The Cambridge Companion to Classic Russian novel

Here you will meet unique sidewhiskers, tucked under the necktie with extraordinary and astounding skill, sidewhiskers that are velvety, satiny, black as sable or as coal, but, alas belonging to the Foreign Office alone. Providence has refused to permit civil servants from other departments to sport black side-whiskers; to their very great chagrin, they must wear red ones.

The blurring of the distinction between the part and the whole - Gogol's characteristic grotesque synecdoche - was to strike a chord in several

modernist writers, for whom it became a means of conveying intensity of emotion, the disintegration of personality, or essential psychological features. Thus, Maiakovskii's lyrical persona in "A Cloud in Trousers" (1915) cries: "But can you turn yourself inside out as I can, so that you are nothing but lips?"; and the hero of Zamiatin's We (written 1920-21, first complete publication in Russian 1952) declares: "imagine a human finger cut off from the whole, from the hand - a separate human finger hunched up, running in a series of hops along the glass pavement. That finger was me" (Entry 18).

In the context of Russian Modernism, the grotesque fantasy of "The Nose" is of particular importance. This story in which a bumptious civil servant, "Major" Kovalev, awakens one day to find that he has lost his nose and later sees it in the guise of a general riding round in a carriage, is astonishingly "modern" for a work written in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is deliberately elusive, with a characteristic dream-like fluidity that extends to every level. Nothing here is stable; character, plot, language, point of view, dimensions, even such a basic category as "animate"/ "inanimate" - all are in constant flux, and there is no fixed point that the reader can hold on to with certainty. One moment the nose is discovered baked in a loaf of bread, the next it is wearing a general's uniform during a service in the Kazan Cathedral and Kovalev approaches it tentatively, since it appears to outrank him. When it is finally recovered, Kovalev tries to stick it back on the smooth place left on his face, but it falls to the table with a dull thud, like something inorganic; later still it reappears in its proper place, once more an integral part of an organism. Some critics have seen in "The Nose" little more than an amusing piece of whimsy, yet the underlying themes of sexual and social anxiety and alienation mark the work as a precursor of Russian Modernism no less clearly than do the stylistic features. A further similarity comes with reader response. The amusement that the reader of "The Nose" is likely to feel will almost certainly be accompanied by an uneasiness that is a characteristic reaction to many of the modernist works of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Gogol's grotesque, unstable fantasy is to find many echoes in the years to come, in works by Belyi, Maiakovskii, Zamiatin, and Olesha, as well as in Kharms's literature of the absurd.

The similarities between Gogol's St. Petersburg tales and the early Dostoevskii have been widely recognized, particularly in the case of The Double, which takes thematic and stylistic elements that had been found earlier in "The Nose" and "Notes of a Madman" and relates them to the onset of the hero's schizophrenia. The modernist features of fractured style, anxiety, and social alienation in the city are all to be found in Dostoevskii

as in Gogol, but in the younger writer they are more explicitly related to their metaphysical and psychological undercurrents. If Gogol's anticipation of Modernism is instinctive, then Dostoevskii's appears to me to be the result of a profound understanding of the great shift in consciousness that was about to take place and that would be expressed in different spheres of thought by Freud, Nietzsche, Lobachevskii, Einstein, and many others. Dostoevskii both anticipates and, through his enormous influence on twentieth-century art and thought, helps to shape modern consciousness,⁴ a process that can be seen nowhere more clearly than in two of the novelist's St. Petersburg works, Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. Here the protagonists' isolation is not only social, but also existential. The question of identity and how it can be determined runs through both works.⁵ In their attempts to find out who they are, and in their eschewal of definition by such extraneous factors as class, wealth, nationality, or self-interest, the Underground Man and Raskolnikov are deeply modern heroes. Similarly, the uneasy, apocalyptic atmosphere of The Devils (1871-72), a sense of being on the edge of catastrophe, anticipates one of the central features of modern consciousness.

The form which Dostoevskii employed for his examination of the existential and psychological condition of modern man was the realistic novel, but it was a new kind of realism, what he himself termed "realism in a higher sense," and in its blend of verisimilitude and fantasy, in its instability and unpredictability, it was exactly suited to the depiction of contemporary life, and was to be a major influence throughout the next century. It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine in any detail the nature of Dostoevskii's realism (a topic that has been extensively discussed by many critics), but one or two examples will indicate the general nature of his innovations. First, there is the depiction of space. The city of St. Petersburg as a whole, its individual streets and buildings, and the rooms inhabited by the heroes of the works are all on the one hand "real," in that their representation is mimetic, and on the other hand they are psychological constructs, spatial analogues of the characters' minds. As has been pointed out by Leonid Grossman, Dostoevskii's depiction of St. Petersburg is the most palpable and accurate in nineteenth-century literature.⁶ Yet the city inhabited by the Underground Man is the physical embodiment of his psychological condition, it is "the underground." And Raskolnikov's room seems to change dimensions in accordance with his frame of mind; one moment it is tiny and stuffy, no bigger than a cupboard, the next it swells to accommodate the student himself and several visitors. Likewise, the stifling weather is both the real St. Petersburg summer climate and a metaphor for Raskolnikov's overheated, airless mind. Similar points could be made about

the handling of time, which appears to expand and contract as a function of Raskolnikov's consciousness; and about some of the secondary characters, whose inconsistencies become explicable if the characters are seen as in part real (that is portrayed by an objective narrator) and in part projections by Raskolnikov of his own preoccupations.

It is important to stress what Dostoevskii himself stressed: that the world which he depicts in Crime and Punishment is no more fantastic than the world of real experience depicted in the newspapers. Modern life in the city is intense and chaotic, and if artists are to portray it adequately they must find new forms. It is but a small step from this point to twentieth-century Modernism. That step was taken by Andrei Belyi in Petersburg (first version 1913-14, second version 1916, final version 1922). The novel's modernity is evident in the mood of anxiety and alienation that permeates the entire work and that arises out of the awareness of impending catastrophe.⁷ That sense of being on the edge of the abyss that is characteristic of the modernist sensibility has, in Belyi's novel, a concrete historical context, since the work is set in the autumn of 1905, when Russia was in the grip of revolutionary turmoil. The plot involves an attempt to assassinate a senior official, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, by planting in his home a bomb hidden in a sardine tin. The first stage of the plan, the placing of the bomb, is carried out by Apollon Apollonovich's son, Nikolai Apollonovich, who is not a revolutionary but who is bound by a promise of help made in a rash moment. Most of the novel is pervaded by an atmosphere of imminent disaster engendered in Nikolai Apollonovich and in the reader by the awareness that the bomb is ticking away and must soon explode.

The absorbing plot and convincing evocation of a particular time and place form the framework on which Belyi hangs his brilliant narrative, which has occasionally been described as the Russian Ulysses. The comparison with Joyce's novel is not entirely without foundation; Vladimir Nabokov placed both (along with works by Kafka and Proust) in his list of the four leading masterpieces of the twentieth century. Like Joyce, Belyi writes highly dynamic prose, the normal semantic significance of which is constantly supplemented by rich phonetic patterning and occasionally by experimental typographical layout. In part, the character of the prose is determined by the voice (or voices) of the narrator, who adopts a wide variety of tones from bumbling incomprehension to sweeping lyricism, and who switches between them without warning, thereby contributing to that volatility, that lack of certainty that is a key modernist concept.

The city itself is rendered with minute topographical accuracy necessitating frequent reference to a contemporary street plan, and yet it is

simultaneously that spectral, fantastic creation of Peter the Great, mythologized by Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevskii, that had become a vital element in the definition of Russia's national identity. Belyi is constantly aware of the works of his predecessors (the Bronze Horseman is a character), as well as the libretto of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, and the reader is required to place the events and characters in their cultural environment by picking up the references. St. Petersburg itself, with all its cultural and mythical significance, emerges as the novel's protagonist, every bit as alive as the human characters.

Apart from the work of Belyi, perhaps the outstanding example of the modernist novel in Russia was by Evgenii Zamiatin, in whom modern consciousness can be seen at its purest. For Zamiatin, no true writer could be settled, content with present realities; writers had to be heretics, forever restless, in constant intellectual movement, and provoking a life-affirming and creative anxiety in their readers. As he said in the essay "Tomorrow" (1919-20):

Today is doomed to die because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the cruel and wise law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only guarantee of eternal movement forward, eternal creation . . . The world is kept alive only by heretics.⁸

In Zamiatin we can see, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, the roots of Russian Modernism in the restless spirit of Romanticism. A recurrent image in his work is that of the lone Scythian horseman forever in motion, a figure similar to Lermontov's rebellious lone white sail, and reminiscent of the constant oppositional nature of Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time (1840, definitive version 1841): "Where is he galloping? Nowhere. Why? For no reason. He gallops simply because he is a Scythian, because he has become one with his horse, because he is a centaur, and the dearest things to him are freedom, solitude, his horse, the wide open steppe."⁹

For Zamiatin, there can be no immutable truths, for if there were any such fixed philosophical points they would contradict the "cosmic, universal law" of constant revolution, which "is everywhere, in everything."¹⁰ His world view is Einsteinian rather than Euclidean, based on the "speeding, curved surfaces" of the new mathematics and the new cosmology rather than the plane surfaces of Euclid and the fixed forces of Newton. Given this view of a universe in constant movement, Zamiatin uses and advocates a correspondingly dynamic literary form. The nineteenth-century Realists' leisurely descriptions of landscape and character are inappropriate

in the modern age: "who will even think of looking at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle … ? Today we can look and think only as people do in the face of death."¹¹ The urgent anxiety of modern life demands brevity, compression, innovative syntax and imagery, and a literary vocabulary enhanced by provincialisms, neologisms, and scientific and technical terms. The syntax of Zamiatin's artistic prose is, in his own words, "elliptic, volatile"; his imagery is "sharp, synthetic, with a single salient feature - the one feature you will glimpse from a speeding car."¹²

Zamiatin was keenly aware of the distinctiveness of modern art. His terms for it were "synthetism" and "neo-realism," and he viewed it as a synthesis of Realism's search for the physical reality of the flesh and Symbolism's obsession with death and retreat from the everyday in quest of the spiritual. On the one hand there was "vivid, simple, strong, crude flesh: Moleschott, Büchner, Rubens, Repin, Zola, Tolstoi, Gorkii, realism, Naturalism"; on the other "Schopenhauer, Botticelli, Rossetti, Vrubel, Churlionis, Verlaine, Blök, idealism, symbolism." The modernist artist returns to the sphere of the first group, to the flesh, but with the full knowledge of the discoveries of the second group. "Thus synthesis: Nietzsche, Whitman, Gauguin, Seurat, Picasso - the new Picasso, still little known - and all of us, great and small, who work in modern art, whatever it may be called - neo-realism, synthetism, or something else."¹³ It is clear from this list that for Zamiatin the essence of modern art lies in sensibility rather than chronology. Whitman, for example, was born before Zola, Tolstoi, or Gorkii, yet Zamiatin considers him a Modernist and the others Realists.

Zamiatin's novel We, substantially written in 1920 and completed in 1921, exemplifies his views on modern consciousness and its formal expression; indeed, essays such as "On synthetism" and, especially, "On literature, revolution and entropy" can be read as a commentary on and explication of the novel. First, the philosophical position adopted within We reflects the view expressed in the essays that revolution must be constant and all-embracing, and that the rejection of all fixed systems of belief, be they religious or political, is a primary requirement for a true artist. In Entry 30 of the fictional diary the following conversation takes place between the rebel I-330 and the mathematician D-503:

"Darling, you're a mathematician. Even more than that, mathematics has

made you a philosopher. Well then, name the final number for me."

"Meaning? I… I don't understand. What final number?"

"The final one, the highest number, the biggest one."

"But, I, that's absurd. Since the number of numbers is infinite, how can there

be a final one?"

"Well then, how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one, revolutions are infinite."

For those brought up in the Single State, taught since early childhood that the revolution which resulted in the foundation of their present society was the last one that would ever take place, such notions of constant revolution are frightening. Surely, argues D-503, those who founded the Single State were right to do so? I-330 wholeheartedly agrees. They were right at the time, but, as with all revolutionaries, when they achieved power they tried to prevent anyone else from rebelling against them. Conviction led to dogma and, eventually, the desire to preserve the status quo at all costs. The specific political implications of passages such as this for the fledgling Soviet state are obvious. Although it is undoubtedly the prescience of Zamiatin's novel - its anticipation of twentieth-century totalitarianism -that is its most striking political feature, its satirical reflection of certain aspects of the political, social, and cultural life of Soviet Russia in the Civil War era should not be overlooked, and was sufficient to ensure that it was not published in Russia in the 1920s. Yet to interpret the theme of revolution in the novel primarily on the political plane is to minimize its significance, not least as the philosophical cornerstone of Zamiatin's Modernism.

The concept of revolution advanced in We is universal, affecting human behavior, social and political institutions, and natural phenomena alike, and is equated with movement, with energy. The opposite tendency, towards stasis, is also universal, and is referred to by Zamiatin as "entropy," a term which he characteristically borrows from science. Thus, whereas Christ is seen as historically and philosophically revolutionary, the Christian church is portrayed as the true ancestor of the Single State: a deadening body, convinced that it is right in all things, and seeking to stifle opposition to its dogma by rooting out and destroying heretics. Entropy and dogma affect even the apparently objective world of mathematics. The conformist D-503 favors those branches of mathematics concerned with certainty, predictability, integration, and the geometry of plane surfaces and fixed solid objects. His heroes are Euclid, Pythagoras, and the early eighteenth-century English mathematician Brook Taylor, and he appears to have no knowledge of, or no esteem for, those nineteenth- and twentieth-century mathematicians whose work supported philosophical notions of uncertainty and relativity. For Zamiatin himself, as for his heroine I-330, the desire for complete certainty, whether in philosophy, religion, mathematics, or any other area, runs counter to the laws of thermodynamics. As I-330 says: "Surely, as a mathematician, you understand that only differ-

ences, differences of temperature, only contrasts in heat, only that makes for life? And if everywhere throughout the universe all bodies are equally warm or equally cool . . . They've got to be smashed into each other - so there'll be fire, explosion, inferno" (Entry 30).

Zamiatin's philosophy provokes unease and anxiety. It permits no comforting notions of eventual peace, no ultimate goal, no heaven, whether on Earth or elsewhere; instead, it promises only "the torment of endless movement" (Entry 28). In this it is modernist thought, strikingly similar in some respects to that of Nietzsche.¹⁴

A second aspect of the content of We that marks it as a modernist text is the prominence of the irrational and the subconscious. There is no evidence that Zamiatin believed in the primacy of the irrational, but in the societies which he depicts (not only the Single State but also the middle-class England of "Islanders," 1917) it has been largely suppressed, thereby destroying that balance between reason and the irrational that, he argues, is essential for the wholeness of the personality. Hence his apparent championing of irrationality. Attempting to explain to D-503 who the Mephi are, I-330 says: "Who are they? The half that we have lost. There's H₂ and there's O, but in order to get H₂0 - streams, seas, waterfalls, waves, storms - the two halves must unite" (Entry 28). The Single State has split the human personality into its rational and irrational components and has almost succeeded in eradicating the latter. But just as water ceases to be water when either of its two elements is removed, so do people cease to be people when their irrational side is repressed. Under the influence of an overwhelming and uncomprehended wave of sexual desire for I-330, D-503's dormant irrationality is aroused, manifesting itself in dreams, in his synaesthetic perception of the physical world around him, especially his perception of color, and in the increasingly original and creative language of his diary entries.

Among the many influences on Zamiatin, mention should be made of Dostoevskii. Much in We, including the role of the irrational in human behavior, and the philosophical issue of the relationship between freedom and happiness, had been encountered earlier in Notes from Underground, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Like twentieth-century writers the world over, Zamiatin found in the work of Dostoevskii a brilliant artistic investigation of the human condition in the modern age which corresponded in many respects to his own creative concerns.¹⁵ On the philosophical level, however, there is a fundamental difference between the two: Zamiatin rejects all notions of peace and reconciliation in Christ, whereas Dostoevskii and some of his heroes, while finding it impossible to accomplish the "leap of faith," need to preserve the figure of Christ as the

only way out of the "underground," the moral and intellectual impasse that is the lot of modern man. Dostoevskii's famous dictum about preferring Christ to the truth if a choice were necessary is diametrically opposed to Zamiatin's relentless refusal to accept any fixed points of belief.

Zamiatin's modernist view of life is expressed in the correspondingly fractured, elliptical prose of We. D-503 begins his diary with the intention of explaining to the less fortunate inhabitants of other planets the near-perfect, rational way of life in the Single State. His ideal is total clarity, a transparency of language that would correspond to the transparency of the buildings in the Single State. Almost immediately, however, this ideal is compromised by the intrusion of metaphor, and as the diary proceeds, its style reflects the increasingly chaotic state of D-503's mind. Zamiatin's short, dynamic sentences, punctuated by dashes and frequently tailing off into three dots, are perfectly suited both to his own view of the nature of prose in the post-Einstein age and to D-503 's uncomprehending slide into the state of alienation and anxiety, simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, that is the modern mode.

The extreme compression of the syntax is complemented by the use of recurrent physical leitmotifs as a kind of shorthand for characterization. The characters are frequently reduced to a single detail that simultaneously suggests physical appearance and personality or function. Thus, I-330 becomes the "X" that is formed in her face by the lines of her eyebrows and the slight furrows from her nostrils to the sides of her mouth and that serves both as a physical identification tag and as an indication of her mysterious inner world. O-90 is constantly described in terms of roundness, a detail expressing her looks, the appropriateness of her name, and the maternalism that is her primary characteristic. The doctor who tells D-503 that he has developed a soul is seen as a pair of scissors, thin, sharp and dangerous. The Guardian S-4711 always appears as a hunched, snake-like figure, the physical embodiment of his ambivalent role as apparent upholder and would-be destroyer of the Single State. His serpent-like shape also acts as a frequent reminder of the mythical level on which the novel operates: the Single State corresponds to the Garden of Eden, the Benefactor to God, D-503 to Adam, I-330 to Satan, Eve and the serpent. On occasion, when D-503 catches a fleeting glimpse of someone, recognition depends entirely on the leitmotif. This is in line with Zamiatin's view that modern prose must correspond to the pace of modern life, that, as we have seen, the image must consist only of the basic detail that would be spotted from a speeding car, yet it must be capable of suggesting the whole character.

With its rapid, elliptical syntax, its identification of single salient features

of physique and character, and its displacement of the "normal" planes of time and space - most evident in stories such as "Mamai" (1920) and "A Story about the Most Important Thing" (1923) - Zamiatin's prose corresponds to his own description of the essence of modern painting. In "On synthetism" he points out that the earthquake in geometric and philosophical thought brought about by Einstein was anticipated by "the seismograph of the new art," which had shattered accepted notions of perspective, the "X, Y and Z axes" of Realism (Zamiatin, "O sintetizme," p. 286). In describing the paintings of his friend Iurii Annenkov, Zamiatin could be describing his own prose: "he has a sense of the exceptional pace and dynamism of our epoch, a sense of time refined to hundredths of a second, the skill (characteristic of synthetism) to provide only the synthetic essence of things" (Zamiatin, "O sintetizme," p. 288).

The painterly qualities of Zamiatin's modernist prose can be seen in his handling of color and light, no less than line. Scholars have sometimes attempted to assign significance to particular colors in We. Thus, for example, the light blue of the clear sky above the Single State and the bluish-grey of the numbers' uniforms have been seen as emblematic of that society's predominant rationality; the red of I-330's lips and of the fire that burns inside her as representing the heat of passion and revolution; the yellow of the ancient dress, of the sap that covers everything in spring, and of the eyes of the beast glimpsed through the glass of the Green Wall as suggesting man's struggle for freedom, for escape to the life-giving force of the sun.¹⁶ Yet, useful as these attempts at disclosing the significance of color in We have been, they have generally failed to do justice to the complexity of the subject. In a recent article Sona S. Hoisington and Lynn Imbery have, for the first time, shown how subtle and dynamic is Zamiatin's use of color, linking him with modern painters, especially Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse.¹⁷ Hoisington and Imbery demonstrate convincingly that Zamiatin's handling of color is based on transformation rather than fixed attributes, and that the opposition between energy and entropy that is the philosophical core of the novel is conveyed through such color transformations. Most of the colors in We are, therefore, dynamic and relative rather than absolute in value, which accords with Zamiatin's concept of Modernism.

Like everything else in the Single State, light is perceived by the citizens as uniform and clear, an analogue of their rational lives. D-503 eulogizes the cloudless blue sky and the even light of the "crystalline sun" and is afraid of the fog that occasionally envelops the city, blurring the customary sharp outlines of the glass buildings. On one level, Zamiatin uses different states of light as symbols of the rational and irrational halves of his hero's

psyche. I-330 tells D-503 that besides fearing the obscurity of the fog (meaning his irrationality) he also loves it (Entry 13). But, like color, light is also used by Zamiatin in a purely painterly fashion; reflecting and refracting, it can become solid, as in the following examples: "on the mirrored door of the wardrobe - a shard of light - in my eyes"; "a sharp ray of sunlight fractures like lightning on the floor, on the wall of the wardrobe, higher, and then this cruel, flashing blade falls on I-330's thrown-back, naked neck"; "a golden sickle of sunlight on the loudspeaker" (Entries 18 and 19).

The diary form and the increasing unpredictability of the narrator focus the attention of the reader of We on the artistic medium itself, as well as on the relativity of perspective. In certain other works of Russian Modernism these issues play an even greater part. The novels of Boris Pilniak, for example, have often been criticized for their dishevelled lack of organization, their repetitiveness (the author habitually incorporated earlier texts within later ones, sometimes with little revision), and their rambling, apparently arbitrary plot development (Donat, the character who, in the early pages of The Naked Year [1922], seems most likely to develop into the novel's hero is disconcertingly killed off at the end of the first chapter). Critics from Pilniak's time to the present have voiced the suspicion that his adoption of a modernist stance merely masks an inability or unwillingness to conform to the discipline of consistent plot and character development.¹⁸ Yet to argue thus is implicitly to apply to Pilniak the inappropriate criteria of the realistic novel. The Naked Year, which owes much to Belyi and Remizov, is an attempt to convey the elemental chaos of revolution by rendering it in a prose that is itself chaotic to the point of near unintelli-gibility in places. Pilniak's text is indeterminate; it cannot be tied down to consistency of language, point of view, or moral perspective. It is driven at least as much by phonetics as by plot or characterization, with many paragraphs being structured on particular sound combinations rather than on a core of meaning. And yet, meaning does emerge through a deliberate lack of coherence in the literary medium analogous to that in Russian life. Pilniak's prose is an eclectic montage of loosely connected (and sometimes unconnected) episodes narrated in a variety of equally heterogeneous stylistic registers. It is prose that insistently draws attention to the nature of the medium and yet remains representative of Russian reality.

Pilniak's style, with colloquialisms alongside archaisms, and phonetic and rhythmic repetitive patterns, is an example of the manner known as "ornamentalism" practiced by many Russian novelists and short-story writers in the 1920s. Patricia Carden considers ornamentalism to be "simply the name attached to the appearance of Modernism in Russian

prose" ("Ornamentalism and Modernism," p. 49). There are advantages in Carden's identification of the two terms, notably the attention which it focuses on the links between Modernism in literature and in the other arts in Russia in the first quarter of the century. In the early work of the painters Goncharova, Larionov and Kandinskii, and the composer Stravinskii, Carden sees "a mood and style reminiscent of ornamental prose," the common features being "a folkloristic primitivism of subject and mood" and "a display of artistic virtuosity" (Carden, "Ornamentalism and Modernism," p. 49). Although this insight into the unifying elements of Modernism in the Russian arts is productive, it serves to narrow the scope of literary Modernism by restricting it to the work of writers who exhibit precisely this combination of folkloric primitivism and formal experimentation. While some of Zamiatin's stories would be covered by this definition, the folkloric elements (though not the primitivism) are absent in We. And authors from a slightly later period, such as Olesha, would be considered by most critics to be modernist, although far removed from the ornamentalism of Remizov or Pilniak.

Several significant novels of the 1920s and early 1930s raise the issue of the boundaries of Modernism in Russian literature: can a work be modernist by virtue of experimental form alone, or does Modernism imply a sensibility marked by uncertainty and instability? The question is made more difficult by the chaotic and paradoxical nature of the period - that of the Revolution and Civil War - in which many Russian novels of the 1920s are set. When Pilniak reflects the political, social, and moral uncertainties of the year 1919 in the chaotic canvas of The Naked Year, when Konstantin Fedin uses a convoluted chronological structure to suggest the complications of the period between 1914 and 1922 in his Cities and Years (1924), or when Isaac Babel depicts the Cossack campaign in Poland in 1920 in a series of interrelated short stories that shock and thrill through the juxtaposition of ethical and aesthetic opposites (Red Cavalry, 192.6), are the chaos and instability an inherent part of the subject-matter, or are they indications of a modernist sensibility in the authors concerned? There is no comprehensive answer to this question. Many major authors of the 1920s attempted to find formal, aesthetic equivalents of the massive social and moral upheaval of the age, but if Babel's prose, for example, is undoubtedly modernist, Fedin's is essentially traditional, with its roots in the Western nineteenth-century realistic novel and a hero, Andrei Startsov, who is the direct descendent of the superfluous men of an earlier period of Russian Realism. The experimental form of Cities and Years derives less from a modernist sensibility than from Fedin's interest in the story-telling possibilities of the Western novelistic tradition which he and other members of

the Serapion Brothers felt were absent in the Russian novel, as well as from the structural possibilities suggested by the new art of the cinema. It is one of several prose works of the period given a modernist veneer by the desire to convey some of the excitement and suspense of the adventure novel or of narrative film.

Nowhere can this tendency be seen more clearly than in the early novels of Valentin Kataev, particularly the much underrated Time, Forward! (1932). In 1936 Kataev wrote: "The elements of cinematic montage, the very concept of montage became organic for many writers of my generation. . . . Time, Forward! is a work constructed literally on cinematic principles."¹⁹ Yet, in contrast to some of Kataev's disturbing late works published between 1965 and his death in 1986, the Modernism of Time, Forward! is one of form rather than spirit. Despite its emphasis on movement, the novel promotes stability, combining the formal experimentation of the 1920s with the new political certainties of the Stalinist period.

A more secure place in the Russian modernist canon is occupied by Yurii Olesha's Envy (1927), a novel which bears a formal resemblance to Notes from Underground. The sense of alienation and existential anxiety experienced by the protagonist, Nikolai Kavalerov, may be linked with the general alienation of the "little man" in Russian literature from Pushkin onward, and, more specifically, with the theme of the "vacillating intellectual" that featured prominently in works of the 1920s. Unable to commit himself to the detested new regime to which he feels superior, and afraid that in its reliance on reason and technology it will shun his essentially emotional and impressionistic apprehension of the world, Kavalerov feels painfully isolated and deprived of a sense of belonging. His ambivalent response to the new world of Soviet society, which he both despises for its supposed lack of humanity and envies because of its vigor and purposefulness, is typical of the heroes of a number of novels in the 1920s, including Andrei Startsov in Cities and Years. But unlike other works with a similar hero, Envy transcends the topical concerns of post-revolutionary Russia by focusing on the relationship between the observer and the material world, and in this respect it is located in one of the mainstreams of European Modernism. Olesha's concern is frequently with the nature of objects and the defamiliarizing effect of such optical tricks as magnification, miniaturization, reflection, refraction, and observation from unusual angles. Kava-lerov's precise and detailed, yet personal, observation of the world around him is reminiscent of the literary Impressionism of Proust and other French writers. When the sharpness of vision is allied to Kavalerov's seemingly endless cascade of unusual and provocative metaphors, the essence of Olesha's modernist prose emerges: fresh, idiosyncratic observation of the

surrounding world combined with metaphor that simultaneously renders the physical reality of the object for the reader and illuminates the psychology of the protagonist/observer.

In his 1992. book Utrachennye al'ternativy (Lost Alternatives), M. M. Golubkov examines the "aesthetic pluralism" of Russian literary theory and practice in the 1920s and shows how, largely as the result of political pressure, Realism, which was simply one aesthetic trend among several, came to be canonized as the only acceptable method for Soviet literature of the 1930s and later decades. The "cultural polycentrism" of the 1920s was replaced by a "monistic" or "monophonie" culture in 1934, and the various modernist trends that had contributed to making the 1920s one of the most interesting periods in the history of Russian literature became nothing more than the "lost alternatives" of Golubkov's title.²⁰ This analysis of the Russian literary process in the 1920s and early 1930s is hardly original (it has been the standard Western interpretation for many years),²¹ but Golubkov's examination of the various branches of modernist prose of the period is of considerable interest. As elsewhere in Europe at this time, the two major divisions of modernist poetics were Impressionism and Expressionism, the former marked by a subjective and hence psychologically significant apprehension of the physical world, and the latter by grotesque deformations, and the absence of individual psychology. The distinctiveness of Russian Modernism, however, lies in the fact that Impressionism and Expressionism are rarely juxtaposed as opposites. Instead, elements of both aesthetic systems are frequently to be found in the same work. Thus, while Expressionism can be most clearly seen in anti-utopian novels such as Zamiatin's We and Andrei Platonov's Chevengur (completed in 1929) and The Foundation Pit (1930), some of its elements can be found in the work of many novelists of the 1920s, such as Gorkii, Kaverin, Tynianov, Bulgakov, and Olesha, who could not adequately be defined as Expressionists. Olesha's debt to Proust might suggest that Envy can be categorized as a work of literary Impressionism, yet in some respects such as the presentation of Andrei Babichev and the starkness of the conflict, with the characters drawn up in opposing camps, its expressionistic elements are strong.

Platonov's The Foundation Pit is one of the major works of Russian Modernism, a grotesque, expressionist vision of the Utopian myths of the first Five-Year Plan period and at the same time an ontological discourse on the relationship between existential essence, flesh, and language. The 1920s saw a widening of the boundaries of literary language in Russia. In itself, skaz - the narration of a text in part or in whole through the substandard speech of an uneducated and sometimes morally obtuse narrator - was not

new (Leskov in particular had used it to great effect in the nineteenth century), but in the 1920s it became very common. The satirical short stories of Zoshchenko and some of Babel's Red Cavalry stories are among the best examples. The incorrect use of "officialese" by semi-literate workers and peasants was also a feature of some works of the 1920s (for example, one of Pilniak's characters uses the memorable phrase enegrichno fuktsirovat' - "to fuction enegretically," meaning, presumably, "to function energetically"). But even in a period of linguistic experimentation and eclecticism, the language of Platonov's tales and novels (which Joseph Brodsky described as "untranslatable")²² is unusually striking. It appears to arise from a confrontation between the colloquial language of the newly and as yet incompletely literate peasants and workers on the one hand and the grandiloquent, slogan-laden "Sovietese" of official publitsistika on the other. Disconcertingly, this awkward fusion of linguistic elements is addressed repeatedly to ontological questions. The narrative stance is stubbornly materialistic. Platonov's narrators, their mentality formed by the militant materialism of the 1920s and early 1930s, make no distinction between abstract and concrete, animate and inanimate. Thus, nouns denoting inanimate objects are frequently combined with "inappropriate" adjectives and verbs denoting feelings. In addition, prepositions and cases are used in an unexpected fashion so as to draw attention to particular details. The effect can be strangely disorientating. Here, for example, is a typical extract, taken from the opening pages of The Foundation Pit:

Voshchev grabbed his bag and set off into the night. The questioning sky shone over Voshchev with the agonizing strength of the stars, but in the city the lights had already been extinguished: whoever was able to do so was sleeping, having eaten his fill of supper. Voshchev descended the crumbly earth [po kroshkam zemli] into a ravine and lay belly-down, so as to fall asleep and part from self. But for sleep, peace of mind was necessary, its trustfulness in life, forgiveness of experienced grief, and Voshchev lay in the dry intensity of consciousness and did not know whether he was useful in the world or whether everything would manage well without him. From an unknown place a wind began to blow, so that people should not suffocate, and in a weak voice of doubt a suburban dog made known its service.

A strong streak of fantasy, with its roots in Gogol and in Dostoevskii's "realism in a higher sense," is characteristic of many of the most significant modernist novels in Russia, including Petersburg, We, and The Foundation Pit. One of the characters in Platonov's novel is a proletarian "blacksmith-bear" who wages a particularly ferocious class war against kulaks. He is presented as a real bear and at the same time a real blacksmith, and his

origins seem to lie simultaneously in folklore and in the realization of a metaphor (native Russian strongman = bear) that is so deeply embedded that it scarcely affects the reader's perception of the bear's animal status. Apart from We, however, the most celebrated example of fantasy in the Russian modernist novel is that of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1928-40), in which farcical comedy coexists with high seriousness, mundane reality with supernatural interventions, twentieth-century Moscow with first-century Jerusalem. Bulgakov's text moves freely in time and space, in the realms of the real and the fantastic, and in matching stylistic registers in a manner that anticipates the "magic realism" of a later era. Some of the principal features of the modernist novel are clearly present here, notably the initially bewildering heterogeneity of the material, the free handling of time and space, and the prominence of the irrational and fantastic. Yet although the novel has a strong apocalyptic element, it lacks the nervous, edgy tenor of much Russian modernist fiction. Its foregrounding of the theme of ultimate justice is reassuring in a way that runs counter to the anxiety and uncertainty of modernity.

Among the many themes of The Master and Margarita is one which is particularly relevant to the modernist novel as a whole: the nature of fiction itself and the status of the fictional text. Most major Russian modernist novels are concerned to some extent with the creative process itself. The precise nature of the diary and the full implications of the act of writing in We, and the relationship between the Master's novel, the authorial novel, and "real" events in The Master and Margarita are but two examples of this concern.

Of course, one must be careful not to imply that metafiction is inherently modernist; fiction about the creation of fiction has existed throughout the ages, and was particularly prominent in the Romantic period. In the age of Modernism and subsequently postmodernism, though, a strikingly high proportion of literary texts are metafictional. In addition to those already mentioned, the novels of Vladimir Nabokov are perhaps the prime example, and it is no coincidence that Nabokov's influence may be detected in the work of several of Russia's postmodernist writers of the present generation, such as Viktor Erofeev and Andrei Bitov. For Erofeev in particular, the aesthetic lessons of the modernist period are very important for the future of Russian literature. In his influential article "Soviet literature: In memoriam," published in 1990, he draws attention to the huge extraliterary weight traditionally attached to creative writing in Russia. It was never enough, he reminds us, for a writer to be simply a writer; under Tsars and Soviets alike he or she had also to fulfil one or more of the roles of mystic, prosecutor, sociologist, and economist, and this

extraliterary burden was frequently borne at the expense of the more properly literary aspects of the writer's craft: "while [the writer] was busy being everything else, he was least of all a writer."²³ Attention to the social, political, or philosophical "message" frequently displaced attention to style, to the precise nuances of literary language. Erofeev expresses the hope that Russian writers will shake off their obsession with society and turn inwards to the proper, wholly aesthetic concerns of art, and that literature will become self-sufficient and self-justifying in a way it had rarely done in the past.

Given the chronological boundaries of Modernism adopted earlier (from the 1890s to the 1930s), detailed consideration of the work of Erofeev, Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and other writers of the late Soviet and post-Soviet period is beyond the scope of this chapter. It is worth noting, though, that the legacy of Modernism is to be seen almost everywhere in serious contemporary Russian fiction. The dazzling artfulness and intertextuality of Bitov's Pushkin House (1978); the surrealism of Sokolov; the use of the grotesque by writers such as Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Viktor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin; and the highly volatile, identity-questioning prose of Valeriia Narbikova - these and other aspects of contemporary literature owe much to the tradition of the Russian modernist novel.

NOTES

1. V. Erlich, Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 1.

2. M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983).

3. The Marquis de Custine quoted in Donald Fänger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 105.

4. See Fänger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, p. 1x9.

5. On this point see M. Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986), p. 36.

6. Grossman is quoted in Fänger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, p. 129.

7. On this point see R. Maguire and J. Malmstad, "Translators' introduction," in Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans, and intro. R. Maguire and J. Malmstad (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. vii.

8. E. Zamiatin, "Zavtra," in Zamiatin, Sochineniia, 4 vols. (Munich: Neimanis, 1970-88), vol. IV, pp. 246-47 (p. 246).

9. E. Zamiatin, "Skify li?" ("Scythians?"), in Zamiatin, Sochineniia, vol. IV, pp. 503-13 (p. 503).

10. E. Zamiatin, "O literature, revoliutsii i entropii" ("On literature, revolution and entropy"), in Zamiatin, Sochineniia, vol. IV, pp. 291-97 (p. 291).

11. Ibid., p. 293.

12. Ibid, p. 296.

13- E. Zamiatin, "? sintetizme" ("On synthetism") in Zamiatin, Sochineniia, vol. IV, pp. 282-90 (pp. 282-83).

14. On Zamiatin and Nietzsche see Peter Doyle, "Zamyatin's philosophy, humanism, and We: a critical appraisal," Renaissance and Modern Studies, 28 (1984), 1-17.

15. On Zamiatin's artistic indebtedness to Gogol and Dostoevskii, and on the nineteenth-century writers as progenitors of Russian Modernism, see Susan Layton, "Zamyatin and literary modernism," in Gary Kern (ed.), Zamyatin's "We": A Collection of Critical Essays (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), pp. 140-48, especially pp. 146-47.

16. See Carl Proffer, "Notes on the imagery in Zamyatin's We," in Kern, pp. 95-105; Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 158; Christopher Collins, Evgenij Zamjatin: An Interpretive Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 53.

17. Sona S. Hoisington and Lynn Imbery, "Zamjatin's modernist palette: colors and their function in We," Slavic and East European Journal, 36 (1992), 159-71.

18. For a critical modern appraisal of Pilniak see Patricia Carden, "Ornamentalism and Modernism," in George Gibian and H. W. Tjalsma (eds.), Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde, 1900-1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 49-64.

19. V. Kataev, "Rovesniki kino," in Kataev, Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1968-72), vol. VIII (1971), p. 314.

20. M. M. Golubkov, Utrachennye al'ternativy (Moscow: Nasledie, 1992).

21. For a somewhat different view see Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, translated by Charles Rougle (Princeton University Press, 1992).

22. I. Brodskii, "Predislovie," in A. Platonov, Kotlovan (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), p. 7.

23. Viktor Erofeev, "Pominki po sovetskoi literature," Literaturnaia gazeta (4 July 1990).

4

STRUCTURES AND READINGS

12

ROBERT BELKNAP

Novelistic technique

The power of the Russian nineteenth-century novel depends in part on earlier techniques of novel-writing which most Western novelists had abandoned. This study will concentrate on the particularly Russian relation between plotting and narration, though it must also reckon with the interplay between Russian and the Western novelistic practices in the nineteenth century. In the first Western book on the Russian novel (1881), Melchoir de Vogué, the eloquent French diplomat, journalist, and gossip, says that for Turgenev the study "of our masters and the friendship and the advice of Mérimée offered precious help; to these literary associations he may have owed the intellectual discipline, the clarity, the precision, virtues which are so rare among the prose writers of his country."¹ This denial that Turgenev is a fully Russian novelist shows that Vogué recognized something special about Turgenev, but it also led Western Europeans from the 1880s on to recognize that there was something special about most Russian novels. A generation later, Henry James praised the power and richness of the Russian novels, but his letter to Hugh Walpole called them "fluid puddings," and he complained to Mrs. Humphry Ward about Tolstoi's "promiscuous shifting of viewpoint and centre,"² perhaps reflecting de Vogue's description of what he felt on reading Dostoevskii, "the shiver that seizes you on encountering some of his characters makes one wonder whether one is in the presence of genius, but one quickly remembers that genius in letters does not exist without two higher gifts, measure and universality …" (de Vogué, Le Roman russe, p. 267). James's prefaces contain the first and most subtle exposition of the novelistic techniques that evolved in the West in the nineteenth century, and his novels may be the least provincial ever written; and yet, somehow, he failed to realize that the rules he presented were not universal aspects of the psychology of art but the conventions of a particular time and place. The Russian interdependence between plotting and narration constituted a very different but no less demanding kind of technical mastery, as can be seen in The Brothers

Karamazov (1880) by looking at the tight relationship between the spiritual state of the character being discussed and the presence or absence of omniscience in the character discussing him. Many Western critics distinguish novels that tell readers what happens from novels that show them what happens; the Russian novelistic techniques let Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and others go beyond both these practices and manipulate readers into experiencing for themselves what the characters in the novel are feeling and arguing.

The Russians inherited this literary goal from Rousseau, Sterne and the other sentimental novelists of the eighteenth century. The Russian Formalist literary critics distinguish between two kinds of literary plot, both of which fit the old definition of a plot as the arrangement of the incidents. In the first kind of plot, or the fabula, the incidents are arranged in the world where the characters live, so that in the fabula a character is always born before dying. In the second kind of plot, or siuzbet, the same incidents are arranged in the text, where the death of a character may be presented long before the birth. All novels rely heavily on the interplay between these two kinds of relationship among incidents, but the nineteenth-century Western novel centers on the relation between the fabula and character, with characters shaping and responding to the sequence of events. In many eighteenth-century and Russian nineteenth-century novels, the siuzbet plays a more important role, and has a closer relation to those crucial figures in all novels through whom we perceive everything else, the narrators. Novels in letters flourished in the eighteenth century partly because collections of real letters and manuals for letter-writing were popular, but also because letters enable authors to trace different careers through the same sequences of incidents and to triangulate a given incident through several sets of responses, so that narration interacts very closely with plot. Russians wrote only half a dozen letter novels in the eighteenth century and only one memorable one in the nineteenth century, Dostoevskii's Poor Folk (1846); yet even a markedly Russian novel like War and Peace shows Tolstoi's often-mentioned eighteenth-century mentality in the interwoven plotting that uses the lives and consciousnesses of several characters and a chameleon-like narrator to infect readers with Tolstoi's historical, psychological, and moral awarenesses.

Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826) was the chief early conduit carrying this eighteenth-century tradition from the West into Russian nineteenth-century prose. Karamzin's most famous short story, "Poor Liza" (1792), appealed to the sentiment that expresses itself through tears, but the sentimentalist aesthetic also valorizes the emotions that produce laughter, social action, and many other responses. In Karamzin's "My Confession" (1802), the

narrator prides himself on his lack of honor, sanity, and social value, carrying Rousseau's wilful taboo-breaking and gratuitous actions to a level of insulting self-consciousness that bridges the gap between Rousseau's voice in his "Confessions" and that of Dostoevskii's Underground Man.

In his role of follower, competitor, and successor to Karamzin as the central figure on the Russian literary scene, Pushkin seems at first to belong to the Western nineteenth-century novelistic tradition, as Turgenev did in his major novels, and as did many lesser novelists in Pushkin's generation, such as Senkovskii, Polevoi, Marlinskii, Bulgarin, Pogorelskii, Lazhech-nikov, Veltman, or Zagoskin. Certainly Pushkin loved the fashionable and was drenched in Western literature; his Captain's Daughter (1836) draws its setting and much of its plot from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley. Yet the works of Pushkin that most influenced the later Russian novels were not conventional novels at all. One was Evgenii Onegin (1823-31), a novel in verse, and the other was The Tales of Belkin (1830), which are usually treated as a group of separate stories. The plotting in Onegin follows the standard pattern René Girard ascribes to European novels: desire is imitative and unreciprocated.³ Onegin rejects Tatiana's love until he sees her loved, and she rejects him when he offers himself to her. But in both of these works, the narrator stands back and reflects upon the incidents in ways that seem sometimes naive and sometimes remarkably sophisticated. The narrator of Evgenii Onegin cries out "Alas!" like a sentimental novelist, and digresses like Fielding or Sterne, although he also enters with the reader into conspiratorial judgment of his hero in the manner of Scott or later, Dickens and Thackeray. Pushkin may draw his plots from contemporary Europe, but his narrative technique in Onegin retains much of Sterne's or Fielding's or Voltaire's eighteenth-century flexibility and playfulness, with a "preface" at the end of chapter 7 and the siuzhet containing much detail about the life and opinions of the narrator which plays no part in the lives of the characters at all.

The Tales of Belkin fall midway through the evolution of the most ambitious Russian prose in the 1820s and 1830s as it recapitulated the long and intricate history of the proto-novel in Europe, moving from collections of individual tales, like Karamzin's, or the Gesta Romanorum (?. 1300), to tales linked by a narrative situation, like Marlinskii's Evenings on the Bivouac (1823) or Boccaccio's Decamaron (1360s), through tales linked by a single narrator like Belkin or Malory's narrator (1485), to tales linked by a single hero, like Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1841) or Don Quixote (1605, 1615). Such evolution never occurs neatly; early techniques often attract late writers more than prescient recent works of isolated geniuses, but the Russians were able to do in decades what took centuries

in the West precisely because in addition to the classical sources in epic, romance, Petronius, Apuleius, and others which shaped the Western novel, the Russians had an existing novelistic tradition developed by Emin, Chulkov, and others in the eighteenth century, and, far more important, the rich novelistic tradition of the West to draw on. Belkin breaks Henry James's cardinal rule for a narrator. James's narrators may be wise or foolish, even insane or fanatic, but must be consistently whatever they are, so that "the interest created, and the expression of that interest, are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves." Moreover, narrators who can see into a character's mind at one moment must not learn what that character is thinking from his countenance at another moment.⁴ The introduction to The Tales of Belkin states that Belkin died at the age of thirty, while on the first page of "The Station Master," Belkin states that he has been travelling through Russia steadily for twenty years. More important, Belkin begins telling "The Blizzard" with full insight into the mind of the heroine and suddenly switches to the narration of her actions entirely from outside. Pushkin breaks James's rules here not through ignorance or inattention, but simply because other literary needs precluded obedience to such rules. The effectiveness of the siuzhet demanded that the reader share Maria's bookish but wholehearted love and also her surprise at the ending of the story. Consistency would have cost him one or the other of these effects, and Pushkin therefore turns to the eighteenth-century tradition of more flexible narrators.

Like The Captain's Daughter, Lermontov's first novel, Vadim (1834), draws heavily on Walter Scott for its plot and atmosphere, and his A Hero of Our Time was the only Russian novel in the first half of the nineteenth century to be judged so accessible to the West that it was repeatedly translated into French. Yet for all its accessibility to Europeans and debts to Scott, Byron, Musset, George Sand, and others, the intricate interplay between its plot and narration sets A Hero of Our Time apart from the mainstream Western novels and other narratives of its time. As the arrangement of events in the world the characters inhabit, the fabula of A Hero of Our Time has an identity whose complexity rivals and intersects that of the narration. Narratively, the voices of Bela, Grushnitskii, or Princess Mary reach the reader through the accounts of Maksim Mak-simych or Pechorin, which are filtered through the voice of an "editor" who sometimes selects the materials from "a thick notebook," and always edits at least the names to protect the real people portrayed. And from the 1841 edition on, a preface interposes the outermost voice of an authorial figure who knows that all the others are fictional. Such narrative layering was commonplace in Russia and the West in the 1830s, but these different

figures inhabit very different worlds, knowing about different events, and more importantly, seeing totally different mechanisms as organizing these events.

In any novel, the central organizing principle in the fabula is usually cause and effect, or its psychological reflex, motivation, but A Hero of Our Time also takes the form of a philosophical dialogue on the nature of causality. On the first page of the novel, the "editor" introduces the topic with a question that applies a certain causal system naively, "How is it that four oxen can haul your loaded carriage like a lark, and six of the creatures can scarcely budge my empty one with the help of these Ossetians [inhabitants of the Northern Caucasus]?" This editor's world operates by the laws of physics, or, when he predicts a fine morrow, by appearances. Maksim Maksimych operates in a world of hidden causes, explaining how the Ossetian greed for extra business makes them impede their own oxen, or how the steam rising from a distant mountain presages a blizzard. Though he is the central figure, Pechorin is only a minor narrator in this first story, but he introduces a Byronic system of motivation into a story where Bela, Kazbich, and the other characters have motives out of a Walter Scott novel, "Listen, Maksim Maksimych … I have an unhappy character: whether my upbringing made me so, or God made me so, I don't know; I know only that if I am the cause of unhappiness to others, I am no less unhappy."⁵ Maksim Maksimych is as naive about such Byronism as the "editor" is about the Caucasus: "'Did the French bring boredom into fashion?' - 'No, the English.' - 'Aha, that's it … of course, they always were outrageous drunkards'" (p. 2.14). Maksim Maksimych introduces not only ethnic, economic, atmospheric, and alcoholic determinism into the causal system; he also uses social class to explain behavior: "What are we uneducated oldsters doing, chasing after you? . . . You're young society folk, proud; as long as you're here under the Cherkassian bullets, you're OK . . . but if you meet us afterwards you're ashamed to offer your hand to one of us" (p. 228).

Maksim Maksimych's causes relate events to one another in the realistic tradition, contrasting not only with the physical causality the editor espouses, but also with the Romantic kinds of causes Pechorin invokes: "These eyes, it seemed, were endowed with some magnetic power' (p. 235); "the bumps on his skull . . . would have astonished a phrenologist with the strange mix of conflicting drives" (p. 248); "We're reading one another in the heart" (p. 249), and so on. For the future of the Russian novel, more important than such phrases are four specially Russian features of causation in Pechorin's accounts: coincidence, including all Pechorin's accidental eavesdropping; the sovereign power of the will, as when Pechorin

draws a group of listeners away from other entertaining interlocutors, or makes Grushnitskii miss his shot; the gratuitous actions, motivated not by anything external but by the nature of the character, such as that which makes Pechorin wonder "why did I not want to set out on that path fate had opened to me where quiet joys and heartfelt calm awaited me? . . . No, I should never have adapted to that destiny" (p. 31z); and finally, fate, which he discusses throughout, but most especially in the final story.

The complex of Pechorinesque causations never exists alone because his narrative voice never exists alone any more than Onegin's does. At the end of the novel, Maksim Maksimych initially responds to Pechorin's account of an experiment in Russian roulette that appeared to confirm predestination: "Yes sir, It's a rather tricky matter! . . . Still, these Asiatic triggers often misfire, if they're badly oiled . . ." Here, the novel seems to have two fabulas, one organizing events according to the rules of practical life and another according to the more exciting rules of Pechorin's world. Lermontov gives Pechorin the last word about fatalism, but it is a curiously indecisive comment on the entire panoply of causal systems that this novel explores in its plot and narration: "[Maksim Maksimych] in general dislikes metaphysical debates."

Lermontov certainly popularized Rousseauesque and Byronic motivational systems that the Russians went on using in close conjunction with their narrative techniques, but the chief explanation for the differences between the Western and the Russian novels of the nineteenth century can be expressed in two words: Nikolai Gogol. Like Karamzin, Gogol has been called the Russian Sterne. It has been argued that the Western Europeans drew a new kind of novel from the tradition of Scott and the "Gothic" novelists because Sterne had carried so many eighteenth-century novelistic techniques to the point of absurdity. The Russians also drew heavily on the sensationalism of Hoffmann and the Gothic novels coupled with the sharp social, moral, and psychological judgment of Scott's novels. Gogol's first novel, Taras Bulba (1835), owes much to Scott; yet Gogol also enabled the Russians to go on developing the techniques of the eighteenth-century Western novels they had been reading in translation and in the original for generations. A short story that appeared almost simultaneously with A Hero of Our Time gives the clearest illustration of Gogol's departure from the Western European tradition later canonized in Henry James's prefaces.

"The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" (1835) seems at first to be an almost plotless story of provincial pettiness, anger, and stupidity; two old friends quarrel over an insignificant request and go through their whole lives unreconciled. In the first sentences of the story, the narrator seems to be equally involved in the insignificant: "Ivan

Ivanovich has a glorious jacket! The most excellent! And what lambswool! Whew, go to, what lambswool! I'll wager Lord knows what if you find anybody's like it!" These words give little information about Ivan Ivanovich but a great deal about the narrator. He is still close enough to infancy to love fuzz, to end every phrase with an exclamation point, and to bubble over with enthusiasm at matters that most of us might at most consider nice. Three pages later, this narrator remains enthusiastic and naive, but already has acquired enough control of himself and the world to enter into sociological, statistical, and perhaps biological disputation:

It has been spread around that Ivan Nikiforovich was born with a tail at his back. But this canard is so absurd and at the same time stupid and indecent that I judge it unnecessary to refute before enlightened readers, who are aware without the slightest doubt, that only witches, and even very few of them have tails at their backs; and they, moreover, belong for the most part to the female sex rather than the male.⁶

Whatever our views on the statistics of caudal preponderance, we all can recognize a much more mature voice than that of the narrator at the beginning of the story. When he appears again twenty pages later, this narrator has developed the voice of a jaded traveler with a clear and ironic sense of the Russian bureaucracy: "The trial then moved with that uncommon speed for which our judiciary is so commonly renowned. They annotated papers, excerpted them, numbered them, bound them, and receipted them all on one and the same day, and placed it all in a cabinet where it lay, lay, lay, a year, another, a third . . ." (vol. n, p. 2.63). And a few pages later, the narrator has even acquired literary self-consciousness: "No, I cannot! . . . Give me another pen! My pen is faded, deadened, with too thin a stroke for this picture!" (p. 271). Finally, on the last two pages of the story, a conscientious, self-important, tired old man displays no trace of enthusiasm:

At that time the weather exercised a strong effect on me: I grew bored when it was boring … I sighed still more deeply and hurried to make my adieus because I was traveling on a quite important matter, and got into my carriage . . . It's boring on this earth, Gentlemen! (pp. 275-6)

This final exclamation point has nothing in common with those at the beginning of the story. These last words almost coincide with Winston Churchill's to his son-in-law while dying in his tenth decade.⁷ Henry James would consider this changing narrator loose and baggy, a danger to the reliability that rests on the integrity of the figure through whom the reader must apprehend everything in the text. And yet Gogol orders these changes

tightly. His narrator has rather more of a career than any other character in the story. Readers see the growing decrepitude and pointlessness of the officials, the provincial town and the two Ivans, and without noticing it, they also experience the ageing of the narrator, and his unsuccessful struggle against the pointlessness of his existence. By breaking the narrative rules of the West and giving his narrator a plot of his own, Gogol implicated the reader in the ageing process that is going on all around him.

Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) became the most important force in the evolution of the Russian technique of novel-writing well before the novel gained recognition from thousands of bemused readers on the world scene. The fabula of the novel derives in large part from that of the typical romance of the road in which a picaro or a more highly placed scamp moves from place to place and extricates himself from scrape after scrape in separate adventures whose organization some critics compare to that of beads on a string. In the manner of Cervantes and Fielding, the siuzhet of Dead Souls contains digressions, responses to real and imaginary readers, and appeals to the reader's experience which are usually not a part of the world the characters inhabit. In one such digression in the last chapter, the narrator apologizes for the far from exemplary characters who have appeared in part I of the novel: "This is Chichikov's fault; in this he is full master and we must be dragged after him wherever he takes it into his head to go" (Gogol', Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii, vol. vi, p. 2.41). In part, this passage continues the playful mockery of verisimilitude that Gogol learned from Sterne and many others: "Although the time in whose duration they would traverse the hall, the anteroom, and the dining room is a bit on the short side, we will try and see whether we can use it somehow to say something about the master of the house" (vol. vi, p. 23). But blaming his hero for the fabula also rejects the idea of a structured plot with a beginning, a middle and an end, confirming the image of beads on a string. Aristotle defined an end as something which needs nothing after it to complete it, but if Sterne and Lermontov had lived longer, Tristram Shandy and A Hero of Our Time would probably have been longer, and Gogol actually wrote further chapters of Dead Souls, which he destroyed; one can always add another bead to a string. With such texts, structural analysis, based on a spatial metaphor in two or three dimensions, may be less useful than algorithmic analysis, based on a metaphor in a single sequence, like time, even though either system of reasoning can be made to work. The diagram on the next page can be described spatially, as a square with helically oriented inflected oblongs and similarly oriented smaller inset oblongs; sufficient measurements would enable a careful reader to reproduce the figure, but it is much easier to use an algorithm or a procedure in time:

Draw a line one unit long; turn left 90 degrees and draw a line two units long; turn left again and draw a line three units long; turn left again and draw a line four units long; turn left again and draw a line five units long; start over. In this procedure, the action at each step is a reaction to the situation after the last step rather than to a vision of the whole. But because it follows explicit rules, it produces a coherent whole. In fiction, a procedure can produce as elegant and powerful an experience as a structural plan can, but it looks loose and baggy to a nineteenth-century Western sensibility.

In Dead Souls, Gogol's rules are accretive and perverse. He adds and adds and adds, and suddenly takes it all away. This pattern repeats itself fractally, at the level of the sentence, of the episode, and of the string of episodes. Chichikov and his two recalcitrant serfs move among landlords with recalcitrant stewards managing recalcitrant serfs, under the aegis of petty officials who cannot control them or be controlled by figures still higher in the fractal hierarchy. Fawning and greed shape the hierarchy at every level, whether the greed be for vodka or a great house, and the protestant virtue, deferral of gratification, exploits the first of these vices for the sake of the second. At each stage of Chichikov's career, in school, as a provincial bureaucrat, as a customs officer, and on his visits to the various town and landed figures, he displays extraordinary discipline until he makes his coup, at which point he loses all control, lets his greed prevail, and has to escape and start over. This pattern of moving from misery into a moment of seeming paradise, and then losing it runs through all of Gogol's best work. Most often, the paradise was never really there in the first place. In Sterne, the anticlimax makes the reader feel foolish or cheated: "Why

didn't I see that coming?" or "How could I be expected to know that?" In Gogol, the frustration of expectations grows out of the logic of a situation that always partakes of the weirdness of Russian life. His very sentences have plots, adding, adding, adding, and then suddenly taking away. The last sentence of chapter 6 offers a good example: "Requesting the lightest possible repast, consisting of nothing but pork, he immediately undressed, and curling up under the bedclothes, fell hard asleep, soundly, in wondrous fashion, as only those sleep who are so happy as to know neither hemorrhoids, nor lice, nor overly powerful mental capacities" (Gogol', Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii, vol. vi, p. 132). Stupidity is often praised, but Gogol finds a context for the praise that contrasts the experience of Chichikov with that of thousands of insomniacs who do not inhabit the world of the novel. Narration here too has a plot of its own.

Tolstoi and Dostoevskii carried the innovations of their Russian predecessors to their highest fruition. When James called War and Peace a "large loose baggy monster" like The Three Musketeers (1844), he failed to see it as a novel of ideas that programmed the reader's experience of those ideas with a mastery as disciplined and well-read as his own. Dostoevskii probably was the person who told de Vogué, "We all emerged from under Gogol's 'Overcoat'." In any case, he often recognized his debt to Pushkin and the two great "demons" in Russian literature, Lermontov and Gogol, as well as to Karamzin and the creators of the nineteenth-century novelistic form in the West, Scott, Hoffmann, Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, and "Gothic" novelists like Ann Radcliffe. Virtually all the important Russian novels in the nineteenth century were written during his lifetime, and his own career paralleled that of the Russian novel in his youth and shaped it in his maturity.

A highly self-conscious experimenter in and borrower of novelistic techniques, Dostoevskii began his career with a novel in letters, a form that had gone out with the eighteenth century. Poor Folk is a novel of oppression and compassion and also a variant on the eighteenth-century theme of the libertine who seduces a young girl. The variant comes from Karamzin's "Poor Liza" via Pushkin; Belkin's "The Station Master" had already explored what happens when the seduced girl so enthrals the seducer that he is reduced to marrying her and setting her up in splendor. Dostoevskii shows how the seducer struggles against this comeuppance and finally gives in to Varvara, though he is no great catch for her; she had lovingly nursed his son through a fatal illness and later reciprocated the love of the poor clerk Makar, who longed to starve with her. Dostoevskii's chief literary polemic, however, is with Gogol's "Overcoat," where the poor clerk starves and deprives himself to obtain a coat he needs, and then loses

it. Dostoevskii's story is about Makar's paradise lost, but Makar loses a human being and not a piece of cloth.

Dostoevskii's second novel, The Double (1846), has a plot that uses many techniques from the tales and novels of Gogol and of E. T. A. Hoffmann. His hero, the disintegrating clerk Goliadkin, has a series of experiences which can be explained as strange coincidences, practical jokes, supernatural events, or the delusions of a perception sinking into madness. Dostoevskii provides strong evidence for each of these plots and no basis for selecting among them, so that the cognitive dissonance drives the reader towards a disintegration very like Goliadkin's. In his major novels, Dostoevskii expands this technique.

In Crime and Punishment (1866), when Raskolnikov stands in the room with two bleeding corpses, holding his breath as he listens at the door, inches from his potential discoverers, who may leave or may bring the police, the readers hold their breath, exert their will upon him not to give up and confess, and then suddenly realize that they are accessories after the fact, trying to help this merciless hatchet-murderer to escape. This complicity in the crime alternates with the reader's horror and revulsion at it, just as Raskolnikov alternates between a drive towards murder and escape and a drive towards freedom from the murderous impulse and - after the murder - towards confession. Dostoevskii manipulates his readers into the plot of the novel by never letting them outside the mind of Raskolnikov, or briefly, the two surrogates who share different parts of his situation and react to it very differently, Razumikhin and Svidrigailov. This intensity of narrative concentration on a single figure implicates the readers in his predicament much as readers willed the escape of picaresque scamps in earlier novels. Crime and Punishment has a beginning, a middle and an end, but it retains the algorithmic integrity of Gogol and his masters. In Crime and Punishment, the shaping rule is not accretive and perverse as in Dead Souls, but rather the terrifying alternation between the crime and the punishment, the rational calculation that the destruction of a bloodsucking insect was an action worthy of a great man, and the direct, emotional realization that this was the blood of a helpless fellow human being. Dostoevskii uses his narrative tools to draw the reader inside this vacillation.

Readers have often charged Dostoevskii with undue reliance on coincidence in structuring the plot of the novel, and plainly, Raskolnikov's overhearing a conversation about murdering the old pawnbroker, like his overhearing a conversation indicating that she will be alone the next day, or his finding an axe on his way to commit the murder, all seem to remove his motives from the tight causal system that a proper Western novel would

have. In fact, however, these coincidences affect Raskolnikov more by being coincidences than by offering means or information that the plot demands. A central driving force towards Raskolnikov's crime is superstition, and the prevalence of coincidences enhances the power of superstition over him. In the huge complex of concepts, images, and characters that line up on opposite sides of this novel, superstition is associated with science, statistics, social utility, calculation, determinism, control, confinement, murder, escape, and suicide, over against religion, generosity, impulse, freedom, dreams, air, confession, repentance, and resurrection. Svidrigailov, the murderer and suicide, and Luzhin, the calculating controller, compete for Raskolnikov with Sonia's and Porfirii's push toward confession and resurrection. This tension among the characters works with the tension among the associated abstractions to make the reader struggle through the novel with Raskolnikov.

Over a decade later in the history of the Russian novel, The Brothers Karamazov has a much more intricate plot than Crime and Punishment and a much more elaborate structure working with it. In place of one governing algorithm and one central character, each brother orders his part of the sequence of events according to his own rule. Smerdiakov provokes aggressions that provoke other aggressions that provoke other aggressions until Alesha absorbs aggression in such a way as to end the sequence. Mitia bursts into such trains of action but at the last moment draws away from violence, while Ivan leaves town, or says, "let one reptile eat the other," but finds himself drawn into a destructive role. When a brother's destiny hangs in the balance, Dostoevskii's narrator recounts his thoughts and dreams, but at other times is forced to learn about that character from his countenance. The sequences of events in this novel, distorted according to the signature rules of the different characters, illustrate a central doctrine of the elder Zosima, who compares the world to a causal ocean in which an action at one point may have a good or evil effect at the other end of the earth. A good character may die, but memories and trains of events that person instituted or modified will continue, though they may lie dormant like seeds whose disappearance leads to fruitfulness. Like the plot, with its multiple signature rules for ordering events, the narrative technique leads readers to experience as well as learn when grace is dormant or prevalent in a character and when it is struggling to emerge. In these and many other ways Dostoevskii fashioned a tight and coherent body of plotting and narrative techniques which conveyed his beliefs and doubts to the reader without the use of the spokesmen or unambiguous lessons that earlier novelists had used. Dostoevskii gives the most eloquent apologia he can imagine for a character who rejects God, not to make us agree with the

Grand Inquisitor, but so that our rejection of his position may have been tested by the full glory of its temptingness.

Tolstoi was a subtler novelist than Dostoevskii, but his narrator also breaks the Western rules for the novel in order to exercise our moral faculties. Sometimes, as in the second epilogue to War and Peace, or the first sentence of Anna Karenina, his narrator enunciates views that transcend the world the characters inhabit, but at other times this narrator treats the fictional characters as if they really existed. These different kinds of pronouncement make Mikhail Bakhtin consider Tolstoi far more didactic than Dostoevskii, in whose works he finds an openness comparable to that of a polyphonic piece of music with no single authorative voice, so that the reader has to listen to the interplay of many voices to discover the meaning of a Dostoevskii novel. Curiously, however, the debate about Tolstoi's attitudes has raged for over a century. His non-fiction unambiguously propounds a Tolstoianism that rejects sex, alcohol, tobacco, meat, and wealth, partly for the violence or exploitation they entail, but also simply because they make people feel comfortable and deflect them from the real struggle against hunger, war, nationalism, ignorance, bureaucracy, unbelief, and the selfish, vicious or stupid misuse of human possibilities.

The meaning of Tolstoi's fiction remains more debatable and more debated, in large part because readers have not always understood where to look for it. Much of it resides not in the dicta of the narrators but in the understandings built into the plot. Tolstoi carried farther than Dostoevskii a technique that Jan Meijer called "situation rhyme," the use of analogous events time after time in the course of a novel.⁸ At the end of Anna Karenina (1877), Levin falls subject to suicidal impulses, avoids ropes as possible instruments of self-destruction, and goes about the main business of his life. Taken alone, the passage seems unimportant and unpersuasive, but in the presence of Anna's suicide and Vronskii's botched attempt at suicide, it makes the parallel plots of the novel interact in a way that becomes a moral exercise. In the same way, Kitty's jealousy of Levin for being drawn to Anna's tragic beauty at the end of the novel collides with Dolly's fury at Oblonskii's actual infidelity at the beginning of the novel, and Anna's morbid anger at Vronskii near the end. Kitty's adolescent crush on Anna collides with her devotion to the least Anna-like woman in the novel, Varenka, as her love for Vronskii collides with her love for Levin, and these collisions collide with one another in a combinatorial investigation of overflowing young affection that illuminates Anna's tragic love. The reader's malaise is not psychological, as in Dostoevskii's Double, but moral: Tolstoi offers his readers ample proof that Anna is primarily a sinner and ample evidence that she is a victim of a complacent, hypocritical,

jealous, and sometimes spiteful society. This conflict matches the goal Tolstoi asserts in What is Art? (1897-98). There he sees art as an instrument not for indoctrinating the reader but for infecting the reader with the highest morality and religion of its time. In this sense, like Dostoevskii in his mature novels, Tolstoi is using the action of this novel to force the reader into active judgment. He did not want self-righteousness but the moral strength that comes from difficult encounters. The critics who make Anna Karenina a simple morality text for or against behavior like Anna's risk becoming what Tolstoi disliked most: comfortable. The intricacy of the parallels and parallels of parallels infects us with a disputatiousness that emerges in the critical debate and makes this book not moral indoctrination but moral exercise. What Western novelists achieved through the intimacies of narrators, Tolstoi often achieved through plotting that infects us with the moral malaise which Tolstoi considered the highest achievement of his civilization.

Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, more than any others, brought the Russian novel-writing techniques back to the West, where their roots in the Gothic novel and the eighteenth-century novel had fallen into desuetude. From the end of the nineteenth century on, western novelists often use techniques from Russia, from the eighteenth century, and from poetry as modernist departures from the nineteenth-century rules, so that the two strands of novel-writing that had partly separated in the nineteenth century came together in the twentieth. The modernist Russian novelists, like their British and American contemporaries from Joyce to Pynchon, worked to make the reader participate actively in the experience and thoughts of the characters. In Russia, as in the West, modernist authors coexisted with more traditional ones surviving from the nineteenth century, like Tolstoi, Chekhov, and Gorkii, or later authors who revived their techniques, like Sholokov and Solzhenitsyn. But modernist authors like Belyi, Bulgakov, Platonov, and Pasternak inherited the Russian nineteenth-century tradition both directly and in a newly enriched form refracted from the West.

Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (1916) draws constant attention to its borrowings from Pushkin, Tolstoi, Gogol, and Dostoevskii, using the depth of literary allusion to make each sentence mean what it says and what its source says at the same time. In this novel about revolution, madness, and the disintegration of a rigid society, Belyi's play upon the borderline between the possible and the supernatural makes his readers vacillate in deepening anxiety not only over an expected bomb explosion but also in that doubt about the nature of the account they are reading, which Freud and others consider the source of the uncanny.⁹ Along with the shiver the uncanny gives us, Belyi's cognitive dissonance makes us experience some-

thing very like the helplessness at being caught up in a revolution, where all the social, semiotic, and moral structures disintegrate:

Suddenly like a faceless smile between his back and his skull appeared a greasy neck crease, just as if a monster were emplaced there; and its neck seemed to be a face, as if in the armchair were emplaced a monster with a noseless, eyeless mug, and the neck fold seemed to be a toothlessly disrupted mouth.¹⁰

Here, as so often in the novel, and in any revolution, what seems to be is not what is, and incidents are connected verbally, or by appearances until a causal or chronological meaning emerges. The nagging insistence of the prose and the repetition of identical as well as parallel events draws readers into the conspiratorial experience.

In the 1930s, Mikhail Bulgakov brought a more playful mind to bear on many of the matters Belyi had approached. Like Belyi, he had a scientific background, had experienced the trauma of revolution, and had experimented with the boundaries of the supernatural in his earlier prose writings. The Master and Margarita (still incomplete on his death in 1940) separates the supernatural from the realistic in two parallel plots, one dealing with the death of Jesus in the hauntingly realistic psychological, social, and archaeological detail that Flaubert had perfected in the history of prose forms, and the other dealing with the appearance in Soviet Moscow of a band of wildly supernatural tricksters. The novel draws its readers into the attractiveness of evil and the ambiguity of good, but the supernatural plot produces less of a sense of the uncanny than the circumstantially detailed historical plot set in Jerusalem. Sometimes as in science-fiction, a genre Bulgakov had excelled in, the supernatural is taken for granted and made analogous to the process of literary creation:

Thus Margarita spoke, going with the master towards their eternal home, and it seemed to the master that Margarita's words flowed just the way the river they had left behind flowed and whispered, and the master's memory, his restless, needled memory started to grow dim. Someone was liberating the master, as he himself had just released the hero he had created.¹¹

This world of eternity, where authors and authors of authors, and - by implication - the Author of authors of authors are free to establish any variety of reality they please, is juxtaposed to, but sharply divided from the world where commonsensical mortals react to supernatural events. Horace Walpole had proposed such a division in the preface to his eighteenth-century account of "miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events": "Allow the possibility of the facts, and all the actors

comport themselves as persons would do in their situation."¹² On the first page of the epilogue, half a page after Bulgakov's extraordinary ending of the account of the Master and Margarita, the narrator of the novel uses a totally different voice: "The writer of these true words himself, while setting out for Theodosia, heard a story on the train about how two thousand people in Moscow had left the theatre literally naked and dispersed to their homes in taxis." These two adjacent points in the text show how Bulgakov juxtaposed different causal systems, not as Lermontov had, to triangulate the same episode, but to establish two different worlds, each with its own narrator, its own causal rules, and its own fabula. In each world, the causal rules are plain, and the reader has the option of bringing them together or reading like a Soviet devotee, accustomed to different ways of thinking in different contexts.

In the 1950s, Boris Pasternak was still using a close interplay between plot and narration to shape his reader's experience, and still being charged with novelistic sloppiness for using coincidence to shape his plot. In section 9 of part IX of Doctor Zhivago, for example, when Zhivago's health and surroundings become almost unbearable, a sleigh arrives "as if from the clouds" bearing his brother Evgraf, who has more influence than even the local commander:

"Whence comes he? Whence his might? What is his work? … Twice now he has entered my life as a good genius, a liberator, solving all the problems. Maybe, alongside the people encountered in it, the makeup of every biography also demands the participation of a secret unknown power, an almost symbolic figure, coming to help unasked, and in my life the role of this beneficial and hidden spring is played by my brother Evgraf."¹³

Here, as in Crime and Punishment, the coincidence exists not to get the author out of the problems he has just created, but because it is a coincidence. It helps to justify Evgraf's status as a secret unknown power, an almost symbolic figure about whom Pasternak is encouraging his readers to reflect and wonder. Evgraf is mysterious, beneficial, and mighty, entering the causal system of the novel much as the creator enters the history of Israel in Genesis. In the last chapter of the novel, Evgraf emerges as the figure who has assembled Zhivago's writings, much as an authorial figure had assembled the stories of Belkin or Pechorin.

In fact, Evgraf, as his name implies, is the good writer, a hypostasis of Pasternak, coming to his hero's assistance unasked and inviting the old comparison between literary and divine creators. This comparison between life and a book, God and an author, a reading and history, with all its implications for the relation between the will of the creator and the inertia

of the created, underlies the whole plot of Doctor Zhivago, culminating in the four last stanzas of the last poem in the novel, where Jesus speaks at Gethsemane:

The Father, can it be, has not arrayed '

His myriads of legions winging hither? So that without a hair of mine disturbed, These enemies be scattered altogether.

But no, the book of life has neared a page More precious than all shrines of holiness. Now what is written has to be fulfilled Amen. So be it, let it come to pass.

You see, like parables the ages move,

And, moving, they can burst into a flame.

I'll go into the tomb acceding to

Torture in that book's fearsome grandeur's name.

I'll go, and rise the third day from the tomb And, as log rafts float down the stream away, Like caravans of barges, centuries Will float from darkness toward my judgment day.

This passage gives a vision of a world where history is like a book or parable whose grander meaning precludes certain surface interventions by the creator. Evgraf brings to Doctor Zhivago a similar vision, justifying the ways of the author to the character, and by analogy, the ways of God to man. Since the whole novel sets a deeply poetic mind in contact with the most horrendous events in history, its own existence, and most particularly the poems and notes Evgraf has gathered in it, becomes a metaphor and, as a part of history, a metonym for the mystery of how a world or book containing such vast evil can be good.

The evolution of the Russian novel has continued, but Erofeev, Bitov, and many others have entered a tradition which the West has also joined, in part because the Russians had developed an enormously powerful and versatile instrument for working on readers, and in part because it is easier for all of us to assimilate the alien and strange if it is actually our own past.

NOTES

1. E. M. De Vogué, Le Roman russe (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1916), p. 197.

2. Henry James, Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), vol. IV, pp. 619, 112.

3. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

4. Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner's, 1934). See, for example, pp. 67, 97, 330.

5. M. lu. Lermontov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia, 1936), vol. V, p. 212.

6. N. V. Gogol', Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii (Leningrad: Academy of Sciences, 1951), vol. Il, p. 226.

7. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset, Memoirs of Churchill's Last Private Secretary (London, Cassell Publishers, 1995), p. 325.

8. Jan M. Meijer, and Jan van der Eng, The Brothers Karamazov by F. M. Dostoevski) (The Hague, Mouton, 1971).

9. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," first published in Imago, 5 (1919). Cited from Freud, Collected Papers, 4 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1924-25), vol. IV, p. 405.

10. Andrei Belyi, Peterburg (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), p. 277.

11. Mikhail Bulgakov, Master i Margarita, in Bulgakov, Romany (Moscow: Khudo-zhestvennaia literatura, 1973), p. 799.

12. E. F. Bleiler (ed.), The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, Vathek by William Beckford, The Vampyre by John Polidori, Three Gothic Novels, and a fragment of a novel by Lord Byron (New York: Dover, 1966), p. 18.

13. Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, i959)»P- 297.

13

BARBARA HELDT

Gender

In his preface to The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879-80 and surely the grand finale of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, Dostoevskii as author introduces Alesha as his hero, a hero for the present. The author thereby follows a line of European Romanticism that sees the hero as conveying his time and place, not just literally but also symbolically for others. As Dostoevskii goes further, into the future, he argues that such a hero, though strange, "carries within him sometimes the core of the universal"¹ which his other contemporaries have been torn away from. One could not imagine a woman writer speaking to the universal or prophesying in this unambiguously assertive manner (except in sorrow), much less inventing a heroine to incarnate such prophecy. The heroine of her time in Russia, perhaps because she would have had to be similarly exceptional without any irony on the part of her author, remains unwritten. Women lived within a tradition of total truth, which included their own reality as defined by male writers in the Russian novelistic canon from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn. A heroine's life terminates abruptly, or ends in marriage, or occasionally survives to a symbolically pregnant widowhood, having no other meaning. There is no Dorothea (the female protagonist of Middlemarch), no heroine allowed to make a big mistake and survive into something beyond the maternal. George Eliot wrote in chapter 10 of Middlemarch that "among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous." Russian authors of the big novel have believed the opposite, and there was little room for women authors in this tradition which grew up in the 1860s, flourishing too under Stalin and under anti-Stalin (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn). But there was also a much neglected female tradition of smaller novel writing, beginning earlier, in the 1840s, and continuing today. The issues addressed and the skill with which these narratives proceed make these almost unknown novels seem deserving of more than auxiliary status in the canon, as I hope my reading of three of them will prove. But first some words about gender and the male tradition.

The Brothers Karamazov begins with a veritable flood of female characters who exhibit hysteria, bad choices and a trivial attitude to life in spite of good looks, intelligence and wealth. Dostoevskii seems to take sadistic pleasure in bringing women like Aglaia and Nastasia Filippovna (from The Idiot, 1868), women of spirit and whose chief feature is their attractiveness (as opposed to more physically flawed males), to a bad end, and always through their own bad choices. In his last novel none of the woman characters, drawn with a disregard for their own fictive lives, does more than reflect one of the brothers' aspirations. The first woman we hear of is one whose suicide we are told would not have happened had she not found a picturesque setting in which to commit it. The first wife of Fedor Karamazov is said to be similarly influenced by other people's ideas when she leaves her family for an emancipated life in the capital. She dies, offstage. More important, the novel does not enter into dialogue with her inner thoughts at all. Not all secondary characters are similarly mocked and trivialized as are emancipated women.

Woman is the passive body (always attractive; that is its value, a value Tolstoi was to dispute and Dostoevskii felt compelled to reduce to comic proportions, a much-feared value because no other beside bearing children is considered) over which male thinkers conduct learned disputes. Women's hysteria and ill-judgment can be pitied only if the woman is of the peasant class. But all women inspire a healthy fear in men, even in Alesha who fears nothing else. So the appraising eye of the narrator may compare the beauty of Grushenka (a voluptuous businesswoman of twenty-two) with that of Katerina Ivanova (a not so nice lady), but the moment of pleasure is shortlived. Women are part of a contest - against men and against each other. Dostoevskii narratively enjoys pitting one woman against another, and any encounter between females always has a sexual edge for the reader. We look, we fear, and we learn, chiefly through a series of scenes that are highly melodramatic in the sense used by Peter Brooks: "Melodrama is indeed, typically, not only a moralistic drama but the drama of morality: it strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to 'prove' the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men."² Malcolm V. Jones has written of the frightening quality of certain of Dostoevskii's scenes in which "Dionysian elements in life may be harnessed and directed toward positive ends."³ The gender implications of these statements need elaboration.

To begin with, what do we learn? Can the female reader witnessing male cruelty learn with Alesha or Prince Myshkin to see what is good? There is no female Alesha, although a female anti-Alesha, Lisa Khokhlakova, exists.

Sonia in Crime and Punishment differs from Myshkin or Alesha in being an incorporeal prostitute of the imagination, a special and unrealistically portrayed status that the heterosexual author appears unwilling to accord to a character of his own gender (unless Gania Ivolgin can be called a sort of male prostitute). Sonia, unlike Myshkin or Alesha, has no special prophetic gift: her more limited role is reactive.

One important question to keep in mind as we read the Russian novel is: Who is the female reader that the author constructs to do the vast work of identification with a male hero and against persons of her own sex?⁴ For Russian novelists, while their particular philosophical dialogue was with men, the immediate audience they preached to and who read their works was in great part female. This would have been true for all the authors who published in the thick journals of the Russian tradition. D. S. Mirsky, Russia's greatest critic, observed almost as a truism in 1920 that "during some five decades of the nineteenth century the vast majority of Russian writers who were generally read were all preachers and teachers."⁵ After the thinkers thought and the preachers preached, women were meant to do the work of morality within the family. They are often faulted in the Russian novel for failing to do it or for doing it badly (Sonia and Lisa, like so many other Russian heroines, both have bad mothers), and if, as we have seen, female failure is mocked or trivialized, the reader is given permission not to be morally involved. As we shall see, women writers' own view of the family and their constricted roles within it formed the basis for an alternative Russian novel.

The male-authored Russian novel constructs a woman reader who needs, then, to be converted - away from her "primitive" reactions to her family and educational upbringing, which as in the case of Gogol's Manilova or Druzhinin's Polinka Saks was intended to lead her to a state of matrimony as frivolous as possible. Woman's primitivism, her natural potential as men saw it, should instead be turned toward the cause of the male intelligent, who might well have female re-education and emancipation as part of his wider plans for Russia, but hardly as a desirable end in themselves, let alone as his priority.⁶ This ethic of forming women through fiction extended easily into the Soviet era: its two-dimensional heroinism at times seems compelling as proto-feminism even to a modern reader. It is only with the most recent novelistic fiction that the teacherly function has atrophied, and that has been seen as a symptom of moral decline even by those otherwise glad to see the end of the Soviet Union (if one reads current debates in such liberal journals as Znamia).

That much of Russian fiction is itself autocratic in its attempt to construct an ideal counter-world to the world of Russia and later the Soviet

Union has been seen as strength rather than as an arrogation of power, as ethically positive rather than as reactive to the authoritarian bind from which the novelist cannot free himself. By striking an autocratic tone of his own, the Russian novelist puts his stamp on a world now ruled benignly by authorial beneficence and dispensation. Or is it? The use of women characters in the novels and the absence of non-pastoral peasants would indicate a male ruler at work in his own tsardom. Female characters idealized or demonized, but rarely (the women of the late Tolstoi and Chekhov being notable exceptions) individualized with an inner voice, emerge as the locus of male desire projected onto their bodies (or spirits, if nonsexual body/soul conventions prevail). Women's spirituality becomes in this context the essence and the embodiment of male longing.

The two twentieth-century novels most firmly cemented into the canon make the authority of the male writer the very subject of the text, but also need their love stories, the feminine interest that Gogol and Dostoevskii were able to do without. In Bulgakov's Master and Margarita and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, the heroines, models of those women famously beloved by their living authors, Margarita and Lara, exist in the novels paradoxically almost solely as emanations of the minds of writers/heroes: they indicate their devotion to the writer's "fate," which is of national and prophetic significance, by a recklessness of behavior when confronting the outside world combined with a singleminded servitude within the home -having no children (Margarita's case) or none who might interfere with caring for the writer or to their commitment to household tasks and other proofs of intimacy that enable him to write. Improbability of plot is named the miracle of life in the midst of "historical" events which defy logic. But the very sweep of the narrative, which tolerates nothing less than total submission to the writer's point of view on the part of the reader and female character alike, seems rather clumsy by comparison to the modernist novel that mocks its romantic heritage that was being written elsewhere in Europe. An exact contemporary of Doctor Zhivago, Philippe Sollers's Une Curieuse Solitude, written in 1957 and published a year later, deals precisely with the role of the woman in the construction of the male narcissism making itself the hero of the text. It is tempting to believe that only in Russia could the same year have produced a novel as unironic as Zhivago on the same theme (to almost universal European acclamation: non-Russians seem to value the backward and the primitive in Russia).

If so many of the novels of Turgenev (following on from Pushkin) and Dostoevskii involve the struggle of the hero to reclaim his patrimony (son over father), in the novels by Bulgakov and Pasternak the writer claims his patrimony over the very time he lives in. His virtue made manifest is

acknowledged first of all by the woman he has chosen for the job. And, once again, there is no irony involved. Russian male narratives were (and are) embedded in a highly gendered social context, an authoritarian and hierarchical society supported and exemplified by certain masculine ranks and rituals, those of the military, the church and the civil service. Every literate Russian male had a place in one of these rankings at some time in his life. When he became a writer, he was free to establish his own rankings, in a moral hierarchy of his own devising. The rejected allegiances of a former career did not vanish altogether and are often present as a satirized anti-world in nearly every Russian novelist, a rejection of the male career in favor of the higher but no less authoritarian vocation of novelist.

The writer can now spread his wings, answering the question posed by Gogol in chapter n of Dead Souls: "What does this vast expanse of space prophesy?" The space in which women writers were positioned was considerably less vast. For in topographical terms, certain areas of her own society were closed to the woman writer. She did not visit the gypsies on her own or in groups of her own sex or spend a night on the streets talking to the homeless, as Tolstoi did. Where she faced penalties of social ostracism, the status of the male writer was enhanced by such breadth of experience. Leskov's travels with his commercial uncle, Chekhov's medical visits and Dostoevskii's youthful midnight urban rambles became the stuff of their fiction. Women writers grew up and remained inside houses: domestic interiors or gardens figure as the chief locus of their writing. As Mary Zirin points out: "Throughout the age of Russian Realism, . . . most women writers remained rooted in the provinces, cut off from day-to-day contact with editors and from the stimulation of interaction with other writers. They sent their manuscripts to the two capitals by mail."⁷

Yet unvarnished female reality even within these restricted territories was still too dangerous a proposition to enter fully into female fictional realism. Most women writers - Karolina Pavlova (1807-93) is a prime example⁸ -felt compelled to blinker the evidence of their own eyes, putting their experience into a shape narrowly acceptable, that of a more conventional fiction that would be read by young girls who had to be protected from too much knowledge; nevertheless this fiction contained warnings in the form of metaphoric hints of future disappointment and warnings of irony in narrative tone. Domestic violence, childbirth and other painful facets of existence appear more readily in the works of men. Nineteenth-century women writers, aware that protective ignorance of life resulted in the repetition of previous injustice, characteristically ended their narratives, from the early society tale onwards, with plots of escape either mental or physical, sometimes, ironically, escape to a bad marriage and thus re-

entrapment.⁹ Bitterness and irony, therefore, lamenting the inevitable, take the place of prophetic truth-telling on a grand scale. Nevertheless, this inhibition, which limits female prose-writing in Russia, also constitutes its strength. The constraints of the female citizen of the middle to upper classes became the constraints of the female heroine in the writings of women. Men, paradoxically, often saw their heroines, and their anti-heroines, differently - as freer than themselves in spirit if not in body. They wanted all of Russia to be as pure and as free, a fantasy which forms the basis of many a "realist" male fiction. (We are not speaking of fantastic elements in the realist novel's plot, nor of the writer's creative fantasy, but rather of the creation of women characters to incarnate dreams of a better Russian social world.)

Male writers, trained in rhetoric in the seminar, gymnasia, and university, wrote persuasively of their truth, the nation's truth. But, - from Gogol's troika to Blok's vision of Christ leading the revolution - much else is swept aside. It is on the side-paths of writing and not on the major routes that we must begin to look for a realism that a tradition animated by the highest artistic confidence and the noblest of social intentions has ignored, breezed past, or subsumed under its own preoccupations. One of the less major routes is the shorter novel, as written by Turgenev, influenced by George Sand and by women writers popular in their time but until recently all but forgotten (though only the 1860 novella First Love is of as high a standard as the best novellas by women).¹⁰ These novels are shorter because they include the family scenes of the male novel but are free of the moral/ philosophical/political ballast. Although 1848 was an important year in European politics, two Russian novels written in that year concentrate exclusively on the politics of the family. Avdotiia Panaeva's The Talnikov Family and Karolina Pavlova's A Double Life both see the family/household unit as the crucial determinant of life in Russia, and in their family units the female side, especially the mother, dominates. The tradition of the female family novel has as its most striking recent achievement the 1992. publication The Time is Night by Liudmila Petrushevskaia.

The continuing drama of family life in which women play an active role less often for better and more often for worse is characteristic of many writings by women and of some by men. For the latter motherhood figures more often as a serious component in the formation of the good man, the good writer or, failing these, of the idea of the Russian nation as it could be. Even in Tolstoi the drama of family life forms part of an education novel for men. The tragedy of Aleksei Vronksii and especially of Aleksei Karenin is as poignant as that of Anna Karenina. She learns little of value in the course of the novel; but, because of her, each of the men learns for a time

what is valuable in life before losing it again. The two Alekseis share with Anna the same inability to live family life: in their case the reader is clearly shown the male codes by which they live as being the root of this inability. The staid and stoic belief of Karenin in ministerial duty and the ethic of the officer and gentleman adhered to by Vronskii are what each man returns to after Anna kills herself. This return represents meaningless decline for the one and meaningless death for the other. Tolstoi pities them for returning to their empty codes, and thereby makes their fate as tragic as Anna's and better documented in social terms. Anna has been provided, after an early marriage, with no code at all, except for the motherly instincts exemplified by the unhappy Dolly, and these she loses by the time she has her second child. Tolstoi never really shows parenthood in this novel except in the smallest of moments; yet we are encouraged to believe that these smallest of moments, expanded into a code of life, alone could have saved Anna from her fate.

The codes of civic and military honor are fairly clear, embedded as they are in the male character's novelistic behavior and in implied authorial commentary. The code of the male writer in opposition to the national codes exemplified by the nation's rulers has been further reinforced by the majority of critical works on Russian literature. But what of the woman writer, who, both by choice and necessity, takes it as her mission to examine female codes, those relating to family and to motherhood and to self? These codes, not as neatly formulated and ritualized as those of the various male professions, have taken on an aura of sacredness yet remain subsidiary to men's interests. Family life shaped individuals, not citizens (contrary to what most efforts to change it have always claimed); it was not the repository of national virtue but rather of the morality of the closest and most obscure human interactions.

The enormous role played by gender in the formation of the Russian woman, the woman writer and the woman reader, the strategies and forms of legitimation used by them, will hopefully be the subject of as many studies as those devoted to the male canon. These strategies were in themselves arguably of little practical or theoretical concern to male authors, even those who, like Tolstoi, portrayed in devastating fashion the effects of gender roles on men. We need to look for evidence of what women actually thought about their relatively obscure lives wherever such evidence is to be found, even under the guise of fiction, often fiction published under a male or gender-neutral pseudonym. Such pseudonyms for women writing in the nineteenth century include: Nadezhda Durova (1783-1866) who wrote (and lived) as Aleksandr Aleksandrov; Avdotia Panaeva (1819 or 1820-93), who published as N. Stanitskii; Nadezhda

Khvoshchinskaia (1824-89) who wrote as V. Krestovskii; her sister Sofia Khvoshchinskaia (1828-65) as Iv. Vesenev; Mariia Vilinskaia (1833-1907) as Marko Vovchok; Maria Tsebrikova (1835-1917) under various aliases, some like N. R. neutrally gendered; Sofia Soboleva (1840-84) as V. Samoilovich.

The attitude of the woman author to the female life portrayed is at least as complex and ironical as that of Lermontov to Pechorin, with the added awareness of the gender-marked status of the woman writer. Often a lesser or younger heroine than herself is made in the fiction to live a life the writer has escaped from. The heroine is deceived by her family, as the author had been. Having learned that the true betrayer is her own mother, the truth of woman's entrapment becomes evident. Her only hope is to escape from one family into another through marriage, a risky proposition at best. Pavlova and Panaeva let their readers entertain not the slightest hope for their heroines.

Whether she was deprived of formal education, like Panaeva, or tutored at home by the best people available, like Pavlova, a woman's childhood was a prelude to marriage, and her marriage, if it occurred, a relief to the parents whose responsibility toward their sixteen- or seventeen-year-old daughter thereby ended. The unique combination of overprotection and gross neglect that characterized the childhoods described by Panaeva and Pavlova demonstrate that norms for girlhood and young womanhood were a confusion of aims and capabilities by the parents, especially the mother, to whom fell most of the responsibility for seeing her daughter through to the next stage.

The bad mothers in these two novels are incompetents and escapists who negate whatever their daughters may feel and thus betray them. There is no code for raising daughters other than that of hiding them from view and then abruptly putting them on full display. The woman's dimension of the Russian experience seems to consist of two stages: first to suffer oneself (in childhood and in marriage) and then to repeat that suffering through the treatment of one's daughter. What women writers tell us about society is that men opt out of the crucial decisions, that social injustice reduces to family justice, where overburdened and ill-educated women mediate between the need to placate inconsistencies of male authority and male absenteeism and the need to make the daily decisions of a household where custom bears little relation to the actual needs of the inhabitants. In the final novel we will discuss, Petrushevskaia's The Time is Night, the themes are essentially the same in 1992, but they are married to the linguistic violence of contemporary speech. These three novelists, as well as other women writers past and present, do not merely add their voices to the male

canon: they exist in defiance of the moralizing prophetic narratives that canon writers and their abetting critics and scholars have written as normative and peculiarly Russian in moral sweep. A feminist, gender-aware criticism or one merely cognizant of what has been omitted must necessarily lead to a reconceptualization of the entire tradition of the Russian novel.

Avdotia Panaeva (née Brianskaia) married the writer Ivan Panaev in 1837 and became the common-law wife of the famous poet Nikolai Nekrasov in the mid-1840s. Her Memoirs, written at the end of her life, treat not herself but the famous men she knew, the radical circle whose writings and other literary activity formed the blueprint for the sociopolitical debates to come. It is her only work which has been repeatedly reprinted, reflecting what has been considered important until now.

The Talnikov Family, written under the alias N. Stanitskii, was Panaeva's first work and it occupies a unique place in her writing. Although written as fiction, it is the most autobiographical of her writings, and also the most powerful. Her fiction that followed with titles proclaiming the misery of the married women ("A Woman's Lot," "Domestic Hell"), was published in the leading radical journals. In her writing, marital and family injustice seems somehow reformable, like serfdom. The absolute hopelessness of the family relations of The Talnikov Family and its central figure of a mother so negative in character that her children could be happy only when she kept her distance from them hints at human depths unmitigated by any hope of spiritual or political reform. The censor understood the attack on parental authority through the description of an unhappy soul-destroying childhood and did not permit publication. Panaeva never again wrote with such density of specifics. What was called "Critical Realism" in the writing of the day kept its critique on the level of lofty moral indignation; its realism reached for a higher plane. The male censor and the male radical writer thus reached a modus vivendi, one which left little real scope for the woman writer who wanted to write about actual conditions of physical and psychological abuse within the family, the place from which so few women ever emerged into public view, and within which they, with so little room to maneuver, were supposed to cast a moral light that would radiate outwards into future generations. The Talnikov Family was published only eighty years after it was written, in 1928. It is largely a forgotten work.¹¹

It begins brutally with the washing of the corpse of the narrator's six-month-old sister. Neither the father nor the mother weeps; only the nurse weeps, because, as we learn, the baby's early death has deprived her of the material rewards otherwise due to her. Violent death or death from neglect constantly shadows this large household which consists of a mother and

father, six children, the mother's two sisters, and the father's sister and mother at the time the narrator begins to "remember herself" at the age of six. The household grows continually: as some leave or die, others are added or born.

The father is described first in all his "savagery" but later mercifully becomes a background figure, absent for most of the day. He starts a game with his three-year-old son: see who can hit hardest. It is a game the adult takes seriously. When the child is hit hard and begins to cry, the father beats him even harder. At this moment the narrator, who has formerly believed that parents have the right not only to punish but also to kill their children, interposes her body between that of her father and brother and receives the blows. The mother finally rescues her bloodied children whose only future defense is simply never to go near their father. But the fairytales told them by their nurse have a healing power: when the hero or heroine of the story suffers, the children bribe the nurse with biscuits to give their lives a happy ending. Panaeva has a good grasp of "the uses of enchantment," and also of the uses of bribery in a household where food, not money, was the currency.

The children are excluded from any area of the house their mother occupies; she literally doesn't care whether they live or die. Unable to prevent the birth of her children, she does her best to deny their existence. A series of aunts and governesses inflict punishment on the children in the mother's absence. They are a not disinterested authority: when the children have to go without dessert, the adult's portion is doubled. All the children (eight by then) live in one room, in which the dirty linen for the entire household is also kept. Any food brought in is immediately eaten by the omnipresent cockroaches. This area of the household remains populated only by women and children. Women who did not marry were a lifelong liability, and had the same dependency as children in the household. Of all her children, therefore, the mother liked her daughters least, calling them monsters who would never marry and cruelly describing different parts of their bodies, much as a loving mother would brag of her children's good features, the narrator explains with wistful sarcasm.

The deaths of three sisters and one brother occur in a single sentence. These deaths are clearly the consequence of abuse and neglect, of never being loved. But the narrator makes no such statement directly. Keeping the immediacy of the childhood memory, she lets the adult characters speak for themselves, as they do in family surroundings, but rarely to the outside world. There is probably no other work of Russian literature in which a mother's hatred of her children is depicted so relentlessly. Yet the mother, who has few positive sides to her, is shown at times in a pathetic light, as

she changes household rules to oblige a male visitor who is never quite called her lover, or as she keeps household accounts manipulated to her own advantage and to the detriment of her children. The father develops great tenderness for his collection of caged birds, symbolic realism that, again, passes without exclamatory comment in the narrative, merely unfolding as one of the stream of events.

The narrator's only friend from the outside world is the daughter of the laundress. A dialogue between this girl and the more innocent narrator about "kissing" older men in return for presents leads to a warning that, when a girl becomes pregnant from such behavior, her mother throws her out. The author is aware of a worse fate for girls of an unprotected lower class, which the stifling combination of isolation and ignorance inflicted on the relatively higher-class girl seeks to avert. The children of the Talnikov family are cut off from most of life, even from walks in summertime. At one point a kind of grotesque ball is given in their house, ostensibly to acquaint them with society, but really at the request of the mother's lover, who is bored. Hideous rivalries emerge among the unmarried women as they prepare for it. There is a rhythm in the novel of expectation thwarted. Every moment of potential happiness is turned to disappointment or disaster.

The sons eventually leave. They are sent out to various institutions and relatives, one to an uncle who beats him. The other grandmother, who shares that household, is powerless to stop the beatings. The grandmother is loved by the narrator because she confirms the reality of her existence, that her parents do not love her. But the grandmother, powerless before her son and estranged from her husband, increasingly gives way to alcohol, foreshadowing the figure of the grandmother in Gorkii's Childhood (1913). That good people have no choice but self-destruction is axiomatic in this novel. Gorkii may point to a way out through social change; but his optimism was ill-founded: the figure of the grandmother who submits to petty male authority within her own family remains a constant in contemporary Russian fiction from Solzhenitsyn's "Matrena's House" (1963) to the novellas of Valentin Rasputin.

Missed opportunities of life, the constant fear of adult power, and especially that of an unreasoning mother, the neglect of all bodily and spiritual needs: these things characterize growing up in the Talnikov household. Rarely has psychological abuse been so skilfully documented, yet no critic has ever put this work with its female narrator on a par with similarly autobiographical fictions of Saltykov-Shchedrin or Gorkii. Panaeva does not prophesy: she makes no overt claim to symbolize Russia in her psychologically detailed girl's point of view of a particular family. The

Talnikov Family belongs in our revised canon precisely because of its lack of symbolic pretense and its privileging of the gendered horrors of a Russian childhood.

Our next nominee for canonization is a work of mixed genre which harks back to an ideal of Romanticism, but makes the role of poet accessible to women, as had the women writers of French Romanticism. (The question of which Western novelists influenced Russian women writers and how works were adapted or incorporated into the Russian woman writer's emerging tradition remains to be studied in depth.) Karolina Pavlova (née Jaenisch, 1807-93) considered herself primarily a poet, and thus her only novel, A Double Life (1848), has an even more unique place in her writings than does The Talnikov Family in Panaeva's. It has gone equally unnoticed, never having been published as a separate book except in English translation. In A Double Life, the pain of young womanhood is uncovered not through gradual knowledge but through its opposite, the burial of that knowledge in a receding dream. Pavlova's work is more indirectly autobiographical than that of Panaeva, but the author is present in every line from the very first one, a bit of overheard conversation in a heartbreak salon: "But are they rich?" Her heroine is an ordinary girl who, although she comes from the highest social and economic class, is being steered inexorably towards a life of imprisonment in a marriage with a libertine husband, this time by a well-meaning mother. In this work too, young women enter and leave the rooms of their own house only when their mothers tell them to do so. They are kept totally ignorant of their own lives, present and future. The male characters' chief freedom is that of being able to be elsewhere: they absent themselves while the women maneuver and speed up their plans for the daughters' marriages. The poetry at the end of each chapter of A Double Life, preceded by a transitional prose passage of reverie, solitude falling into a dream state, represents a vision of ambiguous sexuality, an inner voice that calls and then is silenced forever. Not poetry written by the heroine herself, it is accessible to her only for a time and in the other life of her dreams. An ordinary woman, she is given no higher calling; there will be no compensation for her real life.

Pavlova rightly realizes that women may write poetry, but they do not become The Poet, the autonomous genius, the prophet. They cannot foresee even their own future. But, by documenting the endless materialism of the female circle, Pavlova demonstrates how innate spiritual qualities are cruelly deceived and destroyed as a girl's expectations of life turn into married adulthood. Predicting the lives of women takes the form of irony and rhetorical lament, reaction after the fact, after the occurrence of the inevitable. Irony and lament, not prophecy, best define the authorial voice

of women writers in Russia. It reaches the prestige of national identity only with Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem" (1963), when the worst prophecies were inadequate to daily horror and lament alone could describe them: the lament of the mother for her child, written by a woman, finally became the national symbolism.

The future women writers do foretell seems doomed to be re-enacted ad infinitum. Works of Russian fiction today realize all the metaphorical warnings of nineteenth-century women writers. Women are still being left to learn how to live with a vague ethical code of family responsibility unshared by men. Women writers especially, as in the past, write about how lives burdened by ever increasing family cares seem to lead to general misery. In one of the best Russian novels ever written, the scenario is the same, the narrative is female/unreliable, and the time is now.

The Time is Night (Vrem'ia Noch'), published in New World (Novyi mir, 1992, 2: pp. 65-110), documents the night-time of Russia in the fragmentation of the Russian family that has, ironically, deserted its own mother who is, with further irony, also the lamenting voice that speaks for it: a woman's narrative voice violently censors that of her own daughter and of all other family members. Is this a revenge text on the Russian novel itself? Liudmila Petrushevskaia, who began to write from the mid-1960s onward was first published only in 1980. Of late she has written other endgame pieces, but most were sufficiently futuristic or particular to certain circumstances to offer the reader a ladder on which to climb out of the narrative into a saner reality - just barely. "Our Circle" (Svoi Krug, 1988), like this work, involves cruelty to a child by a mother for his own good, perhaps. In this earlier novella there is no good and no perhaps. The narrative unravelling of intent, as in Petrushevskaia's other stories in which a wife or mother connives in the holding together of a dubious modern family by eventually compromising its tenuous integrity is clear from the outset, as the narrator indulges in the crude language of power and discipline, layered with age-old female complaint. The vision of Woman sitting like Patience on a monument, and especially of enduring Russian womanhood, is forever laid to rest. The narrative of a female tyrant no longer listened to by her own children becomes the voice of the old Soviet Union at the very moment of its disintegration. But why should it be a female voice?

The Soviet Russian family at the end of its existence will no doubt occupy the minds of future sociohistorians as a horrifying combination of female power and lack of real authority within the context of an almost total deficiency of resources and masculine presence. In some families it would seem that the husbandless mother head-of-household has every interest in evicting a son-in-law once he has fathered a grandchild, since,

not being either a mother or child, he lacks any serious voice in the great dialogue between these two. This dialogue is the basis of Petrushevskaia's best plays and stories. Here the voice of the Mother dominates in its hideous self-revelation, its blatant self-justification, narrating all possible aspects of the family in a negative light, cannibalizing and spying upon her own mother, daughter, son and grandchildren while also being the only one strong in her ties to the remnants of the regime that once could support them.

This is the Golovlev family as narrated by Arina Petrovna. This is what Colette called "le mentir-vrai," truth through a verbal fabric of lies and self-deception. We watch the care-giver, this key figure of Russian society, as she goes under, leaving no successor. That she is a hack poet, grotesquely quoting Akhmatova and Pushkin, darkly implies the end of culture also, or at least it suggests the debasement of the very poets of Russia whose resistance to authority is seen by Russians to have built steps to a national future. The subject of all world tragedy is the family at war with itself, its doom threatening the continuation of the nation, though here not quite as nationalism's ideologues foresee. Petrushevskaia's vision is darkly comic, highly parodic. The heroine is grotesquely named Anna Adrianovna, parodying not only Anna Andreeva Akhmatova but also Anna Arkadevna Karenina: "Whether she is struck down by love, by filth or by wheels, it all hurts the same." Save for a few institutions like the madhouse and the penal colonies, the domestic hearth is all that remains of the Nation.

The novella begins with the convention of the found manuscript, a framing device which introduces the author into the text as separate from the narrator. This is an important maneuver, since both are Russian mothers. There is a second reason for the framing epigraph: it imparts a sense of urgency to the reading of the text, which was almost lost altogether. The manuscript has been sent to the busy author by the anonymous daughter of an anonymous mother, their voices shrill against the oncoming night.

The collapse of female domestic virtue in the traditional sense of sympathetic care-giving in a world fraught with uncertainty on the outside is accompanied by a narrative shared by two women, mother and daughter, who in different ways embody that lack of care-giving. This structure reverses the usual course of Russian literature, which upholds female domestic virtue no matter whether the narrator is female (as in the stories of most of Petrushevskaia's immediate predecessors, the published women prose writers of the 1960s) or male, as in the traditional male fiction. The security ensured by compassion and nurture usually provided by the female side has reversed itself in this work into the authority (albeit hollow),

instruction and discipline associated with a masculine principle. When this type of overarching passes to the female side, we are encouraged to consider it as a sure sign of any state's collapse.

The conflict no longer situates itself primarily in the struggle for identity of the middle-class heroine, but rather in a struggle for survival of all who surround her. In this connection the ending is ironic. The heroine, having disposed of her family, sits down to write the lines which comprise the title. But this is not the ending of the nineteenth-century heroine epitomized by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia's pansionerka (boarding-school girl), who must leave her family behind in order to claim her own freedom and selfhood. Petrushevskaia's narrator is the sort of hollow professional subsidized by the very dying social order she now epitomizes in a more horrifically thorough manner than the legislators of Soviet culture ever intended. The very concept of writing as purity of action and the salvation of society is savaged by a woman writer.

The question then arises of whom Petrushevskaia's created writer is writing for, who are her voluntary readers in an age when no one any longer reads because that is the done thing. Can it only be ourselves? All others have departed the scene at the end: the story is over as well as just beginning. All the other characters unto the next two generations have departed into an uncertain future survival without Mother. Only we the readers are listening, her semblables, her sœurs.

This violent wrenching from female dominance that occurs in so many recent works of post-Soviet fiction is peculiar in being as pronounced in the work of women as in that of men.¹² The iron rulers of their domestic establishments and dispensers of the crumbs of wealth that remain in the society bear more than the psychological hatred of their family members: they bear the political hatred of those who grew up in the embrace of the Communist state. The gap between the narrator's stated motive and the results of her verbiage-cum-actions definitely recalls to all former citizens of Communism-land the nurture/discipline gap which permeates their own past. The call to behave came from the women as much as from men; women saw some redemptive virtue in order and discipline. The patriarchal authority of the Soviet state is thus all too easily symbolized as a decadent matriarchy, one in which the matriarch has no real authority to discipline but does so nonetheless.

Russian literature more than any others has been esteemed for its transcendent value, a value placed upon it by Russians and non-Russians, professional academics and ordinary readers alike. This reverent attitude has been copied into the reading of a small body of fiction in particular, one written exclusively by male authors in the case of the novel. Regardless of

origins, affinities, verbal materials and devices of narrative, the end product is deemed to possess a high order of cultural significance and extra-linguistic interest. The twin giants of the Russian novel, Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, bring others (Turgenev, Goncharov, Pisemskii) into their orbit whose novels are distinctly less compelling. Goncharov's account of his voyage in The Frigate Pallada (1855-57) contains much more intelligent and interesting writing than his novel Oblomov (1859), and hardly anyone would read his other novels, much less defend them; the Russian novel commands respect, especially if it contains a prophetic dream, a man who struggles with his life, and a sense of failure at the end. The sense of failure in effect silences the reader: who cannot but respect fictions written in defiance of censorship and repression? Those who have suffered less consider themselves unworthy to demote the ranking martyrs by treating their writing as mere texts. Ideological motivation in Russian authors has been taken for philosophy, social and moral reconstruction, psychological depth, supra-legal ethics and a universally valid view of the meaning of life, decontextualized or rather recontextualized in a Russia of the author's own making and imagining, but often with the readers' own social longings superimposed. The partnership between the Russian novel and its official readers, male master critics, journalists and academics of both sexes, has been a powerful one, worthy of study in its own right.

While Russian poetry rather than the novel has had greater meaning for Russians as historically the first and socially the most recitable texts, it is the Russian novel that has become world property. We might say the property of the West, but the West itself is a peculiar construct of an era of nation-forming and for these purposes it must surely include the educated classes of Asian countries. Russian prophets, most recently Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his speeches addressed to Westerners, have extended their past into our future (fortunately, inaccurately). They have produced authority where there is no power, the Russian or Soviet State, simultaneously playing the opposite role in a male power game whose players occasionally occupy both sides of the equation. We may attribute to Russians and their novels a virility and a faith in big answers to big questions we see ourselves in the "West" as lacking. The novelists themselves, however, attribute this same virility and persevering faith to women and to peasants. That this ideal can go badly wrong has been best demonstrated by Richard Wortman in The Crisis of Russian Populism, and by Laura Engelstein in The Keys to Happiness, her study of the fin-de-siècle. In two recent male novels neither women nor peasants but animals have embodied the ideals of post-Stalinist society. A freed Gulag guard dog in Georgi Vladimov's Faithful Ruslan (1975) and a she-wolf with blue eyes

in Chingiz Aitmatov's Scaffold (Plakha, 1987) carry an interior point of view denied to most females of the human species in modern male fiction.

More than any other novelistic tradition, the Russian one relies on prophecy to underline its authority both with regard both to present action and to future retribution. Coming at a time when demands for social justice and the problematic identities of peoples and individuals within an empire were being debated, prophecy was a way of making one's voice heard in journalistic competition. The end of tyranny was proclaimed, or else tyranny was accommodated and a better world prophesied, as a parallel entity. At the same time that women, as objects of the debate, their bodies scrutinized by the male gaze, had their own voices muted, ignored, buried in family papers filed under male family names, parodied as too strident, edited by male publishers and criticized, if they did appear in print, by the lords of criticism, masters with their own male disciples, who had different agenda. The last of these master critics, Bakhtin, described the novel as a non-canonical genre, one welcoming many voices; but a gendered voice was not among his considerations. The great debate of Russian writers and critics seems to carry on in the same vein.

Our present understanding of the Russian novel needs to be revised from the current notion of grudging inclusiveness of a few women authors as adjuncts. Male writing is (also) gendered; it is partial (both partial to itself and describing only a part of the world it occupies). Women's writing is an authoritative voice in disguise, lacking the sort of tradition of counter-authority in Russia until Anna Akhmatova literally embodied both Russia and the voice of Russia, brilliantly combining the iconographic image of Russia as suffering lamenting woman (Yaroslavna's lament in the medieval masterpiece The Igor Tale) with the normally male voice of the prophetic speaker for Russia. Akhmatova cleverly drew to her the major formalist critics and wrote poetry that they could tackle as both of and new to the canon.

We must carefully consider the question of whether our past study of Russian literature and particularly the Russian novel according to its value as a substitute for liberal institutions in a nation that has otherwise lacked them has not led us to repeat the novelist's belief that the novel in Russia is not just literature, but a repository of truth, morality and even superior craft, when what we should be doing is studying "new" novels, ones not admitted on the basis of lacking a philosophy, an ideology that gives it "scope." We should at the same time re-examine our love of the canon, and do so even on the basis of old-fashioned aesthetics. Much writing on Dostoevskii in particular has flown in the face of common sense about his difficulties in narrating and reconciling implausibilities, to redefine his very

problems as solutions. We might look upon Dostoevskii, the author we began with, as a skilled writer of melodrama, but because he is obsessively Russian, melodrama with a value-enhancing national megaphone attached. The Russian novel as we know it from the male canon is a national genre, despite its European roots. Russian novelists read the latest European novels and often entered into the dialogue with women writers like George Sand or George Eliot. The debate with the European novel was, in part, a gendered one. It may have been one reason for the ascent of a narrative voice that must assert, by omniscience or trickery, a point of view that is anything but multi-voiced or bi-gendered in its quest for absolutes. Chekhov, who could not conceive of a character who propagated the Truth as doing otherwise than curtailing the freedom and selfhood of others, never wrote a novel: though some of his stories (for example, "The House with an Attic") in which lives are ruined by Truth-dominance, seem certainly to be commentaries on the novelistic tradition which continued into his own writing lifetime.

The family dramas women writers describe may be written as realism, neo-Romanticism, or postmodernism, like the three we have examined. Satisfied to remain on the level of everyday horror and loss within a family, they do not blare out the message of wider national significance that Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevskii, Bulgakov, Pasternak, or Solzhenitsyn so obviously weave into the fabric of their narrative. The reader of the Russian novel is conditioned to be repaid with a construct of Russia, one fed by devices of suspense and articulations of terminal states of mind, in return for the effort of reading hundreds of pages, whether over a few days or, like the contemporary reader, in serialized form over months. If women's novels present families as microcosms of the State, their fathers are more often absent than despotic. Absence can result in even greater despotism, as women are left to "rule." But it is striking that the loving father-daughter plot, so crucial to the Verdi opera of the same time, is not foregrounded in the Russian novel. It surfaces at the beginning of the twentieth century in fiction for girls, in the works of Lidiia Charskaia (1875-1937), where a girl must demonstrate bravery to win her father. In novels for adults, however, Daddy in the form of father or husband has problems of his own and the female characters generally take them on, to the exclusion of all else. (Examples are the old Count and Princess Mariia in War and Peace or Sonia and her father in Crime and Punishment.)

To return to a problem we raised earlier: how can the woman reader constructed by these texts which show women to be so unlike ourselves, either weak or superior in the extreme, distinguish herself from or relate herself to these women characters? She is not voluptuous, arbitrary in her

judgments, prone to act and speak without reflection. She is, judging from the constructed reader of women's journals, the mother of daughters, thereby multiplying her importance several times into the next generation. She is not as unimportant to the life plot as she is to the central plot of the novels. The reading communities of women in nineteenth-century Russia have yet to be studied. I would like to infer for the moment that the popularity of novels about women on the fringes of respectability, or who led lives of danger and were punished, had the effect of the sensation-novel on readers who were forced to lead more closeted lives. They enjoyed reading about women they could never meet, let alone become, and flirted with scenarios of danger without a happy ending.

But when these readers read women writers (in spite of the compromises they had to make even to be published), all the irony employed and all the protective artistic distancing of author from heroine still led them back into their own world, a world quite different from that of the canonical male text, in words they may have felt powerless otherwise to articulate. As today's readers begin to recover Russian literature in all its variety, we can also begin to think about its first readers who were women. These first female readers of the Russian novel are the ones Karolina Pavlova dedicated her work to, the "mute sisters of my soul."

NOTES

1. F. M. Dostoevskii, The Brothers Karamazov, books 1-?.

2. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 20.

3. Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoevsky and the Novel of Discord (London: Elek, 1976), p. 22.

4. My thinking about the demands that particular texts made upon their women readers has been focused by a recent work of English criticism: Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

5. D. S. Mirsky, Uncollected Writings on Russian Literature, ed. by G. S. Smith (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1989), p. 46.

6. See my Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).

7. Mary F. Zirin, "Women's Prose Fiction in the Age of Realism," Women Writers in Russian Literature, eds. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 78.

8. See my introduction to Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life, 3rd edn (Oakland, Calif.: Barbary Coast Books, 1990), pp. i-xxii.

9. For outlines of such plots, the reader is referred to Catriona Kelly, A History of Women's Writing 1820-1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

10. Overwhelming evidence of the great numbers of acclaimed women authors can be found in Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin (eds.), A

Dictionary of Women Writers (Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1994). How subsequent generations of critics and publishers allowed them to be "lost," and why, will be the subject of future research.

11. The text I am using was published in B. S. Meilakh (ed.), Russkie povesti XIX veka, 2 vols. (Moscow: Goz. izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1952), vol. 2, pp. 263-357.

12. The following paragraph summarizes part of an argument made elsewhere by me in "Gynoglasnost': Writing the Feminine" in Mary Buckley (ed.), Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 160-75.

14

CARYL EMERSON

Theory

In the nineteenth century, after decades of imitations, translations, and a tradition of bawdy native prose, Russia began to challenge the West as the home of the greatest novels ever written. Are Russian "theories of the novel" comparably rich? The current fame of Mikhail Bakhtin might suggest that this is indeed the case. But Bakhtin was a pioneer: he began work on the novel during the 1920s, with what he considered to be only scattered and unsatisfying critical precedent at his disposal. He repeatedly declared that the protean nature of this genre, its unsystematicity and generosity of form, had made the very question of an adequate theory of the novel awkward for any literary tradition. Since the novel outgrows every definition imposed upon it and can incorporate its own parody without ceasing to be itself, its formal study does not reward that drawing of boundaries upon which respectable theory rests.

For this reason, many discussions claiming to provide a "theory" or "morphology" of the novel in effect provide a history of novels. The literary historian devises a chronology of select novel-types (picaresque, sentimental, Utopian, psychological), attaches it to larger literary periods, and then appends to this structure valuable information about authors, origins, plot invariants, or the literary market. But such chronologies fall short of a unified concept of the genre, as the great comparativist Aleksandr Vese-lovskii acknowledged in his 1886 essay "History or Theory of the Novel?"¹ Veselovskii viewed the novel as the endpoint of a lengthy process of narrative individualization. A fixed, shared "we" was gradually replaced -by way of tragic drama, the chivalric romance, and the Italian novella -with an uncertain, self-orienting "I," a process that represented in miniature the victory of "unity of content" (the ego of the storyteller) over the ancient unity of performance. Veselovskii concluded that this sequence was sufficiently operative in all cultures to justify an immanent theory of the novel. All the same, he adds, the theorist would do well to "eavesdrop as often as

possible on the lessons of history. The history of any literary genre is the best verification of its theory."

Soviet academic work on the novel has followed suit. E. M. Meletinskii's Introduction to the Historical Poetics of the Epic and the Novel (1986) is deeply indebted to Veselovskii in its historicism and comparativist scope, and G. N. Pospelov's theory of "implicit forms" rests upon four historically evolved types of relationship between individual and community.² By far the best known Marxist variant of the genetic-historical approach within the Russian orbit is the work of the émigré communist Georg Lukacs. In his idealist, pre-Marxist study Die Theorie des Romans (1920), Lukacs viewed the epic as the product of an integrated world and the novel as the genre of a "transcendental homelessness." In his later Soviet-Marxist writings, he combined formidable erudition, poetic imagination, and a traditional plot-and-themes methodology with positivist Hegelian principles and class determinism to reaffirm, in an oldfashioned way, humanity's eventual victory over despair through the medium of art. Lukacs's work remains one of the few enduring analyses of the classic European novel to come out of the Soviet 1930s.³

Among Soviet critics dissatisfied with the genetic-historical approach was Boris Griftsov, whose brief monograph The Theory of the Novel was published in 1927, just as Bakhtin was turning his attention to the genre.⁴ Celebrating the novel as the "sole verbal artwork of modern times," a "half-art" that can absorb any other form "with no theoretical prejudices" (p. 10), Griftsov admits that such tolerance has made the genre inaccessible to theorists (his own methodology is conventional, a historical survey of novel-types as they unfold within a single tradition, the French). He finds fault with most of his predecessors. The novel did indeed emerge from rhetoric (such was Gustav Shpet's explanatory thesis), but it was only when rhetoric had ceased to serve strictly ethical goals and had already decayed into casuistry that the novel came into its own as a vibrant fictional form. No genre so rich in singular examples can be covered "historically" or paradigmatically. Its evolution is difficult to demonstrate since one cannot distinguish between imitation and convergence. And, although Formalist studies were then the fashion, novels are not well served by them since little attention was paid to the boundaries between prose genres (prose genres were assumed simply to "grow in" to one another). Lukács's Die Theorie des Romans was not a theory of the novel at all but "metaphysical speculation on one of its principles" (p. 6). Not surprisingly, Griftsov's "several methodological conclusions" are almost all negative warnings (pp. 140-48). Do not tie the evolution of the novel to literary schools. Do not attempt an exhaustive

typology, for there are never enough categories to cover all variants and no list of distinctive features will ever be sufficient. And as regards immanent principles, he comes up with only one: "the novel lives by controversy: by quarreling, by struggle, by a contradictoriness of interests, by contrasts between what is desired and what actually exists" (p. 147).

As theory, this conclusion is thin. Bakhtin will pick up where Griftsov ends. In a Formalist spirit, Bakhtin will specify a "dominant for the novel," the primary feature defining its "literariness": this very motif of contradiction and struggle. But Bakhtin will distance this struggle from any crude identification with real-life battlefields or social class. He will relocate it within the novel's own professional medium: the contradictory, multi-voiced utterance. And language, thus understood, becomes a carrier not of plot, economic pressures, or formal literary devices, but of consciousness itself, a consciousness intended to benefit first and foremost the densely populated, created world of the novel and not primarily the creators and consumers of that world (authors, readers, analysts). Only then, from this theoretically grounded position, will Bakhtin reintegrate literary history into his prosaics and reopen the question of genesis.

Before turning to Bakhtin, however, we must consider briefly the heritage and alternatives. For what we recognize today as "theory" - the quest for laws, invariants, initial conditions - does not have its strict equivalent in the critical thought of most students of the novel. In Russia, a rich body of commentary did accumulate around the genre. But it was most often linked with individual prototypes rather than with organizing principles. Several discrete Russian attitudes toward the mission and function of the novel might be distinguished.

The first might be called, broadly, the "realist." In an essay on Lukacs and Bakhtin, the French Slavist Michel Aucouturier properly notes that "the theory of the novel in Russia suffered precisely from what made its practice so successful there: the crushing domination of a realist aesthetic."⁵ According to this aesthetic, the intent of novelistic prose (in contrast to epos, lyric, or drama) is representational and mimetic: it is perceived as non-autonomous vis-à-vis the real world that contains it, and - as is so often the case with cultural artefacts in the Russian context - expected to serve society, progress, civilization. In such a scheme, the novel's origins are frequently traced to epic narration, with its broad scope, open form, public quests and "choral" embodiment of conscience.

If a single figure exemplifies this mimetic-realist approach to the novel it is Vissarion Belinskii, the "founder of Russian literary criticism" in the 1830s and 1840s. Conceding to the low reputation of the genre in Russia,

Belinskii made little attempt to defend the novel as art. (Bestselling eighteenth-century journalist-novelists such as Mikhail Chulkov or Fedor Emin had been ignored or rebuked by the Enlighteners; Sumarokov, speaking for an official high culture dominated by neoclassical poetics, remarked that novels were rubbish written by ignoramuses and, since they lacked all moral instruction, could not be ranked with works of pure imagination.) Aesthetic criteria were assumed to be secondary. As Belinskii saw it, the purpose of novels was two-fold: either historical-patriotic - to "portray the life of our ancestors" - or moral, to expose social and political ills. As he wrote in 1834, any European poet of talent might have written Pushkin's "Fountain of Bakhchisarai" or "The Gypsies" - but in their setting and diction, Mr. Bulgarin's wretchedly written novels were unmistakably Russian and their very crudeness enabled them to "render a service not to literature but to society."⁶ As Russian Realism matured, the aggressively long, thematically untidy Tolstoian novel would become its trademark. Since the realistic Russian novel was "more real than life itself," theory was presumed by many to be as irrelevant to the one as to the other.

At the far extreme from the realistic-mimetic is a concept of the novel as carrier for Utopian scenarios and social fantasy - which, in the Russian context, often came with a polemical, exceptionalist charge. The canonical prototype here is Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done? (1863), arguably the most influential of all Russian novels, with its vision of cooperative societies, unproblematic personalities and futuristic dream sequences. A half-century later, Chernyshevskii's classic text inspired the doctrine of Socialist Realism, proclaimed by Maksim Gorkii in 1934, which privileged the novel over all other genres.⁷ Socialist Realist production was theory by fiat. In the name of the Soviet State and its victorious proletariat, Gorkii made explicit what had been only implicit earlier: that the Russian novel's most distinctive traits are (and I draw here on Donald Fanger's categories for the "Russianness of the Russian Novel") its formal anomalies, its insistence on an alliance and communion with readers rather than a stance of alienation, and its contrariness - that is, its adversary stance toward whatever critics in the West thought the genre to be.⁸ If novels in the West European tradition were about romantic love, then Soviet novels would be about industrial production.⁹ If doubt, despair, individual psychology and tragic endings had entertained the bourgeoisie, then mass psychology, the vigor of folklore and myth, and uniformly cheerful closure would inspire the Soviet readers of Soviet novels. The "West within" - the nineteenth-century superfluous man - would be replaced by the positive hero, who was a variant on the Orthodox Christian ascetic saint.

Andrei Siniavskii, writing as Abram Tertz in the 1950s, provided the best

theoretical statement on this sort of novel from within its own Soviet system, in his essay "On Socialist Realism?"¹⁰ According to Tertz, the Socialist Realist novel was a text with a Purpose, a closed future, answers in advance and heroes devoid of doubt. As such, it was the culmination of "social" and didactic thinking about the novel - but, Tertz intimates, it was ultimately a failure. Pretending to reflect reality in its "revolutionary development," such texts were in fact sentimental, Utopian, phantasmagoric, and thus closer in many respects to classicism than to Critical Realism. In secular times, he argues, it is not possible to construct a persuasive narrative solely out of cults of personal courage, public self-confidence, and material productivity (however praiseworthy those virtues), if there is no respect for the individuating, ironizing imagination.

A third approach to the novel, the "ethical-religious," overlaps with the other two but is justified on different grounds. If both "mimetic" and "utopian-fantasy" novels tend to spread out horizontally in their plots and seek resolution in a socially-defined purpose, then religious narratives devolve upon a single spiritualized point and can work with tiny casts, even within a single consciousness. Here belong Romantic and neo-Romantic concepts of the novel; here also the confessional or repentant novel-memoirs of error and resurrection, written by such widely different practitioners as Karamzin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Andrei Belyi and Solzhenitsyn. Such prose can celebrate the fantastic, mystical, meta-worldly, and even -as in some Symbolist and postmodernist works - can welcome the altogether inexpressible. Science in the strictly rational or utilitarian sense is abjured, and "literary science" becomes a sort of blasphemy.

What links these writers, first and foremost, is the conviction that the beautiful and the good must coincide, and that the task of literary art is to guide the reader toward an innerly beautiful truth. This truth is real - as real as bread, boots or social justice - and can be pursued within the quotidian times and places of the conventional realist novel. But this truth is also transcendent. It must therefore preserve some autonomy from its immediate environment, for its testing-ground remains the individual soul. When, on the eve of the Great Reforms, Turgenev divided character-types in Russian literature between "Hamlets" and "Don Quixotes," he slightly favored the latter - because the mad knight's willingness to posit an ideal, however ridiculous, at the very least paid homage to a value outside himself, above himself, and was not cravenly dependent upon the material proofs of the world. Likewise, arguing in the early 1860s against the radical social critics, Dostoevskii insisted that a striving for moral beauty and transfiguration is the most "useful" of all possible utilitarianisms, the most precious contribution that art can make to life.¹¹ Such justifications

for moral narrative run like a bright thread through Russian literary history. The most powerful twentieth-century proponent of this view - one that individualizes human beings as it unifies them, calling upon each of us to repent - is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. As the novelist argued in his 1970 Nobel Prize Speech, only one reliable means exists for creating a common bond between all the widely different values, experiences and sufferings that govern and divide the world, and that is literature.

We arrive now at our final category, "aesthetic" approaches to the novel, designed to uncover structural principles and draw attention to the novel's own artfulness. Such an approach is perhaps the only home for "theory proper." It was late in coming, for nineteenth-century Russia - so under the sway of mimesis when it came to prose - rarely subjected the novel to theoretical speculation as a formal artistic object. And when this mimetic aesthetic was challenged, first by the Symbolists and then (from another direction) by the Russian Formalists, it was in a spirit quite hostile to everyday "content." In the novels most favored by Formalist analysts, content (what we would recognize as "plot events" and personalities changing over time) was subverted, diluted by digressions, made problematic, and kept emotionally at bay. For it was, after all, that ancient fascination with character and storyline that had always made novels so popular, so able to pull us in, and that provided an easy escape from the challenges issued both by life and by the constructs of art.

In order to break down the allure of novels, early Formalists who worked on prose simply refused to acknowledge the presence of whole, emotionally integrated novelistic worlds. They either insisted, as did Boris Eikhenbaum in his early work on Tolstoi, that prose art was not modeled on real-life experience at all but rather the reverse, that life was a deliberate "rehearsal" of new literary strategies; or, as Viktor Shklovskii argued, that long prose narratives were constructed (and thus should be read) solely as "parts" - built, as it were, from the bottom up. In this matter of genesis and structure, Formalists were guided in their thinking about novels by what they valued in artistic production generally: "literariness" (literaturnost'), "defamiliarization" (ostranenie), parody, and similar devices applied either as irritants or as stimulants to inert verbal material. They drew on Dickens, Cervantes, Sterne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - and also on Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Lev Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Rozanov and Belyi. Of the Formalists whose work is most central to novel theory (Shklovskii, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Iurii Tynianov), Shklovskii was the most consistently inventive and reductionist. It is significant that Shklovskii's pronouncements came closest to constituting an autonomous "theory" of the novel, but were the least adequate to their subject. The research of his two colleagues, who resorted

(or retreated) to more traditional approaches, was more satisfying and has proved more durable.

Beginning in the early 1920s, in a series of provocative essays ("The Structure of Fiction," "The Making of Don Quixote," "Dickens and the Mystery Novel," "The Novel as Parody: Sterne's Tristram Shandy"), Shklovskii devised a "grammar" for novels - or rather, for what he considered the "typical," that is, the ideal, novel.¹² His schema reduce even the most complex psychological narrative to a mechanical stringing-together of parts into wholes: puns become motifs, motifs are expanded into episodes, episodes into plots, and plots (often via "stepped" or "staircase" construction) into novels. Shklovskii treats these accretive components as elements to be valued by the novelist largely because they are so easily manipulated from the outside: framed, obstructed, braked, and laid bare. Such processes are their own reward. Plot with any larger purpose is an embarrassment or an accident; even in so powerful a figure as Don Quixote, character is assumed to be born out of the novel's structure and not the other way around.

But as Jurij Striedter, one of the Formalists' most sagacious critics, has noted, Shklovskii's reductionism is a rather complex affair.¹³ The device of ostranenie ("defamiliarization") could be applied either ethically - linking it with social and moral criticism - or purely aesthetically. An example of ethical defamiliarization would be Shklovskii's references in his 1917 essay "Art as Device" to Tolstoi's "Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse," or, more famously, to Natasha at the Opera from War and Peace: in such situations, social or artistic convention is indeed "laid bare" but not on behalf of any neutral, disinterested perception of reality. Tolstoi frees up a scene through parody only to reattach it immediately to his own moral code. Theoretically, Shklovskii feels more at home with the second, purer, ethically neutral type of ostranenie, that which loosens art from life for its own sake. Its sole purpose is to revitalize our curiosity about life, which, paradoxically, entails reassuring us over and over that art is not life, and especially not the tedious, shabby everyday life that in Russian has its own derogatory term, byt. Shklovskii sees defamiliarization at work everywhere. In novels as different as Evgenii Onegin, Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, Little Dorrit, and Belyi's Kotik Letaev, Shklovskii assumes that the novelist's primary aim (and that which justifies the great length and complexity of novels) is to mislead and surprise the reader by constructing - and then violating - an expectancy.

To be sure, this method serves some novels better than others. It is hampered by an exceedingly static notion of "surprise," in which reader, work, and outside context are so unchangingly homogenous over time that

the identical devices continue to shock and delight, and also by an unrealistic faith in the power of parody to remain surprising (or even mildly interesting) over long stretches of text. Most unsettling, perhaps, in its implications for the novel is the Formalist passion for "newness at any price," predicated on the dismal thought that the material of the world, unless consciously deformed in some way, can offer no more than the same familiar old content. Familiarity is likened to aesthetic death. Now, stable content is indeed what many readers love in their favorite novels. But in principle, Shklovskii resists any appreciation of novels as "contemporary epics of the everyday," lovingly devoted to accumulation and conservation of detail. He insists that in novels as elsewhere, "a poet removes all signs from their places; an artist always incites resurrections among things."¹⁴ Pushkin and Sterne, with their self-conscious poeticity, heightened sense of symmetry and masterful play with convention, lent themselves readily to this type of analysis. But the indifference of Formalist theory to any sustained quest undertaken by a complex, earnest personality - indeed, to any emotional reaction other than surprise - severely limits its scope. Neither the creating author, the created characters nor the receiving reader are credited with any cumulative development over time; and thus a model that is adequate to folktales, fables, short stories and detective fiction fails to register the one thing that novels have in such abundance: space and duration.

As Jurij Striedter remarks, therefore, Shklovskii's theory of the novel works wholly well only at the extremes of the genre (p. 36). It can be applied to tightly plotted, formulaic prose (mysteries or detective stories), or to novels with no plot at all or with trivial or parodied plots. But it excludes values that a common reader might seek in novels: psychological motivation, inner crises that are real but not the reader's own, a narrator willing to invest emotionally in the telling of a story, a world view that invites us to risk something by entering it. Little wonder that Shklovskii devoted one of his most insightful essays to Vasilii Rozanov's late, quasi-fictional collections of aphorisms and scattered domestic observations. Solitaria and Fallen Leaves.¹⁵But few readers of novels, I believe, would agree with Shklovskii that Rozanov's "bushels" of dead leaves, designed as a tribute to the pre-Gutenberg era and intended to herald the end of literature, are a powerful new literary device and a brave new genre: "novels without motivations."

In his major Formalist works on Russian prose from his early period (1918-24), Boris Eikhenbaum was as much of an innovator as Shklovskii -but less willing to provoke controversy at any price.¹⁶ Sensitive to biography, to the problems of psychology and to individualized literary

style (notably the stylized oral folk discourse known as skaz), Eikhenbaum considered ostranenie a rather crude device, overly dependent on the reader's personal emotional, or even physiological, response and thus a threat to a work-centered poetics.¹⁷ Indeed, his special contribution to a theory of prose, quite Aristotelian in its inspiration, was to exile from the realm of art the raw spontaneous reaction - what he called dushevnye emotions - and demonstrate an author's commitment to designing impersonal, technical, so-called dukhovnye (that is, spiritual-aesthetic) emotions.

To this end, scandalously, Eikhenbaum took on the most canonized "civic" and "realist" writers of the Russian tradition, Gogol and Tolstoi. What mattered for both, he argued, was not the outside world and its ethical dilemmas but the creation of a literary work as a dynamic system. In his analysis of "The Overcoat," for example, he tried to show how Gogol constructed two competing narrative lines - one pathetic and the other comic - whose conflict is stage-managed solely by verbal mimicry, not by any concern for the poor hero's psychology or fate. In the first installment of his huge Tolstoi project (Molodoi Tolstoi [The Young Tolstoi], 1918-22: the only volume that can be called Formalist), Eikhenbaum put forth the startling thesis that Tolstoi's early diaries were not a cri de cœur but something akin to emotional "stylization," an exaggerated literary plan projected onto life. In its extreme demands and inevitable fallings-short, this stylized diary then served Tolstoi as a practice ground for the great repentent novelistic character-studies to come: Olenin, Bezukhov, Levin, Nekhliudov. Continuing to whittle down the myth of the autobiographical or confessional novel, Eikhenbaum's essay "On Tolstoi's Crises" argues that throughout his life - not only in 1881 - Tolstoi was in a state of crisis and revolt, largely against the two clichés that governed the nineteenth-century novel: heroism and romantic love.¹⁸ When Tolstoi later shifted to a "deliberate primitivism" and displayed more enthusiasm for proverbs than for realistic narrative plots, this was less a moral turn on his part than it was a reaction against the preoccupation with detail that was the hallmark of the realistic novel.

In his early work on Tolstoi, then, Eikhenbaum marshalled Tolstoi's horror at imitativeness to bolster the Formalist claim that literary creativity is motivated largely by parody of earlier forms - even in the work of the century's most driven literary moralist. However, in the final chapter of his study on Lermontov (which deals with Lermontov's prose in the context of the Russian novel of the 1830s), Eikhenbaum reveals his good sense and scholarly fastidiousness in the face of counter-intuitive Formalist dogma. He implicitly parts company with Shklovskii on the genesis of novels, and questions as well Shklovskii's thesis that the quest for newness, self-

conscious narration and a laying-bare of formal devices (along the lines of Sterne) is the primary drive-belt of literary development. Surveying the Russian novel-writing community of the 1830s, Eikhenbaum notes that its most active practitioners - writers of widely varying talent, such as Marlinskii, Dal, Veltman, Bulgarin, Odoevskii, the now-forgotten Voskre-senskii - mastered with marvelous ease not only the framing and beading techniques for building long narratives out of short stories but also all the trademarks of Sternean narration: quarrels with one's readers, prefaces occurring in the middle of the book, bumbling lyrical digressions, unmotivated play with the plot. Anyone, it seemed, could get good at these banal devices - and rather than prick readers on to a greater awareness of life and art, such conventions had begun to anaesthetize them. The best novelists were already parodying themselves at it. As a genre, the Russian novel was standing still.

It was Lermontov's achievement, then, in his A Hero of Our Time, to do the genuinely new thing. He invested old-fashioned psychological unity in a single hero, found satisfactory natural motivation for descriptions and events by means of interlocking narrators, and thereby brought the "tiresome play with form" to an end. The road was open for the great realistic novel masterpieces. Here Eikhenbaum, while remaining a Formalist, shows himself willing to serve the individual artwork with the theory, and not - as so often is the case with the more pugnacious, aphoristic Shklovskii - illustrate a bold theoretical premise with snatches of fictional text.

As a theorist of literature, our third exemplary Formalist critic, Iurii Tynianov, never turned his attention to the novel per se. For a mind so partial to functions and systems, it would have been an unruly genre of choice. But Tynianov was the sole Formalist scholar actually to practice novel-writing on a wide and successful scale (his fine "novelizations" of the lives of Kyukhelbeker, Griboedov, and Pushkin); for all his abstract schematics in the realm of theory, he had a keen practitioner's sense of the organic growth of novelistic worlds from within. One area where Tynianov applied his ideas on stylization and parody to two Russian prosewriters of genius is especially relevant, for it provides a model (surely of great importance to Bakhtin) for the emergence of Dostoevskii's psychological novel out of Gogol's grotesque masks and types. In so doing, it altered the way literary influence itself was understood.

In "Dostoevskii and Gogol: Toward a Theory of Parody" (1921), Tynianov tackles the problem of creative parody - but not merely as a means for making something strange.¹⁹ Working within the orthodox Formalist assumption that "the essence of parody lies in the mechanization

[the deadening or bowdlerization] of a device," Tynianov shows how Dostoevskii struggled with and transcended Gogol, first through the homage of imitation and stylization and then, by degrees, through exaggeration and parody. In the process, Dostoevskii distorted and recombined Gogolian phrases; he reanimated Gogol's heroes and introduced them into his own characters' world view, forcing his own heroes to read them and be appalled at them. Gradually, the vacuous Gogolian mask and literary "type" - verbal patter sounding over empty space - were either exposed as such or else became the very different Dostoevskian mask, under whose stunning, static, but ultimately demonic exterior (Svidrigailov, Stavrogin) a genuine personality or character was always ripening. Tynianov intimates that such a complex, multifaceted portrayal of character, the hallmark and pride of the realistic novel, could not have resulted from any mere imitation of real, lived life. Real life has other tasks - and neither the time nor the controlled skill required to work out the necessary forms. Novelistic technique like this could only be the fruit of an intensely competitive intra-literary evolution. And thus "creative parody" presents itself as a central subject for Formalist research.

Tynianov's second major contribution to a theory of the novel - his writings on literary tradition, evolution, and "literary fact" - was less tied to issues of individual influence.²⁰ In fact it worked in the opposite direction. Tynianov insisted that the literary historian must deal not solely with masterpieces, which always defy systematic categorization, but with the many small, routine, popular examples of a genre, whose very ordinariness permits us to see clearly their generic functions and formal elements. Here the novel was superb material, for from the 1830s onward, in Russia as in the West, it stood unrivalled in accessibility, popularity, and number of mediocre bestsellers. By encouraging work on the mainstream novel, Eikhenbaum and Tynianov, by the mid-19 20s, had inspired a school of prose studies that added greatly to our knowledge of individual Russian novelists (especially Bestuzhev-Marlinskii and Veltman) and of vital pre-novelistic genres (most importantly, the sentimental tale and literature of travel).²¹ Among the students of that school was Lidia Ginzburg.

Lidia Ginzburg's work on narrative, and especially her 1971 monograph On Psychological Prose, is arguably the most comprehensive synthesis of Russian thinking about the novel (in its mimetic, Utopian, religious-moral and aesthetic phases) outside the Bakhtinian framework. Tynianov's most talented pupil, Ginzburg was also an enthusiastic promoter of Belinskii and a close student of human psychology - which received its most subtle literary reflection, she felt, in the prose of Lev Tolstoi. Hers is an impure, revisionist Formalism with a human face, one that had learned from Lev

Vygotskii, Carl Jung and William James. "I've never been too bothered by whether or not literary scholarship is a science," she confessed in an interview in 1978.²² She was certain, in any case, that it was not a progressive science; and although some theorizing was essential for precision, any strict structuralist approach "becomes benignly amorphous as it gets more theoretical." Only formulaic genres such as folklore and mythology can be elucidated in that way, she remarked; in complex works, "formalized precision can often lead in practice to utterly arbitrary interpretations."

Ginzburg's contribution to a theory of the novel in On Psychological Prose might be summed up in three basic theses.²³ First there is the "human document" and its role in the molding of fictional character. Art is never separated from life, she insists; we continually aestheticize real-life events and genres, and our behavioral models, personal letters, memoirs, and fantasy-variations on the outside world move back and forth across the art-life border. When depicted in art, human personality is not a structure in the sense of a strict pattern or a straitjacket (the way Belinskian "type" is often erroneously understood); but it is a structure in the dynamic sense that it integrates impressions over time in a recognizable way and gives shape to values or potentials projected into the future. Drawing on Saint-Simon's Mémoires, Rousseau's Confessions, Montaigne's Essais, and in the Russian context on Bakunin, Belinskii, and Herzen, Ginzburg discusses various stages in the "capturing" of personality (Classical, Sentimental, Romantic). Only with the novelists of the early Realist period, she claims, is a binary concept of character - the juxtaposition of fixed, opposed, ideal attributes (duty versus love, head versus heart) - replaced by a fundamentally different and genuinely developmental model.

Ginzburg identifies this new model of explanatory psychologism in the novel with "obuslovlennost'," the "conditionedness" of our cumulative, albeit transitory, existence.²⁴ She attributes the technical breakthrough to Lev Tolstoi, and a careful analysis of his theories of the psyche constitutes Ginzburg's second thesis. Tolstoi devised an artistic method for displaying the dynamics of the mind in all its variety, hesitation, and inarticulateness. He could depict personality as completely fluid and yet - here was his wizardry - as fully, even instantly identifiable. Expose us to one of these bumblingly fluid Tolstoian heroes and immediately we know "who he is," even though individuation in Tolstoi's texts is neither essentialist nor coded in psychoanalytic categories. The characters are open to "life in general," to the unstable stimulations of conversation as a social act. But no matter how they flounder and beg for direction, no omniscient narrator can help them out: because from one minute to the next the heroes themselves do not

know what they wish to say, how they will manage to say it, or how they wish to appear.

In brief, Ginzburg as critic does for Tolstoi the novelist what Bakhtin does for Dostoevskii. She makes him the pinnacle of that long search in literature for a means to reflect the multiplicity and openness of consciousness. Bakhtin, it might be recalled, dismissed Tolstoi as a "monolithically monologic" writer who insisted on owning every idea in his fiction and practiced "absolute language" in his novels;²⁵ Ginzburg has no patience with that verdict. In her opinion, Dostoevskian heroes - if compared with their Tolstoian counterparts - are selfish, socially useless, rhetorically unpersuasive and rather artificial constructs; for "the protagonist of a novel of ideas cannot by its very nature be the projection of an empirical personality" (p. 245).

Ginzburg's third thesis, on ethical evaluation, reconnects her with the social and moral categories of Russian novel criticism. Literature is indeed bound up with ethics, she writes, but in Eikhenbaum's spirit she insists that our ethical reactions to art are not naive: these reactions are designed by authors in accordance with ordered aesthetic norms. By assuming static natures and "typological masks," rationalist and classicist poetics could control readerly reaction rather easily - "a man lied; therefore he was a liar" (p. 334). The age of the realist novel, however, coincided with the challenge of atheism and moral relativism. Norms were in dispute, God did not exist, nature was seen as in flux, and novelists - Herzen, Tolstoi, Gorkii - were expected to work out systems of «on-religious ethics. In principle such systems could not hold. The psychological novel, built on introspection ("its material was the self-aware and self-observant individual" [p. 335]), could not trust its own transitory voices. Thus surrogates for ethical systems were found, in determinism, in the unmasking of convention, in a substitution of honest striving for actual achievement. The psychological stereotype in literature had moved from static opposed qualities, through stable (yet dynamic and productive) features, to the purposeful, but only partially free, impulse (p. 344). Here Tolstoi, fascinated as always by the ways in which we are not free, provides a valuable "typology of impulses" (p. 363). It classifies the outer limits of free initiative recognizable in an era where both human nature and ethical choice were seen as conditioned and severely constrained.

In addition to Ginzburg, the other force in literary theory inspired by Russian Formalist thinking is, of course, the structural semiotics of the Tartu School. But with the exception of the work on Evgenii Onegin by Iurii Lotman, one of the world's great Pushkinists, the Tartu semioticians did not produce theories of the novel as a genre. Interesting local commen-

tary - say, Lotman on the role of "home" in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita²⁶- does draw on novels, but the fact that Structuralism deals more inventively with categories of space than of time has tended, perhaps, to distance the supremely temporal novel from its theoretical purview. For unmatched insights into the potential of novelistic time, we must turn to the final and greatest Russian theorist of the genre.

Mikhail Bakhtin came slowly to the novel. By the time of his seminal essays of the 1930s - "Toward a Prehistory of the Novelistic Word," "The Word in the Novel," "Epic and Novel," and his lengthy study of the chronotope²⁷ - he had been writing and lecturing as a moral philosopher and phenomenologist for over a decade. The novel eventually became the literary receptacle for those values that Bakhtin most prized: individual responsibility and irreplaceability; "participative autonomy" (committing to the risk of interaction, but "without an alibi," that is, in an unrepeatable time and place); the ability to be guided in life by a series of "provisional consummations"; and lastly, a willingness to see difference rather than sameness as the ground both for human compatibility and for literary science. Thinking as a philosopher, Bakhtin had discovered the potential of the dialogic utterance to transmit and preserve individual experience in a maximally accurate, flexible manner. And in place of the quest for a static essence that had fueled Hegelian aesthetics (and many other nostalgic sociologies of the novel), he recommended that we begin closer to home, by engaging language "novelistically" to express relatedness in process.

Bakhtin arrived at a theory of the novel, then, only after he had worked out an approach to language as a whole, and after he had exposed what, for him, were the flaws in a "materialist aesthetics" (as exemplified by early Formalism). He challenged the Formalists' indifference to content, their exile of the linguistic and experiential products of everyday life from the realm of art, their "physiological hedonism" in devices like defamiliariza-tion, and, centrally, their assumption that to "specify" something meant to isolate and then to manipulate it.²⁸ For in fact, Bakhtin maintained, specification occurs only when discrete, vulnerable entities are brought into contact, when a boundary is drawn between two selves and when each self then risks to be changed by interaction across that boundary.²⁹ This dynamic, so alien to a Formalist understanding of literary professionalism, lies at the base of Bakhtin's non-referential - that is, responsive - theory of language, arrived at long before he began to theorize about novels.

Bakhtin's approach to specificity, and to the whole vexed problem of "totality" once the specific has been achieved, is one convenient point of entry into his theory of the novel. In brief, his argument is this. An aesthetic reaction (unlike our scattered everyday acts of attention) is a reaction to the

whole of something: to an integral field, or to the whole of another consciousness. As a reaction, it can be grasped only from the outside; but it must also intuitively sense the other's internal reality, a task realizable only by a mind that is permeated with love. (For this reason, Bakhtin would not acknowledge a "hermeneutics of suspicion," so central to postmodernist investigations of literature.) The artistic whole is a recognizable unity or "unit", and here Bakhtin prefers the word "uniqueness" (edinstvennost') to "unity" (edinstvo), since an artistic "unit" is neither homogenous nor closed. It includes an awareness of what is beyond it and what is not yet, of what can be brought into being only by future interactions - and even then only partially. Thus the whole is never a matter of merely "filling in": clarifying the plot, or carrying out routine acts of catharsis or closure. Totality can only be the result of past history plus present and (unknown) future potentials. And whereas all artistic genres provide some opportunities for such totality, none, Bakhtin came to believe, could accommodate it as generously as the novel.

This understanding of wholeness enabled Bakhtin to move beyond several dead-ended molds into which the novel as a genre had been cast. It freed him, first, from rhetorical explanations, which defined the novel as non-art or as half-art. Such definitions had impeded the quest for an aesthetics of the genre, since, viewed as a branch of rhetoric, the novel could be judged "integral" and "whole" merely by its degree of mimesis, by its success at reflecting the outside world "as it supposedly was." It also improved upon early Formalist attempts (largely by Shklovskii) to account for the rise of the novel, all of which faltered when it came to a vision of the novelistic whole (the Formalists, more comfortable with tidier units like puns and folktales, ultimately could not conceptualize the novel except as an accretion of smaller atomized parts). And Bakhtin's special feel for novelistic wholeness freed him, finally, from the Hegelian anxieties suffered by literary theorists like Lukács, for whom, in the spirit of Romantic anti-capitalism, the novel remained a "degraded epic in search of a lost totality."³⁰ This search might be bracing and even beneficial, as Lukacs felt it was ("The novel," he wrote in chapter 4 of Theory of the Novel, "is the art-form of virile maturity, in contrast to the normative childlikeness of the epic"); but for the Hegelian, the genre was always problematic. And it was doomed.