The Cambridge Companion to Classic Russian novel

The plot of Dead Souls is that of a picaresque novel. Together with a lengthy flashback in which we hear the story of Chichikov's past, there is enough factual material for a realist novel of manners. Gogol, like Pushkin, describes a stable society. But the element of satire is more explicit than in Evgenii Onegin. The provincial bureaucracy is presented as a corporation of parasites and extortionists without a useful function of any kind. Unlike Evgenii Onegin, Dead Souls has a polemic edge. If the reader is willing to see that Chichikov's fraudulent dealings in dead souls imply that buying and selling live human beings is perfectly legal, an indictment of serfdom may be read into the text, hardly Gogol's intent. One can also take a clue

from the title and see Dead Souls as an outcry against the terrible lack of spirituality in Russian life. The comic quality of many scenes in Dead Souls was perceived by Gogol - and by many of his readers, including Pushkin, who found it a terribly sad work - as an enhancement of the bitter truth about the iniquities of Russian life.

But like Evgenii Onegin, Gogol's novel has passages that celebrate day-to-day living and convey an epic sense of gladness. Such are the famous lyric effusions celebrating the Russian language and the boundless expanses of the Russian lands, and, of course, the troika passage. Then there are some beautiful vignettes of Russian life, such as the description of a concert of barking dogs at dusk. Finally, there are those Homeric similes, such as when a face that resembles a "Moldavian pumpkin" easily dovetails into an idyllic scene featuring a Moldavian pumpkin made into a balalaika, or when another round and red face calls forth the picture of a hot mead vendor serving his customers from a brass kettle. It is mostly on account of these passages that Dead Souls has been called by some the Russian national epic.

The art that illuminates Gogol's world is similar to Pushkin's. The narrator, decidedly personal like Pushkin's, also detaches himself from his story at will and takes off in various directions: a Homeric simile; literary and philosophical musings; lyric effusions; worldly wisdom; apostrophe to the readers drawing them into the author's confidence; an inserted novella, "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin." Like Pushkin, Gogol often displaces the focus of his text from the story to the author's consciousness. He is obviously aware of this and lets the reader know his presence, even if it be from a "splendid far-away."

Gogol's language is often self-serving, becoming foregrounded as the artistic dominant. He delights in the beauties of the Russian language, which he celebrates in a rousing lyric passage. Gogol also uses poetic license in letting his prosaic characters wax poetic far in excess of their personality traits. Thus, Pushkin's verse form finds ample compensation in the poetic quality of Gogol's prose. The subtitle of Dead Souls, "A Poem," is justified. Dead Souls is a poem, just as Evgenii Onegin is a novel. But is Dead Souls a realist novel? To contemporaries, and to Belinskii in particular, it certainly was, even though there were voices heard even then that disagreed with this view. When critics of the symbolist period exposed the imaginary nature of Gogol's Russia, it merely confirmed the truism that art and empirical reality are independent of each other.

Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859) is a novel which expresses the spirit of its time, a true Zeitroman. Its hero is a type that represents the author's understanding of the movements in Russian society which foreshadowed

the impending reforms of Alexander II. Oblomov, a well-to-do landowner who lives in Petersburg letting a steward manage his estate, stands for the demise of the old landowning gentry, about to be superseded by a new entrepreneurial class, represented by Oblomov's half-German friend Stolz. Oblomov is sensitive and intelligent, but incapable of any sustained activity and helpless in the affairs of practical life. Stolz is energetic, capable and enterprising, not a bad sort, though a bit of a snob. The novel's plot evolves entirely from the character of its personae. Their character, in turn, is determined by their social position. This also goes for some lower middle-class types and servants, described in vivid detail. The petty clerks who extort small bribes from peasant petitioners and Oblomov's devoted but lazy servant are presented as no less a dying breed than Oblomov.

The strength of Goncharov's realism lies in his descriptive detail of things as well as people. His description of life in an old manor house is an unforgettable classic. He is especially strong in creating metonymic details that establish a character in the reader's mind, such as when Oblomov's crooked brother-in-law, a petty government clerk, always points to a signature on a document with his index finger nail-down; when his sister Agafia, who becomes Mrs. Oblomov, is shown time and again with her bare round elbows busy over her kitchen table; or when the obnoxious scoundrel Tarantev's voice is likened to an empty bucket tumbling down stairs.

The structure of Oblomov is awkward. It begins with a Sternean hundred-page morning at Oblomov's flat. Several friends show up one after another, resulting in a series of character sketches that have no bearing on what there is of a plot. Oblomov then dozes off and in a dream relives his childhood in Oblomovka, the family estate. He awakens to meet Stolz, who tries to give his friend's life some direction. This leads to Oblomov's falling in love with and courtship of Olga Ilinskaia, a beautiful and well-educated but impecunious young lady. This episode ends quietly when Oblomov cannot bring himself to take the practical steps to make marriage possible. Olga goes on to marry Stolz. The second half of the novel has Oblomov become a boarder at the suburban house of Agafia Pshenitsyna, a widow, barely literate, but a great cook. He eventually marries her and they have a son. Inactive and overfed, Oblomov dies of a stroke at forty and his widow is glad to have their son brought up by the Stolzes, so he will be a gentleman like his father.

Oblomov is rich in symbolic detail. At the very outset, word comes to Oblomov that he has lost his lease, because the wreckers are coming to tear the place down, a transparent hint at the impending emancipation of serfs and subsequent ruin of the parasitic landowner class. The image of flies slowly drowning in the sweet syrup of good old-fashioned Russian kvass is

symbolic of the fate of Oblomov and the old way of life, as are many other apt and sharply drawn images.

Oblomov has an objective narrator, who occasionally inserts his opinions and comments. In a brief epilogue he quite surprisingly introduces himself as a friend of Stolz - another example of Goncharov's superb skill which shows not only in many instances of sharply observed detail, but also in ingenious legerdemain applied in creating seemingly natural transitions from one episode of the novel to the next.

Ivan Turgenev felt that his novels, all of which are short, were in fact "novellas." They are close to the French roman à thèse, a fictionalized discourse on a topical issue. Each of Turgenev's novels illuminates a phenomenon of Russian life and relates to a specific period. The progress from Rudin (1856), who here is still a "superfluous man," to the nihilist Bazarov of Fathers and Children (1862) and the populists of Virgin Soil (1877) covers a full generation. Turgenev's novels were perceived by contemporaries as partisan statements and were discussed accordingly. Even their titles and epigraphs were revealing. Fathers and Children was dedicated to the memory of Belinskii, father of the movement that spawned Bazarov. While seeking to take an objective view of things, Turgenev at all times identified himself as a westernizing gradualist liberal. When Fathers and Children was attacked by the Left as well as by the Right, he felt obliged to explain his position in an essay, "Regarding Fathers and Children."

Turgenev declared that his characters, including Bazarov, were based on personal observation and that his plots evolved from character rather than from any play of the imagination. It seems, though, that current ideas were as instrumental in generating his types as were casual impressions of individuals who crossed his path. Turgenev's novels present ordinary people in ordinary human relations as affected by the times. It is the progress of time and the inevitable changes it brings about that produce new and disquieting traits in ordinary people and ordinary relationships, such as between fathers and sons or between men and women in love. Psychological motivation in Turgenev's novels, while at times subtle, is never provocative. His admirable women act in unexpected ways, considering their background, but not irrationally. When Mme. Odintsova refuses to marry Bazarov, to whom she is erotically attracted, she reasons that marrying this strong man will cost her the freedom she has learned to value above everything.

Turgenev's novels are encumbered by few digressions from the main plot and central theme. Descriptive passages, including Turgenev's superb nature scenes, are designed to create atmosphere. Still, as Apollon Grigorev observed, a Turgenevan novel resembles a canvas with some sections

exquisitely finished, some showing well-sketched outlines, and some still blank. In the case of Fathers and Children the reader is well informed about the Kirsanovs' past and present, but little is said about Bazarov's past, intellectual maturation and inner life.

Turgenev's impersonal narrator stays in the background, making a pretense of objectivity although he has his sympathies and antipathies. Precisely by virtue of his impersonal quality, Turgenev's invisible narrator sets claim to some authoritative power of judgment and understanding. As for his own ideas and moods, Turgenev projects them on his characters. This also goes for authorial irony. Bazarov, with all of whose ideas save his rejection of art Turgenev said he agreed, fails to live up to any of them and in practice embraces the idealist notions of his antagonist. Pavel Kirsanov, whose personality and biography resemble Turgenev's, suffers the same fate; he who professes an idealist world view, in practice is good only at things material, such as being impeccably dressed and keeping his financial affairs in order. The narrator, though, never makes these ironies explicit.

Nikolai Leskov's Cathedral Folk (1872) takes the poetics of the realist novel to the limit in various ways, yet it is still typical of it. Subtitled "A Chronicle," it tells the story of the clergy of a provincial town with a symbolic name: Stargorod ("Oldtown"), concentrating on the 1860s, with flashbacks to pre-reform times. The novel carries an explicit political message, defending old values (the Orthodox faith, the traditional Russian way of life) and putting down liberals, foreigners (Poles, Germans, Jews), and progressive ideas. The novel's characters grow out of its basic tendency. Three clerics of Stargorod stand for the old virtues: Father Savelii Tuberozov, wise, righteous and fiery; Father Zakharia Benefaktov, humble, but firm in his faith; Deacon Akhilla Desnitsyn, a rambunctious giant with the heart and mind of a child. Against them, there stand not only the local liberal intelligentsia and assorted bureaucrats who, it being the time of liberal reforms, make a career of persecuting the conservative churchmen, but even an ecclesiastic hierarchy more intent on serving the bureaucracy than on upholding the Orthodox faith.

Leskov's penchant for personalized and stylized narrative reflects on the novel's structure, as it is put together from heterogeneous elements: the chronicler's narrative; pages from Father Tuberozov's diary; various intermezzi, such as when Nikolai Afanasevich, a dwarf once kept as a pet by an aristocratic lady, tells the story of his life; anecdotes and assorted vignettes, such as a description, extending over several pages, of three human figures gradually taking shape in the mist of morning with the sun rising behind them.

Cathedral Folk, though it has its share of ordinary characters, scores its

political points by making its main characters extraordinary. Father Tuberozov is ideally beautiful both physically and morally; toward the end, his life assumes the nature of a martyr's vita. His deacon Akhilla is a lusty hero of Rabelaisian proportions. The dwarf overcomes the indignities of servitude to become a kind, sensible and righteous man. The antagonists of the positive characters are grotesquely ugly, physically and morally. Such are Prince Barnovolokov, a government inspector, and his secretary, the scoundrel Termosesov, who denounces Father Tuberozov, causing his suspension from the ministry.

The edifying and moving story of the three churchmen is interlaced with episodes of scurrilous humor, such as the adventures of a skeleton whose possession is a symbol of progress to the liberal schoolmaster of Stargorod, but which to the churchmen is the remains of a human being in need of a Christian burial. Leskov's forte is language. He rivals Gogol in the stylized or sharply individualized speech of his characters, the precision of his descriptions of their physical appearance, the narrator's easy control of the mood of his narrative from warm pathos to amused irony. As in Gogol, the narrator occasionally shows his own face and flaunts his virtuoso command of language. Yet his ample use of concrete realistic detail makes the whole eminently credible.

Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1877) belongs to the tradition of the family novel. It follows the lives of the Levin, Shcherbatskii, Oblonskii and Karenin families, all related by marriage, for several years in the 1870s. In line with the tradition of the family novel, moral concerns are voiced throughout. Some episodes may be read as satires on the depravity and follies of upper-class society. Anna Karenina is a Zeitroman presenting life in an age of upheaval: the demise of the landed gentry and the ascendancy of capitalism, the crisis in Russian agriculture, confusion in the upper-class family structure, all seen from a vantage point directed backward, rather than forward in time. Embedded in a veritable encyclopedia of Russian life are the tragedy of Anna Karenina and an account of Konstantin Levin's midlife crisis.

All major characters belong to the landed upper middle class (Levin) or to the aristocracy (Vronskii, Anna's lover). Characters from the lower classes appear on the novel's fringes. While ordinary (there are no villains and no paragons of virtue among them), Tolstoi's characters are so strongly individualized they can hardly be perceived as types. The narrative is often conducted on the level of a character's inner life. Psychological motivation is thorough, but leaves open some avenues to the subconscious, particularly as regards the events that lead to Anna's suicide and Levin's suicidal depression.

The structure of the novel is closed only as far as the heroine is concerned. But Anna's tragedy and Levin's searchings blend well into an open panorama of Russian life: a wedding (Levin's), a death (Levin's brother's), a birth (Levin's first child), a ball, a steeplechase, a hunting party, haymaking, and many other masterful vignettes of city and country life.

Tolstoi projects, on the one side, an objective narrator whose consciousness merges with the narrative and its characters, though one senses that many of Levin's experiences, thoughts and feelings are Tolstoi's own. But on the other side, he often detaches himself from his narrative and delivers himself of discourses on a variety of subjects ranging from marriage customs to modern music. In one episode, he takes aim at the literary establishment: Koznyshev, Levin's half-brother, has published an important book, a scholarly work based on years of study; it is ignored or frivolously panned by the critics. An episode involving the painter Mikhailov, who paints Anna's portrait, is devoted to a question that occupied Tolstoi for many years and eventually led to his book What Is Art? (1897-98). Tolstoi's position, as it emerges from this episode, is surprising for a realist: he has it that a work of art is conceived wholly as an intuition, technique of execution being secondary.

Also surprisingly, considering Tolstoi's usual adherence to a factual approach to reality, Anna Karenina has some traits that are in violation of strict realism. There is a great deal of symbolic foreshadowing and outright symbolism. A blizzard and a fatal accident on the railway that punctuate the inception of Anna's fateful passion, Vronskii's careless move causing the death of his beautiful mare Frou-Frou, and other such details foreshadow a tragic end. Such are also the frighteningly symbolic dreams shared by the lovers. This even goes for some details of plot structure, such as when Kitty realizes she is pregnant immediately after having ministered to the dying Nikolai Levin, symbolic of the eternal cycle of life and death. Anna Karenina has a metaphysical subtext, showing men and women searching for a meaning or a direction in their lives. Having shown the futility of them all, Tolstoi lets Levin discover the ideal of a godly life. Anna Karenina is a realist novel with some traits that go against the grain of realism. Its moralism also links it with the eighteenth-century novel.

Fedor Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), set in the late 1860s, actually describes the 1870s. Post-reform Russia appears in such traits as the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurs, disintegration of the traditional family, impoverishment and deforestation of the countryside, and a new judiciary featuring trial by jury. The novel introduces a large number of characters from a broad social spectrum: landowners,

monks, government officials, intellectuals, lawyers, doctors, townspeople of various backgrounds, servants, paupers, and peasants. There are many descriptions of realia: the menu of a dinner party at the local monastery, a shopping spree at the local delicatessen, a doctor's visit to a pauper's cottage, a schoolboy's Sunday morning. A vivid sense of life in a provincial town is provided by the introduction of local gossip, anecdotes and "genre" scenes.

A good part of the narrative is conducted on the level of the principal characters' inner life. Ivan Karamazov's interview with the devil should be viewed as a hallucination. Even characters less central to the action are amply individualized by idiosyncratic speech patterns. The plot combines family saga and local chronicle with high drama and murder mystery, but the entire action is well within the range of the plausible. However, much about the novel's structure is unorthodox for a realist novel: suspense is created by withholding information from the reader; there are flashbacks and some foreshadowing; many inserts of narrative and discourse interrupt the flow of action (Father Zosima's Vita and Wisdom, "The Grand Inquisitor," Grushenka's "Tale of the Onion"). The Brothers Karamazov contains ample digressions with no direct bearing on the plot, such as a discourse on elderdom, observations on female hysterics, remarks on a painting by Kramskoi, and so on.

The Brothers Karamazov has a personalized narrator who, in an "Author's Preface," comes forth with an unorthodox program: he believes that the seed of the future is in the extraordinary and will therefore present an extraordinary hero. But then we face, for long stretches, a narrator who sounds like a conservative, worldly-wise provincial gentleman of advanced years. We also hear many other voices: Father Zosima's, Dmitrii's and Ivan Karamazov's, those of the prosecutor and defense counsel at Dmitrii's trial, and many others. All this is well within the realist canon.

The Brothers Karamazov has an anti-nihilist and anti-liberal bias, and proclaims the need for a spiritual regeneration of Russia, represented by Alesha Karamazov. While raising issues of a social and political nature, the novel also advances metaphysical questions such as that of the compatibility of innocent suffering with the existence of God, the dépendance of virtue on faith in immortality, the rift between human and divine justice, and the Fatherhood of God. Some features of the novel suggest that it is an allegory of the dilemma of godless modern humanity in search of an Absolute. The realist novel has a metaphysical subtext, provided the reader chooses to see it.

Another subtext is introduced by a host of biblical and literary quotations and allusions. Christ's temptation by the devil is projected into Ivan

Karamazov's tragic failure. His devil is a travesty of and a response to Goethe's Mephistopheles. Throughout the novel there appear thinly veiled putdowns of radical and liberal writers such as Herzen, Turgenev and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Altogether, The Brothers Karamazov shows that metaphysical and literary elements may be found embedded in a realist novel without detracting from its objective credibility.

Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don (19Z8-40) is often read as a twentieth-century version of War and Peace, though it is not technically a historical novel, for its action ends only a few years before Sholokhov began to write it. Like War and Peace it relates the experience of several families in times of peace and war. The action is advanced largely by historical events. Historical personages make some appearances. A large number of people, some of whom appear only once, are shown engaged in public affairs, in their familial and personal pursuits, and at work. But The Quiet Don has some unique traits. It is set almost entirely in a Cossack settlement of the Don region. Its main characters are simple, uneducated people. Members of the upper class and intellectuals appear on the fringes only and are viewed through the eyes of the uneducated. The action is seen from the Cossack's point of view, though the narrator at times affects a somewhat broader perspective.

While the narrator is class-conscious, the character of his personae is not exhausted by their social status. The main hero, Grigorii Melekhov, a moderately well-to-do farmer who eventually takes up arms against the Soviets, is an attractive character and a better man than the landless Cossack Misha Koshevoi, who becomes a Communist activist. Love and jealousy, happiness and heartbreak appear independently of political events. The inner life of all characters is uncomplicated. The dialogue, limited to dramatic junctures, is realistic and vigorous. It contains many dialect expressions, as does the narrative. The action features matter-of-fact descriptions of beatings, incest, gang rape, floggings, executions and other shocking scenes. A supporter of the Soviet regime and not himself a Cossack, Sholokhov may have purposely presented life in a Cossack settlement as more cruel and violent than it actually was. There is no moralizing on the part of the narrator, nor does he digress from his narration, except in a large number of masterful nature descriptions. The narrator restrains his own emotions and lets his characters express theirs freely.

While the topic of the novel is clearly defined as the coming of the Soviet order to the land of the Cossacks, it is left to the reader to recognize its political drift. Sholokhov does not present the coming of the Soviet order as historically necessary, but does bring out the reasons why the Bolsheviks

prevailed. The Quiet Don is one of the purest examples of a truly realist novel among the outstanding novels of Russian literature. It projects an objective view of contemporary life with an emphasis on its social aspect, yet without any preaching or theorizing.

Boris Pasternak, a great modernist poet, followed the example of the nineteenth-century realist novel in Doctor Zhivago (1957), his only novel. He made one concession to the lyric bent of his genius, making his hero an amateur poet and adding a cycle of Iurii Zhivago's poems, loosely related to various episodes of the novel.

Doctor Zhivago is one of many novels about the generation that experienced World War I, the Revolution and the coming of the Soviet order. Like Aleksei Tolstoi's A Tour of Hell, it has the ordeal of the Russian intelligentsia for its main theme. Iurii Zhivago, a sensitive but passive observer of life, is at the mercy of the cataclysmic events that engulf the country. They deprive him of Tonia, his loving wife, and his children, then of Lara, his second love. He survives until the end of the NEP period sustained by Marina, the third woman in his life, but dies young, a broken man, stifled by the enforced duplicity of Soviet life.

The Revolution is presented as a calamity that befalls the Russian people regardless of their social class, for while it rights the injustices of the old order it brings with it bondage worse than before. The doers fare even worse than the passive sufferer Zhivago. Pasha Antipov, his rival for Lara's love, is a Communist activist who decides that it is nobler to serve the Revolution uncritically than to value one's own opinions. He perishes senselessly. A multitude of other characters appears, whose lives and deaths seem void of meaning, regardless of their political convictions. The entire action of Doctor Zhivago is marked by randomness, strange coincidences, and a lack of purpose, not at all due to Pasternak's amateurish composition, as has been suggested by some critics, but rather as a proper reflection of the chaotic condition of Russian life during the period in question. A sustained plot, derived from the character of the novel's personae, would have been at odds with the condition of a world profoundly out of joint.

Doctor Zhivago consists of sharply focused scenes scattered over the vast territory of European and Asian Russia, from the first years of the century to an epilogue set toward the end of World War II. A few minor characters stand out precisely because attention is briefly focused on them in a single episode. Meanwhile the main characters, perhaps with the sole exception of Lara, remain remote. We hear Iurii Zhivago's voice frequently and at length, but it lacks immediacy. Having gathered a large volume of impressions and ideas, Pasternak projected them into a panoramic view of life, with a less than perfect effort to mold them into a plot with live

characters. In a sense, though, this shortcoming leads to a high degree of subjective realism, once Doctor Zhivago is read as the writer's personal and intellectual legacy, an interpretation which is supported by the presence throughout the novel of many memorable discourses embracing topics such as the nature of art, the meaning of history, the destiny of the Russian intelligentsia, Christianity, Jewishness, the meaning of dreams, the Immaculate Conception, and many others.

The third-person narrative of Doctor Zhivago has a quality of detachment which has the narrator stay on the outside of the action even as he reports the hideous horrors of war. Pasternak's sense for the concrete detail, metonymic or symbolic, makes certain passages, nature scenes as well as interiors, unforgettable. Such is the rowan tree whose life-sustaining red berries evoke in Zhivago, then a prisoner of a gang of guerillas in the icy wilds of the Urals, the image of a loving women, Lara.

There are several reasons why most of the novels chosen for discussion here date from the nineteenth century. The golden age of the Russian realist novel came to an end around 1880, with the ascendancy of the short story as Russian literature's most representative genre. The very concept of realism came under a two-pronged attack during the first quarter of the twentieth century: to the right, neo-Romantic tendencies took their toll and to the left Marxist ideology branded the objectivity of realism as "pseudo-objectivism." Also, the realist novel was based on a belief that a certain logic was inherent in an individual's biography and a nation's history. Events of the twentieth century caused one to lose faith in this notion, thus depriving the traditional realist novel of its raison d'être.

All but two of the novels discussed here offer a broad panoramic view of Russian life: A Hero of Our Time and Fathers and Children are also the shortest of the ten novels discussed. All but Evgenii Onegin and A Hero of Our Time show some explicit social concern, while only Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov may be called psychological novels. All but Evgenii Onegin and A Hero of Our Time carry a more or less explicit moral or ideological message and in some way all ten pass judgment on the society they describe.

Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Pasternak combine objective narrative with some subjective contemplation. The same authors also digress frequently from their main plot and introduce some literary discussion into their text. Some elements of Romantic poetics may be found in all ten novels. The great Russian novelists do not offer very pure examples of uncompromising Realism. Some lesser writers, such as the conservative Aleksei Pisemskii, the Populists Fedor Reshetnikov and Nikolai Pomia-lovskii, the Marxists Maksim Gorkii and Vikentii Veresaev, and even

popular middle-of-the-road entertainers like Petr Boborykin and Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko are better Realists. However, it does not appear that any of their works contain more truth of any kind than the works discussed here.

NOTES

1. V. N. Maikov, "Nechto ? russkoi literature v 1846 g," in Maikov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Kiev, 1901), vol. I, pp. 207-10.

2. Fabula is the chronological sequence of events, while siuzhet is "a sequence of events, artistically arranged." Boris Tomashevskii, Teoriia literatury, 4th edn (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo 1928), p. 136.

II

ROBERT RUSSELL

The Modernist tradition

It is common to begin discussions of Modernism with caveats about the difficulty or impossibility of adequate definition. In the introduction to his recent study of Russian literature of the 1920s, Victor Erlich reminds us of Irving Howe's use of the terms "elusive" and "protean" to characterize Modernism.¹ In using these words, Howe may appear to be advocating a free-for-all, permissive attitude to the boundaries of Modernism, and it is, indeed, difficult to see how one can be more prescriptive when faced with the vast range of heterogeneous works of art which are, by common consent, "modernist." Marshall Berman's view of Modernism is more comprehensive than most. For him, it is the artistic expression of an experience of alienation, struggle, and contradiction that has been the normal human condition for an ever increasing number of people for almost five hundred years.² Berman's stimulating book contains much that is of value to the student of Russian literature, but I believe that his definition of Modernism, one that includes works by Gogol, Dostoevskii, and even Pushkin, is too capacious. Certainly, given such a definition there can be no opposition between Russian Realism and Russian Modernism; while not coterminous, the two overlap hugely. Such canonical texts of Realism as Notes from Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866) are, for Berman, quintessential modernist works because they are concerned with the human condition of struggle, contradiction, and alienation. Fruitful as this idea is for the interpretation of Dostoevskii and Gogol, I prefer to take a narrower and more orthodox view of the chronological limits of Modernism in Russia, from about the 1890s until the imposition of Socialist Realism in the 1930s. The modernist authors of this period were all conscious of the profound break with the past that marked the contemporary age. It was a deepseated, revolutionary change that was realized in many different spheres of human activity: most obviously, perhaps, in social and political life as the Russian Empire crumbled, but also in philosophy and religion, and in scientific thought.

The old certainties had gone, and a mood of anxiety, tension, and restlessness was now the spirit of the age, the essence of modernist sensibility. Formal innovation followed, as artists sought appropriate means of expressing the comprehensive change that had taken place in all aspects of life.

Before turning to the modernist works of the early twentieth century, however, it will be useful to examine more closely Berman's concept of the experience of modernity and its reflection in nineteenth-century Russian literature, since it is one of the peculiarities of the Russian version of Modernism that it developed less markedly in opposition to the Realism that preceded it than as a continuation of one important strand of that realistic tradition, the so-called "Gogol-Dostoevskii line." That sense of discontinuity, of a complete break with the past expressed by modernist artists in many countries, was certainly not absent in Russia (one only has to think of the Futurists' pledge to "throw Pushkin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi . . . overboard from the steamship of modernity"), but in a culture that had already produced Gogol's "The Nose" (1836) and Dostoevskii's The Double (1846) it was not necessary to invent completely new images of fragmentation in order to reflect the chaos of the new age. Virginia Woolf may have felt that December 1910 was when human nature changed (see her essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown"), but in Russia the disintegration of the personality and of society that marks the boundary of the modern age had been sensed and expressed earlier. Whereas, throughout much of Europe, the experience of the First World War revealed the extent to which the old stable certainties had gone, in Russia the fundamental shift had come more than fifty years earlier, with the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861. And whereas many artists and thinkers throughout Europe had, from the turn of the century or so, sensed and expressed the impending fragmentation and chaos ahead of its universal recognition, in Russia, once again, that process had taken place significantly earlier in the works of Gogol and Dostoevskii beginning in the 1830s and 1840s. This is not to say that Russian artists of the first two decades of the twentieth century stood apart from the general European modernist trend. Nothing could be further from the truth. But, the Futurists' wish to shock notwithstanding, they had no need to jettison all previous cultural models in order to be able to reflect the age.

For many Russians and visitors to that country, the physical embodiment of modernity, the symbol of a break with the past, was the city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703. This is not the place to discuss the general significance of St. Petersburg in Russian literature; that has been done elsewhere, including in another essay in this volume. But it is necessary to

stress the peculiar hold on the modernist imagination exercised by this "spectral" metropolis, a place which the Underground Man describes as "the most abstract and intentional city in the world" and which Dostoevskii himself referred to as "the most fantastic city" (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 1863). Certain attributes of St. Petersburg serve to crystallize the sense of fragmentation and alienation that is central to the spirit of Modernism. First there is the contrast between the magnificent public spaces of the city, particularly the palaces and squares lining the Neva, and the overcrowded tenements with their squalid yards and foul staircases that lie just behind; second, there are the extremities of weather and light, particularly the white nights of mid-summer and the frequent dense fogs, both of which can appear to dissolve solid shapes into ghostly outlines ("was it not all an optical illusion, a phantasmagoria?," asked one early nineteenth-century visitor);³ finally, and perhaps most significantly, there is the fact that this huge city was created in a hostile environment and at the cost of many thousands of lives as an act of will by one man. From Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman (written 1833; first published 1841) onwards, St. Petersburg has been presented in literature in terms of the juxtaposition of opposites, struggle, contradiction, lack of certainty, madness: a place where the strangest things can and do occur. To one of the characters in Dostoevskii's A Raw Youth (1875), it appears as though the entire city is unreal, a dream, and he wonders whether it might "rise with the mist and disappear like smoke," leaving behind the Finnish bog that had been there before, with, perhaps, just the Bronze Horseman astride his hotly breathing steed in the middle of it (1, 8).

A key figure in the creation of the literary image of St. Petersburg was Nikolai Gogol. The city of his stories "Nevskii Prospect" (1835), "Notes of a Madman" (1835), "The Nose" (1836), and "The Overcoat" (1842) is a protagonist rather than a setting, a place where, as he writes in "Nevskii Prospect," "everything is deception, everything is dream, everything is different from what it seems," one where "the Devil himself lights the lamps." The people who hurry along St. Petersburg's main thoroughfare are reduced by Gogol's narrator to their most striking physical attributes: