace is so long. Tolstoy's belief in the efficacy of the ordinary and the futility of system-building set him in opposition to the thinkers of his day. It remains one of the most controversial aspects of his philosophy.

Anna Karenina

In Anna Karenina (1875–77) Tolstoy applied these ideas to family life. The novel's first sentence, which indicates its concern with the domestic, is perhaps Tolstoy's most famous: “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina interweaves the stories of three families, the Oblonskys, the Karenins, and the Levins.

The novel begins at the Oblonskys, where the long-suffering wife Dolly has discovered the infidelity of her genial and sybaritic husband Stiva. In her kindness, care for her family, and concern for everyday life, Dolly stands as the novel's moral compass. By contrast, Stiva, though never wishing ill, wastes resources, neglects his family, and regards pleasure as the purpose of life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that evil, no less than good, ultimately derives from the small moral choices human beings make moment by moment.

Stiva's sister Anna begins the novel as the faithful wife of the stiff, unromantic, but otherwise decent government minister Aleksey Karenin and the mother of a young boy, Seryozha. But Anna, who imagines herself the heroine of a romantic novel, allows herself to fall in love with an officer, Aleksey Vronsky. Schooling herself to see only the worst in her husband, she eventually leaves him and her son to live with Vronsky. Throughout the novel, Tolstoy indicates that the romantic idea of love, which most people identify with love itself, is entirely incompatible with the superior kind of love, the intimate love of good families. As the novel progresses, Anna, who suffers pangs of conscience for abandoning her husband and child, develops a habit of lying to herself until she reaches a state of near madness and total separation from reality. She at last commits suicide by throwing herself under a train. The realization that she may have been thinking about life incorrectly comes to her only when she is lying on the track, and it is too late to save herself.

The third story concerns Dolly's sister Kitty, who first imagines she loves Vronsky but then recognizes that real love is the intimate feeling she has for her family's old friend, Konstantin Levin. Their story focuses on courtship, marriage, and the ordinary incidents of family life, which, in spite of many difficulties, shape real happiness and a meaningful existence. Throughout the novel, Levin is tormented by philosophical questions about the meaning of life in the face of death. Although these questions are never answered, they vanish when Levin begins to live correctly by devoting himself to his family and to daily work. Like his creator Tolstoy, Levin regards the systems of intellectuals as spurious and as incapable of embracing life's complexity.

Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina advance the idea that ethics can never be a matter of timeless rules applied to particular situations. Rather, ethics depends on a sensitivity, developed over a lifetime, to particular people and specific situations. Tolstoy's preference for particularities over abstractions is often described as the hallmark of his thought.

Conversion and religious beliefs

Upon completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy fell into a profound state of existential despair, which he describes in his Ispoved (1884; My Confession). All activity seemed utterly pointless in the face of death, and Tolstoy, impressed by the faith of the common people, turned to religion. Drawn at first to the Russian Orthodox church into which he had been born, he rapidly decided that it, and all other Christian churches, were corrupt institutions that had thoroughly falsified true Christianity. Having discovered what he believed to be Christ's message and having overcome his paralyzing fear of death, Tolstoy devoted the rest of his life to developing and propagating his new faith. He was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901.

In the early 1880s he wrote three closely related works, Issledovaniye dogmaticheskogo bogosloviya (written 1880; An Examination of Dogmatic Theology), Soyedineniye i perevod chetyrokh yevangeliy (written 1881; Union and Translation of the Four Gospels), and V chyom moya vera? (written 1884; What I Believe); he later added Tsarstvo bozhiye vnutri vas (1893; The Kingdom of God Is Within You) and many other essays and tracts. In brief, Tolstoy rejected all the sacraments, all miracles, the Holy Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and many other tenets of traditional religion, all of which he regarded as obfuscations of the true Christian message contained, especially, in the Sermon on the Mount. He rejected the Old Testament and much of the New, which is why, having studied Greek, he composed his own “corrected” version of the Gospels. For Tolstoy, “the man Jesus,” as he called him, was not the son of God but only a wise man who had arrived at a true account of life. Tolstoy's rejection of religious ritual contrasts markedly with his attitude in Anna Karenina, where religion is viewed as a matter not of dogma but of traditional forms of daily life.

Stated positively, the Christianity of Tolstoy's last decades stressed five tenets: be not angry, do not lust, do not take oaths, do not resist evil, and love your enemies. Nonresistance to evil, the doctrine that inspired Gandhi, meant not that evil must be accepted but only that it cannot be fought with evil means, especially violence. Thus Tolstoy became a pacifist. Because governments rely on the threat of violence to enforce their laws, Tolstoy also became a kind of anarchist (anarchism). He enjoined his followers not only to refuse military service but also to abstain from voting or from having recourse to the courts. He therefore had to go through considerable inner conflict when it came time to make his will or to use royalties secured by copyright even for good works. In general, it may be said that Tolstoy was well aware that he did not succeed in living according to his teachings.

Tolstoy based the prescription against oaths (including promises) on an idea adapted from his early work: the impossibility of knowing the future and therefore the danger of binding oneself in advance. The commandment against lust eventually led him to propose (in his afterword to Kreytserova sonata [1891; The Kreutzer Sonata]), a dark novella about a man who murders his wife) total abstinence as an ideal. His wife, already concerned about their strained relations, objected. In defending his most extreme ideas, Tolstoy compared Christianity to a lamp that is not stationary but is carried along by human beings; it lights up ever new moral realms and reveals ever higher ideals as mankind progresses spiritually.

Fiction after 1880

Tolstoy's fiction after Anna Karenina may be divided into two groups. He wrote a number of moral tales for common people, including “Gde lyubov, tam i bog” (written 1885; “Where Love Is, God Is”), “Chem lyudi zhivy” (written 1882; “What People Live By”), and “Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno” (written 1885; “How Much Land Does a Man Need”), a story that the Irish novelist James Joyce rather extravagantly praised as “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” For educated people, Tolstoy wrote fiction that was both realistic and highly didactic. Some of these works succeed brilliantly, especially Smert Ivana Ilicha (written 1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyich), a novella describing a man's gradual realization that he is dying and that his life has been wasted on trivialities. Otets Sergy (written 1898; Father Sergius), which may be taken as Tolstoy's self-critique, tells the story of a proud man who wants to become a saint but discovers that sainthood cannot be consciously sought. Regarded as a great holy man, Sergius comes to realize that his reputation is groundless; warned by a dream, he escapes incognito to seek out a simple and decent woman whom he had known as a child. At last he learns that not he but she is the saint, that sainthood cannot be achieved by imitating a model, and that true saints are ordinary people unaware of their own prosaic goodness. This story therefore seems to criticize the ideas Tolstoy espoused after his conversion from the perspective of his earlier great novels.

In 1899 Tolstoy published his third long novel, Voskreseniye (Resurrection); he used the royalties to pay for the transportation of a persecuted religious sect, the Dukhobors, to Canada. The novel's hero, the idle aristocrat Dmitry Nekhlyudov, finds himself on a jury where he recognizes the defendant, the prostitute Katyusha Maslova, as a woman whom he once had seduced, thus precipitating her life of crime. After she is condemned to imprisonment in Siberia, he decides to follow her and, if she will agree, to marry her. In the novel's most remarkable exchange, she reproaches him for his hypocrisy: once you got your pleasure from me, and now you want to get your salvation from me, she tells him. She refuses to marry him, but, as the novel ends, Nekhlyudov achieves spiritual awakening when he at last understands Tolstoyan truths, especially the futility of judging others. The novel's most celebrated sections satirize the church and the justice system, but the work is generally regarded as markedly inferior to War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy's conversion led him to write a treatise and several essays on art. Sometimes he expressed in more extreme form ideas he had always held (such as his dislike for imitation of fashionable schools), but at other times he endorsed ideas that were incompatible with his own earlier novels, which he rejected. In Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1898; What Is Art?) he argued that true art requires a sensitive appreciation of a particular experience, a highly specific feeling that is communicated to the reader not by propositions but by “infection.” In Tolstoy's view, most celebrated works of high art derive from no real experience but rather from clever imitation of existing art. They are therefore “counterfeit” works that are not really art at all. Tolstoy further divides true art into good and bad, depending on the moral sensibility with which a given work infects its audience. Condemning most acknowledged masterpieces, including Shakespeare's plays as well as his own great novels, as either counterfeit or bad, Tolstoy singled out for praise the biblical story of Joseph and, among Russian works, Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead and some stories by his young friend Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton). He was cool to Chekhov's drama, however, and, in a celebrated witticism, once told Chekhov that his plays were even worse than Shakespeare's.

Tolstoy's late works also include a satiric drama, Zhivoy trup (written 1900; The Living Corpse), and a harrowing play about peasant life, Vlast tmy (written 1886; The Power of Darkness). After his death, a number of unpublished works came to light, most notably the novella Khadji-Murat (1904; Hadji-Murad), a brilliant narrative about the Caucasus reminiscent of Tolstoy's earliest fiction.

Last years

With the notable exception of his daughter Aleksandra, whom he made his heir, Tolstoy's family remained aloof from or hostile to his teachings. His wife especially resented the constant presence of disciples, led by the dogmatic V.G. Chertkov, at Yasnaya Polyana. Their once happy life had turned into one of the most famous bad marriages in literary history. The story of his dogmatism and her penchant for scenes has excited numerous biographers to take one side or the other. Because both kept diaries, and indeed exchanged and commented on each other's diaries, their quarrels are almost too well documented.

Tormented by his domestic situation and by the contradiction between his life and his principles, in 1910 Tolstoy at last escaped incognito from Yasnaya Polyana, accompanied by Aleksandra and his doctor. In spite of his stealth and desire for privacy, the international press was soon able to report on his movements. Within a few days, he contracted pneumonia and died of heart failure at the railroad station of Astapovo.

Assessment

In contrast to other psychological writers, such as Dostoyevsky, who specialized in unconscious processes, Tolstoy described conscious mental life with unparalleled mastery. His name has become synonymous with an appreciation of contingency and of the value of everyday activity. Oscillating between skepticism and dogmatism, Tolstoy explored the most diverse approaches to human experience. Above all, his greatest works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, endure as the summit of realist fiction.

Gary Saul Morson

Additional Reading

Biographies and recollections of Tolstoy

The best portrait of Tolstoy the person is Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nicolaevich Tolstoy (1920, reprinted 1977; originally published in Russian, 1919). There are several biographies of Tolstoy. Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy, 2 vol. (1908–10, reissued 2 vol. in 1, 1987), is a highly detailed account, written by a friend sympathetic to Tolstoy's teachings. Ernest J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (1946, reissued in 2 vol., 1960), is useful for its generous selection of intriguing quotations concerning Tolstoy's life, though it is weak on Tolstoy's works. Henri Troyat, Tolstoy (1967, reprinted 1980; originally published in French, 1965), captures the drama of Tolstoy's life; it is marred, however, by the use of autobiographical fiction as if it were nonfictional documents. Because Troyat is skeptical of Tolstoy's religious teachings, his biography is a useful counterpoint to Maude's. A whimsical biography by a prominent Russian writer and critic is Victor Shklovsky (viktor Shklovskii), Lev Tolstoy (1978; originally published in Russian, 1963). Also of interest is A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy (1988). N.N. Gusev, Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva L'va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo, 2 vol. (1958–60), is a chronology of facts.Informative works on Tolstoy's wife are The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, trans. by Cathy Porter (1985); and S.A. Tolstaia, Autobiography of Countess Tolstoy, trans. from Russian by S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (also published as The Autobiography of Countess Sophie Tolstoi, 1922). Accounts of the Tolstoy's marriage are Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy (1960); Anne Edwards, Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy (1981); and Louise Smoluchowski, Lev and Sonya: The Story of the Tolstoy Marriage (1987). Alexandra Tolstoy, Tolstoy: A Life of My Father (1953, reissued 1975; originally published in Russian, 2 vol., 1953), presents another view.

Criticism

A number of anthologies include Russian and Western criticism spanning the period from Tolstoy's time to the present. Especially useful are Henry Gifford (ed.), Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology (1971); A.V. Knowles (ed.), Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage (1978); and Edward Wasiolek (ed.), Critical Essays on Tolstoy (1986). Other collections of historical criticism are Donald Davie (ed.), Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (1965); Harold Bloom (ed.), Leo Tolstoy (1986); and Ralph E. Matlaw (ed.), Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967). Collections of recent criticism include Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (1978); and Hugh McLean (ed.), In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy (1989). A number of excellent works of Russian criticism are available in translation—e.g., Konstantin Leontiev, “The Novels of Count L.N. Tolstoy: Analysis, Style, and Atmosphere—A Critical Study,” in Spencer E. Roberts (ed. and trans.), Essays in Russian Literature: The Conservative View (1968), pp. 225–356; and Dmitri Merejkowski (Dmitry S. Merezhkovsky), Tolstoi As Man and Artist (1902, reprinted 1970; originally published in Russian, 1901). Boris Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoi (1972; originally published in Russian, 1922), Tolstoi in the Sixties (1982; originally published in Russian, 1931), and Tolstoi in the Seventies (1982; originally published in Russian, 1960), are three works by a writer who is, by common consent, the greatest Tolstoy critic, although many disagree with his preference for purely formal explanations.General overviews of Tolstoy's works may be found in George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (1959, reprinted 1985), a lively study; Edward Wasiolek, Tolstoy's Major Fiction (1978); R.F. Christian, Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (1969); and John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (1966, reissued 1988). An influential view of Tolstoy as a lifelong religious thinker is Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (1986).Studies on War and Peace include Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (1953, reprinted 1993); R.F. Christian, Tolstoy's “War and Peace” (1962); Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace” (1987); and the essays in the Norton critical edition of the novel cited above. On Anna Karenina, the essays in the Norton critical edition, also cited above, are helpful, especially the piece by Barbara Hardy, “Form and Freedom: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,” pp. 877–899. Tolstoy's Short Fiction, ed. and trans. by Michael R. Katz (1991), a Norton critical edition, contains an excellent selection of criticism.Tolstoy's views of art are outlined in the brief work by George Gibian, Tolstoj and Shakespeare (1957, reprinted 1974); and Rimvydas Šilbajoris, Tolstoy's Aesthetics and His Art (1991). Tolstoy and sexuality are dealt with in Peter Ulf Møller, Postlude to The Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the 1890s (1988; originally published in Danish, 1983). Much fine material appears in Tolstoy Studies Journal (annual).Gary Saul Morson