The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 37

modern as well as medieval, is that he does not return. He perfects himself and withdraws further, into increasingly remote geographical spaces. Others may follow him into that wilderness, but the hero does not need others to realize his truth. He is complete in himself.

We might say, then, that relations between righteous persons and their Truth remain stable and unambiguous, but relations between a pravednik and other human beings can differ widely – both inside fiction, and between fictional characters and the reader. Consider some examples from famous Russian novels. Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment is a pravednitsa; she never doubts the rightness of her views over the vacillating anguish of Raskolnikov. But she rarely preaches, either to him or to the reader. Only when directly interrogated does she share the grounds of her faith, and then reluctantly. She is aware of her truth unconsciously, in action, because she is fused with it. Her concern and love are directed at all times toward saving the tormented hero. Such self-effacement is a trademark of Dostoevsky’s righteous people, whose gestures are turned wholly outward, and who (unless ill with epilepsy and raving) tend to be short on words. The chattering, opinionated confessant in Dostoevsky is rarely worthy of trust.

Tolstoy’s variants on the truth-bearing type are different. His heroes tend to be oriented inward, constantly talking to themselves or “thinking out loud,” and they address their truth to the reader (whom they wish to persuade) more directly than to their fictive co-characters. Autobiographical heroes such as Konstantin Levin from Anna Karenina or Dmitry Nekhlyudov from the novel Resurrection (1898) are genuine seekers who come to know Truth. But the urgency of this search to their own desperate selves is such that they have no energy to attend to others as others; other people’s needs and experiences serve largely as a backboard against which to enlighten their own consciousness. (Tolstoy was of course alert to this selfish, self-inflating dynamic, and strove helplessly throughout his life to attain an unconscious humility.) It is characteristic of the gentler, more tolerant Chekhov that he created stories designed to truth-monger in reverse, showing a greater wisdom in losing one’s righteousness than in proving it. The Duel (1891) is an exemplary tale in this regard: each antagonist begins confident that he knows and can expose the fraudulence of the values that the other lives by – and manages to do so very skillfully. But at the end, both admit that “No one knows the whole truth.”

Very occasionally a failed pravednik, for all the indisputability of his failure, utterly wins the sympathy of the reader, the author, and the fictional world in which he lives. He can even be rewarded, although not with salvation. Such is the eponymous novelist-hero of The Master and Margarita (1940) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). This extraordinary novel takes place simultaneously in