Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a hug? impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the Western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly commissioned essays by prominent European and North-American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philosophy; the Romantic, Realist, and Modernist traditions; and technique, gender, and theory. In this context the work of Pushkin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, among others, is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading; all quotations are in English. This volume will be invaluable not only for students and scholars but for anyone interested in the Russian novel.
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors - page ix
Editors' preface - xi
Acknowledgments - xvi
Note on transliteration and translation - xvii
Chronology - xviii
1 Introduction - 1
MALCOLM V.JONES
Part 1: The setting 2 The city - 21
ROBERTA. MAGUIRE
3 The countryside - 41
MUCH McLEAN
Part 2: The culture
4 Politics - 63
W. GARETH JONES
5 Satire - 86
LESLEY MILNE
6 Religion - 104
JOSTEIN B0RTNES
7 Psychology and society - 130
ANDREW WACHTEL
8 Philosophy in the nineteenth-century novel - 150
GARY SAUL MORSON
Part 3. The literary tradition 9 The Romantic tradition - 171
SUSANNE FUSSO
10 The Realist tradition - 190
VICTOR TERRAS
11 The Modernist tradition - 210
ROBERT RUSSELL
Part 4: Structures and readings
12 Novelistic technique - 233 ROBERT BELKNAP
13 Gender - 251
BARBARA HELDT
14 Theory - 271
CARYL EMERSON
Guide to further reading - 294
Index - 298
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Robert belknap is Professor of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous articles on Russian literature; his books include The Structure of "The Brothers Karamazov" and The Genesis of ''''The Brothers Karamazov."
(ostein B0RTNES is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Bergen. His books include Visions of Glory: Studies in Early Russian Hagiography.
Caryl. emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is translator and author of several books on Mikhail Bakhtin, on Russian music, and of articles on Russian nineteenth-century prose, philosophical thought, and readings of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Pushkin. She is also General Editor of Studies in Russian Literature and Theory for Northwestern University Press.
Susanne fusso, Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Wesleyan University, is the author of Designing "Dead Souls": An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol, and co-editor with Priscilla Meyer of Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word. She is now writing a study of Dostoevskii's Adolescent.
Barbara heldt is Professor Emerita of Russian, University of British Columbia. She is author of Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, translator of Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life, Kozma Prutkov: The Art of Parody, and author of numerous articles and contributions to symposia on Russian literature.
Malcolm v. jones is Emeritus Professor in Residence at the University of Nottingham. The author of books and articles on Tolstoi, Dostoevskii and other aspects of Russian literature and intellectual history, he is also President of the International Dostoevsky Society and has recently retired as General Editor of Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature.
W. gareth jones is Professor of Russian at the University of Wales, Bangor. His publications include books and articles on aspects of the Russian eighteenth-
century enlightenment, Tolstoi, Chekhov, and other topics from Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.
ROBERT a. maguire is Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian Studies at Columbia University. His books include Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 15120s, Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, and Exploring Gogol. He has also translated widely from Russian and Polish.
HUGH Mclean is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Nikolai Leskov: the Man and his Work and articles on Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, Kushchevskii, Chekhov, Maiakovskii and Zoshchenko.
robin feuer miller is the author of Dostoevsky and "The Idiot": Author, Narrator, and Reader and of "The Brothers Karamazov": Worlds of the Novel, as well as of essays on Russian and comparative literature. She edited Critical Essays on Dostoevsky and co-edited Kathryn Feuer's Tolstoy and the Genesis of "War and Peace." She is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University.
LESLEY Milne is Reader in Modern Russian Literature at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of books and articles on twentieth-century Russian satire. Her most recent books are Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography and an edited volume, Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright.
GARY saul morson is Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University and has written studies of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Bakhtin. Best known for his theories of "prosaics" and "sideshadowing," his most recent book, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, won the René Wellek award.
Robert russell is Professor of Russian at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of books and articles on Valentin Kataev, Russian drama of the 1920s, and other aspects of twentieth-century Russian literature.
victor terras is Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor Emeritus, Brown University, Providence, R.I. A native of Estonia, he immigrated to the United States in 1952, where he resumed his academic career, interrupted by the war, in 1959. He has taught Russian and Comparative literature at several American universities. He is the author of many books and articles on Russian literature including A History of Russian Literature.
ANDREW wachtel is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University. He is author of books and articles on the representation of childhood in Russian culture, on the writing of history by Russian novelists, on the ballet Petrushka, and on Russian art and music.
EDITORS' PREFACE
The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel is not a history of the Russian novel. It is a collection of essays chiefly about those Russian novels and novelists - emigres excepted - that have made a significant impact on world literature and about the tradition that they represent. It is in this sense that the word "classic" is used, not to confer status, but to acknowledge effect. Forty years ago, Harold Orel, remarking that the importance of the Russian novel in English literary history could hardly be overemphasized, wrote:
Henry James referred to Turgenev as "le premier romancier de son temps"; George Moore, who admired Tolstoy's "solidity of specification," referred to Anna Karenina as the world's greatest novel; Robert Louis Stevenson interpreted Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a room, "a house of life," into which a reader could enter, and be "tortured and purified"; Galsworthy sought "spiritual truth" in the writings of Turgenev and Tolstoy; and Arnold Bennett compiled a list of the twelve greatest novels in the world, a list on which every item came from the pen of a Russian author.1
Lists varied, but the cult of the Russian novel reached its apogee in England in the years following the First World War. In 1931, by which time he had established himself as one of the most promising young English novelists of his generation, William Gerhardie sketched the stylistic features which, in his view, young writers of his time most admired and strove to cultivate. He included among his exemplars Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Turgenev. Gerhardie was showing off, his judgments more witty than profound. Yet on an impressionistic level the notes that he strikes are instantly recognizable: Pushkin's lyrical power and paganism; Lermontov's elegiac quality combined with his Byronism;
1 Harold Orel, "Victorians and the Russian Novel: A Bibliography," Bulletin of Bibliography (January-April 1954), 61; quoted in George Zytaruk, D. H. Lawrence's Response to Russian Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 36.
Chekhov's miraculous naturalness and consumptive cough; Tolstoi's life-imparting breath conjoined, alas, to his foolishness; Dostoevskii's pathological insight but extravagant suspiciousness; Turgenev's purity in reproducing nature marred by his sentimentalism.2 These are the familiar burdens of the Russian soul, mediated through the great prose works of the nineteenth century, as familiar to us as the strains of Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, James, Twain, Hemingway, Conrad, an inalienable part of the modern literary sensibility and, in the view of many, its crowning achievement. Born in St. Petersburg in 1895, Gerhardie himself has some slight claim to being regarded as a "Russian novelist" and might be suspected of favoritism. Yet, with his polyglot background, he was able to draw inspiration from a wide range of European literature. The significant thing is that, once again, the Russians occupy a dominant place.
By adoption, or perhaps by absent-mindedness, we recognize the great Russian realist novels as our classics, an integral part of that interactive web of the modern imagination which found one of its most notable expressions in the novel and which prompted D. H. Lawrence to declare (and the world-famous Russian theorist of the novel Mikhail Bakhtin to imply by his choice of subject) that the novel is among the greatest intellectual achievements of the modem mind.3 We think of them, as we do of the works of Tchaikovsky or Kandinskii, as part of our common heritage, yet extending it in ways which eluded our native-born writers. For they are also in some ways strangely alien to us - strangely Russian - and it is perhaps unsurprising that the Russians themselves have made concepts such as "defamiliarization," and the distinction between "one's own word" and "the alien word," central features of their theories of the novel. Russia, and its literature, has always been conscious of being torn between East and West, where "East" has ranged from Constantinople to the Tatar hordes, and "West" has incorporated the whole of Europe and its cultural progeny.
Before exploring that thought further, it is worth pausing to raise a further question prompted by Gerhardie's list: what Russian names would an anglophone novelist of the 1990s wish to add to it and what would be his or her comments on them? This is a quite difficult question. In 1834, the Russian critic Vissarion Belinskii concluded that there was no such thing as Russian literature, only a few isolated peaks of achievement by outstanding individuals. That might seem to be the common judgment on the Soviet
2 William Gerhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot (London: Robin Clark, 1990; first published 1931). PP- 164-65.
3 Zytaruk, D. H. Lawrence's Response, p. 74.
novel some 160 years later. In Cancer Ward Solzhenitsyn's narrator says of one of his characters that he was rather frightened at the thought of how many writers there were. In the last century there had only been about ten, all of them great. In this century there were thousands; you only had to change a letter in one of their names and you had a new writer. There was Safronov and there was Safonov, and more than one Safonov apparently. And was there only one Safronov? No one could possibly have time to read all their books, and when you did read one, you might just as well not have done. Completely unknown writers floated to the surface, won Stalin prizes, then sank without trace.4 Solzhenitsyn's character is, of course, caricaturing the achievements of the Soviet novel, which are greater than he would allow. But, searching his or her mind for familiar names, our contemporary writer would probably begin by reciting the same ones as Orel or Gerhardie, the "ten" great novelists of the last century. Then, depending on his or her knowledge of the twentieth-century Russian literary scene, a number of others would tumble out: Solzhenitsyn for certain, and then perhaps Belyi, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Bulgakov . . . The cognoscenti might add Zamiatin or Pilniak, Olesha or Platonov. And those with an even more intimate knowledge of the tradition would no doubt wonder whether they should include Karolina Pavlova, Goncharov, Aksakov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leskov, Gorky, Sologub, Bunin, Fedin, Leonov, Aleksei Tolstoi, and more recent writers such as Vasilii Grossman, Tendriakov, Trifonov, Bitov, Voinovich, Petrushevskaia, Tatiana Tolstaia, Rasputin, Erofeev, Aksenov or Zinoviev, who have been quite extensively published and written about in the West. But there is an important difference. The Russian writers in Gerhardie's list repaid their debt to Western literature a hundredfold. They inspired both admiration and imitation across the globe. Those in our supplementary list, while having undoubted claims to the attention of the well-read reader of our time, and in the cases of Bunin (1933), Pasternak (1958), Sholokhov (1965), and Solzhenitsyn (1970) even attracting Nobel Prizes, have not significantly fed back into the Western literary tradition and seem unlikely ever to do so. The two exceptions are perhaps Belyi, whose novel Petersburg has been much admired as a modernist classic, and Bulgakov, whose influence Salman Rushdie has openly and gladly acknowledged.5 The great mass of Soviet novelists, even the good ones, seem unlikely ever to achieve ongoing international acclaim, let alone classic status.
4 A. Solzhenitsyn, Rakovyi korpus (Paris: YMCA Press, 1968), p. no.
5 See Arnold McMillin, "The Devil of a Similarity: The Satanic Verses and Master i Margarita," in Lesley Milne (éd.), Bulgakov, the Novelist-Playwright (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 2.32…
In Belinskii's time, the problem was to escape the thrall of Western European literature and establish an "organic" tradition on a comparable or superior level, which Russia could call its own. This it did, it is commonly claimed, through the dual heritage of Pushkin and Gogol, establishing, as Robert Belknap shows in his essay, a new conception of narrative technique, resulting in what Henry James called "baggy monsters" and "fluid puddings," but which later readers came to regard as a key discovery of the Russian novel,6 which has spiralled back into Western literature in the modernist period. Caryl Emerson, in her essay, shows how the Russians themselves have theorized this achievement.
In the twentieth century, at least from the late 1920s to the post-war period with its succession of thaws and freezes, Russian literature, prolific though it was, would seem to have lain under a curse, from which only a few outstanding individuals contrived a heroic escape, and often enough by a reverse trajectory, through achieving recognition, though not imitation, in the West. This book does not radically challenge this thesis, though it does demonstrate that the soil in which these outstanding writers grew continued to be fertilized by the on-going Russian literary tradition, a tradition which is now in the 1990s showing signs of a new flowering, enriched perhaps by a period of enforced dormancy.
Contributors to this book were asked to write on their particular subjects with an eye to a list of writers whose claim to the status of "classics" is widely agreed, but with the freedom to vary names in the list in deference to the demands of their topic. They were also advised that the essays were not to be conceived as extended encyclopedia articles but would, we hoped, offer new, even idiosyncratic, insights into the subject, informed, where relevant, by recent political and cultural developments. The extent to which we have succeeded is for others to judge. Of course, the strategy, the topics and the list (the very idea of which echoes the unfashionable idea of a literary canon) are all open to debate. But this is a risk which we have chosen to take. We hope that the resulting essays will be of interest to undergraduate, graduate and general readers wishing to discover the common ground between the Russian and the Western novel as well as the characteristic features which Russia has brought into the tradition. They will have to look elsewhere for encyclopedic coverage and for strict consistency of approach. The volume opens with essays by Robert Maguire and Hugh McLean on the twin themes of the city and the countryside, thereby setting out the unique landscape of the Russian novel. The second
6 See Caryl Emerson's essay in this book and Donald Fanger, "On the Russianness of the Russian nineteenth-century novel," in Theofanis George Stavrou (éd.), Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 40-56.
section addresses specific cultural themes with which the Russian novel is widely associated: the often baleful influence of politics (W. Gareth Jones), the tradition of satire which was in many respects a response to it (Lesley Milne), the religious tradition of Russian Orthodoxy (Jostein Bortnes), the relationship of the Russian novel's famed psychological depths to the social setting (Andrew Wachtel), and the philosophical dimension established by the three nineteenth-century giants (Gary Saul Morson). In the third section, Susanne Fusso explores the contribution of the Romantic tradition to the development of the Russian novel while Victor Terras seeks to define the sources and nature of Russian Realism. Robert Russell examines the emergence in the early part of the twentieth century of the Modernist tradition. Finally, in part four, Robert Belknap discusses the peculiar features which characterize the Russian plot and Barbara Heldt asks about the effects on women's writing of a novelistic tradition which was the exclusive preserve of powerful male writers. The last essay, by Caryl Emerson, both gives an overview and critique of Russian theories of the novel and, by implication, furnishes a variety of possible solutions to the problems raised in this introduction and in the essays which follow.
Malcolm V. Jones Robin Feuer Miller
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to express their appreciation to all the contributors, not least for their patience and cooperation in the face of an editorial policy which continued to evolve in matters of detail as the essays came in, and also to Drs. Kate Brett and Linda Bree at the Cambridge University Press for their unflagging support as the agreed deadline repeatedly gave way to external pressures. Finally the editors wish to express their gratitude to Melanie Cumpston, formerly of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham, for her help in preparing the typescript for submission to the Press, and to Hazel Brooks of Cambridge University Press for her unfailingly sympathetic and efficient copy-editing.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION
The Library of Congress system of transliteration from Cyrillic has been used. This includes proper names, though hard and soft signs (which are included in the notes) have been omitted in names in the text of the book. The only exceptions to this rule are names which have become so familiar in English in another form that they would be unrecognizable if this policy were strictly adhered to (e.g. Tchaikovsky, Herzen) and the names of tsars (Alexander I). Like any other policy attempting a compromise between user-friendliness and faithfulness to a particular system, this inevitably leads to some inconsistencies (for example Herzen appears also as Gertsen where works by him in Russian are referred to in the notes) but the editors thought that this would not mislead anyone who is able to read Russian and would not interest anyone who is not.
All translations of quoted extracts are by the appropriate chapter author unless otherwise specified.
CHRONOLOGY
1703 Peter the Great founds St. Petersburg
1709 Victory over Sweden at Poltava
1725-27 Reign of Catherine I
1725 Death of Peter the Great
1727-30 Reign of Peter II
1730-40 Reign of Anna
1740-41 Reign of Ivan VI
1741-61 Reign of Elizabeth
1755 Foundation of the University of Moscow
1761-62 Reign of Peter III
1762-96 Reign of Catherine II
1763 F. A. Emin's novels Miramond and Thermistocles
1766 F. A. Emin's epistolary novel Letters of Ernest and Doravra
1770 M. D. Chulkov's The Comely Cook
Death of F.A. Emin (173 5 .'-70)
1773~75 The Pugachev Revolt (Cossack and peasant uprising led by Emelian Pugachev)
1790 A. N. Radishchev's Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
1792 Death of M. D. Chulkov (1743?-92)
N. M. Karamzin's "Poor Liza"
1796-1801 Reign of Paul I
1801-25 Reign of Alexander I
i8o2 Death of A. N. Radishchev (1749-1802)
1807 Treaty of Tilsit (with Napoleon)
1812 Napoleon invades Russia and enters Moscow
1814 Alexander I enters Paris with his troops after defeat of
Napoleon V. T. Narezhnyi's A Russian Gil Blas
1818-26 N. M. Karamzin's History of the Russian State (12 vols.)
1822 A. S. Pushkin's poem "The Prisoner of the Caucasus"
1823-31 A. S. Pushkin's Evgenyi Onegin; published in full, 1833
1824 A. S. Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies" 1825-55 Reign of Nicholas I
1825 Death of V. T. Narezhnyi (1780-1825) Decembrist Revolt (led by Guards officers seeking to establish a constitution)
1826 Death of N.M. Karamzin (1766-1826)
1829 F. V. Bulgarin's Ivan Vyzhigin
1830 A. S. Pushkin's Tales ofBelkin 1832-34 M. lu. Lermontov's Vadim
1832 N. V. Gogol's "A Bewitched Place"
1833 A. S. Pushkin's The Queen of Spades
A. S. Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman"
1834-36 A. S. Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter
1834 V. G. Belinskii's ground-breaking critical articles Literary Reveries, arguing that Russia has no national literary tradition
1835 N. V. Gogol's Taras Bulba, "Nevskii Prospekt" and "Notes of a Madman"
1836 P. la. Chaadaev's First Philosophical Letter arguing that Russia has made no contribution to universal history N. V. Gogol's "The Nose"
1837 Death of A. S. Pushkin (1799-1837) 1840-41 M. lu. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time
1841 Death of M. lu. Lermontov
1842 N. V. Gogol's Dead Souls and The Overcoat 1843-59 ?. ?. Pavlova's Quadrille
1846 D. V. Grigorovich's The Village
F. M. Dostoevskii's Poor Folk and The Double
1847 D. V. Grigorovich's Anton Goremyka
N. V. Gogol's Selected Passages from Correspondence with
Friends
V. G. Belinskii's Letter to Gogol circulated
I. A. Goncharov's A Common Story
1848 ?. ?. Pavlova's A Double Life Death of V. G. Belinskii (1811-48) F. M. Dostoevskii's "White Nights"
1849 I. A. Goncharov's "Oblomov's Dream"
1852 Death of N. V. Gogol (1809-52)
L. N. Tolstoi's Childhood I. S. Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches
1853-56 Crimean War (between Russia and the combined forces of Britain, France, and Piedmont)
1854 L. N. Tolstoi's Adolescence 1855-81 Reign of Alexander II
J855-57 I- A. Goncharov's The Frigate Pallada
1855 N. G. Chernyshevskii's treatise on The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality
1856 S. T. Aksakov's A Family Chronicle and Recollections I. S. Turgenev's Rudin
1857 L. N. Tolstoi's Youth
1858 S. T. Aksakov's Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov A. F. Pisemskii's A Thousand Souls
1859 LA. Goncharov's Oblomov
I. S. Turgenev's A Nest of Gentlefolk
Death of S. T. Aksakov (1791-1859)
Death of F. V. Bulgarin (1789-1859)
L. N. Tolstoi's Family Happiness
N. A. Dobroliubov's essay "What is Oblomovitis?"
1860 I. S. Turgenev's First Love
I. S. Turgenev's On the Eve
1861 The Emancipation of the Serfs, followed by a series of reforms in the early 1860s
Death of N. A. Dobroliubov (1836-61)
F. M. Dostoevskii's The Insulted and Injured
A. F. Pisemskii's An Old Man's Sin
1862 I. S. Turgenev's Fathers and Children
1863 N. G. Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done? L. N. Tolstoi's The Cossacks
F. M. Dostoevskii's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions A. F. Pisemskii's The Troubled Sea
1864 V. P. Kliushnikov's Mirage
F. M. Dostoevskii's Notes from Underground N. S. Leskov's No Way Out
1865-69 L. N. Tolstoi's War and Peace
1866 F. M. Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment
1867 I. S. Turgenev's Smoke
1868 F. M. Dostoevskii's The Idiot
1869-79 M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's The History of a Town
1869 I. A. Goncharov's The Ravine
1871-72 F. M. Dostoevskii's The Devils
1872 N. S. Leskov's Cathedral Folk
1873 N. S. Leskov's "The Sealed Angel" and "The Enchanted
Wanderer"
1875-80 M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlev Family
1875 F. M. Dostoevskii's A Raw Youth
N. S. Leskov's "At the End of the World"
1877 L. N. Tolstoi's Anna Karenina
I. S. Turgenev's Virgin Soil
1880 F. M. Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov
1881-94 Reign of Alexander III
18 81 Assassination of Alexander II
Death of F. M. Dostoevskii (1821-81) Death of A. F. Pisemskii (1821-81)
1883 Death of I. S.Turgenev (1818-83)
1887 Execution of Lenin's brother
L. N. Tolstoi's On Life
1889 Death of N. G. Chernyshevskii (1828-89)
Death of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89)
1891 Death of I. A. Goncharov (1812-91 )
1892 Death of V. P. Kliushnikov
1893 Death of ?. ?. Pavlova (1807-93) 1894-1917 Reign of Nicholas II
1895 Death of N. S. Leskov (1831-95)
1896 A. P. Chekhov's play The Seagull 1897-98 L. N. Tolstoi's treatise What is Art?
1897 A. P. Chekhov's "The Peasants"
1898 Foundation of the Marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP)
1899 L. N. Tolstoi's Resurrection
A. P. Chekhov's play The Three Sisters Death of D. V. Grigorovich (1822-99)
1901 A. P. Chekhov's play Uncle Vania
1903 A. P. Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard
Split of the RSDLP into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions (the latter led by Lenin)
1904-05 Russo-Japanese War
1904 Death of A. P. Chekhov (1860-1904)
1905 The abortive 1905 Revolution leads to establishment of the short-lived First Duma (Parliament)
1906 Maksim Gorkii's Mother
1907 F. K. Sologub's The Petty Demon
1908 A. M. Remizov's The Clock A. A. Bogdanov's Red Star Maksim Gorkii's Confession
1910 I. A. Bunin's The Village
Death of L. N. Tolstoi (1828-1910)
1911 I. A. Bunin's Sukhodol
1912 A. A. Bogdanov's Engineer Menni
1913 Maksim Gorkii's Childhood 1914-18 First World War
1915 V. V. Maiakovskii's poem "A Cloud in Trousers"
1916 Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (in book form)
1917 Nicholas II abdicates in February; he is succeeded by a Provisional Government; in October the Bolsheviks seize power
E. I. Zamiatin's "Islanders"
1918-21 Civil War and period of War Communism
1920-21 E. I. Zamiatin's We (published for the first time in Russian in 1952 and in the USSR in 1988)
1920 E. I. Zamiatin's "Mamai"
1921-22 Boris Pilniak's The Naked Year
1921-40 A. N. Tolstoi's A Tour of Hell
1922-23 A. N. Tolstoi's Aelita
1922 Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (revised, shortened edition)
1923 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) formally established
D. A. Furmanov's Chapaev
1924 Death of V. I. Lenin
K. A. Fedin's City and Years
A. S. Serafimovich's The Iron Flood
1925 Beginning of Maksim Gorkii's uncompleted novel The Life of Klim Samgin
M. A. Bulgakov's The White Guard
F. V. Gladkov's Cement
1926 Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry
Death of I. A. Furmanov (1891 -1926)
1927 Death of F. K. Sologub (1863-1927)
A. A. Fadeev's The Rout L. M. Leonov's The Thief lu. K. Olesha's Envy
1928-3 2. Stalin inaugurates the collectivization of agriculture
1928-40 M. A. Sholokhov's The Quiet Don
1928 Death of A. A. Bogdanov (1873-1928) The Twelve Chairs by I. Ilf and E. Petrov
1929 A. P. Platonov's Chevengur
M. M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevskii's Creative Work
1930 Death of V. V. Maiakovskii (1893-1930) A. P. Platonov's Foundation Pit
V. V. Nabokov's The Defense
1931 Boris Pasternak's Safe Conduct
The Golden Calf by I. Ilf and E. Petrov
1932-60 M. A. Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned 1932-34 N. A. Ostrovskii's How the Steel was Tempered
1932 V. P. Kataev's Time Forward!
1934 Promulgation by A. A. Zhdanov of the doctrine of Socialist
Realism at First All-Union Writers' Congress in August Death of Andrei Belyi (1880-1934)
1936-38 The Great Purges
1936 Death of Maksim Gorkii (1868-1936) 1936-37 M. A. Bulgakov's Black Snow
1937 Probable year of death of Boris Pilniak (1894-1937?) Death of E. I. Zamiatin (1884-1937)
1938 V. V. Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading
1940 Death of M. A. Bulgakov (1891-1940) 1941-45 Russia participates in the Second World War 1941-44 Siege of Leningrad
1941 Germany invades the USSR Death of Isaac Babel ( 1894-1941 )
1945 A. A. Fadeev's The Young Guard (inflated Stalin-inspired
version 1951 ) Death of A. N. Tolstoi (1883-1945)
1947-54 "Cold War" between the Soviet bloc and the West
1949 Death of A. S. Serafimovich (1863-1949)
1953 Death of I. V. Stalin
Krushchev elected First Secretary Death of I. A. Bunin (1870-1953) L. M. Leonov's Russian Forest
1956 I. G. Erenburg's The Thaw Death of A. A. Fadeev (1901-56)
1957 Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago Death of A. M. Remizov (1877-1957) Launching of Sputnik I
1958 Death of F. V. Gladkov (1883-1958)
i960 Death of lu. K. Olesha (1899-1960)
Death of Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
1961 Iurii Gagarin is the first to travel in space
196Z Cuban missile crisis
A. I. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1963 M. M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevskii's Poetics (revised edition of 1929 book on Dostoevskii)
A. I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrena's Home"
1964 Fall of Khrushchev; he is succeeded by Brezhnev and Kosygin
1966-67 M. A. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita
1966 F. A. Iskander's The Goatibex Constellation
1967 Death of I. G. Erenburg (1891-1967)
1968 A. I. Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward A. I. Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle
1973_75 A. I. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago
1973 F. A. Iskander's Sandro from Chegem V. Erofeev's Moscow Circles
M. A. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (full, Moscow edition)
1974 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the USSR
1975 Death of M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975)
V. N. Voinovich's The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (published in the USSR in 1988-89)
1976 V. G. Rasputin's Farewell to Matera
A. Zinoviev's Yawning Heights (published in USSR in 1990) lu. V. Trifonov's House on the Embankment
1977 Death of K. A. Fedin ( 1892-1977) Death of V. V. Nabokov (1899-1977)
1978 A. G. Bitov's (1937- ) Pushkin House
1979 V. N. Voinovich's Pretender to the Throne (published in the USSR in 1990)
1982 F. A. Iskander's Rabbits and Boa-Constrictors (published in
the USSR in 1987)
Death of Brezhnev; Iurii Andropov elected as General Secretary
1984 Death of Andropov; Konstantin Chernenko elected as General Secretary
Death of M. A. Sholokhov (1905-84) \ Death of Chernenko; Gorbachev elected General Secretary
1985 Gorbachev and Reagan meet at Geneva
1986 Death of V. P. Kataev (1897-1986)
V. N. Voinovich's Moscow 2042 (published in the USSR in
1990)
Explosion at Chernobyl nuclear reactor
Academician Sakharov released from detention in Gorkii
Policy of glasnost' and perestroika announced at XXVII
Party Congress
1988 Celebration of millennium of Russian Orthodox Church
1990 Yeltsin resigns from Communist Party
1991 Yeltsin elected President of Russia August coup against Gorbachev Abolition of USSR (December)
I
MALCOLM V. JONES
Introduction
What does give the classic Russian novel its power over the imagination? There have been many attempts to define its unique features and to account for its rise to pre-eminence in such unpromising soil. Underlying most analyses is the perception that Russian literature achieved its stature in a dialectic (or dialogue) with Western European literary traditions. Bakhtin has provided a theoretical model for this process in a shift from regarding the Western tradition as "authoritative discourse" to regarding it as "inwardly persuasive discourse"; in other words from a mental attitude which saw Western traditions as providing unsurpassable achievements which could only be imitated or rejected, to one which assimilated them to native Russian experience as part of a process of growth-in-dialogue: a complex dance in which the partners now lightly touch, now embrace and now draw apart, at times melting into a common movement and at times loudly asserting their difference.
The double helix comes unbidden to the modern mind as a model of this process. And that is no doubt one of the major reasons for the extraordinary fascination which the Russian novel has exercised over the Western reader. It is not simply that Russian writers have always had the Western tradition at the back of their minds, and woven it into their own tradition, trying to overcome what Harold Bloom has famously called the anxiety of influence. It is that for the first time Russian literature is reflecting back to Western readers a profounder, broader, more complex and, it often seems, more authentic, view of themselves, a view which puts in question not only Western achievements, but also the Western literary heritage as embedded in the novel itself. To put it more simply, Russian novels force us to ask questions about ourselves, about novels, and more broadly about human discourse, as well as about the physical world they purport to convey.
A key role in this process - characterized by a profound inferiority complex and a countervailing impulse to discover and assert an authentic
national voice - was played in the last century by the Russian intelligentsia, for whom the novel was the primary medium of debate. The intelligentsia was both a channel for the assimilation of Western culture and a vehicle for the affirmation of Russia's own unique experience and values and (potential or presumed) contribution to world civilization. Educated Russians of all social classes were heirs both to Western cultural traditions, which they shared with their European and North American counterparts, and their own cultural and historical roots, which were uniquely theirs and which retained a strong sense of otherness. The novel appeared and achieved respectability in Western Europe just at the right moment to act as a vehicle for this ambitious programme. By the 1830s it had come of age in Russia too. Moreover, a more capacious and appropriate vehicle could hardly have been designed for the purpose. The novel was capable, as Bakhtin has famously argued, of absorbing all other genres. As Russians discovered, no field of contemporary human discourse - except perhaps the strictly technical or scientific - was debarred. Imaginative fiction could be manipulated in all sorts of ways unavailable to more direct forms of discourse and, above all, it was capable of relating, as no other medium could, broad social, political, philosophical and religious questions to the existential experience of the individual through the medium of narrative, thus facilitating entry to these questions at a variety of different levels. Through the evolution of its narrative techniques, the novel had proved capable of engaging the interest of the reader simultaneously at the level of story and, as modern theory has it, at the level of "ideal author".
The great novels of the nineteenth century could be, and often were of course, read simply for entertainment. The majority of readers, unlike the writers, were women and the novels often read aloud en famille. Richard Ware draws our attention to a contemporary account of the reception of Anna Karenina, according to which most readers regarded the novel simply as entertaining and absorbing reading, an opinion held not only by shortsighted aristocrats but even by some contemporary critics.1
Another account recalls that there was neither singing nor laughter on the days when a new issue of Russkii vestnik appeared with a fresh installment of Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov. When all were gathered, the family took their places round the table with a green shaded lamp in the middle, and the reading aloud began. Everyone took turns to read and there was no pause until they reached the final page. Faces alternately turned pale and burned with excitement; the voice of the reader shook. The reading was then followed by detailed discussion of every movement in the souls of the characters and by attempts to guess what would happen next.2 In a delightful essay on War and Peace, Nikolai
Bakhtin (Mikhail Bakhtin's brother) recalls how, like many Russian readers, he had, by dint of reading and rereading, come to know the characters in the novel like real-life friends and acquaintances. Then he confesses that actually he had never read the whole of Tolstoi's great novel from cover to cover. He had just dipped into it again and again.3
But, whatever its primary appeal to the reading public, the significance of the nineteenth-century novel will not be fully grasped unless it is understood that each new volume to appear was part of the ongoing debates in the literary journals, the salons and the private apartments of the intelligentsia. Neither Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1875-78) nor Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80) can be appreciated as phenomena of their time apart from the discussions on marriage and the family inspired by Chernyshevskii's novel What is to be Done? (1863). No more, in a later period, can Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita be wholly appreciated apart from its satire on the Soviet literary scene and, on a broader scale, on the Soviet system itself. The aim of literature was not merely to entertain, to instruct or even to reflect reality. It was to seek "the measure of life" in all its dimensions, together with an understanding (and this was a particular feature of its Russianness) of the limitations of the human mind in attempting to grasp its meaning. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian culture experienced two irresistible imperatives (both exemplified in Pushkin's and Gogol's work): to grasp and represent in imaginative literature the full range of contemporary reality, exemplified in such concepts as the narod (the Russian people), the rodina "motherland"), the vast, primitive, anarchic Russian countryside, the history and the symbolism of her capital; and to understand their place in history. This latter quest sometimes embraced the idea of national historical mission, which at times, for example in Dostoevskii's hands, became messianic. Though most of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia lived and worked in the city, the two capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and experienced all the strains of urban life, they were fully aware of the countryside, populated by the oppressed peasant classes, their lives lived out among the beasts they tended. Yet, some thought these same peasants were possessed of superior spiritual insights, often associated with ancient peasant beliefs and folk traditions, such as those celebrated in the novels of Leskov in the nineteenth century and the works of the "village prose" writers (Belov, Rasputin and others) in the twentieth. The liberal intelligentsia (Turgenev, Aksakov, Tolstoi) were themselves often landowners and experienced the tension between the landowner's love of the rural idyll and guilt at the price others had to pay to preserve its semblance. Increasingly, as the nineteenth century wore on, the countryside was seen not just as the repository of Russia's
spiritual heritage, but also as the setting for a social and moral degeneration in which all classes were caught up. Although overlaid by more recent historical events, two world wars, the Revolution and Civil War, the collectivization programme, the purges and the collapse of the Soviet Union, these dimensions have continued to dominate the Russian experience and its representation in fiction to the present day.
That the idyll of the Russian countryside was deeply flawed struck some (Saltykov-Shchedrin, Bunin) so painfully that it seemed to plunge them into a grotesque, nightmarish gloom. Others (Goncharov, Aksakov) presented it more ambiguously. Turgenev and Tolstoy, perhaps, preserved their love of the Russian countryside best. What all the nineteenth-century novelists seem to be acutely aware of is the ultimate futility and hubris of Russia's repeated attempts to subject the vastness and majesty of nature to the human will, together with the inadequacy of human reason fully to comprehend life's meaning. The theme has its first memorable expression in Pushkin's great poem "The Bronze Horseman"; it is central to Tolstoi's philosophy of history in War and Peace; it underlies Dostoevskii and the long anti-rationalist tradition in Russian thought, the fate of Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Children, the failure of the Bolshevik experiment in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, the collapse of Platonov's anarchic Che-vengur, and the tragic-comic depiction of a Moscow thrown into confusion by a visit from the devil in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
And its source is to be found, like those of many of the other leitmotifs of Russian intellectual and spiritual life, in the uncompromisingly anti-rationalist traditions of the Orthodox Faith, traditions thrown into relief by its anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant stance. In his essay Jostein Bortnes shows the impact of Russian Orthodoxy on those major novels which most strikingly exemplify its influence, but its pervasive effect is very widely evident in Russian culture, in the structuring function of religious myths (for example the Easter myth or the Apocalypse), in the presence of folk religious types (for example the Holy Fool) and artefacts (the icon), as well as in a pervasive Anti-Rationalism and preference for apophatic (negative) theology. Elsewhere, John Garrard4 has reminded us that, for better or for worse, Russia was not a part of the Roman Empire, nor did it experience directly the fruits of the Renaissance; nor was it a part of the Roman Catholic tradition which the Roman Empire adopted and which embraced the Renaissance. This made the grafting on of European culture in the modern period all the more problematic and the attempt all the more fascinating. Even where Anti-Rationalism was not explicitly made a virtue, as with the progressive Westerners, its influence ran very deep, until in the twentieth century, in one of those periodic attempts by Russia's rulers to
seize history and nature by the scruff of the neck, the power of science and technology to overcome all natural obstacles temporarily became Holy Writ and gave rise to a completely new dominant in Russian culture.
It seems momentarily to have escaped Gerhardie's attention that one prominent feature of the Russian novel is its deep moral seriousness, its uncompromising wrestling with seemingly intractable social and political problems no less than with the "accursed questions" of philosophy and religion, questions which, as Tolstoi was aware, professional philosophers often consider to be unanswerable because misconceived and which the great novels of Western Europe address only obliquely, if at all. It is a signal characteristic of the Russian novel that it takes seriously (i.e. as indicative of what is essential in life) aspects of human experience frequently banished to the fringes of the secular European novel, to the extent that they may actually become organizing principles of the narrative, and hence, by implication, of that everyday experience which the narrative seeks to express. Not only does religion sometimes play this organizing role, but so do folklore, the dream, the supernatural, metaphysics, and that peculiarly Russian state of mind which critics call poshlost' ("self-satisfied mediocrity") and which, in Gogol's work, facilitates that strange slippage between the material and the surreal (and/or supernatural) which is his hallmark.
This deep seriousness is in part a consequence of the vastness of Russia and of its searing historical experiences, some self-inflicted, some inflicted by external enemies. It is in part a consequence, according to some, of the passion, the complexity, the broadness of the "Russian soul," combining the spirit of Europe with the spirit of Asia, with a tendency to seek extreme, maximalist solutions to the problems of keeping both individual soul and political body under some sort of control. Undoubtedly it is also in part the consequence of working within the context of an oppressive political order, as Gareth Jones explains. As Alexander Herzen wrote, in his "Open letter to Michelet" (1851), the ghastly consequences that attended the written word in Russia inevitably increased its effectiveness:
The free word is listened to with love and veneration, because in our country, it is uttered only by those who have something to say. The decision to publish one's thoughts is not lightly made when at the foot of every page there looms a gendarme, a troika, a kibitka, and the prospect of Tobolsk or Irkutsk.5
It is as if throughout the history of the Russian novel there was always a third, silent participant in the dialogue, alongside the writer and the reader, the oppressive presence of the Russian state and its apparatus of censorship and repression. Just as in Soviet Russia free conversation on politically sensitive issues was inhibited by fear of being overheard by an agent of the
KGB, so throughout the history of Russian literature the spectre of imprisonment, exile, execution or psychiatric supervision played its role in fashioning what was thought, felt, written and said, and how it was expressed. The frequency with which Russian literature actually deals explicitly with these themes, or some metaphorical equivalent, is therefore hardly surprising. Such a predicament gave rise to ingenious, Aesopian techniques for fooling the authorities, to saying what had to be said metaphorically rather than directly, for cultivating what Bakhtin called "the word with a sideways glance." Most notably it gave rise to the tradition of the satirical novel, to which Lesley Milne's essay is devoted. Of course there were sunny interludes, periods when the censorship was relaxed. But they could never be relied upon to last.
Partly in spite of and partly because of this situation, the imaginative world of the Russian novel seems to stretch out endlessly in space and time and at the same time is capable of focusing on the subtlest movements of the inner world of the individual psyche, from the historical vastness of Tolstoi's War and Peace and Sholokhov's The Quiet Don, to the tense psychological and physical enclosure of a Dostoevskian novel, from the daylight naturalism of Turgenev's Fathers and Children, to the apocalyptic fantasy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, from the unremitting satirical gloom of Shchedrin's The Golovlev Family to the tragic lyricism of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
Each Russian writer mapped out the territory in his own way and although their works certainly echo each other and develop each other's achievements, rarely could the work of one be mistaken for that of any other. There has been much discussion of various categories of "realism" in Russian literature (Critical Realism, Romantic Realism, Fantastic Realism, Revolutionary Realism, Socialist Realism). One could equally well discuss categories of "Russianness" and indeed, though scorn is nowadays often poured on the idea of the "Russian soul," such terms may still focus discussion of similarities and differences.6 The point is that, in spite of their pervasive adherence to the principle of "realism," none of the great Russian novelists was a naive Realist, or even a Naturalist in the French sense. Each of them, as we have noted and as several of the essays demonstrate, sought and discovered organizing principles for their perception of experience in realms beyond the material and the immediate. They all understood the limitations of language in expressing human experience. Some, like Gogol, exploited these for satirical and comic purposes. Others, like Dostoevskii, turned them into a structural principle of their fictional world. As Victor Terras argues, Realism was in some measure a negative conception, a move away from Romanticism.
But it was also a sustained attempt by a series of highly gifted writers of riction to redraw the parameters of human experience, to capture, through their own personal sensibilities, the essence of Russian humanity. This essential Russianness would be recognized by readers in all its splendor and misery and would subsequently stand in for Russia in the minds of generations of foreign admirers and color their perceptions of it. Each novelist absorbed those narrative techniques which the European novel had developed and which suited him best and went on to push those techniques in new directions, sometimes stretching them to their limits and sometimes, as with Gogol or Leskov, importing features of the Russian (or Ukrainian) folk tradition which gave their works new and surprising twists. The traditions of European Romanticism were grist to their mill. The pervasive influence of Rousseau on the widely read Tolstoi is generally conceded. Turgenev drew inspiration from his contacts, literary and personal, with the great French writers of his day, Flaubert, Maupassant, Sand, the Goncourts, Mérimée. Among Dostoevskii's favorite novelists were George Sand, Victor Hugo, Balzac and Dickens (the "Romantic Realists"). He even learnt from the French Gothic novelist Eugène Sue, and from Rousseau.
One aspect of their "realism" is the attention Russian novelists pay to the experience of the everyday {byt as it is called in Russian), the social reality round about. The popularity of the "physiology" ("fiziologiia") and the feuilleton (fel'ton) among the writers of the Natural School, fostered by Belinskii in the 1840s, was an important formative influence, as were the novels of Dickens, Sue and Balzac. This surfaces in Bakhtin's theory of the novel in what Morson and Emerson call his conception of the "prosaic,"7 a theme which Gary Saul Morson takes up in a different context in his contribution to this volume. The feel for the physicality of the experienced world is to be found in all the great Russian prose writers, from Pushkin to Platonov, from Pasternak to Petrushevskaia. It is not, as I have hinted, a naturalistic accumulation of minutiae, but a sense of the telling detail. It is true even of Dostoevskii, whom Merezhkovskii contrasted to Tolstoi as the "seer of the spirit" to the "seer of the flesh". Many of the images we take away from Russian novels are in fact physical details: Akakii Akakievich's overcoat, the smell and the sounds of the Haymarket in Raskolnikov's St. Petersburg, Anna Karenina's unruly little curls, Rusanov's cancer, Zhivago's rowan tree and flickering candles, Pilate's attar of roses. Such examples find parallels in Western realist novels. But in Platonov, whose Chevengur is belatedly becoming recognized as one of the most significant Russian novels of the Soviet period, material reality even takes on metaphysical significance. Thomas Seifrid has written that if Platonov portrays man's
existence as a tragic subordination to corporeality, then the ultimate fear troubling this vision is that nothing but matter truly exists.8
If the material, whether of the town or the countryside, plays a notable part in Russian realism, so too does a characteristic which Marshall Berman has ascribed to "the modernism of underdevelopment," a tendency in one powerful tradition of the Russian novel, represented in both the Gogolian and the Pushkinian lines, to question the reliability of our perceptions and to stand nervously on the threshold of an abyss which opens up as soon as confidence in the solidity of the prosaic world is eroded. Beyond the abyss is a world which seems to be structured by the arbitrariness of the dream rather than the solidity of common sense and reason. It is as if "all that is solid melts into air," Berman tells us, quoting, of all people, Karl Marx. It is the ability of the Russian novel to render the sensation of life in the no man's land between the prosaic, everyday, common-sense world and the world of fantasy, dream, folklore, madness, that is one of its hallmarks. Of course the focus on minute physical detail is as much a feature of the dream life as it is of waking experience, perhaps more so. Those critics who tell us that the Jerusalem sections of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita are more realistic than the Moscow chapters sometimes forget that. This sensation is enhanced for Western readers by the fact that, aside from the deployment of narrative techniques, the subject matter itself hovers on the brink of the familiar and the unfamiliar, "one's own world" and "an alien world."
The Modernism of underdevelopment is closely allied to the tendency in Russian literature which is often called - somewhat misleadingly perhaps -"Fantastic Realism." Ranging from the grotesquerie of Gogol's "The Nose," through the frankly supernatural of a small number of Turgenev's and Chekhov's tales and the diablerie of Bulgakov's novel, but also including Dostoevskii's masterpieces, Fantastic Realism in the Russian tradition places a huge question mark against the reliability of common sense, the healthy, the self-evident, the reasonable, and the rational in human experience, and the ability of logic and science to contain it and plumb its depths. It also raises profound questions about our ability ever to discern the boundaries between a world apparently governed by these principles and the realms of dream, fantasy, the supernatural, poetry, the spirit. It is of course in these respects heir to the Romantic and precursor of the modern and post-modern, of Freud, Kafka and the Existentialists. But it is positivistic realism - all that is solid - that it explicitly takes as its point of departure, and our confidence in it which it seeks subtly, by one means or another, to subvert. There is a degree of play in this. There is also an intense seriousness. How could it be otherwise in a country which was
required for seventy-five years to subscribe to systematic, state-sponsored fantasy; in which science itself was put at the service of ideology, where statistics almost always meant lies, and where the outcome, far from being playful and escapist, was the kind of experience expressed by Solzhenitsyn in his First Circle or Zinoviev in Yawning Heights? Solzhenitsyn's works internalize the principle of institutionalized fantasy and it becomes the structural principle which dominates and distorts the everyday experience of millions of people in his world. The twentieth century, no less than earlier epochs, can furnish many horrific examples of societies being fashioned to accord with systematic fantasies. Perhaps the Russians roresaw this and sensed the danger more clearly than most. If so, it did not prevent them from experiencing it as cruelly as any.
Fantastic Realism, then, which both celebrates the non-rational and warns against the terrifying abyss to which it may be the gateway, turns out to be an obsessive fascination of the Russian imagination. It takes many forms, from the appeal of extreme ideological positions - an appeal experienced no less by Tolstoi than by Fedorov, Dostoevskii, Bakunin or Lenin - to fascination with the folkloric, the demonic and the grotesque -Gogol or Bulgakov - an awareness of being part of powerful, impersonal, irresistible historical processes - Tolstoi again, Sholokhov, Bulgakov - or a sense that the patterns of history and personal experience find their meaning in religious categories, for instance, the motifs of death and resurrection (the Easter myth), of crisis, judgment and vindication (the myth of the Apocalypse).
It is perhaps significant that it was a Russian, Mikhail Bakhtin, who introduced into literary theory the term "chronotope," a term which constantly reminds us of the fourth (temporal) dimension of what traditional criticism was wont to call "setting." In theory, all narrative has its own chronotope, just as it has its own setting. But in practice Bakhtin is particularly interested in a relatively small number of particularly striking or recurrent chronotopes for which he found convenient labels, for example, the chronotopes of the carnival, the provincial town, the salon, biographical time, the road, the threshold, each with its own characteristic space-time coordinates and modes of narrative.
One chronotope which does not figure in Bakhtin, and not at all prominently in writing about him - this may incidentally be a key to the dissatisfaction many have felt with his treatment of Dostoevskii - is the apocalyptic. But given the nature of the Russian historical experience it is not surprising that the apocalyptic tradition should have exercised such a hold on the Russian imagination. David Bethea recently published a book on this subject9 in which he analyzed the way in which the apocalyptic
tradition is handled in Dostoevskii's The Idiot, Belyi's Petersburg, Plato-nov's Cbevengur, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The book is remarkable as much for the idea as for the realization, for it throws into relief a facet of the Russian novelistic tradition, the importance of which, though now obvious, had somehow eluded literary criticism, except when dealing with individual writers.10 In passing, Bethea draws attention to a number of features of this tradition which demonstrate that far from being a minor feature of the Russian imagination, it turns out to be a major organizing principle. For example, he links it with both the revolutionary and the Utopian traditions. The real-life visions of such revolutionary activists as Mikhail Bakunin were imbued with apocalyptic motifs, in which a secular Revolution replaces the Second Coming and an earthly Utopia replaces the "new heaven on earth" to come. As Tolstoi's narrator says in "The Kreutzer Sonata," "According to the doctrine of the Church the world will come to an end, and every scientific doctrine tells us the same thing" (chapter n). The Second Coming and the coming of the Revolution merge in the writings of the Symbolists, most memorably in Blok's poem, The Twelve, where the figure of Jesus appears in the snowstorm to lead the revolutionary band. They merge again in expectations of a glorious life built on completely new lines in which humanity will be free from oppression and conflict, in which the righteous (the proletariat) will be vindicated and the sinners (the bourgeoisie) eternally damned. In Pasternak's novel, all, Marxists and non-Marxists alike, experience a sort of elemental upsurge of energy, interpreted by some in a poetic, Schellingian sense, by others according to the Bolshevik creed. The sense of history moving at breakneck speed towards a final and catastrophic dénouement was foreshadowed in Gogol's image of the troika. With hindsight it is possible to see that Russian history actually was rushing towards such a catastrophe, that those Russian writers who sensed it were right in their intuitions, though in most cases wrong in the way they characterized it. The apocalyptic mode of interpreting history had a long pedigree in Russian culture, linked to the notion that Moscow was the Third Rome and that there would be no fourth, and surfacing even in the thought of such disparate thinkers as Nikolai Berdiaev and Iurii Lotman. The tendency for Russia to define itself by radical breaks and maximalist strategies is all part of the apocalyptic package. What some Western critics have seen as a lack (the failure of Russia to garner the fruits of the Graeco-Roman classical tradition) is seen in this perspective as an irresistible organizing principle of historical experience, by no means unique to Russia, but unusual in its pervasive influence on the shape of narrative fiction.
The phenomenon does not cease with the Revolution. The three post-revolutionary novels selected by Bethea are very different from each other in other ways, but share this apocalyptic structure. Apocalypticism, with its play on symbols, merges into Modernism and it comes as no surprise that it arrives there courtesy of Gogol, Dostoevskii and the Symbolists.
The Symbolist-modernist novel, exemplified by Belyi's Petersburg, and discussed in Robert Russell's essay, foregrounds through its style as well as through its subject-matter the disintegration of the subject. Dostoevskii's narrators had sometimes raised questions about the status of their own narrative and jumped unpredictably between incompatible narrative points of view. The narrator of Petersburg goes further. He cannot resist the temptation to suggest that his narrative is nothing but cerebral play. John Elsworth has argued that the entire system of relationships in the novel may be governed by occult forces.11 No less important is the sense that the normal conventions of fiction are about to explode in our faces, and this subversion of realist or representational narrative conventions in favor of techniques of defamiliarization extends to all branches of culture in the extremely rich period of innovation and experimentation of the late tsarist and early Soviet periods. In art, it should be remembered, this was the period not only of Symbolism but also of Neoprimitivism, Cubofuturism, Rayonism, Suprematism and Constructivism.12 Where the printed word was concerned a radical fragmentation often extended to typographical devices (for example in the work of Belyi, Kruchenykh, Kamenskii, Zdanevich, Maiakovskii), and not only in poetry. Petersburg itself contains some thirty cases of typographical devices (major indentations) used to suggest a shift in consciousness through visual effect.13
What actually occurred after 1917 was neither a Second Coming nor a Utopia, though it was often represented in millennial terms. It was, perhaps, more in the nature of a Purgatory (always a questionable concept in Orthodox theology), a period of waiting in which a purifying suffering would be rewarded (or not rewarded in the case of the sinner/bourgeois/ kulak) with a future paradise. Marxist-Leninists called this period "the dictatorship of the proletariat." But whatever it was called, Russian literature felt the need to reflect a paradise deferred, placing it in a situation not unlike that of the Christian Church in the first century ad. The failure of the millennium fully to materialize gave rise, among other, less notable literary phenomena, to the genre of dystopia (Zamiatin's We) and the dynamic of Platonov's unique novel, Chevengur, neither of which appeared in full in Russia until the period of glasnost'.14 Both these novels end in the apparent victory of state bureaucracy over the forces of individual spontaneity and idealism. In We, this conclusion seals the triumph of a scientifi-
cally organized totalitarian state over the individualism of its citizens. In Chevengur, the depressing ending concludes the Quixotic quest of the hero for the home of true socialism but seems to imply that this is the inevitable consequence of the sort of anarchistic political idealism celebrated in such novels of the Civil War period of Revolutionary Romanticism as Pilniak's Naked Year. The Utopian programme of the inhabitants of Chevengur is presented as entirely futile. Gorkii was right in seeing in the novel a profound ambiguity: it is both Utopian and anti-utopian. Its centre of gravity is located beyond and above both. But, most important of all, this centre of gravity is not spiritual: the myth has been secularized; the spiritual has become material.
Translated into practical, political terms, the predicament faced by Platonov was also the predicament faced by the new Soviet State and those who supported it. The issue was how, if at all, the Revolution could be secured by a judicious balance of spontaneity and political force. The State was supposed to be withering away, yet spontaneous, anarchist, naive Communism was demonstrably not capable of creating the brave new world envisaged by the Bolsheviks. The idea of revolution as a spontaneous, elemental, natural force is reflected in many a novel of the early Soviet period as well as in its better-known reflection in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.15 Katerina Clark has argued convincingly that the spontaneity/ consciousness dialectic is the structuring force that shapes the master plot of the Socialist Realist novel and not, as might be thought, the class struggle itself. The characters in Platonov's novel never graduate to political consciousness. Socialist Realists were supposed to put this right by providing models for the Soviet citizen, more or less bewildered by the failure of the Soviet State to "wither away" as Marx and Lenin said it should. Although the term "Socialist Realism" was coined only in 1932., the official Soviet view was that it had been evolving for the last quarter of a century. Precursors such as Gorkii's Mother (1906), Furmanov's Chapaev (1923), Serafimovich's The Iron Flood (1924), Fadeev's The Rout (1927), Gladkov's Cement (1925) and the first two parts of A. Tolstoi's Tour of Hell (1923-41) were all written and published before the key date.16 What was now needed, in Zhdanov's phrase, was "a combination of the most matter-of-fact everyday reality with the most heroic prospects,"17 resulting in what Clark calls its "proclivity for making sudden, unmotivated transitions from realistic discourse to the mythic or Utopian" and "the absence in it of those features that can be seen as exploration or celebration of the objective/subjective split: parody, irony, literary self-consciousness, and creative or complex use of point of view."18 In a sense Soviet society was making the same implausible claim as the Catholic Church in the early
Middle Ages, and trying to fend off heretics with the pretense that the millennium had already arrived.19 The heroes of the Socialist Realist novel often displayed characteristics familiar from medieval Russian religious and secular narratives and the trajectory of their plots often followed the familiar Christian pattern of death, transfiguration and resurrection. While mese novels may be, and were, called classics of Socialist Realism, they have never been recognized as classics of world literature and the thousands of novels which followed the models of Socialist Realism generally failed to transcend their level of achievement. On the other hand, their cultural significance is of great interest. The novels of the high Stalinist period attempt to celebrate that triumph of heroism, science, technology and reason over the forces of anarchy and nature which the mainstream of Russian culture had always problematized. Regrettably, therefore, they find no place in this volume.
However, there are notable novels among the exemplars of Socialist Realism, outstanding examples being Leonov's Russian Forest, A. Tolstoi's A Tour of Hell, and Sholokhov's The Quiet Don. Of these, The Quiet Don is the most widely celebrated in the West. Like no other novel, War and Peace included, it conveys a sense of the vastness, primitiveness and violence of Russia, the Cossack lands, and the instinctual forces and values which impel ordinary, unprivileged men and women in their struggle for survival and supremacy against forces over which the individual has no control. Although it is hailed as one of the great Soviet novels, the irony is that the heroes and heroines belong to the wrong side (the Whites) in the Civil War, as do the Turbins in Bulgakov's novel of 1925, The White Guard. The hero, Grigorii Melekhov, experiences and himself lives the physical violence and mental anguish of his time and place. Sholokhov's masterpiece conveys the life of the Don Cossacks in a period of upheaval through brilliant physical descriptions, but also through his rendering of the timeless values and traditions of the Cossacks themselves.
Not all Russian novels are inspired by a sense of the apocalyptic, even where they display a strong sense of history. Counterbalancing this tendency is another which reminds the reader that beyond the turmoil, the world of nature, of which humanity is a part, continues on its course, ever renewing itself as season follows season and generation succeeds generation. The Turgenevan tradition, as represented by his best-known novels, Rudin, On the Eve and Fathers and Children, in many ways foreshadows the revolutionary novel, but lacks its conviction of the saving power of the Revolution. Nor is it inspired by a vision of impending national doom. In Turgenev's fictional world heroism consists in the constant reaffirma-
tion of humane values by the individual in the face of an unresponsive universe.
Tolstoi was not free of the Russian penchant for philosophizing, prophesying and following through principles to the bitter end. Yet his greatest works of imaginative fiction are structured by quite different principles, in which the physical, the mentally balanced, natural continuity and renewal are underlying structuring principles. Ironically, Bakhtin's principle of dialogue (which he wishes to deny Tolstoi) is actually particularly strong in him. So is his sense of the immediacy of the present moment and of the process of becoming as it is observed, on which Tolstoi is actually stronger than he is on historical processes. Time is cyclical, death and disaster are followed by renewal. This is not apocalyptic time, but it does once again echo a basic Christian structure. It is again the Easter motif, the cycle of death, transfiguration and resurrection, but grafted onto a perception of the world structured by the pagan rhythms and seasons of the natural world rather than, as with Dostoevskii, an apocalyptic framework. Consciously or not he built these motifs into the title of his best-known novel, War and Peace.20Where the apocalyptic occurs in Tolstoi, for example in Pierre's masonic speculations, it appears as a deviation from the norm as it would in an English realist novel. The motif of death and resurrection embraces both the nineteenth century and the revolutionary novel. Only the dark gloom of Saltykovian or Buninesque satire seems to exclude the possibility of rebirth and renewal.
Bakhtin saw Tolstoi's novels as built round such chronotopes as "biographical time" and "the salon." There are, of course, others, particularly in the vast historical panorama of War and Peace, but there is no denying that Tolstoi's salons and his biographies both partake of that sense of breadth in physical time and space which Dostoevskii had sought and found in the inner reaches of the human spirit.
Words and expressions like "measure," "classical mean," or "understatement" do not immediately spring to mind when writing of the major Russian novelists. Yet one only has to mention the names of Pushkin, Turgenev and Chekhov, all, it is true, the writers of shorter fiction, and the enormous influence of the first of these, to be reminded that there is more to the Russian novel than the traditions we have been discussing. The novels of Pushkin and Turgenev have never had the impact on the imagination of the Western reader of the other classics we have discussed (save perhaps those of Turgenev in France), and Chekhov did not write novels at all. Yet they represent vital, lasting strains in the Russian tradition, strains often appreciated better by native Russians than by foreign admirers. Above all they are models of verbal economy, of aesthetic
form, a measure and constant reminder of the ideals which Russian literature is capable of achieving and from which their more unruly successors depart in full knowledge of their parentage.
Pushkin was not simply the first great figure in the tradition, revered continually from his day to this. His spirit has lived in the novels of others, through quotation, allusion, contrast, and more complex forms of inter-textuality, from his immediate contemporaries and successors Lermontov and Gogol, to such contemporaries of ours as Andrei Bitov. The way in which this strain has lived on as an ideal in the world of loose, baggy monsters as well as in the more restrained prose of some of his more direct literary descendants is well shown in Susanne Fusso's essay.
All the novelists mentioned in this introduction are men (which is why some of our contributors use the masculine pronoun when referring to Russian novelists). There have been no outstanding women prose writers in Russia until very recently. It is not entirely clear why this should be. In our own century some of the finest of Russia's poets have been women. A list of the classics of English literature of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries would contain a substantial list of outstanding women novelists, many of whom have long been acknowledged as such and have never been in need of rediscovery. It does not appear to be the case that Russian women were more disadvantaged than English women during either the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries. As Catriona Kelly tells us, the number of women writers grew steadily in the early nineteenth century and writing by women continued to develop its own diverse traditions over the next 170 years, but she nevertheless concludes that "between its origins in the late eighteenth century and the present day . . . Russian women's writing [exists] in the interstices of patriarchal culture."21 The study of Russian writing from feminist perspectives has, however, been developing apace in recent years and as a consequence one of our essays reminds us that the Russian novel is based on an essentially male viewpoint. That this fact does not carry with it the necessary implication that the Russian novel is either inaccessible or an affront to women readers is evident. But it does underline its gender-bias, a fact which Barbara Heldt's essay does something to redress.
The constant balance and counterbalance between the various traditions of the Russian novel - the Pushkinian and the Gogolian, the Dostoevskian and the Tolstoian, the Modernist and the Socialist Realist, the Utopian and the dystopian, above all the tendency towards the fantastic, with the disintegration of the subject and the text, set against the affirmation of the primacy of the physical and the material - have resulted in a literary tradition which, for all its subversive questioning of novelistic discourse,
has never entirely lost its grip on common-sense reality. This is no doubt why its most influential theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, still continued unblush-ingly to use such concepts as "author," "realism" and "subject" in an age when structuralism and post-structuralism was radically problematizing such notions in the West. In one of the final turns of the double helix, it is this twentieth-century theory of the novel, rather than a tradition of Soviet novels, which has come back to invigorate Western literary theory in our own day and once again brought us to recognize the power of the Russian mind to interrogate our own traditions.
NOTES
1. Richard Ware, "Some Aspects of the Russian Reading Public in the 1880s," Renaissance and Modern Studies, 24 (1980), 27; quoted from S. F. Librovich, Na knizhnom postu (Petrograd-Moscow, 1916), p. 99.
2. Ware, "Some Aspects," p. 28; quoted from E. N. Lebedeva, "??? prezhde chitali knigi - stranichki vospominanii," Vsemirnyi vestnik, 10 (1908), 7.
3. Nicholas Bachtin, Lectures and Essays (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1963), p. 28.
4. John Garrard (éd.), The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 3.
5. A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1954-60), vol. vu, pp. 329-30.
6. See Robert Belknap (éd.), Russianness: Studies of a Nation's Identity (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990).
7. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford University Press, 1990).
8. Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. no.
9. David Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1989).
10. See Rufus Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd edn (Stanford University Press, 1975) on the impact of French Socialism on the apocalyptic trend in Russian thought.
11. J. D. Elsworth, Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 88-116.
12. John E. Bowlt (éd.), Russian Art of the Avant Garde, Theory and Criticism, rev. edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).
13. Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature, Avant-garde Visual Experiments 1900-1930 (Princeton University Press, 1984). On Belyi's novels, see pp. 25-44.
14. Chevengur appeared for the first time in full in Russian in 1988; We appeared for the first time in Russia in 1988.
15. See Richard Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 77-122, "Revolution and instinct."
16. English translations of substantial extracts of Furmanov's Chapaev, Serafim-ovich's The Iron Flood, Gladkov's Cement, Fadeev's The Rout, Ostrovsky's
How the Steel was Tempered and Sholokhov's The Fate of a Man, all classics of the Socialist Realist novel, can conveniently be found in Nicholas Luker (trans, and éd.), From Furmanov to Sholokhov, an Anthology of the Classics of Socialist Realism (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988).
17. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 34; quoted from "Rech' sekretaria CK VKP(b) A. A. Zhdanova," Pervyi s"ezd pisatelei. stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Ogiz, 1934), p. 4.
18. Clark, The Soviet Novel, pp. 37, 39.
19. Comparisons might also be made with the Victorian Evangelical novel, on which see, for example, Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses, Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: John Murray, 1977).
20. It may be noted that the only chapter with a title in Anna Karenina (part v, chapter 20) is called "Death" and his third and last novel is entitled Resurrection.
21. Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women's Writing 1820-1992 (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 443.
I
THE SETTING
2
ROBERT A. MAGUIRE
The city
Russia is unique among European states for having had two capitals during much of its modern life: St. Petersburg and Moscow. The first was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, and became the administrative, political, and cultural capital. In these respects, it displaced Moscow, whose history went back at least four hundred years. But Russians continued to regard the older city as the spiritual center of the country; even the tsars, who presided in Petersburg, went to Moscow to be crowned; and the Bolsheviks reconfirmed its traditional importance by moving the government back there in 1924. Each city has come to represent very different and often conflicting values, as we shall see, and each has functioned as a pole around which the vexed question of Russia's character and destiny has revolved.
Since the early nineteenth century, St. Petersburg and Moscow have figured prominently in the Russian novel. But many of the issues that attach to them are far older. In Kievan Rus, the first East Slavic state, cities were not only centers of culture, but enclosures against domestic and foreign enemies. It is instructive, and perhaps psychologically significant, that in Slavic languages, the word for "city," as in Russian gorod and Church Slavonic grad, has no etymological connection with the Latin civis and its derivations in English and the Romance languages, but instead goes back to the Indo-European root designating an enclosed place. Counterparts are found in such words as English "garden," Latin hortus, and Irish gort ("cultivated field"). Russians were hardly unique in feeling that the world at large was hostile and must be shut out. What is unusual is the persistence of this feeling throughout the nation's history. The sources of potential danger were early identified in ways which have also persisted. Under the year 862 (ad) in the Primary Chronicle (twelfth century), we read that the Eastern Slavs, unable to govern themselves, turned west to the Varangians, or Vikings, with the following request: "Our land is great and bounteous, but there is no order in it. Come to reign and rule over us."1 The result was Kievan Rus. A century later, according to the same source,
Great Prince Vladimir wished to import a major religion to replace the native paganism, and for various reasons settled on Eastern Christianity, then centered in Byzantium. Even if the Chronicle's accounts are legendary, they register the early presence in the national mind of two foreign elements, traditionally called "West" and "East," terms which the Russians have used for centuries in pondering their national identity. To be sure, both elements are viewed favorably in the Chronicle. But never having quite melded, they have often been seen as threats to the integrity of native enclosures - political, cultural, psychological - and have inspired ambiguous feelings. "West" may stand for good order and high civilization, but also for tyranny and soullessness. "East" may betoken beauty and a truth rooted in the senses, but also mindless cruelty and destructiveness. Enclosure, East, and West form a cluster of motifs that, with many variations, have helped shape a literary version of the city which is peculiar to Russians.
In the first great work of Russian literature, The Song of Igor's Campaign (1186), "East" is a negative concept, embodied in the vast steppes that are inhabited by the Kumans, a people of Turko-Mongolian origin with no settled way of life. Without consulting the senior prince, Igor sets forth from his town to join battle with them far to the east, is defeated and captured, but eventually escapes and makes his way back. For the author of the poem, the town is a secure, nurturing bastion, and Igor acts unwisely and rashly in leaving it to seek personal glory. A century later, the threat from the East became catastrophic reality when the Mongols, or Tatars, swept westward and destroyed the old Russian state. Towns remained intact; many developed a lively local literature. But it was not until the fourteenth century that one of them, Moscow, began to expand until it achieved predominance.
A considerable body of writing celebrated medieval Moscow as the corporealization of the national idea. Despite its enormous vitality, however, this city-state felt frequently beleaguered from both East and West. Only gradually did it open itself to the world outside. The most spectacular of these openings came with the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703. Military, commercial, and cultural considerations figured in Peter's decision, but the city soon acquired deeper meanings, which writers were quick to exploit. A notable instance is Vasilii Trediakovskii's poem "Praise to the Izhorsk Land, and to the Reigning City of St. Petersburg" (1752). Here the city is treated, in typical eighteenth-century fashion, as a monument to enlightened reason. This was the view that prevailed for nearly half a century thereafter. Gradually, however, darker sides began to emerge, particularly in response to the poetics of Sentimentalism, anorner interna-
tional literary movement that reached Russia late in the 1700s. Nature came to be identified as the locus of vitality and authenticity; the city, of artificiality, insincerity, and deception. Nikolai Karamzin's short story "Poor Liza" (1792) has been exemplary for generations. And it was Karamzin, in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (1810-11), who was one of the first to deconstruct the eighteenth-century view of St. Petersburg in these terms. He chided Peter for setting the city "amidst rippling swamps, in places condemned by nature to be unpopulated and barren. . . . How many people perished, how many millions and how much labor were expended to realize this objective? One might say that Petersburg is founded on tears and corpses . . ." The lesson for this Sentimentalist was that "man shall not overcome nature!" Less familiar in this context, but destined for an equally long life, was the exemplum of a genuinely Russian city, which he set forth many pages earlier and obviously expected his reader (primarily Tsar Alexander I) to prefer to Petersburg: "A small town that was barely known before the fourteenth century. . . raised its head and saved the fatherland (by defeating the Mongols). Honor and glory to Moscow! . . . The Moscow princes accomplished this great work not by personal heroism . . . but solely by virtue of a wise political system that was consonant with the circumstances of the time."2
When Pushkin employed these same contrasts, he could count on practiced responses in his readers. Evgenii Onegin, a "novel in verse" (1823-31), opens in St. Petersburg. There are just enough mentions of landmarks, climate, and real-life personalities to make it instantly recognizable to any Russian: the Summer Garden, the Nevskii Prospect, the white nights, Talon's French restaurant, a cluster of turn-of-the-century playwrights. It is largely an upper-class and therefore Europeanized city that Onegin and the narrator frequent, with its tireless round of parties, balls, and evenings at the theater. Like the city itself, Onegin is a composite of foreign fashions, ideas, and styles. Now and then Pushkin introduces the lower orders - coachmen, merchants, peddlers, bakers, cabbies - mainly by way of ironic contrast with the idle aristocracy. Presently, however, a more familiar contrast is introduced, as Onegin, bored with Petersburg, goes off to his country estate: "For two days," we are told, "he found novelty" in a landscape imported in effect from the eighteenth-century idyll, "lonely fields,/ The coolness of a densely shaded grove,/ The babble of a quiet brook" (1, 54). But soon he is no more satisfied there than any of his numerous literary progeny would be, and, in his relationship with the neighboring Larin family, he turns destructive, breaking Tatiana's heart and killing Lenskii, her sister's fiancé, in a duel.
Outlined this way, the plot draws on conventions that would evoke an
immediate response in any reader of "Poor Liza." But Tatiana is no simple peasant girl, and no ordinary victim of urban lust: her view of life derives not so much from good instincts as from the perusal of foreign novels, and is therefore suspect. Pushkin also plays with the Moscow/Petersburg contrast. Tatiana's family, worried about her spinsterhood, takes her to Moscow to meet eligible men. If Petersburg is Onegin's city, and Onegin has proven unworthy of Tatiana, then Moscow, we suppose, is bound to yield an authentically Russian man who will help Tatiana discover the authentically Russian woman beneath the foreign veneer. Pushkin bolsters our expectations with a brief portrait of "white-stoned Moscow" that is far more appealing and more "Russian" than his Petersburg. He cites the "golden crosses" of the "ancient cupolas" that "blaze like fire," the nostalgia that this view inspires in the poet when he is in exile, and even the name itself, "Ah, Moscow! . . . How much the Russian heart finds blended in this sound!" (VII, 36). The poet does not fail to remind us of the city's refusal to submit to Napoleon during the invasion of 1812 - a rejection, in effect, of foreign ways - and he provides a rapid tour of the main thoroughfare, where bustle and disorder prevail, in contrast to the austere grandeur of Petersburg. The social scene that engulfs Tatiana looks like a warm, extended family, mostly female, unlike the chilly, male-dominated haut-monde of Petersburg. But instead of feeling at home, Tatiana "looks and does not see,/ She loathes the stir of this society;/ She feels stifled here" (VII, 53); and she yearns to be back in the country. She might as well be in Petersburg, where everyone seems to be unhappy; and that in fact is where we find her as the poem ends, married to a prince, ornamenting society, and painfully aware that her existence is empty. In his ironic way, Pushkin undoes the traditional contrast by pronouncing the two cities essentially the same, and even making us wonder whether the old urban/rural contrast really holds, if Onegin and Tatiana cannot find fulfilment in either place.3
Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman (1833) is far shorter than Onegin, but it left a far deeper mark on the developing theme of Petersburg in Russian literature. The Introduction begins with Peter the Great standing in a mist-shrouded, barren landscape, and, "filled with great thoughts," vowing to establish a city that will "strike terror in the Swede" and "cut a window through on Europe." This rehearses the eighteenth-century idea that intention is father to the deed. Suddenly "a century has passed," perhaps in response to the question Trediakovskii had posed in his poem, "What will it be like after a hundred years have passed?" There follows an elaboration of wonders also remarked by the earlier poet: the magnificent symmetries of "palaces and towers," the steady flow of visitors "from all corners of the earth," and the displacement of Moscow. Had Pushkin left matters at that,
the poem would be merely a superior imitation of an eighteenth-century model. But with part I, the imagery and tonality undergo an abrupt change, as a flood falls "like a frenzied beast" upon the city. Evgenii, a humble civil servant, is introduced, the first of the "little men" that were to populate Russian literature for the next century. He escapes the devastation, but goes mad when he discovers that his fiancée has perished. Thereupon he roams the city, "A stranger to the world . . . Neither beast nor man/ Neither this nor that, neither a denizen of the world/ Nor a dead spectre," hereby becoming the progenitor of hundreds of literary spectres in Petersburg settings. Finally he encounters the equestrian statue of Peter the Great in the Senate Square, and threatens it: "Just you wait!" Thereupon the statue leaps off its pedestal, and pursues him through the city until he dies. Legions of Russian writers and critics have puzzled over the meaning of this encounter: the individual sacrificed to the stern, impersonal purposes of the state, retribution visited on the subjects of those power-mad rulers who presume to challenge the forces of nature? In any event, Pushkin once again opens the conventions to serious question.4
Gogol was the first of the great writers after Pushkin to accord Petersburg a central place in his work, in terms that owe much to his predecessors and profoundly influenced his successors. His earliest recorded impressions of the city date from a letter he wrote his mother in April 1829, in which he describes a cheerless, eerily silent metropolis, where "everything is crushed, everything is mired in idle, trivial pursuits." This is the city which, with further indebtedness to Pushkin, later figures in his short stories. Appearances to the contrary, the eighteenth-century conventions are present, only with a peculiarly Gogolian twist. A colorful, bustling city of the kind beloved by Trediakovskii turns up in "Nevskii Prospect" (1835), but it is the product of a mind unhinged by lust, "all [Piskarev's] feelings were ablaze and everything before him was veiled in a kind of mist. The sidewalk swept off beneath his feet, carriages and their trotting horses seemed to stand still, the bridge stretched and broke in mid-arch, a house stood roof downward, a sentry box hurtled toward him, and the sentry's halberd seemed to flash upon his very eyelash, along with the gilt letters of a signboard and the scissors painted on it." This prepares us for the theme of the unreal city that is introduced at the very end, in one of the most fertile passages in Russian literature: "It tells lies at any hour, this Nevskii Prospect does, but most of all when night falls in a dense mass upon it. . . and when the devil himself lights the street lamps for the sole purpose of showing everything as it really is not." Here "light" serves to parody the eighteenth-century idea of Petersburg as an emblem of the Enlightenment.
"The Overcoat" (1842) is Gogol's most famous work, and its treatment
of St. Petersburg has shaped much of Russian urban literature. The main character, Akakii Akakevich, is a "little man" in the mold of Pushkin's Evgenii, but undergoes considerable development. As a copy-clerk, he at first simply accepts what he has been handed, and performs his mindless routines contentedly. Once he leaves his office, however, he is at the mercy of the city, which is bleak and hostile. Still, there are hints that he is capable of a kind of creativity that makes the city unchallenging, even congenial. "But if Akakii Akakevich did look at anything [outside his office], on it he saw his neat, evenly copied lines." The comment has greater point when we remember that much of Petersburg is laid out rectilinearly, and that across the river, on Vasilevskii Island, the streets are called "lines." Akakii's gift, if not necessarily a parody of the "great thoughts" that enabled Peter to make of the real world anything he wanted, establishes him as a character who presumes that he can deal with his surroundings, even change them for the better. But this apparently harmless fantasy proves to be the kernel of larger ambitions, which end by destroying him. Their instrument is the new overcoat, which comes to represent for Akakii something more than a protection against the icy winter wind: full acceptance by his fellow-clerks, perhaps an opportunity for sexual fulfilment, in short, qualities that most human beings take as their due. In Gogol's world, however, aspirations to social and psychological mobility always involve enormous risks; hubris, or overstepping, is as unwise there as in ancient Greece. Punishment soon follows. The coat is stolen off Akakii's back as he walks through late-night streets and enters "an endless square, its houses barely visible on the far side, looking like a fearful desert." In spiritual literature, the desert is often a place of illumination and self-discovery. In Gogol's story, Akakii discovers a self that is stripped of illusion; but the sudden illumination (ironically, nocturnal, as in "Nevskii Prospect") of his true state is too overwhelming for him to survive. Just as Petersburg itself (following Pushkin) no longer functions as an enclosure against hostile nature, so the overcoat can no longer conceal Akakii's ordained position in life, which, Gogol seems to say, is that of mere copy-clerk.5
Gogol's Petersburg is phenomenologically unreal. Perhaps that is why there are so few topographical markers in his urban landscapes, and few references to such traditional motifs as enclosure. Ultimately, he regards this city as deeply un-Russian, even as non-place. We might expect him to hew to convention and advance Moscow as a vital native alternative. He does so only once, in an article of 1837, where, in a detailed comparison of the two cities, Moscow comes off as unmistakably Russian in its open-hearted, slovenly, "feminine" ways. But even here, Gogol has reservations. Perhaps borrowing from Evgenii Onegin, he philistinizes "femininity" to
mean a profusion of marriageable girls and a craze for fashions. And even while deeming Moscow's intellectual life more vigorous than Petersburg's, he reminds us that it too is largely imported from abroad.6 For truly Russian settings, Gogol turns to small provincial towns, but he finds them even less vital. When he did eventually focus, in Dead Souls, on the question of the national identity, his reference point was not Petersburg or Moscow, but all of Russia - and a phantasmal Russia of the future at that.
By this time, it was clear that many different kinds of verbal discourse -histories, guidebooks, newspapers, even popular anecdotes - had begun to contribute to the developing myth of St. Petersburg. But belles-lettres were by far the most important, not only because they now occupied a central position in the national culture, but because they tended, especially in the form of the novel, to exploit and absorb other genres. The work of Fedor Dostoevskii is crucial in these respects. He was born in Moscow, but received his higher education in St. Petersburg, spent most of his life there, and made it the setting of many of his works. Moscow does not really figure in his fiction; other cities and towns are either provincial or foreign; his urban geography therefore resembles Gogol's. Several Petersburgs are evident in his early writings: fantastic and menacing, as in The Double (1846); enchanting and magical, as in "White Nights" (1848); sordid and harsh, as in The Insulted and Injured (1861). In Notes from Underground (1864), the narrator aphorizes a conventional theme when he calls Petersburg "the most abstract and premeditated city on the surface of the earth. (There are premeditated and unpremeditated cities.)"7 He finds evidence at hand in the form of trendy contemporary issues like socialism, science, and utilitarianism. Against them he deploys caprice, anger, and even compassion, which are Dostoevskii's versions of the "irrational" sides of the city that Pushkin had found in vengeful nature, and Gogol in drives for power, sex, and self-aggrandizement.
Of Dostoevskii's four great novels, it is Crime and Punishment (1866) that most creatively draws on tradition to create a haunting picture of nineteenth-century Petersburg. Among the major ingredients are Western influences, the impoverished orders of society, and enclosure. But in every case, Dostoevskii takes these elements to an extreme, and gives them a new slant. For example, Raskolnikov is chock-full of the social, political and anthropological ideas of the day, despises them as the products of "other people's intelligence" - thereby raising the borrowing motif long associated with Petersburg - yet uses them to justify his murder of the old pawnbroker, only to discover that his motives for the crime involve far more than ideas, whatever their source. Urban poverty had been registered by Pushkin and Gogol, but in Dostoevskii's novel, it establishes an overwhelming presence,
with a relentless series of shabby rooms and stinking streets. Like Dickens, with whom he is often compared, Dostoevskii is well aware that poverty has no history. That is perhaps why he offers few glimpses of the famous sights and monuments, which would of course open into the past. He keeps us focused on the present; and by compressing this present into a mere two weeks, he creates a suffocating psychological enclosure from which escape seems impossible. While taking full advantage of the enormous variety of human types present in any large modern city, he contrives to have all the characters touched in one way or another by Raskolnikov's thoughts and actions. Yet by adopting a third-person narration, he makes the point that Raskolnikov himself is subject to larger forces, and is not simply projecting his own mind onto the city. In this hermetically sealed literary world, objects, events, and people are intertwined; any action, however trivial, can generate enormous consequences, like the conversation Raskolnikov overhears in the eating-house between two people he does not know (part 1, chapter 6), which he takes as permission to commit the murder. Ironically, Raskolnikov, once convicted of the crime, exchanges the prison of Petersburg for the "freedom" of exile in Siberia. But as his dreams in the Epilogue show, the city, and all it has come to stand for, cannot be readily forgotten. Indeed, Dostoevskii, in a major revision of the tradition, does not regard Petersburg as an aberration. He offers no mitigating or contrasting order, be it the countryside, nature, or Moscow; the city focuses and intensifies what is happening in Russia at large. As Luzhin puts it: "All these innovations, reforms and ideas of ours - all these have touched us in the provinces too; but in order to see everything and see it more clearly, one must be in Petersburg."8 Many later writers would take note.
Dostoevskii's achievement as an urban novelist is all the more striking when we consider the far more conventional Petersburg set forth in the writings of three of his illustrious contemporaries, Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoi. In Goncharov's first novel, A Common Story (1847), Aduev, a naively idealistic young man, moves to the capital from his country estate in hopes of becoming a famous writer. But he cannot cope with the pitiless demands of the city and with the cynicism of his wealthy uncle, and settles for an undistinguished existence. Oblomov (1859), Goncharov's masterpiece, restates many of the same situations in a far more mature and compelling way. Ilia Ilich Oblomov comes to St. Petersburg from Oblomovka, his estate, to take up a job in the civil service, and to find a wife. He abandons the first after two years, and fails totally with the second. When the novel opens, a decade later, he occupies a spacious, centrally-located apartment, but remains uninvolved in the life of the city, which casts only a shadowy presence throughout. Instead, he lies
on a couch in one room, attended by his elderly servant Zakhar, and reminisces about Oblomovka, a paradise that owes much to literary idylls of the eighteenth century. In fact, his estate has fallen on hard times, and, as the sole heir, he has plenty of work awaiting him there. Though intelligent and well-meaning, he cannot bestir himself to return, any more than he can seek a purposeful life in the city. He is the most celebrated instance of the kind of displaced, or "superfluous" character initiated by Onegin, which throughout the nineteenth century was often regarded as regrettably typical of the Russian character. Turgenev, for one, usually killed such characters off. Goncharov's solution is more ingenious. He decides to bestow happiness on his hero by moving him to a location that combines city and country: the suburb. (Oblomov may in fact be the first piece of suburban literature in Russia.) There he settles down in the well-run house of the widow Pshenitsyna, who becomes a mother-wife figure and makes his life a "living idyll," like the Oblomovka of old. Eventually he dies of inactivity and gluttony. Although he has achieved personal fulfillment, it is devoid of the kind of social concerns that Russian readers had come to expect in literary characters.
Turgenev writes mostly about provincial Russia. But the city, particularly Petersburg, is a constant if nearly silent presence in his six novels. The best is Fathers and Children (1862). It is set in 1859; but in a long flashback, we are told that the young Kirsanov brothers left their estate in the 1840s and went to Petersburg for formation, Pavel as a Guards officer, and Nikolai as a civil servant. Pavel is ruined by the experience, and becomes one of those deracinated characters that literary tradition had already taught readers to associate with the capital. It is probably not coincidental that his patronymic is Petrovich, or "son of Peter," meaning perhaps Peter the Great, and if so, reminding us of the perennial question of the national identity. That question is more palpably raised by Pavel's Western habits, like his Anglophilia and his fondness for European spas, and, contrastively, by certain "Eastern" features of his dress and rooms, such as a fez, Chinese slippers, and Turkish carpets. Nikolai is in danger of displacement, also being a Petrovich, and, like Oblomov, having resigned his government job in disillusionment. What saves him is his decision to return to and manage the family estate, where he forms a liaison with his housekeeper's young daughter, who exemplifies deeply Russian values. As the novel opens, he is being visited by his son, Arkadii, who has brought with him Bazarov, a friend and mentor. Both are recent graduates of St. Petersburg University. There Bazarov has become infected with Western ideas, and is now an exponent of "nihilism" (nigilizm), a foreign word for a foreign concept, around which the intellectual and moral conflicts of the book cluster.
Structurally, Turgenev honors a pattern that goes back to Pushkin and Gogol, whereby alien, usually urban values are suddenly introduced into a vital, self-contained world, often a country estate. In Gogol it is the entity that disintegrates (as in "Old-World Landowners" or The Inspector General). In Turgenev the opposite occurs. Bazarov dies; Pavel ends his visit to resume a life of aimless wandering in Europe. Arkadii, however, comes to see that the "soil" is where he belongs, with a wife and children in his future. As the son of a country doctor, Bazarov really belongs there too; and Turgenev, an accomplished ironist, makes the point by having him buried in his parish churchyard. We are meant to conclude that Petersburg at best serves as an arena where young men may test themselves, but that it cannot provide an authentic way of life for a Russian.
Much the same idea shapes Tolstoi's novella Family Happiness (1859). Here Masha has to leave her idyllic family estate, plunge into the empty social round in Petersburg, and jeopardize her marriage in order to learn that true values reside in the country, with husband and children. An antipathy to Petersburg is apparent from the opening pages of War and Peace (1865-69). For Tolstoi it is a foreign, upper-class city, whose inhabitants lead lives that are "insignificant, trivial, and artificial . . . concerned only with phantoms and reflections of life." Pierre Bezukhov, the hero, feels out of place there, and his marriage to the socially accomplished but stupid Hélène is a disaster. Still, the experience shows him what he is not, and points him toward discovering an authentic self. The most important stopping-place on that long route is Moscow, which is treated as the antithesis of Petersburg in virtually every respect. Tolstoi does not dwell on topographical realia, but he brings in all levels of society to show that this city is a vital, organic entity, and stands for Russia as a whole. Even though Moscow's upper classes have been somewhat tainted by foreign ways, as the celebrated scene of Natasha's evening at the opera reminds us, the solid Russian core remains, waiting to be uncovered. That happens in 1812. Tolstoi's graphic account of Napoleon's occupation of the city re-enacts the old Russian pattern of borrowing from abroad, and shows a way out that Petersburg never took, as the inhabitants burn and then desert the city. Burning of course is a traditional symbol of purification, and it enables Tolstoi to make the important point that Moscow - and by extension, Russia - is less a place than a state of mind: "Everything had been destroyed, except something intangible, yet powerful and indestructible." It is here that Pierre, as a prisoner of the French, "attained the serenity and contentment which he had formerly striven in vain to reach," an "inner harmony" which creates in him a feeling of oneness with all humans, nature, and the universe.9 Eventually he settles in the countryside; but the
two urban experiences, however different, have been essential prerequisites to this discovery of true place.
Yet Tolstoi never allows us to forget that it is character which shapes place, and that place, so regarded, is relatively unimportant. An early version can be seen in The Cossacks (1863), where Olenin tires of the empty life of his fellow-aristocrats in Moscow (which is identical in this respect to Petersburg) and seeks authenticity among the "simple" folk of the Caucasus. But his preconceptions are too powerful; the quest is fruitless; and he ends up with no proper place at all. This is what happens to the heroine of Anna Karenina (1875-77). Both Petersburg and Moscow are treated contemptuously in this novel; the countryside is extolled as the spiritual and moral center of Russian life; but it is ultimately Anna's flaws of character that prevent her from making healthy choices, and doom her to disaster.
Around the turn of the century, fiction writers began to explore new themes, like industrialization, the rising middle class, business entrepre-neurship, and class warfare. Cities and towns were the preferred settings, and blacks and grays the preferred coloration, in the spirit of Dostoevskii and Gogol, but with an admixture of French Naturalists like Zola. These trends are generously represented in the works of Maksim Gorkii, especially in Mother (1906), his most famous and influential novel, which offers an adulatory account of the rising revolutionary movement in ways that left an indelible mark on all Soviet literature: it has rightly been called "the archetype of the socialist realist novel."10 Revolution also drives the plot of Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (first version in book form, 1916; revised, 1922), but that is all the two novels have in common. Gorkii's is propaganda; Belyi's is an ambitiously conceived and intricately woven work of art, which most readers of Russian literature have come to regard as the greatest urban novel of the twentieth century.
The story is set in 1905, when Petersburg, at nearly two million the largest city in the Russian Empire, stood at its height culturally, but was being racked by social unrest that would culminate in revolution. Belyi creates a tissue of detail that makes the city vividly present, indeed almost a character in its own right. In addition to climate, topography, architecture, and the famous streets and monuments, he brings in the great intellectual and cultural issues that engaged educated people, and the political discontents that knew no class boundaries. So particular are the events he describes that we can date the action of the novel, although he does not do so, as unfolding between 30 September and 9 October. It is on them that he builds his fictional plot. It moves linearly. But the lines intersect several great circles, which dip back into time past, ahead into an apocalyptic time
future, and even into an astral "fourth dimension." One consequence is the appearance in fictional present time of characters and events from Russian history. Peter the Great - man and equestrian statue - is the most important. Belyi also draws heavily from earlier Russian fiction, thereby reminding us how much of the identity of Petersburg has been created by writers. "Was that the shadow of a woman darting onto the little bridge to throw herself off?" the narrator asks at one point. "Was it Liza?" in an allusion to the heroine of Tchaikovsky's operatic version of Pushkin's story "The Queen of Spades" (1833). "No, just the shadow of a woman of Petersburg." But it could have been Liza too, in the world as Belyi arranges it. He not only makes no attempt to conceal his borrowings, but ensures that we see them too. This is very much in keeping with the Russian tradition of "literariness" {literaturnost'), which does not prize "originality" in the sense that most non-Russian Western cultures do. The character of the old senator, Apollon Apollonovich, is the richest beneficiary of this tradition, embodying as he does certain attributes of the god Apollo, after whom he is named, the greenish ears of Anna Karenina's husband, the devotion to bureaucratic drudgery of Gogol's Akakii Akake-vich, and the reactionary politics of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the real-life Procurator of the Holy Synod. Belyi also avails himself of much of the complex mythology that had grown up around the city by his time, with heavy doses of the Bible, Rudolf Steiner, and German philosophy. It finds forceful expression in the images of enclosure, East, and West, all of which are intertwined. Most particularly they are associated with Apollon Apollonovich. He regards Russia as a vast, threatening expanse, an "icy plain" that is "roamed by wolves," and is frightened by the rising tide of violence in the country, which he identifies not only with revolutionaries, but with "Eastern" elements variously defined as Mongolians and Turanians. These fears prompt him to seek refuge behind apparently secure enclosures, like Petersburg itself, the thick walls of his magnificent house, Comtean positivism, and the undeviating routines of domestic and official life. But everything he tries to exclude is either already present within any given enclosure, himself included, or gains easy access to it; and at any moment he can find himself whisked out of his rooms, his city, and his body into the fourth dimension.
What is true of Apollon holds for Belyi's novel at large. Nothing is clearly delineated; everything blends and blurs, so that conventional markers like "fact" and "fiction," "past" and "present" are ultimately meaningless. Even Belyi's system of language relies on polyvalence and ambiguity, as we might expect in a Symbolist writer. In these ways too, Petersburg reveals the presence of the same impulse that drove all the
Russian arts of the early twentieth century toward a conflation and synthesis of genres, styles, and materials. As a result, we are offered no reliable phenomenological world, no narrator who explains or even hints at the way things "really" are. By the end of the novel, characters, narrator, and readers find themselves in a state of confusion and puzzlement, much like readers of Gogol, Belyi's favorite writer. Nothing is left of those "great thoughts" which had originally created the city. Paradoxically, the most thoroughgoing novel ever written about Russia's capital city ends by writing Petersburg, and perhaps even Russia itself, out of existence. Belyi began work on a sequel to this novel, which was to be entitled The Invisible City. There, he said, he would no longer "rummage around in vileness," but would "depict wholesome and ennobling elements of 'Life and the Spirit.' "11 But it was never written, perhaps because wholesomeness and nobility are qualities conspicuously absent in earlier fictional treatments of St. Petersburg.
Much of the imagery of Petersburg, however, moved to other venues. One was Utopian societies, often highly technological, as in Aleksandr Bogdanov's Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1912). In early Soviet times, Aleksei Tolstoi's Aelita (1922-23) enjoyed wide popularity. It begins in a Petersburg ravaged by revolution and civil war, an "insane city" of empty, wind-swept streets, boarded-up buildings, and freezing interiors, like all of Russia at the time. No alternative being available, two committed urbanités, the scientists Los and Gusev, build a rocket ship and set out for Mars, where, amidst a desolate landscape, they come upon the magical, sparkling capital city of Soatsera. Unfortunately, it is controlled by an evil tyrant, Tuskub, who wants it annihilated, arguing - in what looks like a throwback to Sentimentalist anti-urbanism - that "the force that is destroying universal order - anarchy - emanates from the city. A laboratory for the preparation of drunkards, thieves, murderers, savage voluptuaries, ravaged souls - such is the city." It turns out, however, that Tuskub is interested merely in hanging on to power, and Gusev, intent on preserving this marvelous city, leads a band of rebels. He fails, and, with Los, escapes back to Petersburg. Four years have passed, and with them, a transformation has occurred: Petersburg has become "one of the really chic cities of Europe," no longer bleak and empty, but bustling and purposeful, with the Nevskii Prospect (in a look back perhaps at the landscape of Belyi's novel) "filled with people, flooded with light from a thousand windows, fiery letters, arrows, and revolving wheels above the roofs." What has made the difference is purposeful labor and a new technology. Los himself is now employed in a factory, where he is "building a multi-purpose engine of the Martian type. It was assumed that his engine would revolutionize the
very foundations of mechanics, and eliminate all the imperfections of the world's economic system."
Aleksei Tolstoi was not alone among writers of the 1920s in abhorring raw nature, seeing cities as models for an ideal society, and assuming that they could be created on this earth. The trick was to find the right people to run them. Nor was he alone in celebrating technology, and identifying it as an urban phenomenon: that was to be a Soviet habit of mind right up to the end of the system in 1991. In Russia, as elsewhere in the industrialized world, there had been considerable discussion, since the late nineteenth century, of the impact of technology on human beings, for better or worse. The best-known exponents of a kind of technological Romanticism were the so-called "Smithy" poets of the 1920s, like Gastev, Kirillov, Kazin and Gerasimov, and the novelist Fedor Gladkov in Cement (1925). At first glance, Tolstoi should be numbered among them. Yet he tells us, in an odd turn of phrase, that Los "did not really believe that any conceivable combination of machines was capable of solving the tragedy of universal happiness."12 This puts Tolstoi in the camp of the skeptics, who were numerous in the 1920s. Most prominent among them was Boris Pilniak, who explored the man/machine relationship in a number of novels. And in Evgenii Zamiatin's We (1921), skepticism spilled into sheer hostility to create the most celebrated dystopia in Russian literature.
The time is the remote future; the place, the Single State, a technologically advanced, rigidly regulated city, which has been surrounded by a green glass wall to keep out the untamed world beyond. It looks like the kind of society that Apollon Apollonovich had dreamed of creating. In fact, Zamiatin draws heavily, though silently, on Belyi's novel for particulars of setting, characterization, imagery, and themes.13 However, he reduces these particulars to the absurd, especially in his treatment of science and technology, which in any event are virtually absent in Petersburg. Technology has built the Single State, and has also devised a rocket ship (described in the imagery of industrial Romanticism) to export "happiness" to other worlds. One catch is that technology has become oppressive, as graphically demonstrated in the Machine, the State's instrument of execution, which punishes the crime of individuality by disintegrating the perpetrators.
We was deemed subversive by a Bolshevik political culture that glorified cities and technology, and it was not published in the Soviet Union for many years. With the removal of the capital to Moscow in 1924, however, writers found a less dangerous and more productive setting for many of these same themes. We might have expected them to devise a new literary code. Instead, they simply borrowed parts, large or small, of the Petersburg
one, their task made easier by the fact that literary Moscow had traditionally functioned mainly as an antithesis to Petersburg, had never developed a particularly specific code of its own, and, in any event, was probably too ancient and potent a symbol of Russian nationalism for accommodation to the needs of a supposedly internationalist age.
An early case in point was Boris Pilniak's The Naked Year (1921). To be sure, it is set in a provincial town, not a metropolis. But this town has a kremlin, or fortress, as did many others; and Pilniak uses it to evoke Moscow, which in turn displays several of the conventional features of Petersburg. The most striking is "Chinatown," whose name derives from an early confusion of the word for "China" (Kitai) with kita, the sixteenth-century term for the wooden fence (later a stone wall) that delimited the central part of Moscow. At one stroke, Pilniak combines the motifs of Easternism and enclosure, insists that they coexist with "Western" phenomena typified as bowler hats and briefcases filled with stocks and bonds, and suggests that the Revolution, for all its vaunted novelty, merely enacts these familiar images and juxtapositions.14 If Andrei Belyi read this novel, he must have given a smile of recognition.
Enclosure and Easternism, however, proved unproductive in other Moscow novels, perhaps because of the new emphasis on internationalism. The themes of urban crime and squalor did pass over, with Leonid Leonov's novel The Thief (1927) among the most notable instances. So did the themes of bureaucracy and technology, along with many familiar character-types. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1928-40) makes more extensive use of these materials than any Soviet novel set in the capital.
Here we see a mostly middle- and lower-class city of the late 1920s, where lawlessness and chaos prevail. To judge by newspaper accounts of the time, this Moscow had a basis in actuality. But in Bulgakov's hands, such actuality soon proves elusive and evanescent, spun as it is out of rumor and gossip, projected onto ever-shifting temporal and spatial planes (even a "fifth dimension"), constantly invaded by supernatural powers, and narrated in a variety of styles and dictions, including an interpolated historical novel about Christ and Pilate. Most striking is its "literariness," as evinced in massive and obvious importations from fictions of centuries past, both Russian and foreign, such as Alice in Wonderland and The Golden Ass. As in Belyi's Petersburg (always a powerful presence), all are as "real" as anything else in this nightmarish city. Especially important as a theme and an engine of the plot is demonism, which also imbibes generously from literary sources. Readers will easily recognize Dosto-evskii's Double (1846), Gogol's "Overcoat", and some of his Dikan'ka
Tales as well, especially "A Bewitched Place" (1832), which could serve as an unofficial subtitle for the whole novel. But it is the figure of Woland, a refugee from Goethe's Faust, who neatly conflates the old Petersburg themes of foreignness, literariness, and demonism. He is the most "positive" of all the weird and unsavory characters in that he at least provides a way of escaping the oppressive enclosure that is everyday Moscow. The chief beneficiary is the heroine, Margarita, who becomes a witch, with decidedly Gogolian characteristics. Presumably she is dead, but there is no telling for sure.
By the time Bulgakov began his novel, the political climate had become decidedly inhospitable to latter-day Petersburgs. No doubt that is one reason why it was not published until the late 1960s. Far more cautious, and ultimately, far more representative, was the picture of Moscow in one of the greatest works of the 1920s, Iurii Olesha's Envy (1927). Like many Soviet writers of the time, Olesha exploits the conflict between the "old" values of tsarist Russia and the "new" values that inspirited the Revolution and the developing Soviet system. He embodies them in six characters and sets them in a Moscow of his own time. The "old" have obvious antecedents in the literature of Petersburg: Ivan Kavalerov, as an impractical dreamer, resembles Oblomov; Kavalerov, the ne'er-do-well and failure, looks back to many a Dostoevskian character; and Annechka is a devouring female of a type frequently found in Gogol. The "new" people embody the "correct" attitudes of the Soviet 1920s: a dedication to urbanism, a transformation of the world through technology and purposeful labor, and the elimination of negative thoughts and feelings. Yet here too Olesha looks to prototypes in the literary Petersburg of old: Andrei, the commissar, is a jumped-up Akakii Akakevich; and Volodia and Valia, the ideal Soviet youths of the future, resemble the antiseptically purposeful people, often revolutionaries, that populate such nineteenth-century novels as Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What Is to Be Done? (1863). Olesha's version of the "new" Moscow is also highly ambiguous. He makes scarcely a mention of the realia that mark the city for even a casual reader; except for a few place-names, we could be in any large modern urban center. Possibly he may be reminding us, no doubt ironically, of yet another politically correct idea of the 1920s: that Moscow, as the headquarters of the world Communist movement, should have no purely Russian coloration. This may be why only the "old" characters are so intent on relishing palpable, local objects, whether charming (Kavalerov's trodden blossom or almond sliver), menacing (Ivan's humanized machine Ophelia), or wondrous (Annechka's bed). But such details are not particular to Moscow, or for that matter, to Russia; the city loses its specific identity, and begins to stand for the
country as a whole. In these senses, Envy prepared the way for at least three decades of Socialist Realist novels, which would revive the centuries-old theme that Moscow is more an idea than a place.
Actually, Pilniak had been among the first, in Naked Year, to foresee this development when he depicted provincial towns as mini-Moscows. By the early 1930s, the official aesthetic of Socialist Realism obliged all writers to do the same. Thus, in Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned (1932-60), Davydov, a metal worker by trade and a Communist by conviction, is sent from the city to bring order to a collective farm. Although he has a lot to learn about rural life, the Party takes for granted that his political attitudes, urban to the core, are adequate to any situation, regardless of locale. Ultimately the lines between city and country were to be erased altogether, at least in theory. But it did not follow that a politically enlightened farmer could function just as effectively in the city: the chronic Bolshevik distrust of rural Russia prevailed. (Significantly, Davydov is killed by enraged peasants.) The country was becoming progressively urbanized, with Moscow setting the political, social, intellectual and technological norms. Eventually this tendency found expression in the notion of "agro-cities," which was proposed by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, but never went very far.
Urban settings continued to predominate in Soviet literature during the so-called "Thaw," that period of comparative political relaxation which got under way around 1956. The better writers, however, began to find more interesting ways of handling them, now that they were freer to disregard the dictates of Socialist Realism, with its penchant for generalization and typology. Many showed an interest in recording the trivia of life, which would not have been possible under Stalinism. Iurii Trifonov, for one, specialized in representing the ordinary, frequently banal routines of domestic life as lived out in Moscow. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has also been a meticulous recorder of quotidian details. Far more than Trifonov or most of his contemporaries, however, he is interested in myth-making, often in terms that are familiar to readers of earlier urban literature. One of them is enclosure. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovicb (1961) is set in a forced labor camp, as are the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago (1973-75); Cancer Ward (1968) takes place mainly in a hospital located in a large city. The First Circle (1968) unfolds in Moscow and environs, with many different enclosures: the city itself, the Kremlin, the Liubianka prison, the sharashka, or special labor camp, the tight world of the Party privileged. All overlap, and together comprise the gigantic enclosure that is the Soviet Union. This Moscow bears no resemblance to the nurturing, authentically Russian city of old. It is more like literary Petersburg from Pushkin through
Belyi, a conglomeration of isolated individuals whose identity is largely shaped by a bureaucracy obsessed with dehumanizing trivia.
Many other writers of this period - and Solzhenitsyn himself to some extent - began to rediscover the countryside as a contrasting realm of salubrious moral values. In Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), the countryside is where the title character goes to escape the privations and dangers of a Moscow torn by Revolution and Civil War. There he learns that all life, large or small, past or present, human or vegetable, is interconnected and sacred, that essentials lie in homely daily details, and that authentic humanity and true art depend on one's ability to achieve a "tranquil and broad outlook which elevate(s) the particular instance to a universality that is familiar to all." But Pasternak enriches this "country" theme by introducing an "Eastern" motif, which had been virtually absent from Soviet urban fiction since the 1920s. Not only does Zhivago settle far to the East, in the Urals region, but just before he leaves Moscow, he sees a mysterious boy "with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat with fur on both sides, the kind people wear in Siberia or the Urals." He understands that this boy is his "death," meaning, perhaps, the death of an old way of life, and rebirth into a new one. If so, then what Pasternak draws on here is the tradition of the vital, life-affirming, and essentially Christian East that goes back to the Primary Chronicle. The literary conventions of the nineteenth century might lead us to suppose that once Zhivago abandons Moscow and embraces the rural east, he achieves personal fulfillment. Pasternak refuses such an easy and obvious solution. Zhivago's life in Moscow is shown to be a necessary preparation for his spiritual and artistic discoveries. It is there that he begins to see that the whole edifice of pre-revolutionary culture has been false, that the Revolution has been beneficial in knocking it down and revealing essentials, as expressed in the "joy of living" an "ordinary" existence, and that he is powerless to interfere in the processes of history or the natural rhythms of life. And it is to Moscow that he ultimately returns, like most of the surviving characters in the novel. He understands that despite its shabbiness and poverty, Moscow is "still a big, modern city," and that such cities are "the only inspiration for a truly new, modern art," speaking as they do the "living language of our time . . . the language of urbanism," which is "incessantly stirring and rumbling outside our doors and windows." Zhivago himself does not live long enough to turn these insights into art. Perhaps it is just as well: he retains something of the aesthete in his makeup, and Pasternak would not have us think that the city is simply material for a good poem. Perhaps that is why his death is followed by an epilogue in which the narrator states that Moscow is not merely "the locale of these
events," but is itself "the real heroine of a long story," the most Russian of subjects, indeed a "holy city," the embodiment, we might say, of an authentically Russian life that knows no polarities, but is organic, unitary, and vital. The similarity to medieval views of Moscow, and, more recently, to Tolstoi's view in War and Peace, though unremarked, is obvious.15
There is no place for Petersburg in Zhivago's world, or, for that matter, in much of the Soviet literature written since the 1920s. But the theme is not dead. In 1978 Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House appeared. The edifice that inspires the title is the famous institute for literary research of the Academy of Sciences, located on Vasilevskii Island in St. Petersburg. We are therefore not surprised to find that, in the spirit of Belyi, the novel cites or alludes to many well-known works of Russian literature, draws characters, situations and themes from them, and treats them all as part of the ongoing life of the city in the 1960s. Bitov need not even be very specific about the sights and landmarks: mere hints and echoes serve to situate any reasonably literate reader. Yet the novel seems luxuriant, mainly because Bitov relishes the particulars of ordinary life. For the most part, he treats them with warmth and affection. That in itself represents a sharp departure from the Petersburg literary conventions, and probably explains why he has no need for a contrasting Moscow or countryside.
Pushkin House was one of the last big novels with a city theme to be published in Russia. Indeed, novels of any kind are rarer now; literature itself has fallen on hard times; creative energies are being directed elsewhere. But given the traditional importance of fiction for reflecting and shaping the national mind, it is likely that Russia will again need its writers, and likely too that the novel, and with it the theme of the city, will revive and continue to resonate.
NOTES
1. In Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi. Nachalo russkoi literatury XI - nachalo XII vekov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), p. 37.
2. Karamzin's memoir was published as a supplement (prilozhenie) to A. N. Pypin, Obshcbestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii pri Aleksandre I, 4th edn (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1908), pp. 491-92, 481, 483. The italics are Karamzin's.
3. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati totnakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1962-66), vol. v, pp. 32, 155-56, 163.
4. Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 379-97-
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