The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 129

moment. During this brief and narrow passage, two perspectives emerge in what had been one coordinated human being. But who precisely is the “he” / “him” referred to in the above passage? By the end of the dying, the kicked and hacked corpse has “nothing in common with him.” So “he” still exists. But where? Is Hadji Murad “dead”? Nowhere in his fictive or theoretical writings does Tolstoy insist on an afterlife, only on “light,” and he adamantly rejects taking any miracles in the Gospels literally, especially the Resurrection. Such delicate, God-like maneuverings by Tolstoy around the life–death boundary are not unique to his war scenes, of course. The culminating moments of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and the flickering final seconds of Anna Karenina perishing under a train produce similar distancings and doubled perspectives. But for all that he excelled at sickness and suicide, Tolstoy returned again and again to the behavior of men under fire as a recurrent marker of courage and honorableness. One cannot imagine Dostoevsky doing war stories – even though the most formative moment of his own life was a scaffold experience, where certain death, he believed, was three minutes away.

Biographies of events, and biographies that are quests for the Word

As a framework for these and other paradoxes in the fiction of Russia’s two greatest novelists, it is helpful to keep in mind their biographies. These celebrated lives qualify as novels in their own right – and in the minds of some, as legend or saints’ lives. Both writers drew deeply on their own experience for their art. Both grew into the role of national prophet and participated in their own mythologization. Each had a “break” in his literary career.

For Dostoevsky (1821–81), the break was traumatic, geographical, and coerced from the outside. In 1849 he was arrested for illicit political activity and condemned to death by firing squad – a sentence that was commuted at the last minute to four years’ hard labor in Siberia followed by six years’ duty as a garrison soldier. Between 1850 and 1859, which coincided with the more general “break” in the Russian nineteenth century, Dostoevsky lived a life apart from his nation’s literature and society. In Siberia he experienced a re-conversion to Russian Orthodoxy as well as the onset of chronic epilepsy, so severe that he referred to his attacks as “little deaths.” In 1860 Dostoevsky returned, much changed, to a much changed homeland. Although he had written startlingly innovative works before his arrest, most notably Poor Folk and The Double (both 1846), his name was largely forgotten. He had to create himself anew.