The Cambridge Companion to Classic Russian novel

5. In Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1937-52), vol. in. The quotes from "Nevskii Prospekt" are on pp. 19, 46; from "Shinel," on pp. 145, 161.

6. Gogol, "Peterburgskie zapiski 1836 goda," in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol.

VIII, pp. 177-79-

7. In Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), vol. v, p. 101.

8. Ibid., vol. vi, p. 115.

9. In Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1929-64), vol. ix, p. 258; vol. xii, pp. 3, 211; vol. xi, pp. 96-97.

10. Victor Terras, "Gorky," in Victor Terras (éd.), Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 181.

11. Belyi, Letter to Aleksandr Blok, December 28, 1912 (January 10, 1913), in V Orlov (éd.), Aleksandr Blok i Andrei Belyi. Perepiska (Moscow: Izd. Gosudarstvennogo Literaturnogo Muzeia, 1940), pp. 301, 309. For the quotations from Belyi's Petersburg, see the 1928 edition as published in Moscow (Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), pp. 58, 78.

12. The quotations are taken from the first edition, as published in Krasnaia nov', 1 (1923), 74; 2 (1923), 55, 57. Most of the passages cited were removed from subsequent editions of the novel, and "Petersburg" was changed to "Petrograd" - all understandable "improvements" in light of the new political climate. "Universal happiness" in the last quotation sounds peculiar - perhaps it is a misprint for "unhappiness" - but it does not alter Tolstoi's idea that technology has its limitations.

13. For a detailed discussion of Zamiatin's indebtedness to Petersburg, see Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, "The Legacy of Petersburg. Zamiatin's We," in John Elsworth (éd.), The Silver Age in Russian Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 182-95.

14. In Pilniak, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura), pp. 46-47-

15. Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), pp. 465, 211, 500, 501, 530-31.

3

HUGH McLEAN

The countryside

Certainly since the time of Theocritus, and doubtless long before that, weary city dwellers have sought - or at least thought about seeking -escape from their noisy, bustling, confining urban world into the tranquillity, spaciousness, and presumed leisure of the countryside. In such moods nature generally appears to them in her most benign aspects: warm but not hot, green, fertile, vivifying, motherly. The country resident, on the other hand, may feel an equally powerful impulse to escape: from the isolation, boredom, discomforts, and dangers of rural life to the security, social connectedness, and relative cultural richness of the town, where people can collectively defend themselves against a nature often not at all benign, as well as against less than benign fellow creatures.

The anti-urban urge has been a theme of literature almost since literature has existed at all. The Western tradition offers a long procession of passionate pastoralists, from Theocritus and Vergil down to Rousseau and beyond. Despite the fact that only a tiny minority of them actually lived in cities, the Russians absorbed the pastoral tradition enthusiastically if belatedly, themselves producing such elegant poetic celebrations of the bucolic life as Gavrila Derzhavin's delightful idyll "To Evgenii; Life at Zvanka"(1807).

In the novel, celebration of the countryside makes a splendid beginning in Evgenii Onegin, Pushkin's great novel-in-verse, the progenitor in theme if not in form of so many distinguished descendants. Evgenii Onegin embodies that triangle of vividly contrasted settings later powerfully exploited by Tolstoi: majestic, imperial, "European" St. Petersburg; comfortable, historic, ultra-Russian Moscow; and a lyric countryside filled with idyllic nests where the gentry played at realizing the Theocritan ideal. "Flowers, love, countryside, idleness, / Fields! I am devoted to you with all my heart"¹ proclaims the narrator-poet, marking this as a distinction that separates him from his hero, who soon tires of live-in "eclogues." It is an attachment the narrator shares with his nature-loving heroine, Tatiana,

who even in her last incarnation as a Petersburg grande dame still longs to return to her bucolic birthplace. Despite the boredom, however, Onegin does settle down easily enough to the life of a country squire, in a prototypical setting the narrator describes as a "charming little place,"² complete with a manor house perched on a hill, a brook, meadows, fields of grain, and a garden serving as "the refuge of meditative Dryads."³ There Onegin lives the life of an "anchorite," amusing himself with reading, horseback riding, wine, "fairly inventive" dinners, and on occasion the "young and fresh kiss"⁴ of one of his dark-eyed serf girls.

Onegin has, however, brought with him, both in his luggage and within himself, some of the trappings of urban culture; these set him apart from the local gentry, whose conversation inescapably turns around such prosaic rural concerns as haymaking and hunting dogs. Their greater cultural sophistication draws together Onegin and Lenskii, the latter fresh from his studies at Gottingen, although Lenskii, unlike Onegin, is willing to let the charms of love draw him into rustic social life. Eventually even the anchorite Onegin is caught in the toils of love, as Tatiana follows up her letter with direct confrontation in the garden. The manor garden as a locus of love declarations, later an almost automatic reflex in the nineteenth-century Russian novel, especially Turgenev's, thus makes an early appearance in Evgenii Onegin, although in an image reversed from the conventional one, with the female offering love and the male rejecting it.

Pushkin takes us through the whole sequence of seasons in the country, showing not just the spring and summer idylls, but also chilly, rainy autumn, and best of all, the crisp, clear Russian winter, felt as exhilarating both by the "triumphant" peasant who opens the first sleigh-road and the frolicsome lad who harnesses himself to the sled on which his dog gets a ride. The winter, the time of nature's death, is the appropriate time for the fatal duel that ends Lenskii's brief life and propels Onegin onto his "journey." A year later Tatiana is taken over the same sleigh-roads to Moscow, to be auctioned off at the "bridal fair."

The majority of inhabitants of the Russian countryside, the actual peasant farmers on whom the country's life depends, make only the briefest cameo appearances. Onegin's perhaps urban-generated liberalism induces him to shift his serfs from barshchina ("corvée," i.e. work for the landlord) to obrok ("quitrent," i.e., payment to the landlord in money or in kind),⁵ much to the consternation of his conservative neighbors; but it never seems to occur to him to question his right to live as a complete parasite and in comparative luxury off the labor of these slaves.

It will be almost two decades before Russian literature will bring these slaves into literary focus. In the meantime, Onegin's journey, retracing the

poet's own exilic wandering, takes him into the more exotic regions of the expanding Russian empire, the picturesque Crimea, with its memories of ancient Greek settlements and Tatar seraglios, and most of all the Caucasus, which served beautifully as Russia's answer to Byron's Near East: towering, majestic peaks, dramatic waterfalls and colorful natives, admirable in the reckless dash of their brave warriors, the exotic charm of their women, the alluring otherness of their (mostly) Muslim customs.

These scenes, already etched into the Russian consciousness from Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), were given their classic novelistic incarnation in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840), where the Caucasus provides an ideal backdrop for another tragic romance between a callous, "burned-out" Russian officer and a vulnerable Circassian maiden, and also for a classic, purely Russian "society tale" of sexual rivalry, set in one of the region's fashionable watering places.

Back home in Russia proper, the idyllic setting of the gentry estate was given a much less benevolent exposure by Gogol. In his story "Old-world Landowners" (1835) Gogol had already, under the guise of what masquerades as an idyll, in fact vividly epitomized what Marx and Engels later called the "idiocy of rural life."⁶ If looked at too closely, Gogol's lovable Baucis and Philemon are actually walking exemplars of the grossest gluttony and empty-headed futility. Now the same theme was writ large in his great novel Dead Souls (1842). Even the plot of this satirical masterpiece was indicative of the fatal weakness that before the end of the century would bring ruin to so many Russian gentlefolk: their addiction to living on borrowed money. The attempt of Gogol's anti-hero, Chichikov, to swindle the state by mortgaging dead instead of live serfs is only an outré, criminal instance of the egregious fiscal irresponsibility characteristic of most gentlemen.

Chichikov's acquisitive excursions outward into the countryside from the town of NN confront him and the reader with a series of stupefying specimens of degenerate gentry whose environs are perfect metonymies of their lifeless souls. In the garden of bland, sentimental, pretentious Manilov, for example, there is a gazebo ludicrously labeled "Temple of Solitary Meditation." The bully, windbag, and liar Nozdrev lives among kindred spirits - a huge pack of dogs to which he was "like a father," while his human children interest him little. Solid, stolid Sobakevich is at least a good manager of his domain, viewing his peasants as an extension of himself. Their no-nonsense homes have no carved ornaments or other frills, but are built to last. In contrast, the huts of miser Pliushkin's serfs have deteriorated to the point of disintegration, their occupants having absconded to the tavern or the open road. In Pliushkin's neglected garden,

however, nature has created a wonderful, tangled wilderness, described by Gogol in wonderful, tangled sentences. In that garden the remnants of human plans and efforts to impose order on nature have long since been submerged to the point of obliteration in luxuriant verdure.

The second volume of Dead Souls was supposed to embody a less negative image of the Russian countryside, a world peopled by landowners some of whom, at least, were trying to realize the practical program of beneficent agricultural and serf management that Gogol later outlined in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). The ideal is presumably realized on the estate of Konstantin Kostanzhoglo, where everything is orderly and in good repair, the peasants have "some sort of intelligent expression on their faces," and the manor house is crowned by a huge (pre-electric) spotlight that lights up his lands for fifteen versts (ten miles) around. The spotlight aptly symbolizes the "enlightening" aspect of Kostanzhoglo's benign concentration camp, which bears a startling resemblance to the regime of peasant control and agricultural management actually instituted a century later on Soviet kolkbozy and sovkhozy. Russian peasants, Gogol clearly believed, were by nature lazy dolts who required the strictest supervision from their God-appointed masters. If all landowners were like Kostanzhoglo, he thought, then serfdom could be the basis for a society not merely tolerable, but actually ideal.

The winds of history, however, were blowing in a different direction. By the late 1840s it was becoming increasingly clear, even in the upper reaches of Nicholas's hidebound government, that serfdom would eventually have to go. It was wasteful and inefficient; as agricultural managers the gentry were negligent, ill-qualified, and ineffective; the peasants had neither incentive nor adequate opportunity to improve their lot by hard work, thrift, and investment. And of course serfdom was flagrantly inhumane. Peasants were helplessly subject to the whims of their owners or the latter's deputies, who not only managed the peasants' labor and disposed of its fruits, but had almost unlimited power over their lives and bodies. In the 1840s Russian literature at last assumed the task of opening the country's eyes to the cruel realities of the peasant's lot.⁷

To be sure, peasants were something of an international fashion at the time, as witness famous novels by George Sand, Berthold Auerbach, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; but no doubt harsh economic conditions in the Russian countryside and a growing recognition of the inhumanity of the serf system independently impressed on Russian writers the timeliness for them of the peasant theme. At any rate, the Russian reading public was jolted in the mid-1840s by two powerful, pioneering novellas produced by a writer long respected in Russia, but little known abroad, Dmitrii

Grigorovich. Grigorovich's The Village (1846) and Anton Goremyka (1847) for the first time offered Russian readers a close look at the realities of everyday peasant life, and a look not "downward" but as if from within. In The Village this view-from-within is rendered still more poignant by the doubly vulnerable status of the central character. Akulia is an orphan girl taken in, very reluctantly, by a neighbor's household when her mother dies. Akulia's life is one of unmitigated oppression not so much by her owners who for the most part are scarcely aware of her existence, though they do, by blindness and caprice rather than malice, later force her into an unsuitable marriage) as by other peasants - first her step-parents and then her husband and in-laws. And even that oppression, it increasingly transpires, is mostly a by-product of the overwhelming social fact about the Russian countryside: poverty.

For most Russian peasants in the nineteenth century were poor. Their wretched houses were smelly, dark, drafty, and crowded. The peasant diet was extremely limited: cabbage soup, kasha (porridge), potatoes, and rye bread were the staples, and in years of bad harvests there was real hunger and even starvation. Few could afford real shoes or boots, instead making do in winter with bast wrappings, made from the inner bark of lime trees. Defenses against disease were those of folk medicine: herbs and magic incantations. Until the zemstvo reforms of the 1860s schools for peasant children were almost non-existent. Serfs were subject to the capricious authority of their owners and could be sold with or without land. Corporal punishment was widely used. Life was bleak and without much prospect of improvement, at least until industrialization late in the century made : »ssible a mass migration of peasants into the cities to become industrial workers. In the meantime the chief escape and entertainment, at least for men, was consumption of alcohol, a practice which unproductively siphoned off the small amount of disposable income the peasants had.

Most of these woes are exhibited in Anton Goremyka, whose hero, an exceptionally kind, responsible peasant, is driven by both malice and circumstances to the last limits of despair. We have the testimony of Lev Tolstoi, then a university student, of the "great impression" made on him by this tale.⁸ Its colors, however, must have seemed unbearably dark to most of the reading public. Surely not all peasants were "poor wretches"; surely the sun sometimes shone on the Russian village. Perhaps in quest of this more balanced view Ivan Turgenev shouldered his gun and undertook to explore the countryside of Orel Province. The ultimate result was his splendid The Sportsman's Sketches (1852), perhaps his greatest book.

Turgenev's work, like Grigorovich's, is an extension to the countryside of the so-called "physiologies," already applied to urban environments in

Nekrasov's Petersburg Miscellanies (1845-46). As a literary form, the physiology was an early manifestation of the developing school of Realism: a basically descriptive rather than narrative genre, in which high value is placed on "truth." In his rural physiologies Turgenev dealt not only with peasants, but with gentry as well, and even with some of the intermediate classes, though he avoids the clergy. In general, he finds an inverse relationship of virtue and attractiveness to social standing. Turgenev's peasants, for the most part, are agreeable, responsive, complex, articulate human beings, whereas landowners are eccentric, self-indulgent, twisted, and incomplete in their humanity, with no special qualifications at all for the function they are supposed to fulfill in rural life, that of agricultural managers.

The very first of the sketches, "Khor and Kalinych" (1847), offers a contrast of two very different human types, showing that male peasants, far from being an undifferentiated mass of bearded look-alikes, offer a wide range of varieties. Khor is as far removed as could be imagined from Anton Goremyka. No doubt highly exceptional in his achieved independence and prosperity, he is an intelligent, enterprising peasant businessman, a markedly successful manager of his domain, allowed a large degree of freedom by his owner as long as his substantial quitrent payments are kept up. His friend Kalinych, on the other hand, is by nature a romantic, a true child of nature, more at home in the woods than under a roof, utterly uninterested in "getting ahead."

Turgenev's roving camera reveals numerous examples of the cruelty and pain engendered by the serf system itself, quite apart from the nearly universal poverty. Particularly injurious is the capricious interference by owners in their serfs' private lives, such as refusal to allow love-marriages, as is the case in "Ermolai and the Miller's Wife." More egregious cruelty is not unknown. In "The Bailiff" the landowner Arkadii Penochkin, a refined, French-speaking aesthete, has a servant flogged because the wine has not been warmed to his satisfaction; and when a family of peasants in a distant village appeals to him against a bailiff whose extortions have reduced them to despair, Penochkin angrily dismisses their complaint, leaving the infamous bailiff free to exact his revenge.

Turgenev is also at pains to show that Russian peasants are by no means lacking in what the educated classes call "culture." Though different and unwritten, their oral culture is no less real and meaningful than the literate one taught to the gentry in schools. In "The Singers" Turgenev's persona, along with an intensely involved audience of peasant enthusiasts, witnesses a musical contest between two expert vocal acrobats, either of whom, had their circumstances been different, might well have graced the operatic stage.

Some of the finest pages in A Sportsman's Sketches are devoted to nature herself, seen apart from the human fauna that exploit and often despoil her. The hunter's last sketch, "Forest and Steppe," is an early instance of those virtuoso nature descriptions that became a much admired feature of all Turgenev's art, displaying his acute perceptions, his detailed, almost scientific knowledge of plant and animal life, his painterly eye for nuances of shading and color, and his unsurpassed power over the rich resources of the Russian language, by means of which he transforms literature into a graphic art.

Country scenes play an important part in most of Turgenev's novels more narrowly defined, such as Rudin (1856), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), On the Eve (1860), and Virgin Soil (1877), though he never again invoked the peasant theme as centrally as he had done in A Sportsman's Sketches. In Turgenev's greatest novel, Fathers and Children (1862), the action is again exclusively concentrated on the life of the gentlefolk in their several nests. They are, however, themselves differentiated by class: the plebeian "nihilist" student Bazarov, son of a country doctor, introduces a disruptive force into the tranquil world of the more aristocratic Kirsanov family, giving them the implied message that they are both parasitic and outmoded. Though he may partly agree with this assessment, Turgenev seems to take malicious satisfaction in showing that the plebeian Bazarov is no more successful than the aristocrats at communicating with real peasants.

Moreover, Bazarov is no more immune than the Kirsanov brothers to the charms of the lovely Fenechka, the softly deferential plebeian beauty Nikolai Kirsanov has taken as mistress and later makes his wife. Bazarov's flirtation with Fenechka provokes an absurd duel with Pavel Kirsanov, who is himself guilty of lusting after Fenechka. These scenes take place in a series of idyllic settings evoked in Turgenev's typical lyric prose, mostly on the Kirsanov estate, but with contrastive excursions both to the neighboring town and to the modest property of Bazarov's parents. All the landscapes are summer ones, incidentally; Turgenev tends to avoid winter scenes.

Hunting itself is seldom at the center of attention in A Sportsman's Sketches, but hunting for its own sake did have a major part to play in Russian literature. Hunting is, after all, an archetypal human activity. Originally part of man's eternal quest for food, it was then extended to encompass the protection of agriculture and domesticated animals from predators. By the nineteenth century, however, it had become primarily a "sport," an entertainment engaged in by country people, mostly gentry, but with peasant participation. Only toward the end of the century was much notice taken of its cruelty and destructiveness.

Both hunting and fishing play an essential part in the great trilogy of Sergei Aksakov, A Family Chronicle and Recollections (1856) and Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov (1858). (Earlier, Aksakov had written the Russians' classic practical manuals on both hunting and fishing.) In the trilogy all the main themes associated with the Russian countryside are present: country life vs. town life; a child's discovery of nature; man's conquest of nature through agriculture; serfdom; Russian conquest of new lands, involving subjection of non-Russian native peoples; and ecological problems, including deforestation and destruction of wildlife habitats.

As in Evgenii Onegin and many other Russian novels, the contrast between life in the town and life on a gentry estate is a central device in Aksakov's novels, woven into the very fabric of the plot, where it acquires a genetic dimension associated with two basic strains in the lineage of grandson Bagrov. On the paternal side, Bagrov's father and heroic grandfather are quintessential country squires, presiding in due succession over a substantial domain in the Ufa region, some 300 miles east of Kazan, wrested by the grandfather both from wild nature and from the nomadic Bashkir tribesmen who had been its owners. Bagrov's mother, on the other hand, is very much a townswoman. At first the family lived in Ufa, while the father pursued an official career, but on the death of his father they moved for good to the Bagrov estate. The narrator, whose Bagrov blood responded powerfully to all the country stimuli - fishing, hunting, farming, and simply nature herself - was thus confronted with a difficult emotional conflict, one that extends through the whole novel: a much adored mother who not only did not share his enthusiasm for these country attractions, but actually tried to bar him from them, as either dangerous or somehow degrading.

Despite his mother's resistance, the country experiences that bring about the boy Bagrov's awakening to nature are among the most strongly felt and formative of his life, described by Aksakov both with the detailed precision of careful observation, and with an emotional exuberance that still avoids all sentimentality or prettifying. As in Evgenii Onegin, all the seasons are covered: the rigors of a winter journey by sleigh during a blizzard (one is made acutely aware of the eternal Russian struggle with cold - man the "naked ape" who has chosen to live in a frigid climate for which nature has provided him with no bodily defenses); the exultation as spring at last breaks winter's hold, ice and snow begin to melt, the birds come back, and the boy can escape the long imprisonment indoors; the lushness of summer, with its freedom and manifold activities of peasants and gentry alike; and finally, the sense of completeness in autumn, with its harvest festivities and rest from summer toil.

Bagrov's grandfather and his father, unlike many Russian landowners, were attentive agricultural managers, and the boy Bagrov observes their activities with fascination. Once, while watching the peasants prepare the land for sowing, the boy asks and is allowed, though reluctantly, to try peasant work himself. But the experience is quite unlike that of Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina. Trying to harrow the ground, Bagrov lacks peasant know-how, cannot walk easily on the ploughed land, cannot make the horse obey him. The peasant boy guiding him laughs at his difficulties, Bagrov feels humiliated, and the experiment is not repeated. Class barriers are not so easily crossed.

Unlike A Sportsman's Sketches, Aksakov's trilogy makes no effort to bring the question of serfdom into primary focus; indeed, the atmosphere of nostalgia for a gentleman's beautiful childhood on an estate farmed by serfs would seem to exclude much expression of protest. Yet some revulsion against cruelty and injustice does penetrate the nostalgia. The tempestuous rages in which old grandfather Bagrov indulges from time to time, committing physical mayhem against his serfs and family alike, are a repellent manifestation of a social system that endows a male master with unbridled power over all the human beings in his domain. The boy Bagrov is also revolted when he sees his grandmother, herself a victim of her husband's violence, take out a whip and flog a serf girl who had done her spinning work badly.

The theme of ecological deterioration, so prominent in our times, is anticipated by Aksakov, as it was later by Chekhov. The domestication of wild lands, a process actively represented by grandfather Bagrov, inevitably brings with it destruction of wildlife habitats and thus less abundant fish and game. Bagrov as fisherman and hunter is thus at odds with Bagrov as farmer, and he finds no way to resolve the contradiction. He celebrates his grandfather's pioneering enterprise, but at the same time laments the destruction of the wilderness which this enterprise causes.

In 1859, a year after Childhood Years of the Bagrov Grandson, there appeared another major text in the Russian pastoral tradition, Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (actually the most pastoral part of the novel, "Oblomov's Dream," had appeared separately as early as 1849). Again as in Aksakov, the pastoral theme is invoked in the form of nostalgia for a lost, idyllic world of childhood. The present of the hero, Ilia Oblomov, is irrevocably fixated in the urban world of St. Petersburg. Duty, however, demands that he return to the rural scenes of his childhood and assume full responsibility for the now neglected lands he has inherited. Hopelessly indolent, he can never summon the energy actually to fulfill his duty. How

much more pleasant to do it all in fantasy, to return via "dream" to the Oblomovka of the past!

The nostalgia of the return is, however, less pure than Aksakov-Bagrov's. First of all, the purpose of the imaginary recovery of childhood is classically psychoanalytic (at least in the modern reader's eyes): to seek an explanation for the hero's crippling psychological disabilities, a quest Aksakov in no way shares. The answer clearly emerges: the pathologically overprotective upbringing of an adored gentry child with no siblings, doted on and cosseted by parents and an extended family, sheltered from every possible danger, real or imaginary, with every wish instantly fulfilled by obsequious servants. The indolence of Oblomov's mature years is already instilled in him in childhood, both by the example of the extraordinarily inactive adults with whom he lives, and by their fear-ridden effort to stifle in him any spark of independence, vigor, or adventure.

A contrast later central to the novel has its roots already at the time of "Oblomov's Dream": the "Russian" indolence of the Oblomovs vs. the "German" efficiency and enterprise of the Stolz family, whose father manages a nearby estate and also runs a boarding school. These "German" virtues, however, are never actually exhibited as manifested in agriculture, and indeed throughout the novel the Stolz side of the contrast remains largely a theoretical abstraction. But Ilia Oblomov's "Russian" indolence is all too palpable. His parents' life closely resembles that of Gogol's old-world landowners: utter idleness, the days punctuated only by the biological rhythms of eating and sleeping. No one really does anything else. The inevitable changes brought about by the passage of time are simply lamented; the ideal world would be for every day to be exactly like the one before. The Oblomov motto of total inertia is succinctly formulated by the mistress: "One should pray more to God and not think about anything."⁹

Standing behind his inert hero, Goncharov is aware that not all is well at Oblomovka, idyllic as it may seem. The indolence has gone so far that even basic house repairs are not made. A balcony long decrepit and ruled out of bounds to the family (but not to their serfs) at last collapses and falls, fortunately crushing only a family of chickens. Farming seems to be left entirely to the peasants themselves, the master's supervision consisting only of sitting by the window and asking passing peasants what they are doing and why. Serfdom seems almost benign in this lazy atmosphere, but some ugly signs nevertheless appear. For instance, the fourteen-year-old Ilia lies on his back so that his servant, Zakhar, can put on his stockings and shoes. If something displeases him in the procedure, "he will let Zakharka have it on the nose with his foot."¹⁰ If Zakhar should complain, he will receive a "light blow with the fist"¹¹ from Oblomov senior. Ilia Oblomov escapes

from Oblomovka to an abortive official career in St. Petersburg, but he cannot escape its spirit of inertia and dependence, which cripples him for life. Oblomov illustrates vividly a fundamental paradox about a serf society: the nominal masters or "parents" are often in effect children, and spoiled children at that, nurtured and cared for by their "parent" slaves.

The pastoral theme plays a prominent part in both of Lev Tolstoi's great novels. The action of War and Peace (1865-69) is of course projected back to a much earlier era, the age of Alexander I, when Russian society (at least in retrospect) had seemed much more stable, confident, and, as it were, morally valid, despite the presence of serfdom, its merits demonstrated by the great victory over Napoleon. All three major families in the novel own country estates, which, as in Gogol, metonymically reflect their owners' characters. Ilia Rostov epitomizes the irresponsibility of the archetypal Russian gentleman: mortgage your lands to the hilt, live lavishly, and hope your children can marry money (in this case they succeed). Pierre Bezukhov inherits vast holdings on which he intends to introduce far-reaching reforms. Few reforms, however, are actually accomplished, for Pierre lacks the perseverance and practical capacity to see to it that his orders are carried out. Old Nikolai Bolkonskii, a former general, has imposed on Bald Hills (Lysye gory) an eighteenth-century rationalist, quasi-military regime. His son Andrei, assuming ownership of an estate at Bogucharovo, exhibits some of the same rationalist traits, but with an admixture of new, liberal ideas. There he is able successfully to implement most of the reforms Pierre dreamed of in vain, including a scheme for peasant emancipation. Nevertheless, it is the Bogucharovo peasants who, seduced by strange superstitions, threaten to revolt when the French armies are at the gates and Princess Maria is alone in charge. Serendipitously, Nikolai Rostov arrives just in time to teach them who is boss, partly by strategic use of his fists.

Hunting is also a gauge of character in Tolstoi, as well as an opportunity for vivid narrative. Maintaining a lavish hunting establishment, Ilia Rostov still enjoys the excitement of the chase, though old age has diminished his physical powers and his judgment. His son, Nikolai, however, has all the dash and passion of the born hunter. And even Natasha, showing that her native Russianness is unspoiled by her aristocratic upbringing, enters fully into the spirit of the hunt and emits a squeal of exultation when she sees that the dogs have run down a hare.

In Anna Karenina we see Russian society at a much later period, the 1870s. Town and country are again vividly contrasted, always in favor of the latter, and with penetrating subtleties. True country people, epitomized by Konstantin Levin, have real roots in the soil. The country is their natural home; they belong there and live fully only there. But others, like Levin's

half-brother Koznyshev, Stiva Oblonskii, Vronskii, and Anna Karenina herself, are only visitors in the country; their real life is in the city. Stiva, in typical gentry fashion, is selling off the timber on his wife's lands for less than it is worth to merchants who know its value very well. Vronskii spends vast sums of money to recreate in the country all the luxuries of urban life and adds some supposed benefactions for the peasants. But his charities are felt as alien and out of proportion, like the cows he imports from Switzerland. He is simply playing "squire." And on Vronksii's estate Anna is only a guest, not the mistress, an alien body in an alien world.

The antipode to these unassimilated urban transplants is Konstantin Levin, Tolstoi's ideal country gentleman, a thoroughly engaged and committed full-time farmer. And Levin's apotheosis is the great mowing scene, when his physical strength enables him to wield a scythe with the best of the peasant mowers, thus obliterating the social distance between himself and the "people" and becoming one of them, at least for a day. In this sublime saturnalia of sweat he experiences real ecstasy, a total obliteration of self.

Later in his life Tolstoi advocated more drastic means for reconciliation of the classes: voluntary renunciation of their property by landowners. Though few gentlemen - not even Tolstoi - adopted this Utopian programme of their own accord, a great many in effect did so involuntarily, losing their lands through forced sale or foreclosure. The decline of the gentry in the nineteenth century remains a crucial sociological fact, most powerfully epitomized in literature in Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlev Family (1880), surely one of the gloomiest books ever written.

Here the degeneration of the gentry is far more than economic; indeed, in the novel's early parts it is not economic at all, as if to demonstrate that there are worse forms of degradation than bankruptcy. The first-generation matriarch, Arina Petrovna Golovleva, is - atypically - a good, industrious manager and succeeds in adding to the family's assets. But it is all for naught. The family for whose sake she has toiled is in a state of catastrophic moral and psychological disintegration, incapable even of enjoying, let alone conserving their wealth. Her husband is a shiftless drunkard who mostly lies in bed writing obscene poetry. Their eldest son, Stepka, after squandering property devolved on him by his mother, returns to live like an animal in an outbuilding in the Golovlev estate, killing himself with vodka. Another son, Pavel, also drinks himself to death. A daughter, Anna, marries against her mother's will, is deserted by her husband and dies, leaving two orphaned daughters, the chief representatives of the third generation. But the ultimate specimen of moral decay - and the crowning glory of the novel - is the third son, Porfirii or "Iudushka" (little Judas), one of the most

unforgettably repulsive characters in literature: pointlessly, pettily acquisitive, impenetrably hypocritical and self-righteous, endlessly mouthing self-justifying moral aphorisms, untouched by any feeling of human connectedness. One of his sons commits suicide when his father disinherits him; the other embezzles government money and is sent to Siberia, where he dies, his father refusing to help him. The two orphan girls complete the process of degeneration. First running away to become provincial actresses, they sink into a mire of vulgarity, becoming virtual prostitutes. One ends by committing suicide, the other destroys herself in the good Golovlev way, with alcohol.

For all of these people the greatest and most beneficial event in their lives is death, and an all-encompassing spirit of emptiness and death pervades the book. Even the landscape is redolent of death: bare, endless fields stretching into the distance, sodden villages like black dots contrasting with the white churches of the village cemeteries. It is hard to imagine any redemption or hope reaching the utter bleakness of the Golovlevs' grim world.

In the early twentieth century Ivan Bunin's novel Sukhodol (1911) seems a direct echo of The Golovlev Family. It shows a gentry family in an even more extreme state of hopelessness and decay, if that can be imagined. At the end of Sukhodol a once imposing manor house, now in ruins and unheated, is inhabited by three shivering elderly women. One of them is totally insane. She and another are the only survivors of the noble Khrushchev dynasty; the third is a former serf who still feels bound to the family, though it has treated her cruelly. For such a family there can be no future but death and extinction.

Bunin's social pessimism, however, goes further than Salytkov's, encompassing the peasantry as well. His novel The Village (1910) shows a brutalized, deracinated, alcohol-poisoned peasant class, scarcely capable even of the farming tasks they supposedly know by instinct. They have lost any vestiges of the vibrant folk culture celebrated by Turgenev. An equally somber picture of peasant life had been presented earlier in Chekhov's famous story "Peasants" (1898), which had shocked the Russian public, used to the much more benevolent view of the peasantry found in the work of populist writers like Nikolai Zlatovratskii.

Bunin's Village contrasts the lives of two brothers of peasant origin. One of them, Tikhon, has made money in the town by ruthless acquisitiveness. He eventually is able to buy the estate of Durnovka, where his greatgrandfather, in the days of serfdom, had been exposed to be devoured by hunting dogs for the crime of stealing his master's lover. But the acquisition brings Tikhon little satisfaction, economic or emotional. The life led there

by its peasant inhabitants has become one of unrelieved, squalid barbarism, grimly observed from the decrepit manor house by Tikhon's agent, his brother Kuzma, himself a sort of failed village philosopher. Farming at Durnovka is carried on sloppily and lazily; there is constant strife and bickering, both among families and within them, frequently erupting into ugly scenes of violence. After a year in Durnovka, Kuzma and Tikhon both only long to get away: "to the town, as far as possible from these cutthroats."¹² Bunin's village is a world devoid of any social cohesion or morality, where irrational, often self-destructive people act out their basest instincts. Although in general Bunin seems to believe that the instinctual life is all that matters, that neither social forms, ideologies, nor culture have much real influence on human behavior, he nevertheless also appears to think that conditions in the Russian countryside actually deteriorated after the emancipation of 1861. Gentry and peasantry decayed together, and the ruin that descended on the country after 1917 was not unexpected.

The countryside was certainly not a primary concern of the urban-centered modernists who dominated the Russian literary scene in the decades before the Revolution. Nevertheless, at least one major novel must be mentioned as an exception to this rule, Andrei Belyi's The Silver Dove (1910). In this characteristically symbolizing novel most of the action takes place in three locales, each supposedly characteristic of the Russian countryside, but at the same time functioning at a high level of symbolic abstraction. The village of Tselebeevo lies between the gentry estate of Gugolevo to the West and the town of Likhov to the East. Gugolevo represents the heritage of Western civilization and culture, the bearers of which were the upper classes, including the gentry and intelligentsia. Likhov, the home of the dissenting religious sect of the "Doves," symbolizes the East, perceived by Belyi as chaotic, irrational, primitive. The hero, Petr Darialskii, is torn between the two: an intellectual rooted in Western culture, engaged to a gentlewoman, he is powerfully drawn, partly by sexual attraction, to a coarse peasant woman, Matrena, and hopes through her to lose himself in the peasant mass. The "doves" want Darialskii to sire a "savior" on Matrena; when he becomes disillusioned and seeks to escape the entanglement, they murder him. This plot was, of course, a symbolic representation of one of the most troublesome problems that had afflicted Russian society since the eighteenth century, the enormous cultural gulf separating the educated classes from the "people," and Belyi's novel was a prophetic illustration of the virulent class hatreds that were to be unleashed and acted out in the Civil War of 1918-20.

The topic of the Civil War was to dominate much of the literature of the first post-revolutionary decade, and its leading new novelist, Boris Pilniak,

took up this theme, using ideas and techniques derived directly from Andrei Belyi and to some extent from Bunin. Pilniak's most characteristic novel, The Naked Year (1921), utilizes typical Belyi-esque devices - "musical" prose, fragmented structure - to represent the chaos of Russian provincial life during the "naked" year, 1919. In that fateful time nature herself participates in the country's destructive orgy of violence and death. As in Blok's "The Twelve," cruel, symbolic snowstorms sweep across the land, in Pilniak singing nonsense, neo-Soviet words: gviuu, gaauuu, gla-vboommm.

A neo-Slavophile, Pilniak enthusiastically endorses the "Eastern," elemental, instinctive, ultra-Russian side of the dichotomy symbolized in The Silver Dove, indeed carrying the confrontation much further than Belyi had done. Pilniak sees the Revolution as the upheaval of "Scythian," atavistic, peasant Russia, gleefully and violently casting off the encrustations of Western civilization imposed on her since the reforms of Peter the Great, and he exults in the destruction. The two most "Western" classes in old Russia, the landed gentry and the merchants, are shown as hopelessly degenerate, ripe for the slaughter. The noble Ordynin family, like Bunin's Khrushchevs, had long ago squandered their landed property. Though they had temporarily recouped their position by a marital alliance with a rich merchant family, all of their wealth has now been swept away by the Revolution save a cellar full of decaying keepsakes. Also like the Khrushchevs', their decline, more than economic, is biological, genetic. The father is mad, the mother in an advanced state of degeneracy, and most of the children variously defective.

Pilniak's "Scythian" view of the Revolution was of course not at all to the liking of the new Bolshevik rulers. In their official view, Soviet Russia was, to be sure, a workers' and peasants' state, but the far more numerous peasants were very much the junior partners in this coalition. They had to be reshaped and pulled along the path of progress by the workers, who in turn had to be properly indoctrinated and led by a Party dominated by intellectuals. During the 1920s, and even more so in the 1930s, formidable pressure was brought to bear on writers to embrace and propagate this "correct" understanding of the historical process.

Even the most well-intentioned writers, however, found it difficult to embody the official formula in actual works about the peasant experience. When foregrounded in fiction, genuine peasant emotions, thoughts, and attitudes tended to overrun the dogma. Something like this seems to have happened with Mikhail Sholokhov's epic novel The Quiet Don (1928-40). Focusing on a highly specific social milieu, the Don Cossacks, one he knew well from personal experience, Sholokhov's artistic integrity overpowered his - no doubt sincere - Communist convictions. Instead of rehearsing an

acceptable Party parable, much to the consternation of official critics Sholokov produced a many-sided, comprehensive picture of a peasant society in turmoil, thoroughly ambiguous in its political implications. The central hero, Grigorii Melekhov, perfectly exemplifies the difficult choices faced by the Cossacks, whose age-old military allegiance to the tsarist state and gut-level attachment to their lands and possessions conflicted with a yearning for social justice, especially among the poor. The Cossacks are forced to choose among political movements and armies that represent alien objectives coming from the larger outside world, Reds vs. Whites, neither of whom stood for what the Cossacks wanted. Grigorii vacillates back and forth between them, for a time identifying with a hopelessly quixotic third force, a movement for Cossack independence. At last totally isolated, he comes to a tragic end - not the buoyantly optimistic finale expected of the exemplary Communist morality.

As in War and Peace, the often horrifying narrative of war and violence in The Quiet Don is relieved by vividly realized scenes of "peace": Cossack life described with ethnographic thoroughness, and within it, Grigorii's intense personal relationships - his parents, his brother and sister, his wife and children, his passionate adulterous love affair. Also following Tolstoi, Sholokhov projects the human violence against the background of a lyrically perceived but "indifferent" Nature, rendered with detail and precision of vocabulary worthy of Turgenev.

Before he had brought his epic novel to a conclusion, Sholokhov was pressured into undertaking a new project, a novel dealing with the "hot" subject of collectivization. Entitled Virgin Soil Upturned, this work proved even more difficult for Sholokhov to complete. The first volume was duly published in 1932, while collectivization was still going on, but the second one did not appear until i960! In this novel Sholokhov's adherence to Party doctrine was much clearer, freer of ambiguities, than had been the case in The Quiet Don. Collectivization was to be represented "correctly," as a class struggle within the village. The better-off kulaks were to be displaced and dispossessed, "liquidated as a class," their property seized and incorporated into collective farms. Although the impetus was supposed to come from the righteously vengeful zeal of the village poor, the real organizer of this social revolution was the Party, represented in the novel by a sterling ex-worker named Semen Davydov. In between the kulaks and the poor were the "middle" peasants, the majority, pulled in both directions - envious of the kulaks, but reluctant to pool their lands and animals into the collective. And to make the class line-up - and the message - even clearer, Sholokhov has the kulaks ally themselves with dark conspirators from the old regime, who lure them with the undying dream of Cossack

independence, to be achieved with (illusory) armed aid expected from the West.

This officially certified series of confrontations might have produced a lifeless and stereotyped piece of Party propaganda. In Sholokhov's hands, however, Virgin Soil Upturned almost succeeds in becoming genuine literature. The social turmoil of that tumultuous time is on the whole convincingly represented, grounded in Sholokhov's intimate knowledge of the Cossack world he depicts. The sufferings of the kulaks are not glossed over, nor is the fact that for many of them their only crime was that they had been good, thrifty farmers. (To be sure, at least one presumably representative kulak, Iakov Ostrovnov, shows his intrinsically evil kulak nature by starving his old mother to death.) Many characters come believably to life, and even the true-blue Communist Davydov is granted a less than exemplary love life, finding it difficult to choose between a sexy adulteress and a pure, dedicated teenager. But the anti-Soviet conspiracy, led by two ex-tsarist officers, one of them a Pole, is thoroughly preposterous, and it comes near to destroying all credence in this otherwise talented novel.

The title of Virgin Soil Upturned, if not its actual content, anticipates and symbolically represents over-ambitious and, in too many cases, ultimately disastrous Soviet projects for transforming nature: literally, Khrushchev's ill-advised effort to solve the perennial grain shortages by bringing under cultivation steppe lands where the water supply was only marginally adequate; and figuratively, countless other projects - damming rivers, changing their courses, placing factories so that their wastes could be discharged into rivers and lakes. The end result of all this has been to turn the former Soviet Union into an ecological disaster area from which it may take decades to recover. Hymnic celebrations of these hubristic assaults on nature were characteristic literary products of "socialist realism."

The peasant theme, though certainly not the countryside, is almost completely absent from one of the most celebrated Russian novels of the Soviet period, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), though the author does take the opportunity, through one of his characters, to pronounce his judgment that collectivization had been a dismal failure, necessitating a huge, terror-based cover-up, aimed at "teaching people not to judge and think."¹³ This wholesale repudiation of collectivization, impossibly heretical in 1957, became the stock-in-trade of the "village prosaists" of a later era, especially after the advent of glasnost'. All the novel's characters come from the intelligentsia, shown struggling through the chaotic events of War and Revolution, mostly in the cities but with periodic shifts of scene to rural areas, particularly to a region in the Urals similar to the one where

Pasternak himself had lived in 1915-16. There Iurii Zhivago experiences the joy of union with nature through physical labor. "What happiness it is to work from dawn to dusk for yourself and your family, to build a shelter, to cultivate the earth in the quest for food, to create your own world, like Robinson Crusoe, imitating the Creator creating the universe."¹⁴

In general, Zhivago displays an acute sensitivity to Nature, best expressed in his poems, which form an integral part of the novel. Yet prose descriptions are often equally poetic, conveying not simply rapture at Nature's beauty, but a sense of wonder and reverence before her infinite variety, her changeability, her power. Pasternak's Nature, unlike Pushkin's, is not at all indifferent to human affairs, but actively participates in them like the rowan tree that holds out two snowy arms to welcome Zhivago.

As Zhivago's name suggests (deriving from the Russian adjective for "living" or "alive"), the whole novel is a hymn to Life, perceived as a deep, self-renewing force of nature, far more fundamental than the deluded, blood-stained efforts of those who claimed to be reshaping it. And at the core of this Life is Love. Nature herself wills the love of Iurii Zhivago and Lara Antipova: the earth, the sky, the clouds, and the trees insist on it. In the intensity of their love the lovers feel at one with the universe, part of its beauty, alienated from those who were foolishly seeking to exalt man over the rest of nature.

During the Stalin period and its immediate aftermath Russian writers continued to turn out a constant stream of officially approved novels dealing with peasant themes and the countryside. Most of these have been gratefully submerged in the "memory hole" that has swallowed up much of the written-to-order propaganda of that era, but a few may merit a more lasting place in Russian literature. One such is Leonid Leonov's Russian Forest (1953), one of the first Soviet novels to revive the "ecology" themes dating back to Aksakov and Chekhov: the problem of conservation, wise management of the vast timberlands of northern Russia and Siberia, many of which were being wantonly devastated in the fever of "socialist construction." This theme was to be invoked more boldly in the work of many of the derevenshchiki ("village prosaists") prominent in the 1960-1980 period.

The novel was also not the primary genre of the derevenshchiki, who mostly gravitated from the largely descriptive and factual ocherk or "sketch" dominant in the 1950s to the short story and novella. Some longer novels were nevertheless written by members of this group, which includes Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Astafev, Vasilii Belov, Boris Mozhaev, Fedor Abramov and several others. Limitations of space regrettably preclude extended discussion here of these interesting writers.¹⁵

The village prosaists obviously owe a considerable debt to Aleksandr Solzhhenitsyn, whose story "Matrena's Home" (1963) adumbrated many of their central themes: celebration of rural Russia and its old-time denizens as a repository of traditional culture, morality, and values, doubly threatened by encroachments from urban industrial society and contamination from Communist dogma.

Valentin Rasputin's powerful novella Farewell to Matera (1976) must serve here as a characteristic, if superior, specimen of this extensive literature. The huge Bratsk hydroelectric project in Siberia involved damming the Angara River, in the process inundating forever a fertile island where generations of peasants had led good, traditional Russian lives. Seen in their last season before the man-made flood, the inhabitants divide by generations, the young generally accepting the change in the name of progress and opportunity. But the story focuses on the old, especially a group of old women, who lament the destruction of their familiar world. These women, a living link to the peasant culture of the past, as human beings are deeper, more thoughtful, and wiser than their descendants.

The novella thus poses the most fundamental of "countryside" questions, many of which had been anticipated by writers of earlier times. These questions, of course, are also relevant outside Russia. Is "progress" worth its costs? How much land, and what land, should be allocated to agriculture, how much to urbanization, and how much left wild? Aksakov and Chekhov had asked these questions in the nineteenth century, and they are very much on the agenda today. Could we not manage our factories without massive pollution and environmental destruction? In general, could we human beings not learn to live in better harmony with nature, making measured use of her bounty to fill our needs, but without destroying either her beauty or her capacity for self-renewal?

NOTES

1. A. S. Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, I, 56, in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1962-66), vol. v, p. 33.

2. Ibid., 11, 1 (p. 36).

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., iv, 38-39 (p. 92).

5. Ibid., n, 4 (pp. 37-38).

6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel H. Beer (Arlington Heights, 111.: 1955), 14.

7. Or reassumed: Aleksandr Radishchev's Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow had made a noble effort in this direction as early as 1790, but his book was of course suppressed.

8. N. N. Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k biografii s 1828 po 1855 god (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR 1954), see illustration facing p. 241.

9. I. A. Goncharov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1952-55), vol. iv, p. 134.

10. Ibid., p. 145.

11. Ibid.

12. I. A. Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1965-67), vol. in, p. 118.

13. Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 519.

14. Ibid., p. 286.

15. The reader is referred to the excellent study by Kathleen F. Parthé, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton University Press, 1992).

2

THE CULTURE

4

W. GARETH JONES

Politics

From the very beginnings of modern Russian literature, Russia's writers have consciously dealt with politics. Following Peter the Great's death in 1725, there was a danger that his modernizing reforms would be frustrated by conservative forces. Consequently in 1729 Feofan Prokopovich who had been a fervent panegyrist for Peter, proposed to his younger protégé Antioch Kantemir, a writer of satires against the anti-Petrine reactionaries, that they should consider themselves members of a "Learned Watch" dedicated to the defense of the westernizing reforms. Assuming a distinct ideological position, these Russian writers were not content with being mere reflectors of the political scene, but chose to play an active part in the political process. In future, this had serious consequences. By placing themselves close to the seat of autocratic power, writers inevitably encouraged the Russian autocrats to seek to control their production and their lives. At the close of the century, the minor writer I. F. Bogdanovich could even propose that writers be dressed in uniform and given ranks commensurate with the distinction of their service to the state.¹ The strict discipline implied by that "uniform" has been present throughout most of the history of modern Russian literature; its links with politics have made its writers subject to the control of censorship and to the sanctions of exile, imprisonment or even execution.

Russian literature's long political engagement was recognized in the title The Government and Literature in Russia that Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, suggested to the revolutionary writer Stepniak in 1888 for a work to be written in English. But the repression suffered by Russian writers as a result of their close involvement with politics was highlighted in the book's prospectus: it would be a "martyrology of Russian literature," beginning in the eighteenth century with Novikov and Radishchev and continuing with Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Griboedov, Polezhaev, Kostomarov, Shevchenko, Dostoevskii, Mikhailov, and Chernyshevskii, and would lead up to Plekhanov's contemporary Russia where "almost all

the talented writers of the present day have been or still remain in exile."² Plekhanov, Russia's leading Marxist at the time, could not have foreseen that the martyrdom of Russia's writers would continue into the twentieth century, long after the establishment of an avowedly Marxist regime in 1917.

Russian writers not only courted their martyrdom by volunteering to embrace politics, but indeed were often obliged, in the absence of other channels of expression, to be the sole focus of political discourse. It was a role they fully recognized. When encouraging the young Tolstoi's first steps as a writer in 1856, Nekrasov underlined the commitment required by the particular nature of Russian society: "You will do still more when you understand that in our country the role of a writer is above all the role of a teacher and, as far as possible, an intercessor for the mute and oppressed."³ Despite the young Tolstoi's wish at that time not to be trammeled by politics, by the close of the century he too had assumed the role of the radical oppositionist. And the authority of the novelist challenged that of the autocrat. Suvorin, the editor of New Age (Novoe Vremia), the leading conservative journal, realized that "we have two tsars, Nicholas II and Lev Tolstoi. Nicholas II can do nothing with Tolstoi, cannot shake his throne, whereas Tolstoi without any doubt is shaking the throne of Nicholas and his dynasty."⁴

The writer's calling, described by Nekrasov and embraced by Tolstoi, has been, of course, the traditional role of poets and writers who more often than not in the history of world literature have been conscious spokesmen for a particular society or for a whole people. The modern novel, a genre that seeks to set its characters against a broad social canvas, might be expected to have provided an excellent vehicle for the writer as prophet of the nation. Developing as it did during the age of Romanticism, the European novel seemed well poised to express the collective nationalism that sprang from the Romantic spirit with its quest for national origins and delight in historical local color. Paradoxically, however, the Romantic age also insisted on the overriding importance of the immediate personal experience of the individual. Since politics with its concern for public actions and events did not accord well with this individualistic Romantic outlook, the notion was formed that politics should have no part in imaginative literature. "Politics in a work of literature," remarked Stendhal in a famous quip, "is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar": but he went on to say, "and yet something which it is impossible to ignore."⁵ Stendhal's own novels are indeed packed with politics as proof of this. However, to some extent he resolves the paradox of placing a Romantic with his individual outlook against the broad social

and political background of a novel by endowing his heroes with a special perspective. Their standpoint is that of a small, beleaguered group of intellectuals facing a sluggish and corrupting society, celebrated in his phrase "the happy few." The Russian novelists who appeared after Stendhal in the early nineteenth century also found it impossible to turn their attention away from politics. And they shared his standpoint of an élite intelligentsia, although, burdened as they were by the Russian noble intelligentsia's collective guilt for serfdom and deep sense of alienation, they might be better described as "the unhappy few." They also shared the relationship that Stendhal's novels had to a revolutionary historical event. The consequences of the French Revolution of 1789 were the source of the Frenchman's novels. Similarly, a series of cataclysmic turning points was to direct the concerns of Russia's novelists: 1825 and the Decembrist Revolt, 1861 and the Emancipation of the Serfs, 1905 and the First Russian Revolution, 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1956 and De-Stalin-

ation. 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union may prove another each defining moment.

It was the conspiracy against the autocracy by young noblemen, many of ???? his own friends, ending with their tragic defeat of 14 December 1825 that was central to much of Pushkin's writing. He was obsessed by the causes of the debacle and the necessity of an action which seemed doomed to failure. To make sense of the rebellion and its aftermath, he was to turn to the past and the popular upheavals of Russian history. But even in his "novel in verse," Evgenii Onegin, the first great Russian novel, although it might appear that Pushkin is concerned only with the private worlds of his characters, Onegin is presented as a representative figure of the generation of young Russian noblemen who became Decembrists. This is made explicit only in the unpublished tenth chapter where Onegin is described as moving in Decembrist circles. Although in the end the abiding interest of Onegin is Pushkin's portrayal of a man crippled by lack of commitment in love, the same flaw of non-commitment in the Russian character might have been one of the reasons why the Decembrist Revolt had failed. In setting aside the notion of his tenth chapter, Pushkin may have understood that the novel would become unbalanced if great political events intruded too forcibly on the intimate world of his hero, but, in any case, he would have been obliged to yield to the rigors of the draconian censorship established by Nicholas I in response to the Decembrist Revolt.

The impediments to publishing any work in the 1830s which could treat more overtly Pushkin's concern with rebellion was shown by the case of his unfinished novella Dubrovskii which had difficulty passing through the censorship when it was published posthumously. In Dubrovskii Pushkin

quotes verbatim the transcript of a lawsuit which took place in Tambov between 1826 and 1832 resulting in the unjust expulsion of a poor landowner by a rich one, Troiekurov. The law officers who come to take possession for Troiekurov are burned alive in Dubrovskii's manor house. Dubrovskii, the fireraiser, is admired by his people for his revolt against oppression. Again the portrayal of the individual rebelling against the consequences of overweening power, the theme given dramatic intensity in Pushkin's narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman, was at the heart of Dubrovskii. However, as is apparent in The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin's attitude to political power was ambivalent. He was as impressed by its exercise as he was appalled by its consequences.

This ambivalence was present in Pushkin's response to the Pugachev rebellion of 1773-75. Not only did he write an official history of the rebellion, with the support of Nicholas I who gave him privileged access to the archives, but also The Captain's Daughter, a novel set in the time of the rebellion. Both history and novel were written side by side and completed together in 1836. Comparing them highlights the particular strengths of the novel as a literary form, and the way in which it could deal with politics despite the censorship. In the History it is the narrative of significant events and campaigns that predominates; the episode recorded in the History on which The Captain's Daughter is based is a mere illustration of the atrocities of the Pugachev rebellion. Pugachev storms a government fort, hangs its commander before the eyes of his young wife who is then raped by Pugachev. Forced to become his mistress, she is eventually murdered by his followers who fear her influence over him. The politics of rebellion in the novel work on the individual lives of characters but it is their personal experiences that occupy the foreground. Pushkin had demonstrated in The Captain's Daughter how the Russian novelist could achieve that delicate balance between the portrayal of political power and the rebellion against it by creating fictional characters who, although insignificant to a historian's eyes, appeared to be more vibrantly alive than the historical personages among whom they move. If Evgenii Onegin, as a novel of contemporary society, could not explicitly portray its hero as a potential political rebel, the historical novel could allow Pushkin more latitude.

The example of Walter Scott, whose novels enjoyed great vogue at the time, enabled Pushkin to present The Captain's Daughter as a historical romance safely located in the past. It was no accident that its plot follows a pattern similar to that of Scott's novel Waverley, but the rebel campaigns described by Scott are for him long ago and far off. His novels have no bearing on any contemporary political upheaval in Britain. The Decembrist Revolt would have cast a different light on The Captain's Daughter. Read

in the aftermath of the Decembrist Revolt, Grinev's words at the close of chapter 13 rang out with particular poignancy: "May God preserve us from witnessing a Russian rebellion, meaningless and merciless!"

The use of fictionalized history to convey the interplay of power and rebellion was also made by Pushkin's contemporary, Nikolai Gogol. The anarchic atrocity at the heart of the rebellion against autocratic power in The Captain's Daughter recurs in the barbarous cruelty depicted in Gogol's Taras Bulba. Read on its own, Taras Bulba, weaving together events of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, may appear to be more like the comfortably distanced romances of Scott and works by the faithful Russian followers of his conventions, like Narezhnyi and Zagoskin. Gogol's tale, however, belongs to a cycle of stories that made up the novel Mirgorod. And the lightning flashes of the historical romance of Taras Bulba were finally grounded in the present day of Mirgorod's last story, "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich." Again a political rebellion was illuminated, and one not unconnected with the Decembrists, for the time of the two Ivans' quarrel was given as 1831, the year of a major Polish rebellion against the tsar. Taras Bulba on its own would have been a work to rally anti-Polish sentiment. But Gogol shows how by 1831, the time of his two Ivans, the heroic idealism of Taras Bulba, the valorous comradeship in defense of the Orthodox faith, had degenerated into mean spite.

"The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich" was a jaundiced portrayal of how aristocratic virtues had withered away to be supplanted by the seediness of the local bureaucracy and military, which maintained Nicholas I's repressive regime after 1825. The tale anticipates the social satire of The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. Its political bite did not escape the censor who excised certain passages, while reviewers in the Petersburg press, supportive of the regime, castigated the tale for being "dirty" and "vulgar." The denunciatory tone was conveyed by the literary journal The Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela) when it wrote "Why show us these rags, these dirty scraps however skilfully they are presented? Why portray the ugly picture of the backyard of life and humanity without any apparent aim?"⁶ Supporters of the regime easily recognized the subversive edge of Gogol's comedy despite his vehement denials that he had any political axe to grind. Critics of the autocracy were certainly even quicker in realizing how Gogol was an example of how literature could be used to express their protest.

It is Vissarion Belinskii (1811-48), the leading spirit behind the radical, revolutionary movement, who ensured that the political resonances of the early Russian novels would not go unnoticed. Belinskii was aware that the

repressive intellectual climate of his day channeled political thought into forms of imaginative expression. The writer, therefore, was obliged to be an agent in any political reform. As a consequence Evgenii Onegin anc Dead Souls could both be read as indictments of the social system, with Pushkin and Gogol, however much it went against their political grain, being enlisted as liberating agents of progress.

A key article by Belinskii appeared in the September 1835 issue of the literary journal, Telescope (Teleskop). His "On the Russian tale and the tales of Mr Gogol" extolled the novel as the only worthwhile modern genre, differentiated "ideal" from "real" literature, and gave preference to the realistic novel which reproduced life "in all its nakedness and truth." Belinskii stressed the analytical role of literature operating on life as a "scalpel" to reveal "all its wickedness, and all its frightening ugliness." This was the advantage of the new tendency in literature headed by Gogol which uncovered the warped social relations of serf Russia. Belinskii championed Gogol as the leader of the Natural School whose uncovering of Russia's social vices implied the need for political reform.

Later in his "Letter to N. V. Gogol," written from the safety of Western Europe in 1847, as a riposte to Gogol's claim that his work had no political import, he revealed his understanding of the Russia that he believed Gogol had shown in nakedness and truth:

[Russia] presents the frightful picture of a country where human beings trade in human beings without even having the justification so cunningly used by the American plantation owners in their claim that a negro is not a human being: a country where people call each other not by proper names but by nicknames like Vanka, Steshka, Vaska, Palashka; a country, finally, where not only are there no guarantees for the individual personality, honor or property, but there is not even a proper police system, but only vast corporations of various bureaucratic thieves and plunderers!⁸

This might well have been Belinskii's reading of Dead Souls, and it led him to spell out the political program needed to replace a world deadened by the inhuman system of serfdom with civilization, enlightenment and humanity. "The most vital national problems in Russia today are the abolition of serfdom, the repeal of corporal punishment, and the strictest possible implementation of at least those laws that do exist." Dead Souls had been read by Belinskii, as he had read Evgenii Onegin, primarily as an indictment of Russian society. The first task was to overthrow the old order, before proceeding to promote the new progressive world. For the moment the Russian novel's political role would have to be one of criticism and destruction: the surgeon's scalpel rather than the sculptor's chisel. In his "Letter to N. V. Gogol," Belinskii made manifest the political role

of the novelist as he saw it and as it would be accepted by the Russian radical intelligentsia:

Literature alone, despite a barbarous censorship, still has vitality and forward movement. That is why the calling of the writer is so honored among us, why literary success comes so easily even with a little talent; that is why the title of poet or writer has eclipsed the glitter of epaulettes and multicolored uniforms; that is why a so-called liberal tendency, even one unsupported by real talent, is rewarded with general attention, and why there is such a sudden drop in the popularity of great writers who, sincerely or not, offer themselves in the service of the Orthodox Church, autocracy and nationality.⁹

Belinskii regretfully had to cite Pushkin with his political ambivalence as an example of the latter, but he went on to reiterate that "The public is right. It sees Russian writers as its only leaders, defenders, and saviors from the darkness of autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality." It must be remembered, of course, that the official policy of the Russia of Nicholas I was "Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality."

Not only did Belinskii highlight the political import of writers such as Pushkin and Gogol, but he suggested, when identifying and promoting new talent, that the treatment of political themes was a requirement for aspiring novelists. It was Belinskii who proclaimed to Dostoevskii, when he was a young and obscure writer, that his Poor Folk had revealed the misery of the life led by the downtrodden minor officials at the bottom of the bureaucratic pile. In return, committed young writers acknowledged Belinskii as their mentor. One of the charges brought against Dostoevskii when he was arrested for subversive activities in 1849 and condemned to death was that he had circulated Belinskii's banned "Letter to N. V. Gogol" which was not approved for publication until 1872.

While in such works as Dostoevskii's Poor Folk and Herzen's Who is to Blame? the stifling, inhuman effect of a pernicious urban society was castigated, the radical response read between the lines was that any amelioration could be sought only in the Utopia of a socialist, collectivist future. The position of Russia's serfs was different: to effect a radical change in their state, no Utopian vision was needed but the actual abolition of serfdom.

Again it was Belinskii who underlined the message inherent in Turgenev's sketch "Khor and Kalinych" - the first in the series that was to become A Sportsman's Sketches - where the independent Russian peasant Khor flourished despite "very unfavorable circumstances" which was Belinskii's code for serfdom. Nurtured by Belinskii's criticism, Turgenev was fully aware of his political role. A Sportsman's Sketches was the first work of

fiction that could be said to have had direct political consequences; it played its part in the agitation that led to the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. Turgenev wrote of A Sportsman's Sketches later that "under this title I collected and concentrated everything against which I had taken a decision to struggle to the end - with which I had sworn never to compromise. It was my Hannibal's oath; and it was not I alone who took that oath then."¹⁰ Turgenev entered into the ideological debates of his time, making a political point against the Slavophiles, by presenting his flourishing peasant as a supporter of the arch-Westernizer Peter the Great who was for the peasant the truest of Russians. Only the spectre of the censorship prevented Turgenev from adding to the series of stories the projected "Russian German and Reformist" whose main character would embody the repressive essence of the Nicholaevan regime.

When the collected stories of A Sportsman's Sketches were published in a single volume in 1852 the political force of the work was well summed up in a censor's denunciation of its harmful consequences in a report to the Minister of Popular Education. The censor who had passed A Sportsman's Sketches for publication was dismissed and Turgenev himself was exiled by decree of Nicholas I to his estate.

Although Belinskii had died in 1848, his influence lived on and not only through the pages of the young writers he had championed - Turgenev. Herzen, Annenkov, Dostoevskii and Nekrasov. The aura of Belinskii spread throughout Russia. In 1856 Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile distrustful of Western ideas, discovered to his grief that

The name of Belinskii is known to every thinking man . . . There is not a country schoolmaster who does not know - and know by heart - Belinskii's letter to Gogol. If you want to find honest people, people who care about the poor and the oppressed, an honest doctor, an honest lawyer not afraid of a fight you will find them among Belinskii's followers.¹¹

There were many followers who steadfastly maintained the link between the novel and politics. The most brilliant and compelling example was N. A. Dobroliubov whose death from consumption at the age of 2.5 in 1861 ensured that he would be remembered for the optimistic ardor of the totally committed youthful radical, not cooled by the experience of age. He had the added advantage of writing at a time when change at last seemed possible. Political reform, which had seemed so impossible when Belinskii died in 1848 in the year of Europe's abortive revolutions, became a distinct possibility in the euphoria following the death of Nicholas I in 1855, the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and the accession of the reforming tsar, Alexander II. After 1858 the government allowed open discussion of

reforms in the press and the new liberalism came to a head with the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. Using literary commentary as a means for raising political issues, Dobroliubov led the assault on Russia's social system from the pages of the radical journal, The Contemporary (Sovre-mennik). More impatient and dogmatic than Belinskii, Dobroliubov distilled the prescriptive essence of his forerunner's thinking. Literature's function was to be a means of propaganda for radical ideas. So dominant was Dobroliubov's strident personality that it was thought by contemporaries that he had been the model of the "new man" for a number of novelists including Turgenev's Bazarov in his Fathers and Children. It is a curious example of how life and art combined. The force of Dobroliubov's polemics seemed to be acknowledged by novelists who felt obliged to include within their fictional world the image of the man who insisted that their fiction was only valid if it furthered the political agenda proposed by him in the real world.

It was with the milestone of the 1861 Act of Emancipation that the Russian novel acquired its revolutionary status, despite the qualms of its mainly liberal and noble authors. From now on it would not limit itself to reflecting society and being a forum for opinion but would also present images of radical change. Not only did the Emancipation of the Serfs promise to overthrow the last vestiges of the feudal order but men would be freed from grinding labor by the new technological discoveries of natural science and women would be liberated from their position of social inferiority.

That 1861 was perceived as a transforming moment was indicated by the very titles of Russian novels and critical articles. Such was Dobroliubov's "When Will the Real Day Come?": the title of his review of Turgenev's On the Eve (1860). To hasten that real day, it was necessary to dispense with the superfluous men and replace them with "men of action and not of abstract, always somewhat Epicurean, reasoning."¹² The task prescribed by Dobroliubov for writers as their political responsibility was to search out this "new man" and present him to the Russian public.

Another key essay by Dobroliubov clearly shows how his reviews of contemporary novels were camouflage for political statements. "What is Oblomovitis?" (1859) took as its starting point Goncharov's novel Oblomov which had presented a smiling picture of a country squire sunk in sloth. For Dobroliubov, however, Oblomov's idleness was no laughing matter but a social disease that revealed the dysfunction of Russian society. He went further, discovering that most Russian novels hitherto had projected weak, ineffectual characters deformed by their egoism. With a sweep of his net, Dobroliubov put the heroes of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin,

Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, and Turgenev's Rudin into the same category. All had been corrupted by the rottenness of serfdom and the stagnation of the repressive regime needed to sustain it. Past literature hac correctly identified the main symptom of Russia's political decay. Literature's task was now to promote the image of the new man whose hour was about to strike.

Russian novelists, responding to the tremendous pressure of the conflicting political currents of the day instinctively as artists, might not have needed the goad of radical critics. Yet the effectiveness of Dobroliubov's criticism is seen in Turgenev's response to the charge in his "What is Oblomovitis?" that all the main characters were ineffectual. In 1860 Turgenev made a crucial change to his novel Rudin which had first appeared in 1856. At the end of the original version Rudin becomes a homeless wanderer: in the revised i860 edition he perishes on the Paris barricades waving a red banner, a hero alongside his brother revolutionaries. The redeeming of Rudin as a révolté coincided with Turgenev's conception of Bazarov, the new man who was to be the hero of his Fathers and Children. In its reference to a generational change, the very title of Fathers and Children again pointed to the historical watershed of 1861. Bazarov embodies many of the traits of the "new man": he has no noble pedigree, he scorns any attempt to idealize the peasantry and rejects art. liberal reformism, divine revelation, all institutions based on custom. His total negation of civilizing values explains his title of "nihilist." He declares himself committed only to the objective lessons of natural science. He is subject to nobody and is his own man, totally independent. He is clearly projected into the future as a "man of the sixties," a representative of the "children" in revolt against the principles and faith of their "fathers," the "men of the forties." Making the characters representative of precise historical decades is as significant as the exact placing of the novel in 1859 It is a feature of all Turgenev's novels that chronicle and evaluate the "body and pressure" of time that they describe eternal human concerns in the particular political crux of an exact time.

The political impact of Fathers and Children was immediate when it was published in the spring of 1862 following the Act of Emancipation. That Turgenev had succeeded in bringing to life the "new man" in his hero Bazarov was proved by the swift reaction of all shades of the political spectrum. There was considerable disagreement as to Turgenev's intention. His friend Annenkov wanted to know whether Bazarov was to be taken "as a fruitful force for the future or as a disgusting boil on the body of a hollow civilization to be lanced as soon as possible."¹³ Most critics were convinced that Turgenev had taken sides and remonstrated with him.

Among the radicals Dmitri Pisarev was almost alone in approving the picture of Bazarov as someone with whom the honest and fearless youth could identify.¹⁴ The most vitriolic assault on Turgenev's supposed sympathies came from The Contemporary, the journal previously edited by Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov, which argued that he had indeed painted a disgusting boil, a repellent caricature of the young radicals.¹⁵ Consequently, to his dismay, Turgenev was relegated to the camp of the reactionaries. The stormy political wrangle on Turgenev's true intentions continued to rumble on through the century, and indeed echoes of the great debate still reverberated a century later.

Fathers and Children was a novel with political consequences in that it helped the various political persuasions to demarcate themselves more clearly. It brought into focus the main issues that separated the "children," the impatient radicals of the sixties, from the "fathers", the long-suffering liberals of the forties. It gave a name, Nihilism, and with it substance to the amorphous yearnings of a new generation. And it politicized the Russian novel in a new way for Fathers and Children was answered, not only by reviews and polemical articles in the thick journals, but by another novel: Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done?.

Chernyshevskii was a political prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg for his activities as a radical publicist when he wrote What is to be Done? between December 1862 and April 1863. Although a lax censorship originally allowed it to be published in The Contemporary in 1863, as soon as the intent of the novel was revealed it was banned until the 1905 revolution. Its proscription and the treatment of its author gave it a remarkable prestige among the radicals. In his treatise of 1855, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, Chernyshevskii had argued that art could only be an auxiliary to real life and that its function must be to act as a "textbook for life." What is to be done? was an example of such a textbook. Without any of the ambiguities of Fathers and Children, it presents lucid models of the new men and women, bent on bettering humanity through the continual purification and strengthening of its essentially good nature through guild socialism, women's liberation and enlightened self-interest. At the centre of the novel stands the paragon figure of Rakhmetov, chaste, monastic yet enigmatic - a man who has become a superman of "a new breed" by submitting himself to a socialist doctrine. The prophetic tone of the novel was enhanced by the four dreams - it would be more apt to call them visions - which come to the central figure of Vera Pavlovna, culminating in the fourth vision when she sees her promised land with its eternal summer guaranteed in the electrically-lit, aluminum Crystal Palace where all social problems have been resolved. The

visionary enthusiasm of the novel and the sense of the compelling personality of its martyred author ensure that What is to be Done? retains its appeal. What is certain is that as a political "textbook for life" it satisfied the yearnings of thousands of eager disciples. They included the young Lenin and his elder brother who was executed for revolutionary activities.¹⁶

That the years of debate leading to the Emancipation of 1861 and the immediate aftermath should have led to a politicized literature is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising that the radical extremism of Chernyshevskii should have elicited a vehement reaction against it. Anti-nihilist novels with their telling titles streamed from the press in the wake of Pisemskii's The Troubled Sea (1863), a diatribe against the younger generation; Leskov's No Way Out (1864), Aksharumov's A Complex Affair (1864). Kliushnikov's Mirage (1864), Avenarius's The Plague (1867), Goncharov's The Ravine (1869).¹⁷ The political divide between the generations of the 1840s and 18 60s, made manifest by Turgenev's Fathers and Children, continued to fascinate Russians. Particularly poignant was the situation of Dostoevskii who had been banished as a child of the "forties" and had now returned into the altered world of the sixties. His response was Notes from Underground (1864) which signalled a turning point in his career and prepared the groundwork for his major novels. Dostoevskii's intention seems to have been to throw overboard the idealists of the forties who included his own youthful self, the writer of Poor Folk. Not only the men of the forties are attacked in Notes from Underground, however, but also the new men who had recently appeared, for the work is aimed against Chernyshevskii, the acknowledged leader of the new generation and in particular his "textbook for life," What is to be Done? Chernyshevskii had chosen the Crystal Palace in London as his symbol of the triumph of rational technology and social organization; Dostoevskii deliberately shattered this symbol with his hero of Notes from Underground who rebels against the notions of utilitarian self-interest and perfection. Chernyshevskii would be content with a perfecting of political institutions; Dostoevskii highlighted the permanent rebellious state of his own man from the underground who would never be satisfied with any political structure. His hero outradicalizes the radicals, as later the heroes of his major novels will do.

Crime and Punishment which followed Notes from Underground is remarkable for combining within the main character, Raskolnikov, both the rationalist whose life is based on self-interest and the subversive "underground man" with his irrational Napoleonic aspirations. By splitting the "new man" from within in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevskii sunders the idea of the monistic nature of man for whom a lucid "textbook for life"

could be written. While the murder committed by Raskolnikov can only be indirectly linked with the growing number of political assassinations by "nihilists" in the late 1860s,¹⁸ Dostoevskii's novel The Devils had its source in real political unrest in the summer of 1867. His young brother-in-law, a student liable to be embroiled in the troubles, was persuaded by the Dostoevskiis to leave Moscow for the haven of Dresden where they were living at the time. Dostoevskii discussed the life and ideas of the student world with his brother-in-law and, according to his wife,¹⁹ it was from these conversations that Dostoevskii conceived the idea of depicting the political movement of the time in one of his novels, and of modeling one of the main characters, Shatov, on the student Ivanov who was later to be killed in 1869 on the orders of the revolutionary terrorist Nechaev. Initially the novel was to be a "pamphlet novel," aimed against the revolutionaries. In the end the pamphleteer in Dostoevskii was to be shouldered aside by the artist with his urge to grapple with universal philosophical and religious questions in his portrayal of Stavrogin. No longer was the novel solely concerned with political polemics, but the original pamphleteering kernel remained an integral part of it. The Devils features the Verkhovenskiis, father and son; like Fathers and Children, it is an examination of warring generations. Dostoevskii, however, deepens Turgenev's sense of the interdependence between the two generations. The older Verkhovenskii, Stepan Trofimovich, has spawned a son, Petr, who has exploited but distorted the ideals of his father's generation, transmuting the idealistic liberal humanism of the 1840s Westernizers into a shallow nihilistic opportunism, to become a dim reflection of the sinister, amoral Nechaev whose revolutionary ambition had culminated in murder. Other characters also caricature representatives of political trends criticized by Dostoevskii. Shatov is an extreme Slavophile who transforms the nation into his God. Kirillov is an extreme Westernizer who follows the thesis that mankind is God. The representation of Nechaev's activities in The Devils led to an impassioned political debate on the forms of revolutionary action in the early 1870s.

Dostoevskii is polemicizing as well with Turgenev who is caricatured in the novel as Karmazinov, a writer attacked for his increasingly tendentious novels. Dostoevskii was particularly incensed by Turgenev's latest novel Smoke (1867). Turgenev, moving in Russian émigré circles abroad, had been implicated in a political affair which had obliged him to beg for clemency and accept exoneration from the Russian authorities. Consequently he was shunned not only by the young radicals but also by the older progressives. His sense of rejection was distilled into the bitterness of Smoke. Slight of plot, Smoke, set in Baden-Baden during a few August days in 1862, is a vehicle for a series of satirical vignettes depicting the radical

left-wing of the Russian intelligentsia as well as members of the right-wing establishment. The element of political pamphleteering in Smoke sets it apart from Turgenev's other novels, as does the mediating of Turgenev's personal views through the mouth of Potugin, the narrator. Although its preoccupation with issues long since dead may make it appear dated, some aspects are more enduring, particularly the two problems posed by Potugin: firstly, the Russian need to find a leader and secondly, Russia's ambivalent attitude to the West. Potugin's policy is that only the best essence of European civilization should be emulated by Russians, since Russian culture is impoverished. Again the Crystal Palace is used to underline Potugin's argument. Imagine, he said, the Great Exhibition with the discoveries of each nation in turn withdrawn from the exhibits; the withdrawal of Russia's contributions would leave the exhibition unchanged "because even the samovar, bast shoes, the shaft-bow, the knout - these famous products of ours - were not invented by us."²⁰ The novel as a political pamphlet restates Turgenev's moderate Westernist viewpoint: his belief in reason against the vaunted Russian intuition, his belief in Western intellect rather than the Russian soul.

Turgenev's last novel Virgin Soil was even more of a pamphlet novel contrasting the conservative landed squirearchy with the young populists. It has been suggested that the only way of understanding Virgin Soil is in terms of the doctrine of Soviet Socialist Realism.²¹ Characters are divided into black and white according to their political credentials. The pure populists include a positive hero Solomin, a factory manager, anticipated in a preparatory sketch as a necessary contrast to the Russian Utopian prophet: "one must place a real practical man American-style who gets on quietly with his job like a peasant ploughing and sowing."²² It provides an uplifting message for the future. It can be seen as a prototype of the political novel of the twentieth century with Solomin extolled in the novel's last chapter as one of the "strong, grey, monochrome men from the people" to whom the future belongs.

Although there seems to be a great divide between this figure and the early Rudin romantically brandishing his red banner on the 1848 Paris barricades, Turgenev was adamant at the end of his life that they were the product of the same impulse. "The author of Rudin written in 1855," he wrote, "and the author of Virgin Soil written in 1876 is the same man. I endeavored during all that time as far as my strength and ability permitted with conscientious objectivity to portray and embody in fitting types what Shakespeare calls 'the body and pressure of time'; and the swiftly changing faces of Russian people from cultured society which was the main object of my observations."²³

While the "body and pressure of time" pushed Turgenev into writing novels which were more and more structured on broad political divisions, his great contemporaries Dostoevskii and Tolstoi seemed to mount a determined critical resistance to the dominant spirit of their age that demanded political engagement. Dostoevskii in particular challenged all the modish assumptions and currents of his own time, revealing the irrational in human behavior which must undermine any rational political program. Likewise in his War and Peace, Tolstoi directed his readers away from the "body and pressure" of their own time to consider the instinctive behavior of the masses and the folly of seeing war, that ultimate expression of power politics, as a process that could be explained by historical analysis. The rejection in War and Peace of all historical explanations of human behavior in terms of social developments implied a rejection of the sense conveyed by Fathers and Children that one generation, that of the sixties, must be related, even if antipathetically, to the preceding one. Yet both Dostoevskii and Tolstoi incorporate into their novels topical political issues of the day which had resulted from the great reforms of the sixties that followed the revolutionary Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. Even such a minor reform as the vain attempt to control alcoholism in 1863 by changing the licensing laws supplied Dostoevskii with the crucial sub-plot of the Marmeladov family in Crime and Punishment; and the consequences of the transformation of Russia's legal system was explored in the portrayal of the new kind of professional enlightened prosecutor in the character of Porfirii. Later in The Brothers Karamazov the new jury system imported from Western Europe would be examined critically and shown to be unworkable in Russian society. Even factual newspaper reports could be incorporated within the fiction as Dostoevskii did in The Devils by using reports of the long trial of the Nechaevists who had murdered the student leader Ivanov.

In his Anna Karenina Tolstoi likewise drew heavily on the burning political issues of the day, particularly those concerned with the reforms. The establishment of a system of local government councils, the zemstva, by Alexander II was a key part of the reconstruction of the Russian state and Konstantin Levin, initially an enthusiastic zemstvo member, is shown to have lost his ardor for the institution as it had been undermined by the self-interest of its participants. The same self-seeking infects the laudable endeavors of Karenin, a high ranking state official, to deal with injustices suffered by national minorities in the Russian Empire. Tolstoi is exceptional among the novelists of his time in dealing with the human mechanics of the political processes at local and state level. Even today's reader can comprehend the disappointment of men of Levin's temperament in the

souring of idealistic reform. The reader of the 1870s responded more keenly to the novel's response to the flux of contemporary political events such as the populists' "going to the people" movement with which Levin flirted.

The measure of the force of the novel's political impact was that Katkov, the Slavophile editor of the Russian Herald (Russkii Vestnik), in which Anna Karenina was appearing, refused in 1877 to publish the concluding part, in which the motives of Russian volunteers for the Balkan war in support of Serbian independence were put into question.

It must be remembered that the political ambit of all those novels of the sixties and seventies was emphasized because they were serialized in the thick journals, such as Chernyshevskii's and Dobroliubov's The Contemporary and Katkov's Russian Herald, where the serialized fiction was accompanied by critical, philosophical, and political articles. The symbiosis between fiction and real social criticism was also emphasized by the habit of characters within the fiction of writing such articles. Both Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov write articles which are pivotal to the novel. In Anna Karenina both Konstantin Levin's brothers are writers, Nikolai, the socialist crank, and Sergei Koznyshev, his half-brother, whose political treatise, An Essay-Reviewing the Foundations and Forms of Government in Europe and Russia, to which he had devoted six years of his life, is met by total silence.

The dispiriting indifference to Koznyshev's work seems to foretell the stagnation in Russian political thought in the 1880s and 1890s. With the accession of Alexander III after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, a repressive regime was brought into being that attempted to suppress all oppositionist political activity and the intellectual debate that nurtured it. With the dousing of political debate, the great age of the Russian novel seemed to have ended. The closing years of the nineteenth century were a period referred to as one of "small deeds" and chronicled mainly by the minor forms of the novella, short story and sketch rather than the novel. Only Tolstoi remained of the great novelists and he had demonstratively turned his back on art to become a moral teacher. The moralist speaks out loudly in Tolstoi's Resurrection (1899) which was read as such an assault on the Russian Imperial regime and Russian Orthodoxy that it resulted in Tolstoi's formal excommunication by the Church. Resurrection, however, was a rare reminder of the past glories of the Russian novel's ability to shake political faiths. Chekhov, the greatest writer of the period, despite his genius in capturing the anguish of the age in such stories as "Ward 6", set his face against any overt political statement. "It is no good for an artist," he wrote to Suvorin, his publisher who had chided him for avoiding the

burning questions of the day, "to concern himself with what he does not understand. For specialist problems we have our specialists; it is their business to pass judgment on the peasant commune, on the fate of capital, on the harmfulness of drunkenness, on boots, on women's complaints."²⁴

It was not until Russia experienced another cataclysmic political event, the First Russian Revolution of 1905, that politics re-emerged as a dominant force in a Russian novel. Gorkii's novel Mother (1906) stood out as a work planned to serve the cause of Revolution. The novel is a semi-documentary, based on the real-life story of an exiled political activist Petr Zalomov and his mother Anna Zalomova who was known to Gorkii as a boy. Gorkii's personal involvement in the 1905 Revolution when he was imprisoned and then exiled also lay behind the novel. As in Turgenev's later novels, many of the characters are mouthpieces for political trends -international socialism, anarchism and revolutionary socialism - and the central political message is spelled out by the son at his trial. The stark political theories, however, are humanized since their exponents are seen through the compassionate, caring eyes of the central character of the mother. It is the suffering of the "children," and particularly that of her only son, that transforms the proletarian mother into a Madonna-like character. Appreciating the oppressed revolutionary workmen as tormented Christian martyrs, she comes to understand the sacrifice inherent in the revolutionary vocation and transfers her devotion from the Orthodox Church to political activism. A future paradise on earth bought with revolutionary blood replaces her previous faith of personal immortality in heaven.

The two themes of a quasi-religious transformation of society and the projection of a positive hero apparent in Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done? are certainly evident in Gorkii's Mother. Although the effect of Gorkii's novel was captured by a friend who told him, "Now everyone's talking not about Turgenev's Fathers and Children but about Gorkii's Mothers and Children,"²⁵one striking difference between Mother and its predecessors, Turgenev's Fathers and Children and Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done?, is that it did not inspire other novelists to grapple with the implications of its characters' standpoints as happened in the 1860s and 1870s. It acquired a singular reputation but little resonance in other novels. The best selling novels of its day such as Artsybashev's Sanin and Sologub's The Petty Demon were deliberately apolitical. If novelists responded to the revolutionary pressure of their age, then the response was reflected in avant-garde techniques rather than ideological themes. Advances in the novel's technical boundaries, revolutions in its form, were achieved above all by Belyi's Petersburg, which, despite its treatment of events with

potential political significance, may be seen as political only in its deliberate assumption of an anti-political stance.

Even the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 did not immediately resurrect the committed political novel. Indeed, the most trenchant criticism of prescriptive, exemplary literature came from the Bolshevik writer Evgenii Zamiatin shortly after the triumph of Bolshevism in 1917. His anti-utopian novel We, written in 1920-21, questioned the model Crystal Palace of Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done? in its portrayal of a totalitarian Single State enclosed in a city of glass. The hero of We, D-503, totally absorbed in the collective state, discovers his individuality through falling in love with a female number I-330 who turns out to be the leader of a revolutionary cult bent on shattering the entropy of the Single State symbolized by the city of glass. Zamiatin was also countering the populist extremists who had elevated the "people" into their God, and so challenged a heresy to which Gorkii had succumbed and promoted in Mother. Gorkii's Confession of 1908 ended with a prayer to "the almighty, immortal people!," "and there shall be no other gods in the world but thee, for thou art the one God that creates miracles!" It was the same divine "people" to whom Nilovna in Gorkii's Mother had transferred her religious faith. Zamiatin might well be referring to this aspect of Mother when he makes D-503 in his "Entry No. 22" sardonically record the parallel between the Single State which gives him passive contentment and the fellowship of Christians, "our only (though very imperfect) forerunners: for them passivity was a virtue, pride was a vice, and they understood that We belonged to God, I to the devil."

Although Zamiatin's We was banned, he played a leading part in the Serapion Brotherhood, a focus of the diffuse trend known as the poputchiki or "fellow-travelers." Although Bolshevism had imposed a totalitarian political regime on Russia, literary politics remained surprisingly pluralistic in the 1920s. While the fellow-travelers gave general support to the regime, they were in agreement with Chekhov's view that writers in addressing human experience should be content with producing evidence and not attempt to be judges. The outstanding novels of the early Soviet period are content to chronicle the cataclysmic events of the Civil War without providing a focused political viewpoint.

Such apolitical objectivity was not allowed to go unchallenged. An opposing faction of writers, the On Guardists, demanded detailed Party regulation of all literature by the Bolsheviks. In the Communist Party discussions on its policy towards literature in 1924 and 1925, although the On Guard view was rejected, the right of the Party to guide literature was asserted with the setting up of the centralized All-Union Association of

Proletarian Writers (VAPP). Even when this became the more rigid RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), there were still attempts, ultimately in vain, to maintain some equilibrium between the conflicting Russian traditional understandings of the novel's purpose. In the balance was the view of literature as presenting a true representation of reality, and the opposing view that literature should be prescriptive, set forth models of behavior and be an auxiliary to the policy of "changing the world" at the heart of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan (1928-193 3).

By 1934 Russian novelists had become subject not only to one publishing system, one Writers' Union, but to the one official doctrine of Socialist Realism. The doctrine's three tenets - partiinost' ("party-mindedness"), ideinost' ("ideological content") and narodnost' ("nationality") - emphasized the spirit of collectivism which permeated Socialist Realism. The triad bore a striking resemblance to the official motto of Nicholas I, "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality," against which Belinskii had inveighed in his "Letter to N. V. Gogol."

Political dogmatism now dictated the content of Russian novels. The criteria for assessing them were primarily political rather than purely literary. Those novels of the 1930s, however, that were hailed as the most effective in promoting the new ideology did not fit into the prescription of Socialist Realism. Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don (1928-40) was the Soviet novel par excellence but as Mathewson suggested,²⁶ it challenged every tenet of Socialist Realism in the tragic fate of the hero, Grigorii Melekhov. The novel, chronicling the counter-revolution of the Don Cossacks, focuses on the contradictory and confused Melekhov who strives to grasp and make sense of the shifting kaleidoscopic politics of his own age. It is that riven, shifting Melekhov that puts The Quiet Don outside the prescribed pattern of extolling single-minded proletarian or Party heroes.

Yet, novels, such as The Quiet Don, that escaped the narrow confines of the new dogma, were paradoxically cited as exemplars of Socialist Realism. Novels as disparate as Gorkii's Mother and Klim Samgin (1936), Furmanov's Chapaev (1923), Aleksei Tolstoi's A Tour of Hell (1921-40), Nikolai Ostrovskii's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932-34), and Fadeev's The Young Guard (1945/1951), were to be the models for the new politicized literature after 1932. Socialist Realism may be viewed not so much as the imposition of Stalin's totalitarian will on Russia's novelists, but as the distillation of attitudes assumed in the Soviet novel of the 1920s which were in turn derived from nineteenth-century experience.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 had not led to a new world for Russian literature. With the establishment of Stalinism in the early 1930s, it seemed to the contrary that the traditions of the nineteenth century had reasserted

themselves with a new vigor. As far as literature was concerned, it has been argued that Stalinism appeared as a reprise of the militant materialism of the 1860s.²⁷ The propagandistic novels which were required seemed to be a new version of the novels represented by Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done? It has also been argued that the positive heroes prescribed by Soviet doctrine had their source, not in Marxist theory, but in the fictional heroes of Chernyshevskii and Gorkii.²⁸

With Stalin's death in March 1953 the policies associated with him began to decompose. The period became known as the "Thaw" (Ottepel and the title of Ilia Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw in 1956 was proof of the novelists' enduring role in channelling political attitudes. It was 1956 that proved to be the pivotal year when in February Khrushchev's speech at the Twentieth Party Congress denounced Stalin for his repression. The Thaw clearly celebrated de-Stalinization in its portrayal of a society frozen ir. deep inertia being thawed by the warm sincerity of its main characters. But The Thaw essentially retained the model, exemplary hero of the Socialist Realist novel: it was only the purpose of the hero that was adjusted. The other landmark political novel that appeared in the same year as The Thau was Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone which again preserved the essence or the Socialist Realist pattern while adjusting the conflict: a lowly, powerless representative of the common people overcomes the resistance of a Stalinist party apparatus.

Novelists, like the politicians of the Thaw period, were too rooted in Stalinism and the Stalinist doctrine of Socialist Realism to free themselves totally. The metaphor of the "Thaw" was well suited to the real situation: despite the experience of fresh warmth, the solid ground of Stalinist politics remained unchanged. The excavation and moving of that ground would be a political imperative of the post-Thaw years.

In literature it was carried out mainly by the growing publications of memoirs, reminiscences and diaries in such literary journals as New World (Novyi mir). Not only did the memoirs restore the suppressed memory of Russia but they also challenged, perhaps at first unconsciously, two fundamental tenets of Socialist Realism. The memoir literature emphasized the objective, cognitive role of literature which had been relegated in favor of a purposeful, agitational depiction of life. It also replaced the positive hero's political exhortation with the private voice of ordinary people, buffeted by revolution, purges and warfare, yet obliged to stay silent. In his editorial to the fortieth anniversary number of New "World in 1965 Tvardovskii showed how conscious the journal was of the effect of its deliberate policy of memoir publishing. That editorial was linked with Solzhenitsyn's work. It placed Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

within the memoir genre as it may well have placed Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), ironically rejected by New World in 1956, for Doctor Zbivago corrected Russia's amnesia by restoring lost memories of the revolutionary years. In her own memoir Hope against Hope Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized that Pasternak's novel was a remembrance of things past, an attempt to determine his own place in the swift-flowing movement of days, and to seek understanding of this movement.²⁹Doctor Zbivago shared with the memoir literature generally a concern with apparent trivialities of day-to-day existence rather than a concern with great events and personalities. In this way it made the same political statement as A Captain's Daughter with its regard for the individual and the rebel against the state. Alongside these memoirs, yet linked with them, was the open publication of works, which had long been repressed, by authors who in some cases were long dead. Even the public acknowledgment of authors such as Babel, Bulgakov, Pilniak, Zamiatin and Zosh-chenko was a political act in the post-Thaw period. The most significant example of an exhumed work was undoubtedly Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, finished just before the author's death in 1940 but not published until 1966-67. Set in Moscow in the late twenties or early thirties, it too, when it appeared in the mid-sixties, was part of the memoir literature.

If Stalinism was guided by the experience and the models of the nineteenth-century novelists in prescribing its politicized literature, then the process of de-Stalinization after 1956 also drew on the same traditions to dismantle those prescriptions. In the courageous challenge made to political censorship by such works as Doctor Zhivago, The Master and Margarita and Solzhenitsyn's novels, in their banning and eventual publication, Russians recognized a reprise of their nineteenth-century political history. The authority of liberal "thick journals" such as New World was itself reminiscent of their influential predecessors such as The Contemporary of the 1850s and 1860s which gave a platform to Belinskii, Dobroliubov, Nekrasov and Chernyshevskii and promoted new, politically engaged novels. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago followed Pushkin's example in The Captain's Daughter in seeking to make sense of Russian history and Russian rebelliousness by illuminating the life of individuals. Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita derived inspiration from Gogol's treatment of social reality through fantasy. Bulgakov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, all of whom suffered political repression, were candidates for inclusion in a "martyrology of Russian literature" such as Plekhanov had envisioned in 1888. Yet, paradoxically, all three, like Pushkin in his time, had been close to the seat of central power: Bulgakov and Pasternak were given special acknowledgment by Stalin, while Solzhenitsyn was favored by Khrush-

chev's direct intervention authorizing publication of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovicb. Proof of the continuing close relationship between the novel and political power was the choice of a novelist, Chingiz Aitmatov, to propose Gorbachev formally as first President of the Soviet Union. Will the dissolution of that Union in 1991 herald a new development in the political novel as Russia's novelists take their bearings on a new revolutionary milestone? The immediate reaction of Russia's prose writers seems to be an attempt to evade the burden of their traditional role as spokesmen and prophets by deliberately avoiding political engagement, or even by constructing texts that do not fit into the traditional novel genre. In time, of course, that attitude, adopted in defiance of a long tradition of political engagement, may well be seen as a challenging political stance.

NOTES

1. Iu. M. Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina (Moscow: Kniga, 1987), p. 22.

2. G. V. Plekhanov, Literatura i estetika, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), vol. 11, pp. 7-8.

3. N. A. Nekrasov, Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhstvennaia literatura, 1965-67), vol. viii, p. 189.

4. Quoted by E. Lampert in Malcolm Jones (éd.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 145.

5. Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare, chapter 5.

6. N. V. Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1952-53), vol. n, p. 325.

7. V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1953-59), vol. 1, p. 267.

8. Ibid., p. 213.

9. Ibid.

10.1. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia Nauk, 1960-68), vols, i-xv, Sochineniia, vol. iv, p. 408.

n. Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Hogarth Press, 1978 '. p. 150.

12. N. A. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1961-64), p. 103.

13. V. A. Arkhipov, "K tvorcheskoi istorii romana I. S. Turgeneva Ottsy i deti," Russkaia literatura, 1 (1958), 148.

14. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, pp. 282-83, 286.

15. M. A. Antonovich, "Asmodei nashego vremeni," Sovremennik (March 1862). pp. 65-114.

16. Lenin is quoted in Rufus W. Mathewson Jr., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd edn. (Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 82 and Richard Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 24.

17. For an account of these novels and their background, see Charles A. Moser. Antinihilistn in the Russian Novel of the 1860s (The Hague: Mouton, 1964).

18. See Richard Peace, Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 2.8.

19. A. G. Dostoevskaia, "Vospominaniia," in A. Dolinin (éd.), F. M. Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia litera-tura, 1964), vol. 11, p. 74.

20. Turgenev, Sochineniia, vol. ix, p. 233.

11. Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist (London: Oxford University Press, i960), p. 169.

2.2. Turgenev, Sochineniia, vol. xn, p. 314.

23. Ibid., p. 303.

24. A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974-82), Pis'ma vol. in, p. 45.

25. L'vov-Rogachevskii quoted in Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel, p. 51.

26. Mathewson, The Positive Hero, p. 232.

27. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 534.

28. Mathewson, The Positive Hero.

29. See Max Hayward, Writers in Russia: 1917-1978 (London: Harvill, 1983), pp. 209-10.