Russian literature. A short introduction

Yet the creepy Yudushka Golovlyov in the first novel and the stentorian Mayor Ugryum-Burcheev in the second were more than simply vehicles for Saltykov’s ideological points. It was literary critics, rather than authors, who relentlessly classified characters in terms of their supposed expression of contemporary ills, effacing the differences between Evgeny Onegin, Pechorin, and Andrey Bolkonsky so they could be rounded up into a shorn herd of ‘superfluous men’. In similar vein, Nikolay Dobrolyubov’s essay on Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, ‘What is Oblomovitis?’, presented the book as a parable about idleness versus industriousness, ignoring the fact that the superlatively indolent and gluttonous Oblomov had stimulated his creator’s fancy as the book’s positive hero, self-righteous Stolz, had not.

For writers, as opposed to commentators, there was always a tension between ideological and imaginative aims. The frequent practice among writers of composing prefaces, afterwords, and commentaries upon their own literary texts was a manifestation of the ‘intergeneric’ character of Russian literature, its desire to bridge the gap between fiction and non-fiction (note the pasting of real documents into Tolstoy’s War and Peace). But it also pointed to an awareness that literary convention interfered with the straightforward communication of messages.

A striking instance of the clash between fiction and ideology was Tolstoy’s late story The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). An ‘Afterword’ written by Tolstoy after the book was published endorsed the outrageous case made by the central character, Pozdnyshev: it insisted that absolute celibacy was the only morally acceptable form of human existence. Tolstoy also expressed consternation that readers should have found it so hard to grasp the point of his story. But Pozdnyshev, who was shown in the opening sections of the story itself swarming with nervous tics and feeding his caffeine addiction with glass after glass of the strongest tea, was hardly the best advocate of views that his creator (then energetically recommending abstention from intoxicating substances)