Russian literature. A short introduction

them, an ironic commentator upon folly, a sympathizer in time of grief). Yet even Tatiana remains a symbol rather than a counterfeit of lived reality, a creature of idealism rather than representation. She is as much a manifestation of the creative sensibility as a portrait of a provincial young lady. If her letter to Evgeny, written when awake, is a tissue of quotations from books she has read, her dream of Evgeny surrounded by strange creatures is narrated in the language of Pushkin’s own lyric ballads.

None of this has resonance in, say, the writing of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Chekhov. Pushkin’s characters usually do not have their own voices: they are pegs upon which the fabric of authorial brilliance is hung (the same is true of Gogol’s characters, with the exception of the Mayor in the Government Inspector, who, in his final outburst of rage against the trick that has been played on him, achieves a truly personal eloquence unlike anything else in the play). Pushkin’s acidly detached portrayal of Hermann and Liza allows little space to speech from within the characters: Hermann in particular remains enigmatic because he is always seen from outside. The furthest possible point from this was reached in Dostoevsky’s extraordinary, and by both national and international standards revolutionary, story Notes from Underground, in which we have no point of orientation but the voice of the central character himself, tormenting us with his capricious and contradictory statements from the very first sentence of the novel:

I am a sick man. A bitter and spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver has something wrong with it. But actually I don’t give a stuff about being ill and I’m not even sure what’s wrong with me. I’m not going for treatment and I never have gone for treatment, even though I do respect doctors and medicines. And on top of that, I’m superstitious; superstitious enough, even, to respect medicine. (I’m educated enough not to be superstitious, but I still am superstitious.) No, sir, the reason I don’t go for treatment is out of spite. You probably won’t want to