The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 127

With a brief aside on poetry in an age of prose, this chapter is limited to the work of three titans: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Our strategy will be to take themes and genres familiar from the Romantic era – issues of rank, honor, embarrassment, comedies of self-improvement, the “love story” and “death story” – and suggest how they continue to live inside new literary worlds and answer to new realities. In the previous chapter, for example, we saw that the duel of honor, a central ritual of self-respect and the cause of death for two great writers, survived into the Realist period largely in parodied forms. (This is not to say, however, that Realist-era authors were immune to its appeal in their own lives. In May 1861, Tolstoy venomously provoked a quarrel with the placid Turgenev, his elder by ten years, over a private matter – the latter man’s education of his illegitimate daughter – and challenged Turgenev to a duel with pistols. Friends intervened and the confrontation was averted.) Perhaps because it was so often parodied, dueling retained some literary currency. Other canonized Romantic themes were not so much parodied as pried open, examined from the inside, and given a deeper consciousness.

Consider, as a test case, Gogol’s Petersburg stories of urban poverty and humiliation. His narrators look in on the story from the outside with some glee, moving the sufferer rather quickly to his denouement. Akaky Akakievich falls ill and dies within a page, Poprishchin is committed to a madhouse in half-a-dozen diary entries after which we can assume he dies there – or at least falls silent. Following in Gogol’s footsteps, Dostoevsky takes the same clerk but postpones the end, endows him with more self-awareness and pride, and cuts off the escape. Madness must be lived through at length, and dying people talk right down to the finish line. Since Dostoevsky’s clerks are not just alone but terribly lonely, they seek wherever possible to turn their inner torment into an addressed dialogue. Thus – to take only the pre-exile fiction – DostoevskyfirstreworksPoprishchin’sclerklyconfessions as an epistolary novel (Poor Folk, 1846); then as a transcript of schizophrenia, with several sides of a single personality in erratic, edgy communication with one another (The Double, 1846); finally as a dream-fantasy addressed equally to the reader and to a possibly dreamed-up love object (White Nights, 1848). As these lengthy painful exercises unfold, the hero’s humiliation, embarrassment, and need to hide from himself become so great that his consciousness must “burst out” into some sort of freedom – but not as Gogol’s heroes do, not one-way, disappearing down the street. In Dostoevsky, bursts or explosions are contained within the narrative, as “scandal,” and they tend only to confuse the survivors. They resolve nothing. Bursting out into the freedom to commit murder – Raskolnikov’s route – is an impulse we begin to understand only after the whole length of Crime and