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Russian literature
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The 19th century
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Vasily Zhukovsky
Konstantin Batyushkov
Yevgeny Baratynsky
Aleksandr
Sergeyevich Pushkin
"The Bronze Horseman"
Illustrations by Alexandre Benois
"Eugene Onegin"
CANTO I,
CANTO II,
CANTO III,
CANTO IV,
CANTO V,
CANTO VI,
CANTO VII,
CANTO VIII
collection:
Portrait in Russian Art
(18th-19th centuries)
Mikhail Lermontov
"Death of the Poet"
"Mtsyri"
"The Demon"
Illustrations by
Mikhail Vrubel
Aleksandr Griboyedov
"Woe
From Wit"
Nikolay Gogol
Fyodor
Tyutchev
Afanasy Fet
Nikolay Nekrasov
Aleksandr Ostrovsky
Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin
Vissarion Belinsky
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
Nikolay Dobrolyubov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"The Idiot"
Leo Tolstoy
"The Kreutzer Sonata"
Ivan Turgenev
Sergey Aksakov
Aleksandr Herzen
Ivan Goncharov
Nikolay Leskov
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
Vsevolod Garshin
Anton Chekhov
"Uncle Vanya"
Pyotr
Chaadayev
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The 19th century
The Russian 19th century is one of the most fruitful
periods in world literature. Several features, in
addition to those mentioned above, distinguish the
literary culture of these years:
(1) Literature enjoyed greater prestige in Russia
than in the West, and its achievements were
sometimes thought (as
Dostoyevsky
once declared) to be the justification for the
Russian people’s very existence. Literary critics
were typically the leaders of Russian intellectual
life and political thought.
(2) Literature and criticism were expected to
fulfill functions, such as philosophical, moral, and
religious analysis, that in Europe were typically
assigned to distinct disciplines. Thus
Dostoyevsky’s
works are central to the histories of all these
areas of Russian thought. One can see why the
highest achievement of Russian literature was
probably the philosophical novel.
(3) In the 19th (still more, the 20th) century,
politics and literature were intimately connected,
and a writer or critic was often called upon to be a
political prophet.
The
"Golden Age" of poetry
Readers relying on translations usually think of
Russian literature almost exclusively in terms of
prose, but for Russians their tradition is also, and
perhaps equally, one of poetry. The 19th century
began with the “Golden Age” of Russian poetry. An
aristocratic sensibility, the culture of salons, an
aura of friendly intimacy, and genres suitable to
this ethos marked the poetry of this period. The
romantic poet Vasily Zhukovsky is celebrated
for several translations or adaptations that are
major poems in their own right, including versions
of the English poet
Thomas Gray’s
An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1802 and
1839),
Homer’s Odyssey (completed 1847), and
Lord Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon”
(1822). His “Svetlana” (1813) reworks the German
poet Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore.”
Konstantin Batyushkov was noted for playful
and erotic as well as melancholy verse and for the
elegy Umerayushchy Tass (1817; “The Dying Tasso”).
The “Pushkin Pleiad,” consisting of poets of
Pushkin’s generation and closely associated with
him, included Anton Delvig, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky,
and, most important, Yevgeny Baratynsky, who
was a superb philosophical “poet of thought.”
Vasily Zhukovsky

Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky (Russian:
Васи́лий Андре́евич Жуко́вский; February
9 [O.S. January 29] 1783 – April 24 [O.S.
April 12] 1852) was the foremost Russian
poet of the 1810s.
He is credited with introducing the
Romantic Movement to Russian literature.
The main body of his literary output
consists of free translations covering
an impressively wide range of poets from
Ferdowsi to Schiller. Quite a few of his
translations proved to be better-written
and more enduring works than their
originals.
Life
Zhukovsky was born in Mishenskoe,
near Tula Oblast, Russia, the
illegitimate son of a Russian landowner
named Afanasi Bunin (related to the
Modernist writer Ivan Bunin) and his
Turkish housekeeper Salha, who had been
brought to Tula as a prisoner of the
Russo-Turkish war. She was later
christened as Elizaveta Demyanovna
Turchaninova. The infant Zhukovsky was
given the surname and patronymic of a
poor family friend named Andrey
Zhukovsky, who formally adopted him, but
he was raised by Bunin's wife and her
sisters and later ennobled in his own
right. In his youth, he lived and
studied at the Moscow University's
Noblemen's Pension, where he was heavily
influenced by Freemasonry, English
Sentimentalism, and the German Sturm und
Drang. He also frequented the house of
Nikolay Karamzin, the preeminent Russian
man of letters and the founding editor
of The European Messenger (also known in
English as The Herald of Europe).
In 1802, Zhukovsky published a free
translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard" in The
Messenger. The translation introduced
Russian readers to his trademark
sentimental-melancholy style and
instantly made him a household name.
Today it is conventionally cited as the
starting point of Russian Romanticism.
In 1808, Karamzin asked Zhukovsky to
take over the editorship of the
Messenger. The young poet used this
position to explore Romantic themes,
motifs, and genres. He was also among
the first Russian writers to cultivate
the mystique of the Romantic poet. He
dedicated much of his best poetic work
to his half-niece Maria (Masha)
Protasova, the daughter of his
half-sister, with whom he had a
passionate but Platonic affair. His
efforts to get permission to marry Masha
never succeeded. In 1812 Zhukovsky was
present at the Battle of Borodino
outside Moscow, after which he served
with Kutuzov's general staff. After the
war he took up a position as Russian
tutor to the Grand Duchess Alexandra
Fedorovna, the German wife of the future
tsar Nicholas I. Many of Zhukovsky's
best translations from German were made
as exercises for Alexandra.
In later life, Zhukovsky made a second
great contribution to Russian culture as
an educator and patron of the arts. In
1826, he was appointed tutor to the
tsarevich, the son of Alexandra
Fedorovna and Nicholas I, later to
become Tsar Alexander II. Zhukvosky's
progressive program of education so
deeply influenced Alexander that the
liberal reforms of the 1860s can be
partially attributed to it. The poet
also used his high station at court to
take up the cudgels for such
free-thinking writers as Mikhail
Lermontov, Alexander Herzen, Taras
Shevchenko (Zhukovsky was instrumental
in buying him out of serfdom), and the
Decembrists. On Pushkin's death in 1837,
Zhukovsky stepped in as his literary
executor, not only rescuing his work
from a hostile censorship, including
several unpublished masterpieces, but
also diligently collecting and preparing
Pushkin's legacy for publication.
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, he
nurtured the genius and promoted the
career of Nikolay Gogol, another close
personal friend. In this sense, he acted
behind-the-scenes as a kind of
impresario for the Russian Romantic
Movement that he set in motion. During
his later years he lived mostly in
Germany where he married a local girl
and fathered two children, Pavel and
Alexandra. Zhukovsky died in
Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1852, aged 69.
His body was returned to Russia and
buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra
cemetery in St. Petersburg.
Career
According to Nabokov, Zhukovsky
belonged to the class of poets who
incidentally verge on greatness but
never quite attain to that glory. His
main contribution was as a stylistic and
formal innovator who borrowed liberally
from European literature in order to
provide models in Russian that could
inspire "original" works. Zhukovsky was
particularly admired for his first-rate
melodious translations of German and
English ballads.
Among these, Ludmila (1808) and its
companion piece, Svetlana (1813), are
considered landmarks in the Russian
poetic tradition. Both were free
translations of Gottfried August
Burger's well-known German ballad Lenore
-- although each interpreted the
original in a different way. Zhukovsky
characteristically translated Lenore yet
a third time as part of his efforts to
develop a natural-sounding Russian
dactylic hexameter. His many
translations of Schiller -- including
lyrics, ballads, and the drama Jungfrau
von Orleans (about Joan of Arc) --
became classic Russian works that many
consider to be of equal if not higher
quality than their originals. They were
remarkable for their psychological depth
and greatly impressed and influenced
Dostoevsky, among others. Zhukovsky's
life's work as an interpreter of
European literature probably constitutes
the most important body of literary
hermeneutics in the Russian language.
When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812,
Zhukovsky joined the Russian general
staff under Field Marshal Kutuzov. There
he wrote much patriotic verse, including
the original poem, A Bard in the Camp of
the Russian Warriors, which helped to
establish his reputation at the imperial
court. He also composed the lyrics for
the national anthem of Imperial Russia,
"God Save the Tsar!" After the war, he
became a courtier in St. Petersburg,
where he founded the jocular Arzamas
literary society in order to promote
Karamzin's European-oriented,
anti-classicist aesthetics. Members of
the Arzamas included the teenage
Alexander Pushkin, who was rapidly
emerging as Zhukovsky's heir apparent.
The two became lifelong friends, and
although Pushkin eventually outgrew the
older poet's literary influence, he
increasingly relied on his protection
and patronage. Following the example of
his mentor Karamzin, Zhukovsky travelled
extensively in Europe throughout his
life, meeting and corresponding with
world-class cultural figures like Goethe
or the landscape painter Caspar David
Friedrich. One of his early
acquaintances was the popular German
writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué,
whose prose novella Undine was a
European best-seller. In the late 1830s,
Zhukovsky published a highly-original
verse translation of Undine that
reestablished his place in the poetic
avant-garde. Written in a waltzing
hexameter, the work became the basis for
a classic Russian ballet.
In 1841, Zhukovsky retired from court
and settled in Germany, where he married
Baltic German Elisabeth von Reutern, the
18-year-old daughter of an artist friend
Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern. The couple
had two children, including Alexandra,
who had an affair with Grand Duke Alexei
Alexandrovich. The aged poet devoted
much of his remaining life to a
hexameter translation of Homer's
Odyssey, which he finally published in
1849. Although the translation was far
from accurate, it became a classic in
its own right and occupies a notable
place in the history of Russian poetry.
Some scholars argue that both his
Odyssey and Undina -- as long narrative
works -- made an important, though
oblique contribution to the development
of the Russian novel.
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Konstantin Batyushkov

born May 18 [May 29, New Style], 1787,
Vologda, Russia
died July 7 [July 19], 1855, Vologda
Russian elegiac poet whose sensual and
melodious verses were said to have
influenced the great Russian poet
Aleksandr Pushkin.
Batyushkov’s early childhood was spent
in the country on his father’s estate.
When he was 10 he went to Moscow, where
he studied the classics and learned
French and Italian, languages that were
to have an important influence on his
style of writing. In 1802 he went to St.
Petersburg, living for a time with an
uncle, Mikhail Muravyov, a writer and
poet. He served in the army during the
campaigns of 1813–14 against Napoleon.
Afterward, he became a prominent member
of Arzamas (a literary group formed by
the followers of Nikolay Karamzin, who
advocated the modernization of the
Russian literary language).
Batyushkov’s literary output was not
large—a few elegies and lyrics and some
free translations of amorous epigrams
from the Greek—but his verses are unique
in their Italianate quality, producing a
musical softness and sweetness. His
poetry, written between 1809 and 1812,
brought him fame. His collected works
appeared in 1817, and shortly afterward
he ceased writing. Suffering from mental
illness, he was sent abroad in hope of a
cure, which was never achieved.
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Yevgeny Baratynsky

Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (Boratynsky
Russian: Евге́ний Абра́мович
Бараты́нский (Боратынский), 2 March [O.S.
19 February] 1800 – July 11, 1844) was
lauded by Alexander Pushkin as the
finest Russian elegiac poet. After a
long period when his reputation was on
the wane, Baratynsky was rediscovered by
Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky as a
supreme poet of thought.
Life
Of noble ancestry, Baratynsky was
educated at the Page Corps at St.
Petersburg, from which he was expelled
at the age of 15 after stealing a
snuffbox and five hundred roubles from
the bureau of his accessory's uncle.
After three years in the countryside and
deep emotional turmoil, he entered the
army as a private.
In 1820 the young poet made his
acquaintance with Anton Delvig, who
rallied his falling spirits and
introduced him to the literary press.
Soon Baratynsky was transferred to
Finland, where he remained six years.
His first long poem, Eda, written during
this period, established his reputation.
Through the interest of friends he
obtained leave from the tsar to retire
from the army, and settled in 1827 in
Muranovo near Moscow (now a literary
museum). There he completed his longest
work, The Gipsy, a poem written in the
style of Pushkin.
Baratynsky's family life seemed to be
happy, but a profound melancholy
remained the background of his mind and
of his poetry. He published several
books of verse that were highly valued
by Pushkin and other perceptive critics,
but met with the comparatively cool
reception of the public, and violent
ridicule on the part of the young
journalists of the "plebeian party". As
the time went by, Baratynsky's mood
progressed from pessimism to
hopelessness, and elegy became his
preferred form of expression. He died in
1844 at Naples, where he had gone in
pursuit of a milder climate.
Poetry
Baratynsky's earliest poems are
punctuated by conscious efforts to write
differently from Pushkin who he regarded
as a model of perfection. Even Eda, his
first long poem, though inspired by
Pushkin's The Prisoner of the Caucasus,
adheres to a realistic and homely style,
with a touch of sentimental pathos but
not a trace of romanticism. It is
written, like all that Baratynsky wrote,
in a wonderfully precise style, next to
which Pushkin's seems hazy. The
descriptive passages are among the best
— the stern nature of Finland was
particularly dear to Baratynsky.
His short pieces from the 1820s are
distinguished by the cold, metallic
brilliance and sonority of the verse.
They are dryer and clearer than anything
in the whole of Russian poetry before
Akhmatova. The poems from that period
include fugitive, light pieces in the
Anacreontic and Horatian manner, some of
which have been recognized as the
masterpieces of the kind, as well as
love elegies, where a delicate sentiment
is clothed in brilliant wit.
In his mature work (which includes all
his short poems written after 1829)
Baratynsky is a poet of thought, perhaps
of all the poets of the "stupid
nineteenth century" the one who made the
best use of thought as a material for
poetry. This made him alien to his
younger contemporaries and to all the
later part of the century, which
identified poetry with sentiment. His
poetry is, as it were, a short cut from
the wit of the 18th-century poets to the
metaphysical ambitions of the twentieth
(in terms of English poetry, from
Alexander Pope to T. S. Eliot).
Baratynsky's style is classical and
dwells on the models of the previous
century. Yet in his effort to give his
thought the tersest and most
concentrated statement, he sometimes
becomes obscure by sheer dint of
compression. Baratynsky's obvious labour
gives his verse a certain air of
brittleness which is at poles' ends from
Pushkin's divine, Mozartian lightness
and elasticity. Among other things,
Baratynsky was one of the first Russian
poets who were, in verse, masters of the
complicated sentence, expanded by
subordinate clauses and parentheses.
Philosophy
Baratynsky aspired after a fuller
union with nature, after a more
primitive spontaneity of mental life. He
saw the steady, inexorable movement of
mankind away from nature. The aspiration
after a more organic and natural past is
one of the main motives of Baratynsky's
poetry. He symbolized it in the growing
discord between nature's child — the
poet — and the human herd, which were
growing, with every generation, more
absorbed by industrial cares. Hence the
increasing isolation of the poet in the
modern world where the only response
that greets him is that of his own
rhymes (Rhyme, 1841).
The future of industrialized and
mechanized mankind will be brilliant and
glorious in the nearest future, but
universal happiness and peace will be
bought at the cost of the loss of all
higher values of poetry (The Last Poet).
And inevitably, after an age of
intellectual refinement, humanity will
lose its vital sap and die from sexual
impotence. Then earth will be restored
to her primaeval majesty (The Last
Death, 1827).
This philosophy, allying itself to his
profound temperamental melancholy,
produced poems of extraordinary majesty,
which can compare with nothing in the
poetry of pessimism, except Leopardi.
Such is the crushing majesty of that
long ode to dejection, Autumn (1837),
splendidly rhetorical in the grandest
manner of classicism, though with a
pronouncedly personal accent.
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Aleksandr Pushkin
Pushkin
occupies a unique place in Russian literature. It is
not just that Russians view him as their greatest
poet; he is also virtually the symbol of Russian
culture. His life, as well as his work, has acquired
mythic status. To criticize
Pushkin, or
even one of his characters—as, for example, Tatyana,
the heroine of his novel Yevgeny Onegin (written
1823–31; Eugene Onegin)—has been taken as something
akin to blasphemy.
Pushkin’s
quasi-sacred status has itself been parodied by
Russian authors, including the satirist Mikhail
Zoshchenko, the absurdist
Daniil Kharms, and, most recently, Andrey
Sinyavsky
in his Progulki s Pushkinym (1972; Strolls with
Pushkin).
Even if one sets this mythic image aside,
Pushkin
is truly one of the world’s most accomplished poets;
his verse, however, which relies on the author’s
perfect control of form, tone, and language, does
not read well in translation. Deeply playful and
experimental,
Pushkin adopted
a vast array of conflicting masks and personae. He
writes now seriously, now with irony, and now with
irony at his own irony, on moral and philosophical
themes. He is ultimately a philosophical fox,
appreciating the limitations, as well as the
virtues, of any set of ideas. A master parodist,
Pushkin wrote a
number of erotic and at times sacrilegious
mock-epics, such as “Gavriiliada” (1821; “The
Gabrieliad”), a scabrous retelling of the
Annunciation, and Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan
and Ludmila), which, after parodying epic, folk
tale, literary ballad, and romance in a spirit of
pure play, ends with a startlingly sombre epilogue.
His diverse lyrics include a series on the poet’s
double identity as artist and man of the world;
political poems that got him into trouble with the
tsar as well as poems in praise of the tsar and his
suppression of the Poles; some remarkable elegies (“Vospominaniye”
[1828; “Remembrance”]; “Elegiya” [1830; “Elegy”]);
love poems, including the “imageless” “Ya vas lyubil”
(1829; “I Loved You Once”); and powerful meditations
on human evil (“Anchar” [1828; “The Upas Tree”]; “Ne
day mne Bog soyti s uma” [1833; “God Grant I Go Not
Mad”]).
Pushkin’s
narrative poems include Tsygany (1824; “The
Gypsies”), which considers the meaning of freedom.
Plot is mere excuse for parody of literary forms and
conventions in Domik v Kolomne (1830; The Little
House in Kolomna). Most famously, Medny vsadnik
(written 1833; The Bronze Horseman), which reflects
on Peter the Great and the significance of St.
Petersburg, examines the meaning of history in
relation to individual lives. Concern with the
nature of historical causation also led to complex
formal innovations in the quasi-Shakespearean drama
Boris Godunov (written 1824–25), which reworked
Karamzin’s Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo and was
in turn reworked by other artists, notably Modest
Mussorgsky in his opera Boris Godunov (1869; revised
1874).
Pushkin’s
greatest work was probably Eugene Onegin, the first
truly great Russian novel and the source of
countless themes and images in Russian fiction.
Playful in the manner of
Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy and
Lord Byron’s
Don Juan,
it far surpasses them for sheer brilliance of form,
wit, and thought. Amid endless clever digressions,
in which the poet adopts a dazzling array of tones
and engages in myriad self-conscious self-parodies,
it tells the story of Onegin, a “superfluous
man”—that is, a man with no core or purpose to his
life—and Tatyana, who stands for authenticity in a
sea of literary or social clichés, which she somehow
manages to transcend even when she accepts them. The
work’s serial publication over several years enabled
both its own unpredictable creation and changes in
the author’s perspective to become themes of the
poem itself.
Each of
Pushkin’s four
“little tragedies,” all written in 1830, succinctly
deals with a philosophical problem. The most
remarkable, Motsart i Salyeri (Mozart and Salieri),
based on a legend that Salieri poisoned Mozart,
meditates on the nature of creativity while
introducing, in brilliantly compressed speeches,
what was to be one of the important Russian
themes—metaphysical rebellion against God.
After 1830
Pushkin turned
to prose. He wrote both a novella and a nonfictional
account—Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The Captain’s
Daughter) and Istoriya Pugachovskogo bunta (1834;
The History of Pugachev)—about the same historical
events, as if to illustrate that representing the
historical truth requires more than one genre.
Povesti pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (1831;
Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin) filters
five narratives, each a parody of a received plot,
through the minds of several narrators, collectors,
or editors. Pikovaya dama (1834; The Queen of
Spades) offers a suspenseful account of a man
seeking mystic knowledge that would enable him to
gamble without risk and, implicitly, to know the
deepest forbidden truths.
Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment may be seen as an expansion of
Pushkin’s brief
story.
Aleksandr
Sergeyevich Pushkin
"The Bronze Horseman"
Illustrations by Alexandre Benois
"Eugene Onegin"
CANTO I,
CANTO II,
CANTO III,
CANTO IV,
CANTO V,
CANTO VI,
CANTO VII,
CANTO VIII
collection:
Portrait in
Russian Art (18th-19th centuries)

1799, Moscow, Russia
died Jan. 29 [Feb. 10], 1837, St.
Petersburg
Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and
short-story writer; he has often been
considered his country's greatest poet
and the founder of modern Russian
literature.
The early years.
Pushkin's father came of an old boyar
family; his mother was a granddaughter
of Abram Hannibal, who, according to
family tradition, was an Abyssinian
princeling bought as a slave at
Constantinople (Istanbul) and adopted by
Peter the Great, whose comrade in arms
he became. Pushkin immortalized him in
an unfinished historical novel, Arap
Petra Velikogo (1827; The Negro of Peter
the Great). Like many aristocratic
families in early 19th-century Russia,
Pushkin's parents adopted French
culture, and he and his brother and
sister learned to talk and to read in
French. They were left much to the care
of their maternal grandmother, who told
Aleksandr, especially, stories of his
ancestors in Russian. From Arina
Rodionovna Yakovleva, his old nurse, a
freed serf (immortalized as Tatyana's
nurse in Yevgeny Onegin), he heard
Russian folktales. During summers at his
grandmother's estate near Moscow he
talked to the peasantsand spent hours
alone, living in the dream world of a
precocious, imaginative child. He read
widely in his father's library and
gained stimulus from the literary guests
who came to the house.
In 1811 Pushkin entered the newly
founded Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye
Selo (later renamed Pushkin) and while
there began his literary career with the
publication (1814, in Vestnik Evropy,
“The Messenger of Europe”) of his verse
epistle “To My Friend, the Poet.” In his
early verse, he followed the style of
his older contemporaries, the Romantic
poets K.N. Batyushkov and V.A. Zhukovsky,
and of the French 17th- and 18th-century
poets, especially the Vicomte de Parny.
While at the Lyceum he also began his
first completed major work, the romantic
poem Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and
Ludmila ), written in the style of the
narrative poems of Ludovico Ariosto and
Voltaire but with an old Russian
settingand making use of Russian
folklore. Ruslan, modeled on the
traditional Russian epic hero,
encounters various adventuresbefore
rescuing his bride, Ludmila, daughter of
Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev, who, on
her wedding night, has been kidnapped by
the evil magician Chernomor. The poem
flouted accepted rules and genres and
was violently attacked by both of the
established literary schools of the day,
Classicism and Sentimentalism. It
brought Pushkin fame, however, and
Zhukovsky presented his portrait to the
poet with the inscription “To the
victorious pupil from the defeated
master.”
St. Petersburg.
In 1817 Pushkin accepted a post in the
foreign office at St. Petersburg, where
he was elected to Arzamás, an exclusive
literary circle founded by his uncle's
friends. Pushkin also joined the Green
Lamp association, which, though founded
(in 1818) for discussion of literature
and history, became a clandestine branch
of a secret society, the Union of
Welfare. In his political verses and
epigrams, widely circulated in
manuscript, he made himself the
spokesman for the ideas and aspirations
of those who were to take part in the
Decembrist rising of 1825, the
unsuccessful culmination of a Russian
revolutionary movement in its earliest
stage.
Exile in the south.
For these political poems, Pushkin was
banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820
to a remote southern province. Sent
first to Yekaterinoslav (now
Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), he wasthere
taken ill and, while convalescing,
traveled in the northern Caucasus and
later to the Crimea with General
Rayevski, a hero of 1812, and his
family. The impressions he gained
provided material for his “southern
cycle” of romantic narrative poems:
Kavkazsky plennik (1820–21; The Prisoner
of the Caucasus), Bratya razboyniki
(1821–22; The Robber Brothers), and
Bakhchisaraysky fontan (1823; The
Fountain of Bakhchisaray).
Although this cycle of poems confirmed
the reputation of theauthor of Ruslan
and Ludmila and Pushkin was hailed as
theleading Russian poet of the day and
as the leader of the romantic,
liberty-loving generation of the 1820s,
he himself was not satisfied with it. In
May 1823 he started work on his central
masterpiece, the novel in verse Yevgeny
Onegin (1833), on which he continued to
work intermittently until 1831. In it he
returned to the idea of presenting a
typical figure of his own age but in a
wider setting and by means of new
artistic methods and techniques.
Yevgeny Onegin unfolds a panoramic
picture of Russian life. The characters
it depicts and immortalizes—Onegin, the
disenchanted skeptic; Lensky, the
romantic, freedom-loving poet; and
Tatyana, the heroine, a profoundly
affectionate study of Russian womanhood:
a “precious ideal,” in the poet's own
words—are typically Russian and are
shown in relationship to the social and
environmental forces by which they are
molded. Although formally the work
resembles Lord Byron's Don Juan, Pushkin
rejects Byron's subjective, romanticized
treatment in favour of objective
description and shows his hero not in
exotic surroundings but at the heart of
a Russian way of life. Thus, the action
begins at St. Petersburg, continues on a
provincial estate, then switches to
Moscow, and finally returns to St.
Petersburg.
Pushkin had meanwhile been transferred
first to Kishinyov (1820–23; now
Chişinău, Moldova) and then to Odessa
(1823–24). His bitterness at continued
exile is expressed in letters to his
friends—the first of a collection of
correspondence that became an
outstanding and enduring monument of
Russian prose. At Kishinyov, a remote
outpost in Moldavia, he devoted much
time to writing, though he alsoplunged
into the life of a society engaged in
amorous intrigue, hard drinking, gaming,
and violence. At Odessa he fell
passionately in love with the wife of
his superior, Count Vorontsov,
governor-general of the province. He
fought several duels, and eventually the
count asked for his discharge. Pushkin,
in a letter to a friend intercepted by
the police, had stated that he was now
taking “lessons in pure atheism.” This
finally led to his being again exiled to
his mother's estate of Mikhaylovskoye,
near Pskov, at the other end of Russia.
At Mikhaylovskoye.
Although the two years at Mikhaylovskoye
were unhappy for Pushkin, they were to
prove one of his most productive
periods. Alone and isolated, he embarked
on a close study of Russian history; he
came to know the peasants on the
estateand interested himself in noting
folktales and songs. During this period
the specifically Russian features of his
poetry became steadily more marked. His
ballad “Zhenikh” (1825; “The
Bridegroom”), for instance, is based on
motifs from Russian folklore; and its
simple, swift-moving style, quite
different from the brilliant
extravagance of Ruslan and Ludmila or
the romantic, melodious music of the
“southern” poems, emphasizes its stark
tragedy.
In 1824 he published Tsygany (The
Gypsies), begun earlier as part of the
“southern cycle.” At Mikhaylovskoye,
too, he wrote the provincial chapters of
Yevgeny Onegin; the poem Graf Nulin
(1827; “Count Nulin”), based on the life
of the rural gentry; and, finally, one
of his major works, the historical
tragedy Boris Godunov (1831).
The latter marks a break with the
Neoclassicism of the French theatre and
is constructed on the “folk-principles”
of William Shakespeare's plays,
especially the histories and tragedies,
plays written “for the people” in the
widest sense and thus universal in their
appeal. Written just before the
Decembrist rising, it treats the burning
question of the relations between the
ruling classes, headed by the tsar,
andthe masses; it is the moral and
political significance of the latter,
“the judgment of the people,” that
Pushkin emphasizes. Set in Russia in a
period of political and social chaos on
the brink of the 17th century, its theme
is the tragic guilt and inexorable fate
of a great hero—Boris Godunov,
son-in-law of Malyuta Skuratov, a
favourite of Ivan the Terrible, and here
presented as the murderer of Ivan's
little son, Dmitri. The development of
the action on two planes, one political
and historical, the other psychological,
is masterly and is set against a
background of turbulent eventsand
ruthless ambitions. The play owes much
to Pushkin's reading of early Russian
annals and chronicles, as well as to
Shakespeare, who, as Pushkin said, was
his master in bold, free treatment of
character, simplicity, and truth to
nature. Although lacking the heightened,
poetic passion of Shakespeare's
tragedies, Boris excels in the
“convincingness of situation and
naturalness of dialogue” atwhich Pushkin
aimed, sometimes using conversational
prose, sometimes a five-foot iambic line
of great flexibility. The character of
the pretender, the false Dmitri, is
subtly andsympathetically drawn; and the
power of the people, who eventually
bring him to the throne, is so greatly
emphasized that the play's publication
was delayed by censorship. Pushkin's
ability to create psychological and
dramatic unity, despite the episodic
construction, and to heighten the
dramatic tension by economy of language,
detail, and characterization make this
outstanding play a revolutionary event
in the history of Russian drama.
Return from exile.
After the suppression of the Decembrist
uprising of 1825, thenew tsar Nicholas
I, aware of Pushkin's immense popularity
and knowing that he had taken no part in
the Decembrist “conspiracy,” allowed him
to return to Moscow in the autumnof
1826. During a long conversation between
them, the tsar met the poet's complaints
about censorship with a promise that in
the future he himself would be Pushkin's
censor and told him of his plans to
introduce several pressing reforms from
above and, in particular, to prepare the
way for liberation of the serfs. The
collapse of the rising had been a
grievous experience for Pushkin, whose
heart was wholly with the “guilty”
Decembrists, five of whom had been
executed, while others were exiled to
forced labour in Siberia.
Pushkin saw, however, that without the
support of the people, the struggle
against autocracy was doomed. He
considered that the only possible way of
achieving essential reforms was from
above, “on the tsar's initiative,” as he
had written in “Derevnya.” This is the
reason for his persistent interest in
the age of reforms at the beginning of
the 18th century and in the figure of
Peter the Great, the “tsar-educator,”
whose example he held up to the present
tsar in the poem “Stansy” (1826;
“Stanzas”), in The Negro of Peter the
Great, in the historical poem Poltava
(1829), and in the poem Medny vsadnik
(1837; The Bronze Horseman ).
In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin poses
the problem of the “little man” whose
happiness is destroyed by the great
leader in pursuit of ambition. He does
this by telling a “story of St.
Petersburg” set against the background
of the flood of 1824, when the river
took its revenge against Peter I's
achievement in building the city. The
poem describes how the “little hero,”
Yevgeny, driven mad by the drowning of
his sweetheart, wanders through the
streets. Seeing the bronze statue of
Peter I seated on a rearing horse and
realizing that the tsar, seen triumphing
over the waves, is the cause of his
grief, Yevgeny threatens him and, in a
climax of growing horror, is pursued
through the streets by the “Bronze
Horseman.” The poem's descriptive and
emotional powers give it an
unforgettable impact and make it one of
the greatest in Russian literature.
After returning from exile, Pushkin
found himself in an awkward and
invidious position. The tsar's
censorship proved to be even more
exacting than that of the official
censors, and his personal freedom was
curtailed. Not only was he put under
secret observation by the police but he
was openly supervised by its chief,
Count Benckendorf. Moreover, his works
of this period met with little
comprehension from the critics, and even
some of his friendsaccused him of
apostasy, forcing him to justify his
political position in the poem “Druzyam”
(1828; “To My Friends”). The anguish of
his spiritual isolation at this time is
reflected in a cycle of poems about the
poet and the mob (1827–30) and in the
unfinished Yegipetskiye nochi (1835;
Egyptian Nights).
Yet it was during this period that
Pushkin's genius came to its fullest
flowering. His art acquired new
dimensions, and almost every one of the
works written between 1829 and 1836
opened a new chapter in the history of
Russian literature. He spent the autumn
of 1830 at his family's Nizhny Novgorod
estate, Boldino, and these months are
the most remarkable in the whole of his
artistic career. During them he wrote
the four so-called “little tragedies”—Skupoy
rytsar (1836; The Covetous Knight),
Motsart i Salyeri (1831; Mozart and
Salieri), Kamenny gost (1839; The Stone
Guest), and Pir vo vremya chumy (1832;
Feast in Time of the Plague)—the five
short prose tales collected as Povesti
pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Bel ki na
(1831; Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich
Belkin); the comic poem of everyday
lower-class life Domik v Kolomne (1833;
“A Small House in Kolomna”); and many
lyrics in widely differing styles, as
wellas several critical and polemical
articles, rough drafts, and sketches.
Among Pushkin's most characteristic
features were his wide knowledge of
world literature, as seen in his
interest in such English writers as
William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Sir
Walter Scott, and the Lake poets; his
“universal sensibility”; and his ability
to re-create the spirit of different
races at different historical epochs
without ever losing his own
individuality. This is particularly
marked in the “little tragedies,” which
are concerned with an analysis of the
“evilpassions” and, like the short story
Pikovaya Dama (1834; The Queen of
Spades), exerted a direct influence on
the subject matter and techniques of the
novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Last years.
In 1831 Pushkin married Natalya
Nikolayevna Goncharova and settled in
St. Petersburg. Once more he took up
government service and was commissioned
to write a history of Peter the Great.
Three years later he received the rank
of Kammerjunker (gentleman of the
emperor's bedchamber), partly because
the tsar wished Natalya to have the
entrée to court functions. The social
life at court, which he was now obliged
to lead and which his wife enjoyed,was
ill-suited to creative work, but he
stubbornly continued to write. Without
abandoning poetry altogether, he turned
increasingly to prose. Alongside the
theme of Peter the Great, the motif of a
popular peasant rising acquired
growingimportance in his work, as is
shown by the unfinished satirical
Istoriya sela Goryukhina (1837; The
History of the Village of Goryukhino),
the unfinished novel Dubrovsky (1841),
Stseny iz rytsarskikh vremen (1837;
Scenes from the Age of Chivalry), and
finally, the most important of his prose
works, the historical novel of the
Pugachov Rebellion, Ka pi tan ska ya
dochka (1836; The Captain's Daughter),
which hadbeen preceded by a historical
study of the rebellion, Istoriya
Pugachova (1834; “A History of Pugachov”).
Meanwhile, both in his domestic affairs
and in his official duties, his life was
becoming more intolerable. In court
circles he was regarded with mounting
suspicion and resentment, and his
repeated petitions to be allowed to
resign his post, retire to the country,
and devote himself entirely to
literature were all rejected. Finally,
in 1837, Pushkin was mortally wounded
defending his wife's honour in a duel
forced on him by influential enemies.
Assessment.
Pushkin's use of the Russian language is
astonishing in its simplicity and
profundity and formed the basis of the
style ofnovelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan
Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. His novel in
verse, Yevgeny Onegin, was the first
Russian work to take contemporary
society as its subject and pointedthe
way to the Russian realistic novel of
the mid-19th century. Even during his
lifetime Pushkin's importance as a great
national poet had been recognized by
Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, his successor
and pupil, and it was his younger
contemporary, the great Russian critic
Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, who
produced the fullest and deepestcritical
study of Pushkin's work, which still
retains much of its relevance. To the
later classical writers of the 19th
century, Pushkin, the creator of the
Russian literary language, stood as the
cornerstone of Russian literature, in
Maksim Gorky's words, “the beginning of
beginnings.” Pushkin has thus become an
inseparable part of the literaryworld of
the Russian people. He also exerted a
profound influence on other aspects of
Russian culture, most notably in opera.
Pushkin's work—with its nobility of
conception and its emphasis on civic
responsibility (shown in his command to
the poet-prophet to “fire the hearts of
men with his words”), its life-affirming
vigour, and its confidence in the
triumph of reason over prejudice, of
human charity over slavery and
oppression—has struck an echo all over
the world. Translated into all the major
languages, his works are regarded both
as expressing most completely Russian
national consciousness and as
transcending national barriers.
Dimitry Dimitriyevich Blagoy
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Lermontov and
Griboyedov
Next to
Pushkin,
Mikhail Lermontov,
who personifies Romanticism, is probably Russia’s
most frequently anthologized poet. His celebrated
lyrics often recycle lines from his own and others’
poems. “Smert poeta” (1837; “Death of a Poet”),
which first earned him fame, deals with
Pushkin’s death
shortly after a fatal duel in 1837. Among his
narrative poems, Demon (1841; The Demon) describes
the love of a Byronic demon for a mortal woman;
Pesnya pro tsarya Ivana Vasilyevicha, molodogo
oprichnika i udalogo kuptsa Kalashnikova (1837; A
Song About Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young
Bodyguard, and the Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov) is
a stylized folk epic. Also an accomplished prose
stylist,
Lermontov wrote
Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time),
which in form is something between a novel and a
complexly framed cycle of stories about a single
hero, a Byronic superfluous man. This work ranges
from sketches of philosophical brilliance (“The
Fatalist”) to episodes of near puerility (“Princess
Mary”). The theme of the superfluous man finds
another important rendition in
Aleksandr Griboyedov’s
classic work,
Gore ot uma
(completed 1824; Woe from Wit).
Mikhail Lermontov
"Death of the Poet"
"Mtsyri"
"The Demon"
Illustrations by
Mikhail Vrubel

Russian writer
born Oct. 15 [Oct. 3,
Old Style], 1814, Moscow, Russia
died July 27 [July 15], 1841, Pyatigorsk
Main
the leading Russian Romantic poet and author of the novel Geroy nashego
vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time), which was to have a profound
influence on later Russian writers.
Life
Lermontov was the son of Yury Petrovich Lermontov, a retired army
captain, and Mariya Mikhaylovna, née Arsenyeva. At the age of three he
lost his mother and was brought up by his grandmother, Yelizaveta
Alekseyevna Arsenyeva, on her estate in Penzenskaya province. Russia’s
abundant natural beauty, its folk songs and tales, its customs and
ceremonies, the hard forced labour of the serfs, and stories and legends
of peasant mutinies all had a great influence in developing the future
poet’s character. Because the child was often ill, he was taken to spas
in the Caucasus on three occasions, where the exotic landscapes created
lasting impressions on him.
In 1827 he moved with
his grandmother to Moscow, and, while attending a boarding school for
children of the nobility (at Moscow University), he began to write
poetry and also studied painting. In 1828 he wrote the poems Cherkesy
(“Circassians”) and Kavkazsky plennik (“Prisoner of the Caucasus”) in
the vein of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, whose influence then
predominated over young Russian writers. Two years later his first
verse, Vesna (“Spring”), was published. The same year he entered Moscow
University, then one of the liveliest centres of culture and ideology,
where such democratically minded representatives of nobility as
Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolay Platonovich Ogaryov, and others studied.
Students ardently discussed political and philosophical problems, the
hard fate of serf peasantry, and the recent Decembrist uprising. In this
atmosphere he wrote many lyrical verses, longer, narrative poems, and
dramas. His drama Stranny chelovek (1831; “A Strange Man”) reflected the
attitudes current among members of student societies: hatred of the
despotic tsarist regime and of serfdom. In 1832, after clashing with a
reactionary professor, Lermontov left the university and went to St.
Petersburg, where he entered the cadet school. Upon his graduation in
1834 with the rank of subensign (or cornet), Lermontov was appointed to
the Life-Guard Hussar Regiment stationed at Tsarskoye Selo (now
Pushkin), close to St. Petersburg. As a young officer, he spent a
considerable portion of his time in the capital, and his critical
observations of aristocratic life there formed the basis of his play
Maskarad (“Masquerade”). During this period his deep—but
unreciprocated—attachment to Varvara Lopukhina, a sentiment that never
left him, was reflected in Knyaginya Ligovskaya (“Duchess Ligovskaya”)
and other works.
Lermontov was greatly
shaken in January 1837 by the death of the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin
in a duel. He wrote an elegy that expressed the nation’s love for the
dead poet, denouncing not only his killer but also the court
aristocracy, whom he saw as executioners of freedom and the true
culprits of the tragedy. As soon as the verses became known to the court
of Nicholas I, Lermontov was arrested and exiled to a regiment stationed
in the Caucasus. Travel to new places, meetings with Decembrists (in
exile in the Caucasus), and introduction to the Georgian
intelligentsia—to the outstanding poet Ilia Chavchavadze, whose daughter
had married a well-known Russian dramatist, poet, and diplomatist,
Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboyedov—as well as to other prominent Georgian
poets in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) broadened his horizon. Attracted to the
nature and poetry of the Caucasus and excited by its folklore, he
studied the local languages and translated and polished the
Azerbaijanian story “Ashik Kerib.” Caucasian themes and images occupy a
strong place in his poetry and in the novel Geroy nashego vremeni, as
well as in his sketches and paintings.
As a result of zealous
intercession by his grandmother and by the influential poet V.A.
Zhukovsky, Lermontov was allowed to return to the capital in 1838. His
verses began to appear in the press: the romantic poem Pesnya pro tsarya
Ivana Vasilyevicha, molodogo oprichnika i udalogo kuptsa Kalashnikova
(1837; “A Song About Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Bodyguard, and the
Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov”), the realistic satirical poems
Tambovskaya kaznacheysha (1838; “The Tambov Paymaster’s Wife”) and
Sashka (written 1839, published 1862), and the romantic poem Demon. Soon
Lermontov became popular; he was called Pushkin’s successor and was
lauded for having suffered and been exiled because of his libertarian
verses. Writers and journalists took an interest in him, and fashionable
ladies were attracted to him. He made friends among the editorial staff
of Otechestvennye zapiski, the leading magazine of the Western-oriented
intellectuals, and in 1840 he met the prominent progressive critic V.G.
Belinsky, who envisioned him as the great hope of Russian literature.
Lermontov had arrived among the circle of St. Petersburg writers.
At the end of the
1830s, the principal directions of his creative work had been
established. His freedom-loving sentiments and his bitterly skeptical
evaluation of the times in which he lived are embodied in his
philosophical lyric poetry (“Duma” [“Thought”], “Ne ver sebye . . . ”
[“Do Not Trust Yourself . . . ”]) and are interpreted in an original
fashion in the romantic and fantastic images of his Caucasian poems,
Mtsyri (1840) and Demon, on which the poet worked for the remainder of
his life. Finally, Lermontov’s mature prose showed a critical picture of
contemporary life in his novel Geroy nashego vremeni, containing the sum
total of his reflections on contemporary society and the fortunes of his
generation. The hero, Pechorin, is a cynical person of superior
accomplishments who, having experienced everything else, devotes himself
to experimenting with human situations. This realistic novel, full of
social and psychological content and written in prose of superb quality,
played an important role in the development of Russian prose.
In February 1840
Lermontov was brought to trial before a military tribunal for his duel
with the son of the French ambassador at St. Petersburg—a duel used as a
pretext for punishing the recalcitrant poet. On the instructions of
Nicholas I, Lermontov was sentenced to a new exile in the Caucasus, this
time to an infantry regiment that was preparing for dangerous military
operations. Soon compelled to take part in cavalry sorties and
hand-to-hand battles, he distinguished himself in the heavy fighting at
Valerik River, which he describes in “Valerik” and in the verse “Ya k
vam pishu . . . ” (“I Am Writing to You . . . ”). The military command
made due note of the great courage and presence of mind displayed by the
officer-poet.
As a result of
persistent requests by his grandmother, Lermontov was given a short
leave in February 1841. He spent several weeks in the capital,
continuing work on compositions he had already begun and writing several
poems noted for their maturity of thought and talent (“Rodina”
[“Motherland”], “Lyubil i ya v bylye gody” [“And I Was in Love”].
Lermontov devised a plan for publishing his own magazine, planned new
novels, and sought Belinsky’s criticism. But he soon received an order
to return to his regiment and left, full of gloomy forebodings. During
this long journey he experienced a flood of creative energy: his last
notebook contains such masterpieces of Russian lyric poetry as “Utes”
(“The Cliff”), “Spor” (“Argument”), “Svidanye” (“Meeting”), “Listok” (“A
Leaf”), “Net, ne tebya tak pylko ya lyublyu” (“No, It Was Not You I
Loved So Fervently”), “Vykhozhu odin ya na dorogu . . . ” (“I go to the
Road Alone . . . ”), and “Prorok” (“Prophet”), his last work.
On the way to his
regiment, Lermontov lingered on in the health resort city of Pyatigorsk
for treatment. There he met many fashionable young people from St.
Petersburg, among whom were secret ill-wishers who knew his reputation
in court circles. Some of the young people feared his tongue, while
others envied his fame. An atmosphere of intrigue, scandal, and hatred
grew up around him. Finally, a quarrel was provoked between Lermontov
and another officer, N.S. Martynov; the two fought a duel that ended in
the poet’s death. He was buried two days later in the municipal
cemetery, and the entire population of the city gathered at his funeral.
Later, Lermontov’s coffin was moved to the Tarkhana estate, and on April
23, 1842, he was buried in the Arsenyev family vault.
Assessment
Only 26 years old when he died, Lermontov had proved his worth as a
brilliant and gifted poet-thinker, prose writer, and playwright, the
successor of Pushkin, and an exponent of the best traditions of Russian
literature. His youthful lyric poetry is filled with a passionate
craving for freedom and contains calls to battle, agonizing reflections
on how to apply his strengths to his life’s work, and dreams of heroic
deeds. He was deeply troubled by political events, and the peasant
mutinies of 1830 had suggested to him a time “when the crown of the
tsars will fall.” Revolutionary ferment in western Europe met with an
enthusiastic response from him (verses on the July 1830 revolution in
France, on the fall of Charles X), and the theme of the French
Revolution is found in his later works (the poem Sashka).
Civic and philosophical
themes as well as subjective, deeply personal motifs were closely
interwoven in Lermontov’s poetry. He introduced into Russian poetry the
intonations of “iron verse,” noted for its heroic sound and its energy
of intellectual expression. His enthusiasm for the future responded to
the spiritual needs of Russian society. Lermontov’s legacy has found
varied interpretations in the works of Russian artists, composers, and
theatrical and cinematic figures. His dramatic compositions have played
a considerable role in the development of theatrical art, and his life
has served as material for many novels, poems, plays, and films.
Vladimir
Viktorovich Zhdanov
|
|
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Aleksandr Griboyedov
"Woe
From Wit"

Alexandr GriboedovAleksandr Sergeyevich
Griboyedov (Russian: Алекса́ндр
Серге́евич Грибое́дов, alternative
transliteration: Alexander Griboedov)
(January 15, 1795 – February 11, 1829)
was a Russian diplomat, playwright, and
composer. He is recognized as homo unius
libri, a writer of one book, whose fame
rests on the brilliant verse comedy Woe
from Wit (or: The Woes of Wit), still
one of the most often staged plays in
Russia. One expert, Angela Brintlinger,
argues that "not only did Griboedov's
contemporaries conceive of his life as
the life of a literary hero—ultimately
writing a number of narratives featuring
him as an essential character—but indeed
Griboedov saw himself as a hero and his
life as a narrative. Although there is
not a literary artifact to prove this,
by examining Griboedov's letters and
dispatches, one is able to build a
historical narrative that fits the
literary and behavioural paradigms of
his time and that reads like a real
adventure novel set in the wild, wild
East."
Early life
Born in Moscow, Griboyedov studied at
the Moscow University from 1810 to 1812.
He then obtained a commission in a
hussar regiment, but resigned it in
1816. Next year, Griboyedov entered the
civil service, and in 1818 was appointed
secretary of the Russian legation in
Persia, and was transferred to Georgia.
He had commenced writing early and, in
1816, had produced on the stage at
St.Petersburg a comedy in verse called
The Young Spouses (Молодые супруги),
which was followed by other works of the
same kind. But neither these nor the
essays and verses which he wrote would
have been long remembered but for the
immense success gained by his comedy in
verse Woe from Wit (Горе от ума, or Gore
ot uma), a satire upon Russian
aristocratic society.
As a high official depicted in the play
styles it, this work is "a pasquinade on
Moscow". The play's merits are in its
accurate representation of certain
social and official types-such as
Famusov, the lover of old abuses, the
hater of reforms; his secretary,
Molchalin, servile fawner upon all in
office; the aristocratic young liberal
and Anglomaniac, Repetilov; contrasted
with whom is the hero of the piece,
Chatsky, the ironic satirist, just
returned from the west of Europe, who
exposes and ridicules the weaknesses of
the rest, his words echoing that outcry
of the young generation of 1820 which
reached its climax in the military
insurrection of 1825, and was then
sternly silenced by Nicholas I. Although
rooted in the classical French comedy of
Molière, the characters are as much
individuals as types, and the interplay
between society and individual is a
sparkling dialectical give-and-take.
Griboyedov spent the summer of 1823 in
Russia, completed his play and took it
to St.Petersburg. There it was rejected
by the censors. Many copies were made
and privately circulated, but Griboyedov
never saw it published. The first
edition was printed in 1833, four years
after his death. Only once did he see it
on the stage, when it was acted by the
officers of the garrison at Yerevan.
Soured by disappointment, he returned to
Georgia, made himself useful by his
linguistic knowledge to his relative
general Ivan Paskevich during a campaign
against Persia, and was sent to St.
Petersburg with the Treaty of
Turkmenchay of 1828. Brilliantly
received there, he thought of devoting
himself to literature, and commenced a
romantic drama, A Georgian Night
(Грузинская ночь, or Gruzinskaya noch').
Death
Several months after his wedding to the
16-year-old daughter of his friend
Prince Chavchavadze, Griboyedov was
suddenly sent to Persia as Minister
Plenipotentiary. In the aftermath of the
war and humiliating Treaty of
Turkmenchay, anti-Russian sentiment in
Persia was rampant and, soon after
Griboyedov's arrival at Tehran, a mob
stormed the Russian embassy.
Monument erected in Soviet times in
Dilijan, Armenia commemorating the
location where Aleksandr Pushkin (on his
way to meet his brother) stopped the
carriage with Aleksandr Griboyedov's
body being transported to Tiflis. An
inscription in Russian and Armenian
says: "Here A. S. Pushkin on
28[verification needed] June 1829 saw
the body of A. S. Griboyedov".The
incident began when an Armenian eunuch
escaped from the harem of Persian shah
Fath Ali Shah, and two Armenian girls
escaped from that of his son-in-law. All
three sought refuge at the Russian
embassy. As agreed to in the Treaty of
Turkmenchay, Armenians living in Persia
were permitted to return to Eastern
Armenia. However, the Shah demanded that
Griboyedov return the three. Griboyedov
refused as he knew what sort of fate
awaited them if he did. This caused an
uproar throughout the city and several
thousand Persians encircled the Russian
compound demanding their release.
Griboyedov and other members of his
mission, seeing that things are bad,
prepared for a siege and sealed all the
windows and doors, armed and in full
uniform, resolved to defend to the last
drop of blood. The Cossack detachment
assigned to protect the embassy was too
small in number but held off the mob for
over an hour until finally being driven
back to Griboyedov's office. There, he
and the rest of the Cossacks held out
even further until the mob broke through
and slaughtered them all. Griboyedov was
among the first who were shot to death.
Second secretary of the mission Adelung
and, in particular, a young doctor (name
unknown) fought hard, but the fight was
too unequal , and soon the scene was
that of butchered, decapitated corpses.
The mob grabbed the corpse of
Griboyedov, distinguished by his
uniform, and dragged it through the
streets and bazaars of the city, with
cries of celebration. The eunuch was one
of the first killed in the assault on
the embassy; the fate of the two
Armenian girls remains unknown.
His body was for three days so
ill-treated by the mob that it was
recognized only by an old scar on the
hand, due to a wound received in a duel.
His body was taken to Tiflis and buried
in the monastery of Saint David
(Mtatsminda Pantheon). His 16-year-old
widow, Nino, on hearing of his death,
gave premature birth to a child who died
a few hours later. She lived another
thirty years after her husband's death,
rejecting all suitors and winning
universal admiration for her fidelity to
his memory.
In a move to placate Russia for the
attack and the death of its ambassador,
Persia presented the Tsar with a large
diamond, now known as the Shah Diamond,
as a gift. The ceremony is depicted in
the 2002 film Russian Ark, by leading
Russian director Alexander Sokurov, with
lavish realism.
One of the main settings for the satire
of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master
and Margarita is named after Griboyedov,
as is the Griboyedov Canal in Central
Saint Petersburg.
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Nikolay Gogol
One of the finest comic authors of world literature,
and perhaps its most accomplished nonsense writer,
Gogol is best
known for his short stories, for his play Revizor
(1836; The Inspector General, or The Government
Inspector), and for Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead
Souls), a prose narrative that is nevertheless
subtitled a “poem.” “Nos” (1836; “The Nose”), a
parable on the failure of all explanatory systems,
relates an utterly inexplicable incident and the
attempts to come to terms with it. Both “Shinel”
(1842; “The Overcoat”), which is probably the most
influential Russian short story, and “Zapiski
sumasshedshego” (1835; “The Diary of a Madman”) mix
pathos and mockery in an amazing display. As in
“Nevsky prospekt” (1835; “Nevsky Avenue”) and
“Povest o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s
Ivanom Nikiforovichem” (1835; “The Tale of How Ivan
Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”),
language itself seems to generate its own absurd
content while the universe turns out to be a
counterfeit of which there is no original.
Characteristic of
Gogol is a
sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed
as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly
turns into metaphysical horror. The Inspector
General develops a sequence of (witting and
unwitting) confidence games within confidence games
in a corrupt world of endless self-deception. The
mock-epic, even mock-satiric, Dead Souls
simultaneously allegorizes the timeless bureaucratic
tendency to make official documentation more genuine
than actual existence, the emptiness of the human
soul, and the mind’s absurd ways of grasping meaning
or value. It is one of the most striking (and most
Gogolian) ironies of Russian literary history that
radical critics celebrated Gogol as a realist.
Nikolay Gogol

Russian writer
born March 19 [March
31, New Style], 1809, Sorochintsy, near Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire
[now in Ukraine]
died Feb. 21 [March 4], 1852, Moscow, Russia
Main
Ukrainian-born Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist, whose novel
Myortvye dushi (Dead Souls) and whose short story “Shinel” (“The
Overcoat”) are considered the foundations of the great 19th-century
tradition of Russian realism.
Youth and early fame.
The Ukrainian countryside, with its colourful peasantry, its Cossack
traditions, and its rich folklore, constituted the background of Gogol’s
boyhood. A member of the petty Ukrainian gentry, Gogol was sent at the
age of 12 to the high school at Nezhin. There he distinguished himself
by his biting tongue, his contributions of prose and poetry to a
magazine, and his portrayal of comic old men and women in school
theatricals. In 1828 he went to St. Petersburg, hoping to enter the
civil service, but soon discovered that without money and connections he
would have to fight hard for a living. He even tried to become an actor,
but his audition was unsuccessful. In this predicament he remembered a
mediocre sentimental-idyllic poem he had written in the high school.
Anxious to achieve fame as a poet, he published it at his own expense,
but its failure was so disastrous that he burned all the copies and
thought of emigrating to the United States. He embezzled the money his
mother had sent him for payment of the mortgage on her farm and took a
boat to the German port of Lübeck. He did not sail but briefly toured
Germany. Whatever his reasons for undertaking such an irresponsible
trip, he soon ran out of money and returned to St. Petersburg, where he
got an ill-paid government post.
In the meantime Gogol
wrote occasionally for periodicals, finding an escape in childhood
memories of the Ukraine. He committed to paper what he remembered of the
sunny landscapes, peasants, and boisterous village lads, and he also
related tales about devils, witches, and other demonic or fantastic
agents that enliven Ukrainian folklore. Romantic stories of the past
were thus intermingled with realistic incidents of the present. Such was
the origin of his eight narratives, published in two volumes in 1831–32
under the title Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki (Evenings on a Farm near
Dikanka). Written in a lively and at times colloquial prose, these works
contributed something fresh and new to Russian literature. In addition
to the author’s whimsical inflection, they abounded in genuine folk
flavour, including numerous Ukrainian words and phrases, all of which
captivated the Russian literary world.
Mature career.
The young author became famous overnight. Among his first admirers were
the poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky, both of whom he had
met before. This esteem was soon shared by the writer Sergey Aksakov and
the critic Vissarion Belinsky, among others. Having given up his second
government post, Gogol was now teaching history in a boarding school for
girls. In 1834 he was appointed assistant professor of medieval history
at St. Petersburg University, but he felt inadequately equipped for the
position and left it after a year. Meanwhile, he prepared energetically
for the publication of his next two books, Mirgorod and Arabeski
(Arabesques), which appeared in 1835. The four stories constituting
Mirgorod were a continuation of the Evenings, but they revealed a strong
gap between Gogol’s romantic escapism and his otherwise pessimistic
attitude toward life. Such a splendid narrative of the Cossack past as
“Taras Bulba” certainly provided an escape from the present. But “Povest
o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem” (“Story
of the Quarrel Between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich”) was, for
all its humour, full of bitterness about the meanness and vulgarity of
existence. Even the idyllic motif of Gogol’s “Starosvetskiye
pomeshchiki” (“Old-World Landowners”) is undermined with satire, for the
mutual affection of the aged couple is marred by gluttony, their
ceaseless eating for eating’s sake.
The aggressive realism
of a romantic who can neither adapt himself to the world nor escape from
it, and is therefore all the more anxious to expose its vulgarity and
evil, predominates in Gogol’s Petersburg stories printed (together with
some essays) in the second work, Arabesques. In one of these stories,
“Zapiski sumasshedshego” (“Diary of a Madman”), the hero is an utterly
frustrated office drudge who finds compensation in megalomania and ends
in a lunatic asylum. In another, “Nevsky prospekt” (“Nevsky Prospect”),
a tragic romantic dreamer is contrasted to an adventurous vulgarian,
while in the revised finale of “Portret” (“The Portrait”) the author
stresses his conviction that evil is ineradicable in this world. In 1836
Gogol published in Pushkin’s Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) one of his
gayest satirical stories, “Kolyaska” (“The Coach”). In the same
periodical also appeared his amusingly caustic surrealist tale, “Nos”
(“The Nose”). Gogol’s association with Pushkin was of great value
because he always trusted his friend’s taste and criticism; moreover, he
received from Pushkin the themes for his two principal works, the play
Revizor (The Government Inspector, sometimes titled The Inspector
General), and Dead Souls, which were important not only to Russian
literature but also to Gogol’s further destiny.
A great comedy, The
Government Inspector mercilessly lampoons the corrupt bureaucracy under
Nicholas I. Having mistaken a well-dressed windbag for the dreaded
incognito inspector, the officials of a provincial town bribe and
banquet him in order to turn his attention away from the crying evils of
their administration. But during the triumph, after the bogus
inspector’s departure, the arrival of the real inspector is announced—to
the horror of those concerned. It was only by a special order of the
tsar that the first performance of this comedy of indictment and
“laughter through tears” took place on April 19, 1836. Yet the hue and
cry raised by the reactionary press and officialdom was such that Gogol
left Russia for Rome, where he remained, with some interruptions, until
1842. The atmosphere he found in Italy appealed to his taste and to his
somewhat patriarchal—not to say primitive—religious propensity. The
religious painter Aleksandr Ivanov, who worked in Rome, became his close
friend. He also met a number of traveling Russian aristocrats and often
saw the émigrée princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a convert to Roman
Catholicism, in whose circle religious themes were much discussed. It
was in Rome, too, that Gogol wrote most of his masterpiece, Dead Souls.
This comic novel, or
“epic,” as the author labeled it, reflects feudal Russia, with its
serfdom and bureaucratic iniquities. Chichikov, the hero of the novel,
is a polished swindler who, after several reverses of fortune, wants to
get rich quick. His bright but criminal idea is to buy from various
landowners a number of their recently deceased serfs (or “souls,” as
they were called in Russia) whose deaths have not yet been registered by
the official census and are therefore regarded as still being alive. The
landowners are only too happy to rid themselves of the fictitious
property on which they continue to pay taxes until the next census.
Chichikov intends to pawn the “souls” in a bank and, with the money thus
raised, settle down in a distant region as a respectable gentleman. The
provincial townsmen of his first stop are charmed by his polite manners;
he approaches several owners in the district who are all willing to sell
the “souls” in question, knowing full well the fraudulent nature of the
deal. The sad conditions of Russia, in which serfs used to be bought and
sold like cattle, are evident throughout the grotesquely humorous
transactions. The landowners, one more queer and repellent than the
last, have become nicknames known to every Russian reader. When the
secret of Chichikov’s errands begins to leak out, he hurriedly leaves
the town.
Dead Souls was
published in 1842, the same year in which the first edition of Gogol’s
collected works was published. The edition included, among his other
writings, a sprightly comedy titled Zhenitba (Marriage) and the story
“The Overcoat.” The latter concerns a humble scribe who, with untold
sacrifices, has acquired a smart overcoat; when robbed of it he dies of
a broken heart. The tragedy of this insignificant man was worked out
with so many significant trifles that, years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
was to exclaim that all Russian realists had come “from under Gogol’s
greatcoat.” The apex of Gogol’s fame was, however, Dead Souls. The
democratic intellectuals of Belinsky’s brand saw in this novel a work
permeated with the spirit of their own liberal aspirations. Its author
was all the more popular because after Pushkin’s tragic death Gogol was
now looked upon as the head of Russian literature. Gogol, however, began
to see his leading role in a perspective of his own. Having witnessed
the beneficent results of the laughter caused by his indictments, he was
sure that God had given him a great literary talent in order to make him
not only castigate abuses through laughter but also to reveal to Russia
the righteous way of living in an evil world. He therefore decided to
continue Dead Souls as a kind of Divine Comedy in prose; the already
published part would represent the Inferno of Russian life, and the
second and third parts (with Chichikov’s moral regeneration) would be
its Purgatorio and Paradiso.
Creative decline.
Unfortunately, having embarked upon such a soul-saving task, Gogol
noticed that his former creative capacity was deserting him. He worked
on the second part of his novel for more than 10 years but with meagre
results. In drafts of four chapters and a fragment of the fifth found
among his papers, the negative and grotesque characters are drawn with
some intensity, whereas the virtuous types he was so anxious to exalt
are stilted and devoid of life. This lack of zest was interpreted by
Gogol as a sign that, for some reason, God no longer wanted him to be
the voice exhorting his countrymen to a more worthy existence. In spite
of this he decided to prove that at least as teacher and preacher—if not
as artist—he was still able to set forth what was needed for Russia’s
moral and worldly improvement. This he did in his ill-starred Bybrannyye
mesta iz perepiski s druzyami (1847; Selected Passages from
Correspondence with My Friends), a collection of 32 discourses
eulogizing not only the conservative official church but also the very
powers that he had so mercilessly condemned only a few years before. It
is no wonder that the book was fiercely attacked by his one-time
admirers, most of all by Belinsky, who in an indignant letter called him
“a preacher of the knout, a defender of obscurantism and of darkest
oppression.” Crushed by it all, Gogol saw in it a further proof that,
sinful as he was, he had lost God’s favour forever. He increased his
prayers and his ascetic practices; in 1848 he even made a pilgrimage to
Palestine, but in vain. Despite a few bright moments he began to wander
from place to place like a doomed soul. Finally he settled in Moscow,
where he came under the influence of a fanatical priest, Father Matvey
Konstantinovsky, who seems to have practiced on Gogol a kind of
spiritual sadism. Ordered by him, Gogol burned the presumably completed
manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls on Feb. 24 (Feb. 11,
O.S.), 1852. Ten days later he died, on the verge of semimadness.
Influence and reputation.
Whatever the vagaries of Gogol’s mind and life, his part in Russian
literature was enormous. Above all, it was from the nature of such works
as The Government Inspector, Dead Souls, and “The Overcoat” that
Belinsky derived the tenets of the “natural school” (as distinct from
the “rhetorical,” or Romantic, school) that was responsible for the
trend of subsequent Russian fiction. Gogol was among the first authors
to have revealed Russia to itself. Yet in contrast to the simple
classical-realistic prose of Pushkin, adopted by Leo Tolstoy, Ivan
Goncharov, and Ivan Turgenev, Gogol’s ornate and agitated prose was
assumed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Gogol’s realism of indictment found many
followers, among them the great satirist Mikhail Saltykov. He was also a
champion of the little man as a literary hero. His vexation of spirit,
too, was continued (but on a higher level) by both Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky as was his effort to transcend “mere literature.”
Janko Lavrin
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Other poets and dramatists
From the death of
Lermontov until
the end of the 19th century, Russian literature was
dominated by prose, but some poets of lasting
interest appeared.
Fyodor Tyutchev, a member of
Pushkin’s
generation, wrote nature, love, and political poetry
but is probably best appreciated for his
philosophical “poetry of thought,” including “Silentium!”
(1830).
Afanasy Fet wrote delicate love lyrics
remarkable for their absence of verbs. Violently
attacked by radical critics as symbolizing pure art,
he came to be appreciated by the Symbolist poets to
follow.
Nikolay Nekrasov, who was also a major figure
in Russian journalism, wrote social satires,
tendentious “civic” verse, and compassionate
accounts of peasant life, including Komu na Rusi
zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in
Russia?), which he began writing in 1863 and left
unfinished at the time of his death.
Fyodor Tyutchev

Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, Tyutchev also
spelled Tiutchev (b. Dec. 5 [Nov. 23,
Old Style], 1803, Ovstug, Russia—d. July
27 [July 15], 1873, St. Petersburg),
Russian writer who was remarkable both
as a highly original philosophic poet
and as a militant Slavophile, and whose
whole literary output constitutes a
struggle to fuse political passion with
poetic imagination.
The son of a wealthy landowner, educated
at home and at Moscow University,
Tyutchev served his country as a
diplomat in Munich and Turin. In Germany
he developed a friendship with the poet
Heinrich Heine and met frequently with
the idealist philosopher Friedrich W.J.
von Schelling. His protracted expatriate
life, however, only made Tyutchev more
Russian at heart. Though the bare and
poverty-stricken Russian countryside
depressed him, he voiced a proud,
intimate, and tragic vision of the
motherland in his poetry. He also wrote
political articles and political verses,
both of which reflect his reactionary
nationalist and Pan-Slavist views, as
well as his deep love of Russia. He once
wrote, “I love poetry and my country
above all else in the world.”
Tyutchev’s love poems, most of them
inspired by his liaison with his
daughter’s governess, are among the most
passionate and poignant in the Russian
language. He is regarded as one of the
three greatest Russian poets of the 19th
century, making a trinity with Aleksandr
Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.
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Afanasy Fet

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, Fet also
spelled Foeth, legitimatized name
Afanasy Afanasyevich Shenshin (b. Dec. 5
[Nov. 23, Old Style], 1820, Novosyolki,
near Mtsensk, Orlov district, Russia—d.
Dec. 3 [Nov. 21], 1892, Moscow), Russian
poet and translator, whose sincere and
passionate lyric poetry strongly
influenced later Russian poets,
particularly the Symbolist Aleksandr
Blok.
The illegitimate son of a German woman
named Fet (or Foeth) and of a Russian
landowner named Shenshin, whose name he
assumed by decree in 1876, Fet was still
a student at the University of Moscow
when, in 1842, he published several
admirable lyrics in the literary
magazine Moskvityanin. In 1850 a volume
of his poems appeared, followed by
another in 1856. He served several years
in the army, retiring in 1856 with the
grade of captain. In 1860 he settled on
an estate at Stepanovka, in his home
district, where he was often visited by
his friends Ivan Turgenev and Leo
Tolstoy.
His intense and brief lyrics, which
aimed to convey vivid momentary
sensations, were to have great influence
on the later Symbolists, but during his
lifetime he was decried because of his
reactionary political views and somewhat
unattractive personality. After 1863 he
published very little, but he continued
to write nature poetry and love lyrics
(published posthumously in a four-volume
collected edition, 1894). His works also
include translations of Ovid, Virgil,
J.W. von Goethe’s Faust, and Arthur
Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and
Idea.
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Nikolay Nekrasov

Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov, (b. Dec.
10 [Nov. 28, Old Style], 1821, Nemirov,
Ukraine, Russian Empire—d. Jan. 8, [Dec.
27, 1877], 1878, St. Petersburg,
Russia), Russian poet and journalist
whose work centred on the theme of
compassion for the sufferings of the
peasantry. Nekrasov also sought to
express the racy charm and vitality of
peasant life in his adaptations of folk
songs and poems for children.
Nekrasov studied at St. Petersburg
University, but his father’s refusal to
help him forced him into literary and
theatrical hack work at an early age.
His first book of poetry was published
in 1840. An able businessman, he
published and edited literary
miscellanies and in 1846 bought from
Pyotr Pletnev the magazine Sovremennik
(“The Contemporary”), which had declined
after the death of its founder,
Aleksandr Pushkin. Nekrasov managed to
transform it into a major literary
journal and a paying concern, despite
constant harassment by the censors. Both
Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy published
their early works in Sovremennik, but
after 1856, influenced by its subeditor,
Nikolay Chernyshevski, it began to
develop into an organ of militant
radicalism. It was suppressed in 1866,
after the first attempt to assassinate
Alexander II. In 1868 Nekrasov, with
Mikhail Saltykov (Shchedrin), took over
Otechestvenniye zapiski (“Notes of the
Fatherland”), remaining its editor and
publisher until his death.
Nekrasov’s work is uneven through its
lack of craftsmanship and polish and a
tendency to sentimentalize his subjects,
but his major poems have lasting power
and originality of expression. Moroz
krasny-nos (1863; “Red-nosed Frost,” in
Poems, 1929) gives a vivid picture of a
brave and sympathetic peasant woman, and
his large-scale narrative poem, Komu na
Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be
Happy and Free in Russia?, 1917), shows
to the full his gift for vigorous
realistic satire.
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Among the dramatists of this period,
Aleksandr Ostrovsky, who has proved much more
popular in Russia than abroad, wrote many
slice-of-life plays about the Russian merchantry.
His plays Svoi lyudi—sochtyomsya! (1850; “It’s a
Family Affair—We’ll Settle It Among Ourselves”; Eng.
trans. A Family Affair) and Groza (1859; The
Thunderstorm) were the subject of reviews by
Nikolay Dobrolyubov
(1836–61), one of Russia’s most influential radical
critics. Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin wrote a
macabre trilogy, whose third play, Smert Tarelkina
(1869; The Death of Tarelkin), is a brilliant piece
of grotesque humour about a man who fakes his own
death. The theme of the faked suicide, a motif of
Russian drama, later appeared in
Leo Tolstoy’s
Zhivoy trup (written 1900; The Living Corpse) and
Nikolay
Erdman’s Samoubiytsa (1928; The Suicide).
Aleksandr Ostrovsky

Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky, (b.
March 31 [April 12, New Style], 1823,
Moscow, Russia—d. June 2 [June 14],
1886, Shchelykovo), Russian dramatist
who is generally considered the greatest
representative of the Russian realistic
period.
The son of a government clerk, Ostrovsky
attended the University of Moscow law
school. From 1843 to 1848 he was
employed as a clerk at the Moscow
juvenile court. He wrote his first play,
Kartiny semeynogo schastya (“Scenes of
Family Happiness”), in 1847. His next
play, Bankrot (“The Bankrupt”), later
renamed Svoi lyudi sochtemsya (It’s a
Family Affair, We’ll Settle It Among
Ourselves), written in 1850, provoked an
outcry because it exposed bogus
bankruptcy cases among Moscow merchants
and brought about Ostrovsky’s dismissal
from the civil service. The play was
banned for 13 years.
Ostrovsky wrote several historical plays
in the 1860s. His main dramatic work,
however, was concerned with the Russian
merchant class and included two
tragedies and numerous comedies,
including the masterpiece Bednost ne
porok (1853; “Poverty Is No Disgrace”).
His Snegurochka (1873; “The Snow
Maiden”) was adapted as an opera by
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov in 1880–81.
Ostrovsky was closely associated with
the Maly (“Little”) Theatre, Moscow’s
only dramatic state theatre, where all
his plays were first performed under his
supervision. He served as the first
president of the Society of Russia
Playwrights, which was founded on his
initiative in 1874, and in 1885 he
became artistic director of the Moscow
imperial theatres. The author of 47
original plays, Ostrovsky almost
single-handedly created a Russian
national repertoire. His dramas are
among the most widely read and
frequently performed stage pieces in
Russia.
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Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin

Aleksandr Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin
(Russian: Александр Васильевич
Сухово-Кобылин) (September 29 [O.S.
September 17] 1817, Moscow - September
24 [O.S. September 11] 1903, Beaulieu-sur-Mer,
France), was a Russian nobleman, chiefly
known for the works he authored as an
amateur playwright.
A rich aristocrat who often travelled,
Sukhovo-Kobylin was arrested, prosecuted
and tried for seven years in Russia for
the murder of his French mistress
Louise-Simone Dimanche, a crime of which
he is nowadays generally believed to
have been innocent. He only managed to
achieve acquittal by means of giving
enormous bribes to court officials and
by using all of his contacts in the
Russian elite. According to his own
version as well as the generally
accepted view today, he was targeted
precisely because he had the financial
capabilities to give such bribes. Based
on his personal experiences,
Sukhovo-Kobylin wrote a trilogy of
satirical plays about the prevalence of
bribery and other corrupt practices in
the Russian judicial system of the time
- "Krechinsky's Wedding" (Russian:
Свадьба Кречинского) (1850-1854, begun
in prison), "The Trial" (Russian: Дело)
(1869), and "Tarelkin's Death"
(alternatively titled "Rasplyuyev's
merry days" (Russian: Смерть Тарелкина,
Расплюевские веселые дни) (1869). The
first work had immediate success and
became one of Russia's most frequently
performed plays. It is also considered
Sukhovo-Kobylin's best. The trilogy in
its entirety was published in 1869 under
the title "Scenes from the Past"
(Russian Картины прошлого). Attempts to
stage the last two plays ran into
difficulties with censorship; in
particular, "Tarelkin's Death" was only
staged in 1899. While popular, the two
sequels failed to achieve the same
success as the first play.
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The “intelligentsia”
Beginning about 1860, Russian culture was dominated
by a group known as the “intelligentsia,” a word
that English borrowed from Russian but which means
something rather different in its original Russian
usage. In the word’s narrow sense, the
“intelligentsia” consisted of people who owed their
primary allegiance not to their profession or class
but to a group of men and women with whom they
shared a common set of beliefs, including a fanatic
faith in revolution, atheism, and materialism. They
usually adopted a specific set of manners, customs,
and sexual behaviour, primarily from their favourite
book, Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel
Chto delat (1863; What Is to Be Done?). Although
appallingly bad from a literary point of view, this
novel, which also features a fake suicide, was
probably the most widely read work of the 19th
century.
Generally speaking, the intelligentsia insisted that
literature be a form of socialist propaganda and
rejected aesthetic criteria or apolitical works. In
addition to Vissarion Belinsky, Chernyshevsky
and Nikolay Dobrolyubov, typical members of
the intelligentsia came to include Lenin, Stalin,
and other Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917. Thus
it is not surprising that a gulf separated the
writers from the intelligentsia. In an important
anthology attacking the mentality of the
intelligentsia, Vekhi (1909; Landmarks), the critic
Mikhail Gershenzon
observed that “an almost infallible gauge of the
strengths of an artist’s genius is the extent of his
hatred for the intelligentsia.” Typically, the
writers objected to the intelligentsia’s
intellectual intolerance, addiction to theory, and
belief that morality was defined by utility to the
revolution.
Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky,
and
Anton Chekhov
were all sharply contemptuous of the intelligentsia.
Vissarion Belinsky

born May 30 [June 11, New Style],
1811, Sveaborg, Fin., Russian Empire
died May 26 [June 7], 1848, St.
Petersburg, Russia
eminent Russian literary critic who is
often called the “father” of the Russian
radical intelligentsia.
The son of a provincial doctor,
Belinsky was expelled from the
University of Moscow (1832) and earned
his living thereafter as a journalist.
His first substantial critical articles
were part of a series that he wrote for
the journal Teleskop (“Telescope”)
beginning in 1834. These were called
“Literaturnye mechtaniya” (“Literary
Reveries”), and they established his
reputation. In them he expounded F.W.J.
Schelling’s Romantic view of national
character, applying it to Russian
culture.
Belinsky was briefly managing editor
of the Moskovsky nablyudatel (“Moscow
Observer”) before obtaining a post in
1839 as chief critic for the journal
Otechestvennyye zapiski (“National
Annals”). The influential essays he
published there on such writers as
Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Gogol
helped shape the literary and social
views of other Russian intellectuals for
decades to come. By 1840 Belinsky had
moved from the idealism of his early
essays to a Hegelian view that art and
the history of a nation are closely
connected. He believed that Russian
literature had to progress in order to
help the still-embryonic Russian nation
develop into a mature, civilized
society. His theory of literature in the
service of society became an article of
faith among Russian liberals and was the
distant progenitor of the Soviets’
doctrine of Socialist Realism.
In 1846 Belinsky joined the review
Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), for
which he wrote most of his last essays.
In 1847 he wrote a famous letter to
Gogol, denouncing the latter’s
Bybrannyye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami
(“Selected Passages from Correspondence
with My Friends”) as a betrayal of the
Russian people because it preached
submission to church and state.
Belinsky’s perceptive praise of such
writers as Pushkin, Gogol, Mikhail
Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan
Turgenev, and Ivan Goncharov helped
establish their early reputations. He
laid the foundation for modern Russian
literary criticism in his belief that
Russian literature should honestly
reflect Russian reality and that art
should be judged for its social as well
as its aesthetic qualities.
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Nikolay Chernyshevsky

N.G. Chernyshevsky, in full Nikolay
Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (b. July 12
[July 24, New Style], 1828, Saratov,
Russia—d. Oct. 17 [Oct. 29], 1889,
Saratov), radical journalist and
politician who greatly influenced the
young Russian intelligentsia through his
classic work, What Is to Be Done?
(1863).
Son of a poor priest, Chernyshevsky in
1854 joined the staff of the review
Sovremennik (“Contemporary”). Though he
focused on social and economic evils and
tried to expound predictable laws of
economic change, he followed his fellow
journalist Vissarion Belinsky and the
English utilitarians in preaching a
highly purified egoism as the most
natural and desirable mainspring of
human conduct. Landowners accused him of
stirring up class hatred; and, although
the extent to which he was actively
subversive is a matter of controversy,
he was arrested in 1862 and, after two
years’ imprisonment, was exiled to
Siberia, where he remained until 1883.
While in prison he wrote his didactic
novel Shto Delat? (1863; A Vital
Question or What Is to Be Done?). He was
a Westernizer who opposed nationalist
Slavophiles. In the U.S.S.R. he was
considered by many to be a forerunner of
Vladimir Lenin.
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Nikolay Dobrolyubov

Nikolay Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov, (b.
Jan. 24 [Feb. 5, New Style], 1836,
Nizhny Novgorod, Russia—d. Nov. 17 [Nov.
29], 1861, St. Petersburg), radical
Russian utilitarian critic who rejected
traditional and Romantic literature.
Dobrolyubov, the son of a priest, was
educated at a seminary and a pedagogical
institute. Early in his life he rejected
traditionalism and found his ideal in
progress as represented by Western
science. In 1856 Dobrolyubov began
contributing to Sovremennik (“The
Contemporary”), an influential liberal
periodical, and from 1857 until his
death he was chief critic for that
journal. He was perhaps the most
influential critic after Vissarion
Belinsky among the radical
intelligentsia; his main concern was the
criticism of life rather than of
literature. He is perhaps best known for
his essay “What is Oblomovism”
(1859–60). The essay deals with the
phenomenon represented by the character
Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov’s novel of
that name. It established the term
Oblomovism as a name for the superfluous
man of Russian life and literature.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Having been imprisoned in Siberia for political
activity,
Dostoyevsky
parodied What Is to Be Done? in Zapiski iz podpolya
(1864; Notes from the Underground), a novella that
has had incalculable influence on Western literature
for formal as well as thematic reasons. In a complex
series of paradoxes, its hero argues against
determinism, utopianism, and historical laws. In
Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and
Punishment), a philosophical and psychological
account of a murder, Dostoyevsky examines the
tendency of intelligents (members of the
intelligentsia) to regard themselves as superior to
ordinary people and as beyond traditional morality.
Besy (1872; The Possessed), a novel based on Russian
terrorism, is famous as the work that most
accurately predicted 20th-century totalitarianism.
In Idiot (1868–69; The Idiot) and Bratya Karamazovy
(1879–80; The Brothers Karamazov),
Dostoyevsky,
who is generally regarded as one of the supreme
psychologists in world literature, sought to
demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity with
the deepest truths of the psyche.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"The Idiot"

Russian author
in full Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky
also spelled Dostoevsky
born November 11,
[October 30, Old Style], 1821, Moscow, Russia
died February 9 [January 28, O.S.], 1881, St. Petersburg
Main
Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration
into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his
unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on
20th-century fiction.
Dostoyevsky is usually
regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived. Literary
modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology,
and literary criticism have been profoundly shaped by his ideas. His
works are often called prophetic because he so accurately predicted how
Russia’s revolutionaries would behave if they came to power. In his time
he was also renowned for his activity as a journalist.
Major works and
their characteristics
Dostoyevsky is best known for his novella Notes from the Underground
and for four long novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed
(also and more accurately known as The Demons and The Devils), and The
Brothers Karamazov. Each of these works is famous for its psychological
profundity, and, indeed, Dostoyevsky is commonly regarded as one of the
greatest psychologists in the history of literature. He specialized in
the analysis of pathological states of mind that lead to insanity,
murder, and suicide and in the exploration of the emotions of
humiliation, self-destruction, tyrannical domination, and murderous
rage. These major works are also renowned as great “novels of ideas”
that treat timeless and timely issues in philosophy and politics.
Psychology and philosophy are closely linked in Dostoyevsky’s portrayals
of intellectuals, who “feel ideas” in the depths of their souls.
Finally, these novels broke new ground with their experiments in
literary form.
Background and early life
The major events of Dostoyevsky’s life—mock execution, imprisonment
in Siberia, and epileptic seizures—were so well known that, even apart
from his work, Dostoyevsky achieved great celebrity in his own time.
Indeed, he frequently capitalized on his legend by drawing on the highly
dramatic incidents of his life in creating his greatest characters. Even
so, some events in his life have remained clouded in mystery, and
careless speculations have unfortunately gained the status of fact.
Unlike many other
Russian writers of the first part of the 19th century, Dostoyevsky was
not born into the landed gentry. He often stressed the difference
between his own background and that of Leo Tolstoy or Ivan Turgenev and
the effect of that difference on his work. First, Dostoyevsky was always
in need of money and had to hurry his works into publication. Although
he complained that writing against a deadline prevented him from
achieving his full literary powers, it is equally possible that his
frenzied style of composition lent his novels an energy that has
remained part of their appeal. Second, Dostoyevsky often noted that,
unlike writers from the nobility who described the family life of their
own class, shaped by “beautiful forms” and stable traditions, he
explored the lives of “accidental families” and of “the insulted and the
humiliated.”
Dostoyevsky’s father, a
retired military surgeon, served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital
for the Poor in Moscow, where he treated charity cases while also
conducting a private practice. Though a devoted parent, Dostoyevsky’s
father was a stern, suspicious, and rigid man. By contrast, his mother,
a cultured woman from a merchant family, was kindly and indulgent.
Dostoyevsky’s lifelong attachment to religion began with the
old-fashioned piety of his family, so different from the fashionable
skepticism of the gentry.
In 1828 Dostoyevsky’s
father managed to earn the rank of a nobleman (the reforms of Peter I
the Great had made such a change in status possible). He bought an
estate in 1831, and so young Fyodor spent the summer months in the
country. Until 1833 Dostoyevsky was educated at home, before being sent
to a day school and then to a boarding school. Dostoyevsky’s mother died
in 1837. Some 40 years after Dostoyevsky’s death it was revealed that
his father, who had died suddenly in 1839, might have been murdered by
his own serfs; however, this account is now regarded by many scholars as
a myth. At the time, Dostoyevsky was a student in the Academy of
Military Engineering in St. Petersburg, a career as a military engineer
having been marked out for him by his father.
Dostoyevsky was
evidently unsuited for such an occupation. He and his older brother
Mikhail, who remained his close friend and became his collaborator in
publishing journals, were entranced with literature from a young age. As
a child and as a student, Dostoyevsky was drawn to Romantic and Gothic
fiction, especially the works of Sir Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe,
Nikolay Karamzin, Friedrich Schiller, and Aleksandr Pushkin. Not long
after completing his degree (1843) and becoming a sublieutenant,
Dostoyevsky resigned his commission to commence a hazardous career as a
writer living off his pen.
Early works
The first work Dostoyevsky published was a rather free and
emotionally intensified translation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie
Grandet; and the French writer’s oeuvre was to exercise a great
influence on his own fiction. Dostoyevsky did not have to toil long in
obscurity. No sooner had he written his first novella, Bednyye lyudi
(1846; Poor Folk), than he was hailed as the great new talent of Russian
literature by the most influential critic of his day, the “furious”
Vissarion Belinsky.
Three decades later, in
The Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky recalled the story of his
“discovery.” After completing Poor Folk, he gave a copy to his friend,
Dmitry Grigorovich, who brought it to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov. Reading
Dostoyevsky’s manuscript aloud, these two writers were overwhelmed by
the work’s psychological insight and ability to play on the
heartstrings. Even though it was 4:00 am, they went straight to
Dostoyevsky to tell him his first novella was a masterpiece. Later that
day, Nekrasov brought Poor Folk to Belinsky. “A new Gogol has appeared!”
Nekrasov proclaimed, to which Belinsky replied, “With you, Gogols spring
up like mushrooms!” Belinsky soon communicated his enthusiasm to
Dostoyevsky: “Do you, you yourself, realize what it is that you have
written!” In The Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky remembered this as the
happiest moment of his life.
Poor Folk, the appeal
of which has been overshadowed by Dostoyevsky’s later works, is cast in
the then already anachronistic form of an epistolary novel. Makar
Devushkin, a poor copying clerk who can afford to live only in a corner
of a dirty kitchen, exchanges letters with a young and poor girl,
Varvara Dobrosyolova. Her letters reveal that she has already been
procured once for a wealthy and worthless man, whom, at the end of the
novel, she agrees to marry. The novel is remarkable for its descriptions
of the psychological (rather than just material) effects of poverty.
Dostoyevsky transformed the techniques Nikolay Gogol used in The
Overcoat, the celebrated story of a poor copying clerk. Whereas Gogol’s
thoroughly comic hero utterly lacks self-awareness, Dostoyevsky’s
self-conscious hero suffers agonies of humiliation. In one famous scene,
Devushkin reads Gogol’s story and is offended by it.
In the next few years
Dostoyevsky published a number of stories, including Belyye nochi
(“White Nights”), which depicts the mentality of a dreamer, and a
novella, Dvoynik (1846; The Double), a study in schizophrenia. The hero
of this novella, Golyadkin, begets a double of himself, who mocks him
and usurps his place. Dostoyevsky boldly narrates the story through one
of the voices that sounds within Golyadkin’s psyche so that the story
reads as if it were a taunt addressed directly to its unfortunate hero.
Although Dostoyevsky
was at first lionized, his excruciating shyness and touchy vanity
provoked hostility among the members of Belinsky’s circle. Nekrasov and
Turgenev circulated a satiric poem in which the young writer was called,
like Don Quixote, “The Knight of the Doleful Countenance”; years later,
Dostoyevsky paid Turgenev back with a devastating parody of him in The
Possessed. Belinsky himself gradually became disappointed with
Dostoyevsky’s preference for psychology over social issues. Always prone
to nervous illness, Dostoyevsky suffered from depression.
Political activity and arrest
In 1847 Dostoyevsky began to participate in the Petrashevsky Circle,
a group of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism. He eventually
joined a related, secret group devoted to revolution and illegal
propaganda. It appears that Dostoyevsky did not sympathize (as others
did) with egalitarian communism and terrorism but was motivated by his
strong disapproval of serfdom. On April 23, 1849, he and the other
members of the Petrashevsky Circle were arrested. Dostoyevsky spent
eight months in prison until, on December 22, the prisoners were led
without warning to the Semyonovsky Square. There a sentence of death by
firing squad was pronounced, last rites were offered, and three
prisoners were led out to be shot first. At the last possible moment,
the guns were lowered and a messenger arrived with the information that
the tsar had deigned to spare their lives. The mock-execution ceremony
was in fact part of the punishment. One of the prisoners went
permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write Crime and
Punishment.
Dostoyevsky passed
several minutes in the full conviction that he was about to die, and in
his novels characters repeatedly imagine the state of mind of a man
approaching execution. The hero of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, offers
several extended descriptions of this sort, which readers knew carried
special authority because the author of the novel had gone through the
terrible experience. The mock execution led Dostoyevsky to appreciate
the very process of life as an incomparable gift and, in contrast to the
prevailing determinist and materialist thinking of the intelligentsia,
to value freedom, integrity, and individual responsibility all the more
strongly.
Instead of being
executed, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison
labour camp, to be followed by an indefinite term as a soldier. After
his return to Russia 10 years later, he wrote a novel based on his
prison camp experiences, Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1861–62; The House
of the Dead). Gone was the tinge of Romanticism and dreaminess present
in his early fiction. The novel, which was to initiate the Russian
tradition of prison camp literature, describes the horrors that
Dostoyevsky actually witnessed: the brutality of the guards who enjoyed
cruelty for its own sake, the evil of criminals who could enjoy
murdering children, and the existence of decent souls amid filth and
degradation—all these themes, warranted by the author’s own experience,
gave the novel the immense power that readers still experience. Tolstoy
considered it Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece. Above all, The House of the
Dead illustrates that, more than anything else, it is the need for
individual freedom that makes us human. This conviction was to bring
Dostoyevsky into direct conflict with the radical determinists and
socialists of the intelligentsia.
In Siberia Dostoyevsky
experienced what he called the “regeneration” of his convictions. He
rejected the condescending attitude of intellectuals, who wanted to
impose their political ideas on society, and came to believe in the
dignity and fundamental goodness of common people. He describes this
change in his sketch The Peasant Marey (which appears in The Diary of a
Writer). Dostoyevsky also became deeply attached to Russian Orthodoxy,
as the religion of the common people, although his faith was always at
war with his skepticism. In one famous letter he describes how he
thirsts for faith “like parched grass” and concludes: “if someone proved
to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth
were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ
rather than with the truth.”
Dostoyevsky suffered
his first attacks of epilepsy while in prison. No less than his accounts
of being led to execution, his descriptions of epileptic seizures
(especially in The Idiot) reveal the heights and depths of the human
soul. As Dostoyevsky and his hero Myshkin experience it, the moment just
before an attack grants the sufferer a strong sensation of perfect
harmony and of overcoming time. Freud interpreted Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy
as psychological in origin, but his account has been vitiated by
research showing that his analysis was based on misinformation. In 1857
Dostoyevsky married a consumptive widow, Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva (she
died seven years later); the unhappy marriage began with her witnessing
one of his seizures on their honeymoon.
Works of the 1860s
Upon his return to Russia, Dostoyevsky plunged into literary
activity. With his brother Mikhail, he edited two influential journals,
first Vremya (1861–63; “Time”), which was closed by the government on
account of an objectionable article, and then Epokha (1864–65; “Epoch”),
which collapsed after the death of Mikhail. After first trying to
maintain a middle-of-the-road position, Dostoyevsky began to attack the
radicals, who virtually defined the Russian intelligentsia. Dostoyevsky
was repulsed by their materialism, their utilitarian morality, their
reduction of art to propaganda, and, above all, their denial of
individual freedom and responsibility. For the remainder of his life, he
maintained a deep sense of the danger of radical ideas, and so his
post-Siberian works came to be resented by the Bolsheviks and held in
suspicion by the Soviet regime.
Works of the 1860s » Notes from the Underground
In the first part of Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the
Underground) an unnamed first-person narrator delivers a brilliant
attack on a set of beliefs shared by liberals and radicals: that it is
possible to discover the laws of individual psychology, that human
beings consequently have no free choice, that history is governed by
laws, and that it is possible to design a utopian society based on the
laws of society and human nature. Even if such a society could be built,
the underground man argues, people would hate it just because it denied
them caprice and defined them as utterly predictable. In the novella’s
second part the underground man recalls incidents from his past, which
show him behaving, in answer to determinism, according to sheer spite.
Dostoyevsky thus makes clear that the underground man’s irrationalist
solution is no better than the rationalists’ systems. Notes from the
Underground also parodied the bible of the radicals, Nikolay
Chernyshevsky’s utopian fiction What Is to Be Done? (1863).
Works of the 1860s » Stay in western Europe
For several reasons, Dostoyevsky spent much of the 1860s in western
Europe: he wanted to see the society that he both admired for its
culture and deplored for its materialism, he was hoping to resume an
affair with the minor author Appolinariya Suslova, he was escaping his
creditors in Russia, and he was disastrously attracted to gambling. An
unscrupulous publisher offered him a desperately needed advance on the
condition that he deliver a novel by a certain date; the publisher was
counting on the forfeit provisions, which would allow him nine years to
publish all of Dostoyevsky’s works for free. With less than a month
remaining, Dostoyevsky hired a stenographer and dictated his novel Igrok
(1866; The Gambler)—based on his relations with Suslova and the
psychology of compulsive gambling—which he finished just on time. A few
months later (1867) he married the stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna
Snitkina. She at last put his life and finances in order and created
stable conditions for his work and new family. They had four children,
of whom two survived to adulthood.
Works of the 1860s » Crime and Punishment
Written at the same time as The Gambler, Prestupleniye i nakazaniye
(1866; Crime and Punishment) describes a young intellectual,
Raskolnikov, willing to gamble on ideas. He decides to solve all his
problems at a stroke by murdering an old pawnbroker woman. Contradictory
motives and theories all draw him to the crime. Utilitarian morality
suggests that killing her is a positive good because her money could be
used to help many others. On the other hand, Raskolnikov reasons that
belief in good and evil is itself sheer prejudice, a mere relic of
religion, and that, morally speaking, there is no such thing as crime.
Nevertheless, Raskolnikov, despite his denial of morality, sympathizes
with the unfortunate and so wants to kill the pawnbroker just because
she is an oppressor of the weak. His most famous theory justifying
murder divides the world into extraordinary people, such as Solon,
Caesar, and Napoleon, and ordinary people, who simply serve to propagate
the species. Extraordinary people, he theorizes, must have “the right to
transgress,” or progress would be impossible. Nothing could be further
from Dostoyevsky’s own morality, based on the infinite worth of each
human soul, than this Napoleonic theory, which Dostoyevsky viewed as the
real content of the intelligentsia’s belief in its superior wisdom.
After committing the
crime, Raskolnikov unaccountably finds himself gripped by “mystic
terror” and a horrible sense of isolation. The detective Porfiry
Petrovich, who guesses Raskolnikov’s guilt but cannot prove it, plays
psychological games with him until the murderer at last confesses.
Meanwhile, Raskolnikov tries to discover the real motive for his crime
but never arrives at a single answer. In a famous commentary, Tolstoy
argued that there was no single motive but rather a series of “tiny,
tiny alterations” of mood and mental habits. Dostoyevsky’s brilliance in
part lies in his complex rethinking of such concepts as motive and
intention.
Crime and Punishment
also offers remarkable psychological portraits of a drunkard,
Marmeladov, and of a vicious amoralist haunted by hallucinations,
Svidrigailov. Raskolnikov’s friend Razumikhin voices the author’s
distaste for an ideological approach to life; Razumikhin’s own life
exemplifies how one can solve problems neither by grand ideas nor by
dramatic gambles but by slow, steady, hard work.
Quite deliberately,
Dostoyevsky made the heroine of the story, Sonya Marmeladova, an
unrealistic symbol of pure Christian goodness. Having become a
prostitute to support her family, she later persuades Raskolnikov to
confess and then follows him to Siberia. In the novel’s epilogue, the
prisoner Raskolnikov, who has confessed not out of remorse but out of
emotional stress, at first continues to maintain his amoral theories but
at last is brought to true repentance by a revelatory dream and by
Sonya’s goodness. Critical opinion is divided over whether the epilogue
is artistically successful.
Works of the 1860s » The Idiot
Dostoyevsky’s next major novel, Idiot (1868–69; The Idiot),
represents his attempt to describe a perfectly good man in a way that is
still psychologically convincing—seemingly an impossible artistic task.
If he could succeed, Dostoyevsky believed, he would show that
Christ-like goodness is indeed possible; and so the very writing of the
work became an attempt at what might be called a novelistic proof of
Christianity.
The work’s hero, Prince
Myshkin, is indeed perfectly generous and so innocent as to be regarded
as an idiot; however, he is also gifted with profound psychological
insight. Unfortunately, his very goodness seems to bring disaster to all
he meets, even to the novel’s heroine, Nastasya Filippovna, whom he
wishes to save. With a remarkably complex psychology, she both accepts
and bitterly defies the world’s judgment of her as a fallen woman.
Ippolit, a spiteful young man dying of consumption, offers brilliant
meditations on art, on death, on the meaninglessness of dumb brutish
nature, and on happiness, which, to him, is a matter of the very process
of living. Columbus, he explains, was happy not when he discovered
America but while he was discovering it.
Dostoyevsky’s last decade » The Possessed
Dostoyevsky’s next novel, Besy (1872; The Possessed), earned him the
permanent hatred of the radicals. Often regarded as the most brilliant
political novel ever written, it interweaves two plots. One concerns
Nikolay Stavrogin, a man with a void at the centre of his being. In his
younger years Stavrogin, in a futile quest for meaning, had embraced and
cast off a string of ideologies, each of which has been adopted by
different intellectuals mesmerized by Stavrogin’s personality. Shatov
has become a Slavophile who, like Dostoyevsky himself, believes in the
“God-bearing” Russian people. Existentialist critics (especially Albert
Camus) became fascinated with Kirillov, who adopts a series of
contradictory philosophical justifications for suicide. Most famously,
Kirillov argues that only an utterly gratuitous act of self-destruction
can prove that a person is free because such an act cannot be explained
by any kind of self-interest and therefore violates all psychological
laws. By killing himself without reason, Kirillov hopes to become the
“man-god” and so provide an example for human freedom in a world that
has denied Christ (the God-man).
It is the novel’s other
plot that has earned Dostoyevsky the reputation of a political prophet.
It describes a cell of revolutionary conspirators led by Pyotr
Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who binds the group together by involving them
in murdering Shatov. (This incident was based on the scheme of a real
revolutionary of the time, Sergey Nechayev.) One of the revolutionaries,
Shigalyov, offers his thoughts on the emergence of the perfect society:
“Starting with unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”
Enforced equality and guaranteed utopia demand the suppression of all
individuality and independent thought. In lines that anticipate Soviet
and Maoist cultural policy, Pyotr Stepanovich predicts that, when the
revolution comes, “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will
have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned,” all in the name of
“equality.”
Pyotr is the son and
Stavrogin the former student of the novel’s weak but endearing liberal,
Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Dostoyevsky suggests that the madness
of the radical sons derives from their fathers’ liberal skepticism,
mockery of traditional morals, and, above all, neglect of the family.
The Possessed is a profoundly conservative and Christian work. In
contrast to its savage portraits of intellectuals, the novel expresses
great sympathy for workers and other ordinary people ill-served by the
radicals who presume to speak in their name.
Dostoyevsky’s last decade » A Writer’s Diary and other works
In 1873 Dostoyevsky assumed the editorship of the conservative
journal Grazhdanin (“The Citizen”), where he published an irregular
column entitled Dnevnik pisatelya (“The Diary of a Writer”). He left
Grazhdanin to write Podrostok (1875; A Raw Youth, also known as The
Adolescent), a relatively unsuccessful and diffuse novel describing a
young man’s relations with his natural father.
In 1876–77 Dostoyevsky
devoted his energies to Dnevnik pisatelya, which he was now able to
bring out in the form he had originally intended. A one-man journal, for
which Dostoyevsky served as editor, publisher, and sole contributor, the
Diary represented an attempt to initiate a new literary genre. Issue by
monthly issue, the Diary created complex thematic resonances among
diverse kinds of material: short stories, plans for possible stories,
autobiographical essays, sketches that seem to lie on the boundary
between fiction and journalism, psychological analyses of sensational
crimes, literary criticism, and political commentary. The Diary proved
immensely popular and financially rewarding, but as an aesthetic
experiment it was less successful, probably because Dostoyevsky, after a
few intricate issues, seemed unable to maintain his complex design.
Instead, he was drawn into expressing his political views, which, during
these two years, became increasingly extreme. Specifically, Dostoyevsky
came to believe that western Europe was about to collapse, after which
Russia and the Russian Orthodox church would create the kingdom of God
on earth and so fulfill the promise of the Book of Revelation. In a
series of anti-Catholic articles, he equated the Roman Catholic church
with the socialists because both are concerned with earthly rule and
maintain (Dostoyevsky believed) an essentially materialist view of human
nature. He reached his moral nadir with a number of anti-Semitic
articles.
Because Dostoyevsky was
unable to maintain his aesthetic design for the Diary, its most famous
sections are usually known from anthologies and so are separated from
the context in which they were designed to fit. These sections include
four of his best short stories—Krotkaya (“The Meek One”), Son smeshnogo
cheloveka (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”), Malchik u Khrista na elke
(“The Heavenly Christmas Tree”), and Bobok—as well as a number of
autobiographical and semifictional sketches, including Muzhik Marey
(“The Peasant Marey”), Stoletnaya (“A Hundred-Year-Old Woman”), and a
satire, Spiritizm. Nechto o chertyakh Chrezychaynaya khitrost chertey,
esli tolko eto cherti (“Spiritualism. Something about Devils. The
Extraordinary Cleverness of Devils, If Only These Are Devils”).
Dostoyevsky’s last decade » The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky’s last and probably greatest novel, Bratya Karamazovy
(1879–80; The Brothers Karamazov), focuses on his favourite theological
and philosophical themes: the origin of evil, the nature of freedom, and
the craving for faith. A profligate and vicious father, Fyodor Pavlovich
Karamazov, mocks everything noble and engages in unseemly buffoonery at
every opportunity. When his sons were infants, he neglected them not out
of malice but simply because he “forgot” them. The eldest, Dmitry, a
passionate man capable of sincerely loving both “Sodom” and “the
Madonna” at the same time, wrangles with his father over money and
competes with him for the favours of a “demonic” woman, Grushenka. When
the old man is murdered, circumstantial evidence leads to Dmitry’s
arrest for the crime, which actually has been committed by the fourth,
and illegitimate, son, the malicious epileptic Smerdyakov.
The youngest legitimate
son, Alyosha, is another of Dostoyevsky’s attempts to create a realistic
Christ figure. Following the wise monk Zosima, Alyosha tries to put
Christian love into practice. The narrator proclaims him the work’s real
hero, but readers are usually most interested in the middle brother, the
intellectual Ivan.
Like Raskolnikov, Ivan
argues that, if there is no God and no immortality, then “all is
permitted.” And, even if all is not permitted, he tells Alyosha, one is
responsible only for one’s actions but not for one’s wishes. Of course,
the Sermon on the Mount says one is responsible for one’s wishes, and,
when old Karamazov is murdered, Ivan, in spite of all his theories,
comes to feel guilty for having desired his father’s death. In tracing
the dynamics of Ivan’s guilt, Dostoyevsky in effect provides a
psychological justification for Christian teaching. Evil happens not
just because of a few criminals but because of a moral climate in which
all people participate by harbouring evil wishes. Therefore, as Father
Zosima teaches, “everyone is responsible for everyone and for
everything.”
The novel is most
famous for three chapters that may be ranked among the greatest pages of
Western literature. In “Rebellion,” Ivan indicts God the Father for
creating a world in which children suffer. Ivan has also written a
“poem,” The Grand Inquisitor, which represents his response to God the
Son. It tells the story of Christ’s brief return to earth during the
Spanish Inquisition. Recognizing him, the Inquisitor arrests him as “the
worst of heretics” because, the Inquisitor explains, the church has
rejected Christ. For Christ came to make people free, but, the
Inquisitor insists, people do not want to be free, no matter what they
say. They want security and certainty rather than free choice, which
leads them to error and guilt. And so, to ensure happiness, the church
has created a society based on “miracle, mystery, and authority.” The
Inquisitor is evidently meant to stand not only for medieval Roman
Catholicism but also for contemporary socialism. “Rebellion” and “The
Grand Inquisitor” contain what many have considered the strongest
arguments ever formulated against God, which Dostoyevsky includes so
that, in refuting them, he can truly defend Christianity. It is one of
the greatest paradoxes of Dostoyevsky’s work that his deeply Christian
novel more than gives the Devil his due.
In the work’s other
most famous chapter, Ivan, now going mad, is visited by the Devil, who
talks philosophy with him. Quite strikingly, this Devil is neither grand
nor satanic but petty and vulgar, as if to symbolize the ordinariness
and banality of evil. He also keeps up with all the latest beliefs of
the intelligentsia on earth, which leads, in remarkably humorous
passages, to the Devil’s defense of materialism and agnosticism. The
image of the “petty demon” has had immense influence on 20th-century
thought and literature.
In 1880 Dostoyevsky
delivered an electrifying speech about the poet Aleksandr Pushkin, which
he published in a separate issue of The Diary of a Writer (August 1880).
After finishing Karamazov, he resumed the monthly Diary but lived to
publish only a single issue (January 1881) before dying of a hemorrhage
on January 28 in St. Petersburg.
Assessment
Dostoyevsky’s name has become synonymous with psychological
profundity. For generations, the depth and contradictoriness of his
heroes have made systematic psychological theories look shallow by
comparison. Many theorists (most notably Freud) have tried to claim
Dostoyevsky as a predecessor. His sense of evil and his love of freedom
have made Dostoyevsky especially relevant to a century of world war,
mass murder, and totalitarianism. At least two modern literary genres,
the prison camp novel and the dystopian novel (works such as Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four), derive from his writings. His ideas and formal
innovations exercised a profound influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, André
Gide, Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Mikhail Bulgakov, to
name only a few. Above all, his works continue to enthrall readers by
combining suspenseful plots with ultimate questions about faith,
suffering, and the meaning of life.
Gary Saul Morson
|
Leo Tolstoy
Probably even more than
Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy has
been praised as being the greatest novelist in world
literature. The 19th-century English critic and poet
Matthew Arnold famously expressed the commonest view
in saying that a work by
Tolstoy is not
a piece of art but a piece of life: his novels read
as if life were writing directly, without mediation.
Tolstoy’s
techniques reflect his belief that no theory is
adequate to explain the world’s complexity, which
unfolds by “tiny, tiny alterations” fitting no
pattern. He denied the existence of historical laws
and insisted that ethics is a matter not of rules
but of supreme sensitivity to the particular. “True
life,” he contended, is lived not at moments of
grand crisis but at countless ordinary and prosaic
moments, which human beings usually do not notice.
All these ideas are illustrated and explicitly
expressed in Voyna i mir (1865–69; War and Peace),
set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, and in Anna
Karenina (1875–77), which applies this prosaic view
of life to marriage, the family, and work. Anna
Karenina also contrasts romantic love, which is
based on intense moments of passion and leads to
adultery, with the prosaic love of the family, which
is based above all on intimacy.
After completing Anna Karenina,
Tolstoy
underwent a religious crisis, which eventually led
him to reject his two great novels, formulate a new
religion that he thought of as true Christianity,
and cultivate a different type of art. To outline
his views, he wrote a number of tracts, including
Tsarstvo bozhiye vnutri vas (1893; The Kingdom of
God Is Within You) and Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1898;
What Is Art?). His only long novel of this period,
Voskreseniye (1899; Resurrection), is a tendentious
failure. But he produced brilliant novellas, many of
which were published posthumously, including Otets
Sergy (written 1898; Father Sergius), in which he
seems to reflect on his own quest for sainthood, and
Khadzhi-Murat (written 1904; Hadji-Murad). Smert
Ivana Ilicha (1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyitch),
which is often considered the greatest novella in
Russian literature, conveys the existential horror
of sickness and mortality while describing
civilization as a web of lies designed to distract
people from an awareness of death.
Leo Tolstoy
"The Kreutzer Sonata"

Russian writer
Tolstoy also spelled Tolstoi, Russian in full Lev
Nikolayevich, Count (Graf) Tolstoy
born Aug. 28 [Sept. 9, New Style], 1828, Yasnaya
Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire
died Nov. 7 [Nov. 20], 1910, Astapovo, Ryazan
province
Main
Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s
greatest novelists.
Tolstoy is best known
for his two longest works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which are
commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written. War and Peace
in particular seems virtually to define this form for many readers and
critics. Among Tolstoy’s shorter works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is
usually classed among the best examples of the novella. Especially
during his last three decades Tolstoy also achieved world renown as a
moral and religious teacher. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil had
an important influence on Gandhi. Although Tolstoy’s religious ideas no
longer command the respect they once did, interest in his life and
personality has, if anything, increased over the years.
Most readers will agree
with the assessment of the 19th-century British poet and critic Matthew
Arnold that a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life;
the 20th-century Russian author Isaak Babel commented that, if the world
could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Critics of diverse
schools have agreed that somehow Tolstoy’s works seem to elude all
artifice. Most have stressed his ability to observe the smallest changes
of consciousness and to record the slightest movements of the body. What
another novelist would describe as a single act of consciousness,
Tolstoy convincingly breaks down into a series of infinitesimally small
steps. According to the English writer Virginia Woolf, who took for
granted that Tolstoy was “the greatest of all novelists,” these
observational powers elicited a kind of fear in readers, who “wish to
escape from the gaze which Tolstoy fixes on us.” Those who visited
Tolstoy as an old man also reported feelings of great discomfort when he
appeared to understand their unspoken thoughts. It was commonplace to
describe him as godlike in his powers and titanic in his struggles to
escape the limitations of the human condition. Some viewed Tolstoy as
the embodiment of nature and pure vitality, others saw him as the
incarnation of the world’s conscience, but for almost all who knew him
or read his works, he was not just one of the greatest writers who ever
lived but a living symbol of the search for life’s meaning.
Early years
The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy was born at the family
estate, about 130 miles (210 kilometres) south of Moscow, where he was
to live the better part of his life and write his most important works.
His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna, née Princess Volkonskaya, died before he
was two years old, and his father Nikolay Ilich, Count Tolstoy, followed
her in 1837. His grandmother died 11 months later, and then his next
guardian, his aunt Aleksandra, in 1841. Tolstoy and his four siblings
were then transferred to the care of another aunt in Kazan, in western
Russia. Tolstoy remembered a cousin who lived at Yasnaya Polyana,
Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya (“Aunt Toinette,” as he called her),
as the greatest influence on his childhood, and later, as a young man,
Tolstoy wrote some of his most touching letters to her. Despite the
constant presence of death, Tolstoy remembered his childhood in idyllic
terms. His first published work, Detstvo (1852; Childhood), was a
fictionalized and nostalgic account of his early years.
Educated at home by
tutors, Tolstoy enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1844 as a student
of Oriental languages. His poor record soon forced him to transfer to
the less demanding law faculty, where he wrote a comparison of the
French political philosopher Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu’s The
Spirit of Laws and Catherine II the Great’s nakaz (instructions for a
law code). Interested in literature and ethics, he was drawn to the
works of the English novelists Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens and,
especially, to the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau; in place of a cross, he wore a medallion with a portrait of
Rousseau. But he spent most of his time trying to be comme il faut
(socially correct), drinking, gambling, and engaging in debauchery.
After leaving the university in 1847 without a degree, Tolstoy returned
to Yasnaya Polyana, where he planned to educate himself, to manage his
estate, and to improve the lot of his serfs. Despite frequent
resolutions to change his ways, he continued his loose life during stays
in Tula, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. In 1851 he joined his older brother
Nikolay, an army officer, in the Caucasus and then entered the army
himself. He took part in campaigns against the native Caucasian tribes
and, soon after, in the Crimean War (1853–56).
In 1847 Tolstoy began
keeping a diary, which became his laboratory for experiments in
self-analysis and, later, for his fiction. With some interruptions,
Tolstoy kept his diaries throughout his life, and he is therefore one of
the most copiously documented writers who ever lived. Reflecting the
life he was leading, his first diary begins by confiding that he may
have contracted a venereal disease. The early diaries record a
fascination with rule-making, as Tolstoy composed rules for diverse
aspects of social and moral behaviour. They also record the writer’s
repeated failure to honour these rules, his attempts to formulate new
ones designed to ensure obedience to old ones, and his frequent acts of
self-castigation. Tolstoy’s later belief that life is too complex and
disordered ever to conform to rules or philosophical systems perhaps
derives from these futile attempts at self-regulation.
First publications
Concealing his identity, Tolstoy submitted Childhood for publication
in Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), a prominent journal edited by the
poet Nikolay Nekrasov. Nekrasov was enthusiastic, and the pseudonymously
published work was widely praised. During the next few years Tolstoy
published a number of stories based on his experiences in the Caucasus,
including “Nabeg” (1853; “The Raid”) and his three sketches about the
Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War: “Sevastopol v dekabre
mesyatse” (“Sevastopol in December”), “Sevastopol v maye” (“Sevastopol
in May”), and “Sevastopol v avguste 1855 goda” (“Sevastopol in August”;
all published 1855–56). The first sketch, which deals with the courage
of simple soldiers, was praised by the tsar. Written in the second
person as if it were a tour guide, this story also demonstrates
Tolstoy’s keen interest in formal experimentation and his lifelong
concern with the morality of observing other people’s suffering. The
second sketch includes a lengthy passage of a soldier’s stream of
consciousness (one of the early uses of this device) in the instant
before he is killed by a bomb. In the story’s famous ending, the author,
after commenting that none of his characters are truly heroic, asserts
that “the hero of my story—whom I love with all the power of my soul . .
. who was, is, and ever will be beautiful—is the truth.” Readers ever
since have remarked on Tolstoy’s ability to make such “absolute
language,” which usually ruins realistic fiction, aesthetically
effective.
After the Crimean War
Tolstoy resigned from the army and was at first hailed by the literary
world of St. Petersburg. But his prickly vanity, his refusal to join any
intellectual camp, and his insistence on his complete independence soon
earned him the dislike of the radical intelligentsia. He was to remain
throughout his life an “archaist,” opposed to prevailing intellectual
trends. In 1857 Tolstoy traveled to Paris and returned after having
gambled away his money.
After his return to
Russia, he decided that his real vocation was pedagogy, and so he
organized a school for peasant children on his estate. After touring
western Europe to study pedagogical theory and practice, he published 12
issues of a journal, Yasnaya Polyana (1862–63), which included his
provocative articles “Progress i opredeleniye obrazovaniya” (“Progress
and the Definition of Education”), which denies that history has any
underlying laws, and “Komu u kogu uchitsya pisat, krestyanskim rebyatam
u nas ili nam u krestyanskikh rebyat?” (“Who Should Learn Writing of
Whom: Peasant Children of Us, or We of Peasant Children?”), which
reverses the usual answer to the question. Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya)
Andreyevna Bers, the daughter of a prominent Moscow physician, in 1862
and soon transferred all his energies to his marriage and the
composition of War and Peace. Tolstoy and his wife had 13 children, of
whom 10 survived infancy.
Tolstoy’s works during
the late 1850s and early 1860s experimented with new forms for
expressing his moral and philosophical concerns. To Childhood he soon
added Otrochestvo (1854; Boyhood) and Yunost (1857; Youth). A number of
stories centre on a single semiautobiographical character, Dmitry
Nekhlyudov, who later reappeared as the hero of Tolstoy’s novel
Resurrection. In “Lyutsern” (1857; “Lucerne”), Tolstoy uses the diary
form first to relate an incident, then to reflect on its timeless
meaning, and finally to reflect on the process of his own reflections.
“Tri smerti” (1859; “Three Deaths”) describes the deaths of a noblewoman
who cannot face the fact that she is dying, of a peasant who accepts
death simply, and, at last, of a tree, whose utterly natural end
contrasts with human artifice. Only the author’s transcendent
consciousness unites these three events.
“Kholstomer” (written
1863; revised and published 1886; “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse”)
has become famous for its dramatic use of a favourite Tolstoyan device,
“defamiliarization”—that is, the description of familiar social
practices from the “naive” perspective of an observer who does not take
them for granted. Readers were shocked to discover that the protagonist
and principal narrator of “Kholstomer” was an old horse. Like so many of
Tolstoy’s early works, this story satirizes the artifice and
conventionality of human society, a theme that also dominates Tolstoy’s
novel Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks). The hero of this work, the dissolute
and self-centred aristocrat Dmitry Olenin, enlists as a cadet to serve
in the Caucasus. Living among the Cossacks, he comes to appreciate a
life more in touch with natural and biological rhythms. In the novel’s
central scene, Olenin, hunting in the woods, senses that every living
creature, even a mosquito, “is just such a separate Dmitry Olenin as I
am myself.” Recognizing the futility of his past life, he resolves to
live entirely for others.
The period of the great novels (1863–77)
Happily married and ensconced with his wife and family at Yasnaya
Polyana, Tolstoy reached the height of his creative powers. He devoted
the remaining years of the 1860s to writing War and Peace. Then, after
an interlude during which he considered writing a novel about Peter I
the Great and briefly returned to pedagogy (bringing out reading primers
that were widely used), Tolstoy wrote his other great novel, Anna
Karenina. These two works share a vision of human experience rooted in
an appreciation of everyday life and prosaic virtues.
The period of the great novels (1863–77) » War and Peace
Voyna i mir (1865–69; War and Peace) contains three kinds of material—a
historical account of the Napoleonic wars, the biographies of fictional
characters, and a set of essays about the philosophy of history. Critics
from the 1860s to the present have wondered how these three parts
cohere, and many have faulted Tolstoy for including the lengthy essays,
but readers continue to respond to them with undiminished enthusiasm.
The work’s historical
portions narrate the campaign of 1805 leading to Napoleon’s victory at
the Battle of Austerlitz, a period of peace, and Napoleon’s invasion of
Russia in 1812. Contrary to generally accepted views, Tolstoy portrays
Napoleon as an ineffective, egomaniacal buffoon, Tsar Alexander I as a
phrasemaker obsessed with how historians will describe him, and the
Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov (previously disparaged) as a patient old
man who understands the limitations of human will and planning.
Particularly noteworthy are the novel’s battle scenes, which show combat
as sheer chaos. Generals may imagine they can “anticipate all
contingencies,” but battle is really the result of “a hundred million
diverse chances” decided on the moment by unforeseeable circumstances.
In war as in life, no system or model can come close to accounting for
the infinite complexity of human behaviour.
Among the book’s
fictional characters, the reader’s attention is first focused on Prince
Andrey Bolkonsky, a proud man who has come to despise everything fake,
shallow, or merely conventional. Recognizing the artifice of high
society, he joins the army to achieve glory, which he regards as truly
meaningful. Badly wounded at Austerlitz, he comes to see glory and
Napoleon as no less petty than the salons of St. Petersburg. As the
novel progresses, Prince Andrey repeatedly discovers the emptiness of
the activities to which he has devoted himself. Tolstoy’s description of
his death in 1812 is usually regarded as one of the most effective
scenes in Russian literature.
The novel’s other hero,
the bumbling and sincere Pierre Bezukhov, oscillates between belief in
some philosophical system promising to resolve all questions and a
relativism so total as to leave him in apathetic despair. He at last
discovers the Tolstoyan truth that wisdom is to be found not in systems
but in the ordinary processes of daily life, especially in his marriage
to the novel’s most memorable heroine, Natasha. When the book stops—it
does not really end but just breaks off—Pierre seems to be forgetting
this lesson in his enthusiasm for a new utopian plan.
In accord with
Tolstoy’s idea that prosaic, everyday activities make a life good or
bad, the book’s truly wise characters are not its intellectuals but a
simple, decent soldier, Natasha’s brother Nikolay, and a generous pious
woman, Andrey’s sister Marya. Their marriage symbolizes the novel’s
central prosaic values.
The essays in War and
Peace, which begin in the second half of the book, satirize all attempts
to formulate general laws of history and reject the ill-considered
assumptions supporting all historical narratives. In Tolstoy’s view,
history, like battle, is essentially the product of contingency, has no
direction, and fits no pattern. The causes of historical events are
infinitely varied and forever unknowable, and so historical writing,
which claims to explain the past, necessarily falsifies it. The shape of
historical narratives reflects not the actual course of events but the
essentially literary criteria established by earlier historical
narratives.
According to Tolstoy’s
essays, historians also make a number of other closely connected errors.
They presume that history is shaped by the plans and ideas of great
men—whether generals or political leaders or intellectuals like
themselves—and that its direction is determined at dramatic moments
leading to major decisions. In fact, however, history is made by the sum
total of an infinite number of small decisions taken by ordinary people,
whose actions are too unremarkable to be documented. As Tolstoy
explains, to presume that grand events make history is like concluding
from a view of a distant region where only treetops are visible that the
region contains nothing but trees. Therefore Tolstoy’s novel gives its
readers countless examples of small incidents that each exert a tiny
influence—which is one reason that War and Peace is so long. Tolstoy’s
belief in the efficacy of the ordinary and the futility of
system-building set him in opposition to the thinkers of his day. It
remains one of the most controversial aspects of his philosophy.
The period of the great novels (1863–77) » Anna Karenina
In Anna Karenina (1875–77) Tolstoy applied these ideas to family
life. The novel’s first sentence, which indicates its concern with the
domestic, is perhaps Tolstoy’s most famous: “All happy families resemble
each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna
Karenina interweaves the stories of three families, the Oblonskys, the
Karenins, and the Levins.
The novel begins at the
Oblonskys, where the long-suffering wife Dolly has discovered the
infidelity of her genial and sybaritic husband Stiva. In her kindness,
care for her family, and concern for everyday life, Dolly stands as the
novel’s moral compass. By contrast, Stiva, though never wishing ill,
wastes resources, neglects his family, and regards pleasure as the
purpose of life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that
evil, no less than good, ultimately derives from the small moral choices
human beings make moment by moment.
Stiva’s sister Anna
begins the novel as the faithful wife of the stiff, unromantic, but
otherwise decent government minister Aleksey Karenin and the mother of a
young boy, Seryozha. But Anna, who imagines herself the heroine of a
romantic novel, allows herself to fall in love with an officer, Aleksey
Vronsky. Schooling herself to see only the worst in her husband, she
eventually leaves him and her son to live with Vronsky. Throughout the
novel, Tolstoy indicates that the romantic idea of love, which most
people identify with love itself, is entirely incompatible with the
superior kind of love, the intimate love of good families. As the novel
progresses, Anna, who suffers pangs of conscience for abandoning her
husband and child, develops a habit of lying to herself until she
reaches a state of near madness and total separation from reality. She
at last commits suicide by throwing herself under a train. The
realization that she may have been thinking about life incorrectly comes
to her only when she is lying on the track, and it is too late to save
herself.
The third story
concerns Dolly’s sister Kitty, who first imagines she loves Vronsky but
then recognizes that real love is the intimate feeling she has for her
family’s old friend, Konstantin Levin. Their story focuses on courtship,
marriage, and the ordinary incidents of family life, which, in spite of
many difficulties, shape real happiness and a meaningful existence.
Throughout the novel, Levin is tormented by philosophical questions
about the meaning of life in the face of death. Although these questions
are never answered, they vanish when Levin begins to live correctly by
devoting himself to his family and to daily work. Like his creator
Tolstoy, Levin regards the systems of intellectuals as spurious and as
incapable of embracing life’s complexity.
Both War and Peace and
Anna Karenina advance the idea that ethics can never be a matter of
timeless rules applied to particular situations. Rather, ethics depends
on a sensitivity, developed over a lifetime, to particular people and
specific situations. Tolstoy’s preference for particularities over
abstractions is often described as the hallmark of his thought.
Conversion and religious beliefs
Upon completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy fell into a profound state of
existential despair, which he describes in his Ispoved (1884; My
Confession). All activity seemed utterly pointless in the face of death,
and Tolstoy, impressed by the faith of the common people, turned to
religion. Drawn at first to the Russian Orthodox church into which he
had been born, he rapidly decided that it, and all other Christian
churches, were corrupt institutions that had thoroughly falsified true
Christianity. Having discovered what he believed to be Christ’s message
and having overcome his paralyzing fear of death, Tolstoy devoted the
rest of his life to developing and propagating his new faith. He was
excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901.
In the early 1880s he
wrote three closely related works, Issledovaniye dogmaticheskogo
bogosloviya (written 1880; An Examination of Dogmatic Theology),
Soyedineniye i perevod chetyrokh yevangeliy (written 1881; Union and
Translation of the Four Gospels), and V chyom moya vera? (written 1884;
What I Believe); he later added Tsarstvo bozhiye vnutri vas (1893; The
Kingdom of God Is Within You) and many other essays and tracts. In
brief, Tolstoy rejected all the sacraments, all miracles, the Holy
Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and many other tenets of
traditional religion, all of which he regarded as obfuscations of the
true Christian message contained, especially, in the Sermon on the
Mount. He rejected the Old Testament and much of the New, which is why,
having studied Greek, he composed his own “corrected” version of the
Gospels. For Tolstoy, “the man Jesus,” as he called him, was not the son
of God but only a wise man who had arrived at a true account of life.
Tolstoy’s rejection of religious ritual contrasts markedly with his
attitude in Anna Karenina, where religion is viewed as a matter not of
dogma but of traditional forms of daily life.
Stated positively, the
Christianity of Tolstoy’s last decades stressed five tenets: be not
angry, do not lust, do not take oaths, do not resist evil, and love your
enemies. Nonresistance to evil, the doctrine that inspired Gandhi, meant
not that evil must be accepted but only that it cannot be fought with
evil means, especially violence. Thus Tolstoy became a pacifist. Because
governments rely on the threat of violence to enforce their laws,
Tolstoy also became a kind of anarchist. He enjoined his followers not
only to refuse military service but also to abstain from voting or from
having recourse to the courts. He therefore had to go through
considerable inner conflict when it came time to make his will or to use
royalties secured by copyright even for good works. In general, it may
be said that Tolstoy was well aware that he did not succeed in living
according to his teachings.
Tolstoy based the
prescription against oaths (including promises) on an idea adapted from
his early work: the impossibility of knowing the future and therefore
the danger of binding oneself in advance. The commandment against lust
eventually led him to propose (in his afterword to Kreytserova sonata
[1891; The Kreutzer Sonata]), a dark novella about a man who murders his
wife) total abstinence as an ideal. His wife, already concerned about
their strained relations, objected. In defending his most extreme ideas,
Tolstoy compared Christianity to a lamp that is not stationary but is
carried along by human beings; it lights up ever new moral realms and
reveals ever higher ideals as mankind progresses spiritually.
Fiction after 1880
Tolstoy’s fiction after Anna Karenina may be divided into two
groups. He wrote a number of moral tales for common people, including
“Gde lyubov, tam i bog” (written 1885; “Where Love Is, God Is”), “Chem
lyudi zhivy” (written 1882; “What People Live By”), and “Mnogo li
cheloveku zemli nuzhno” (written 1885; “How Much Land Does a Man Need”),
a story that the Irish novelist James Joyce rather extravagantly praised
as “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” For
educated people, Tolstoy wrote fiction that was both realistic and
highly didactic. Some of these works succeed brilliantly, especially
Smert Ivana Ilicha (written 1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyich), a novella
describing a man’s gradual realization that he is dying and that his
life has been wasted on trivialities. Otets Sergy (written 1898; Father
Sergius), which may be taken as Tolstoy’s self-critique, tells the story
of a proud man who wants to become a saint but discovers that sainthood
cannot be consciously sought. Regarded as a great holy man, Sergius
comes to realize that his reputation is groundless; warned by a dream,
he escapes incognito to seek out a simple and decent woman whom he had
known as a child. At last he learns that not he but she is the saint,
that sainthood cannot be achieved by imitating a model, and that true
saints are ordinary people unaware of their own prosaic goodness. This
story therefore seems to criticize the ideas Tolstoy espoused after his
conversion from the perspective of his earlier great novels.
In 1899 Tolstoy
published his third long novel, Voskreseniye (Resurrection); he used the
royalties to pay for the transportation of a persecuted religious sect,
the Dukhobors, to Canada. The novel’s hero, the idle aristocrat Dmitry
Nekhlyudov, finds himself on a jury where he recognizes the defendant,
the prostitute Katyusha Maslova, as a woman whom he once had seduced,
thus precipitating her life of crime. After she is condemned to
imprisonment in Siberia, he decides to follow her and, if she will
agree, to marry her. In the novel’s most remarkable exchange, she
reproaches him for his hypocrisy: once you got your pleasure from me,
and now you want to get your salvation from me, she tells him. She
refuses to marry him, but, as the novel ends, Nekhlyudov achieves
spiritual awakening when he at last understands Tolstoyan truths,
especially the futility of judging others. The novel’s most celebrated
sections satirize the church and the justice system, but the work is
generally regarded as markedly inferior to War and Peace and Anna
Karenina.
Tolstoy’s conversion
led him to write a treatise and several essays on art. Sometimes he
expressed in more extreme form ideas he had always held (such as his
dislike for imitation of fashionable schools), but at other times he
endorsed ideas that were incompatible with his own earlier novels, which
he rejected. In Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1898; What Is Art?) he argued
that true art requires a sensitive appreciation of a particular
experience, a highly specific feeling that is communicated to the reader
not by propositions but by “infection.” In Tolstoy’s view, most
celebrated works of high art derive from no real experience but rather
from clever imitation of existing art. They are therefore “counterfeit”
works that are not really art at all. Tolstoy further divides true art
into good and bad, depending on the moral sensibility with which a given
work infects its audience. Condemning most acknowledged masterpieces,
including Shakespeare’s plays as well as his own great novels, as either
counterfeit or bad, Tolstoy singled out for praise the biblical story of
Joseph and, among Russian works, Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead and
some stories by his young friend Anton Chekhov. He was cool to Chekhov’s
drama, however, and, in a celebrated witticism, once told Chekhov that
his plays were even worse than Shakespeare’s.
Tolstoy’s late works
also include a satiric drama, Zhivoy trup (written 1900; The Living
Corpse), and a harrowing play about peasant life, Vlast tmy (written
1886; The Power of Darkness). After his death, a number of unpublished
works came to light, most notably the novella Khadji-Murat (1904;
Hadji-Murad), a brilliant narrative about the Caucasus reminiscent of
Tolstoy’s earliest fiction.
Last years
With the notable exception of his daughter Aleksandra, whom he made
his heir, Tolstoy’s family remained aloof from or hostile to his
teachings. His wife especially resented the constant presence of
disciples, led by the dogmatic V.G. Chertkov, at Yasnaya Polyana. Their
once happy life had turned into one of the most famous bad marriages in
literary history. The story of his dogmatism and her penchant for scenes
has excited numerous biographers to take one side or the other. Because
both kept diaries, and indeed exchanged and commented on each other’s
diaries, their quarrels are almost too well documented.
Tormented by his
domestic situation and by the contradiction between his life and his
principles, in 1910 Tolstoy at last escaped incognito from Yasnaya
Polyana, accompanied by Aleksandra and his doctor. In spite of his
stealth and desire for privacy, the international press was soon able to
report on his movements. Within a few days, he contracted pneumonia and
died of heart failure at the railroad station of Astapovo.
Assessment
In contrast to other psychological writers, such as Dostoyevsky, who
specialized in unconscious processes, Tolstoy described conscious mental
life with unparalleled mastery. His name has become synonymous with an
appreciation of contingency and of the value of everyday activity.
Oscillating between skepticism and dogmatism, Tolstoy explored the most
diverse approaches to human experience. Above all, his greatest works,
War and Peace and Anna Karenina, endure as the summit of realist
fiction.
Gary Saul Morson
|
Ivan Turgenev
The first Russian writer to be widely celebrated in
the West,
Turgenev
managed to be hated by the radicals as well as by
Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky for
his dedicated Westernism, bland liberalism,
aesthetic elegance, and tendency to nostalgia and
self-pity. He first gained fame with his subtle
descriptions of peasant life in Zapiski okhotnika
(1852; A Sportsman’s Sketches), which contributed to
the climate leading to the abolition of serfdom. He
is celebrated for his novels about intelligents and
ideology: Rudin (1856), Nakanune (1860; On the Eve),
and Dym (1867; Smoke). His most distinguished work,
Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons), offers both
an evenhanded portrait of the radical nihilists and
an allegorical meditation on the conflict of
generations.
Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, (b. October
28 [November 9, New Style], 1818, Oryol,
Russia—d. August 22 [September 3], 1883,
Bougival, near Paris, France), Russian
novelist, poet, and playwright, whose
major works include the short-story
collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852)
and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the
Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), and
Fathers and Sons (1862). These works
offer realistic, affectionate portrayals
of the Russian peasantry and penetrating
studies of the Russian intelligentsia
who were attempting to move the country
into a new age. Turgenev poured into his
writings not only a deep concern for the
future of his native land but also an
integrity of craft that has ensured his
place in Russian literature. The many
years that he spent in western Europe
were due in part to his personal and
artistic stand as a liberal between the
reactionary tsarist rule and the spirit
of revolutionary radicalism that held
sway in contemporary artistic and
intellectual circles in Russia.
Early life and works.
Turgenev was the second son of a
retired cavalry officer, Sergey
Turgenev, and a wealthy mother, Varvara
Petrovna, née Lutovinova, who owned the
extensive estate of
Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. The dominant
figure of his mother throughout his
boyhood and early manhood probably
provided the example for the dominance
exercised by the heroines in his major
fiction. The Spasskoye estate itself
came to have a twofold meaning for the
young Turgenev, as an island of gentry
civilization in rural Russia and as a
symbol of the injustice he saw inherent
in the servile state of the peasantry.
Against the Russian social system
Turgenev was to take an oath of
perpetual animosity, which was to be the
source of his liberalism and the
inspiration for his vision of the
intelligentsia as people dedicated to
their country’s social and political
betterment.
Turgenev was to be the only Russian
writer with avowedly European outlook
and sympathies. Though he was given an
education of sorts at home, in Moscow
schools, and at the universities of both
Moscow and St. Petersburg, Turgenev
tended to regard his education as having
taken place chiefly during his plunge
“into the German sea” when he spent the
years 1838 to 1841 at the University of
Berlin. He returned home as a confirmed
believer in the superiority of the West
and of the need for Russia to follow a
course of Westernization.
Though Turgenev had composed derivative
verse and a poetic drama, Steno (1834),
in the style of the English poet Lord
Byron, the first of his works to attract
attention was a long poem, Parasha,
published in 1843. The potential of the
author was quickly appreciated by the
critic Vissarion Belinsky, who became
Turgenev’s close friend and mentor.
Belinsky’s conviction that literature’s
primary aim was to reflect the truth of
life and to adopt a critical attitude
toward its injustices became an article
of faith for Turgenev. Despite the
influence of Belinsky, he remained a
writer of remarkable detachment,
possessed of a cool and sometimes ironic
objectivity.
Turgenev was not a man of grand
passions, although the love story was to
provide the most common formula for his
fiction, and a love for the renowned
singer Pauline Viardot, whom he first
met in 1843, was to dominate his entire
life. His relation with Viardot usually
has been considered platonic, yet some
of his letters, often as brilliant in
their observation and as felicitous in
their manner as anything he wrote,
suggest the existence of a greater
intimacy. Generally, though, they reveal
him as the fond and devoted admirer, in
which role he was for the most part
content. He never married, though in
1842 he had had an illegitimate daughter
by a peasant woman at Spasskoye; he
later entrusted the upbringing of the
child to Viardot.
During the 1840s, Turgenev wrote more
long poems, including A Conversation,
Andrey, and The Landowner, and some
criticism. Having failed to obtain a
professorship at the University of St.
Petersburg and having abandoned work in
the government service, he began to
publish short works in prose. These were
studies in the
“intellectual-without-a-will” so typical
of his generation. The most famous was
“The Diary of a Superfluous Man” (1850),
which supplied the epithet “superfluous
man” for so many similar weak-willed
intellectual protagonists in Turgenev’s
work as well as in Russian literature
generally.
Simultaneously, he tried his hand at
writing plays, some, like A Poor
Gentleman (1848), rather obviously
imitative of the Russian master Nikolay
Gogol. Of these, The Bachelor (1849) was
the only one staged at this time, the
others falling afoul of the official
censors. Others of a more intimately
penetrating character, such as One May
Spin a Thread Too Finely (1848), led to
the detailed psychological studies in
his dramatic masterpiece, A Month in the
Country (1855). This was not staged
professionally until 1872. Without
precedent in the Russian theatre, it
required for its appreciation by critics
and audiences the prior success after
1898 of the plays of Anton Chekhov at
the Moscow Art Theatre. It was there in
1909, under the great director
Konstantin Stanislavsky, that it was
revealed as one of the major works of
the Russian theatre.
Sketches of rural life.
Before going abroad in 1847,
Turgenev left in the editorial offices
of the literary journal Sovremennik
(“The Contemporary”) a short study,
“Khor and Kalinych,” of two peasants
whom he had met on a hunting trip in the
Oryol region. It was published with the
subtitle “From a Hunter’s Sketches,” and
it had an instantaneous success. From it
was to grow the short-story cycle A
Sportsman’s Sketches, first published in
1852, that brought him lasting fame.
Many of the sketches portrayed various
types of landowners or episodes, drawn
from his experience, of the life of the
manorial, serf-owning Russian gentry. Of
these, the most important are “Two
Landowners,” a study of two types of
despotic serf-owners, and “Hamlet of
Shchigrovsky Province,” which contains
one of the most profound and poignant
analyses of the problem of the
“superfluous man.” Far more significant
are the sketches that tell of Turgenev’s
encounters with peasants during his
hunting trips. Amid evocative
descriptions of the countryside,
Turgenev’s portraits suggest that,
though the peasants may be “children of
nature” who seek the freedom offered by
the beauty of their surroundings, they
are always circumscribed by the fact of
serfdom.
Turgenev could never pretend to be much
more than an understanding stranger
toward the peasants about whom he wrote,
yet through his compassionate, lucid
observation, he created portraits of
enormous vitality and wide impact. Not
only did they make the predominantly
upper class reading public aware of the
human qualities of the peasantry, but
they also may have been influential in
provoking the sentiment for reform that
led eventually to the emancipation of
the serfs in 1861. He added to the
Sketches during the 1870s, including the
moving study of the paralyzed Lukeriya
in “A Living Relic” (1874).
When the first collected edition
appeared, after appearing separately in
various issues of the Sovremennik,
Turgenev was arrested, detained for a
month in St. Petersburg, then given 18
months of enforced residence at
Spasskoye. The ostensible pretext for
such official harrassment was an
obituary of Gogol, which he had
published against censorship
regulations. But his criticism of
serfdom in the Sketches, certainly muted
in tone by any standards and explicit
only in his references to the
landowners’ brutality toward their
peasants, was sufficient to cause this
temporary martyrdom for his art.
First novels.
Although Turgenev wrote “Mumu,” a
remarkable exposure of the cruelties of
serfdom, while detained in St.
Petersburg, his work was evolving toward
such extended character studies as Yakov
Pasynkov (1855) and the subtle if
pessimistic examinations of the
contrariness of love found in “Faust”
and “A Correspondence” (1856). Time and
national events, moreover, were
impinging upon him. With the defeat of
Russia in the Crimean War (1854–56),
Turgenev’s own generation, “the men of
the forties,” began to belong to the
past. The two novels that he published
during the 1850s—Rudin (1856) and Home
of the Gentry (1859)—are permeated by a
spirit of ironic nostalgia for the
weaknesses and futilities so manifest in
this generation of a decade earlier.
The first of Turgenev’s novels, Rudin,
tells of an eloquent intellectual,
Dmitry Rudin, a character modeled partly
on Bakunin, whose power of oratory and
passionately held belief in the need for
progress so affect the younger members
of a provincial salon that the heroine,
Natalya, falls in love with him. But
when she challenges him to live up to
his words, he fails her. The evocation
of the world of the Russian country
house and of the summer atmosphere that
form the backdrop to the tragicomedy of
this relationship is evidence of
Turgenev’s power of perceiving and
recording the constancies of the natural
scene. The vaster implications about
Russian society as a whole and about the
role of the Russian intelligentsia are
present as shading at the edges of the
picture rather than as colours or
details in the foreground.
Turgenev’s second novel, Home of the
Gentry, is an elegiac study of
unrequited love in which the hero,
Lavretsky, is not so much weak as the
victim of his unbalanced upbringing. The
work is notable for the delicacy of the
love story, though it is a shade mawkish
on occasion. More important in terms of
the author’s thought is the elaborate
biography of the hero. In it is the
suggestion that the influence of the
West has inhibited Turgenev’s generation
from taking action, forcing them to
acknowledge finally that they must leave
the future of Russia to those younger
and more radical than themselves.
The objectivity of Turgenev as a
chronicler of the Russian intelligentsia
is apparent in these early novels.
Unsympathetic though he may have been to
some of the trends in the thinking of
the younger, radical generation that
emerged after the Crimean War, he
endeavoured to portray the positive
aspirations of these young men and women
with scrupulous candour. Their attitude
to him, particularly that of such
leading figures as the radical critics
Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Nikolay
Dobrolyubov, was generally cold when it
was not actively hostile. His own rather
self-indulgent nature was challenged by
the forcefulness of these younger
contemporaries. He moved away from an
emphasis on the fallibility of his
heroes, who had been attacked as a type
by Chernyshevsky, using the short story
“Asya” (1858) as his point of departure.
Instead, Turgenev focused on their
youthful ardour and their sense of moral
purpose. These attributes had obvious
revolutionary implications that were not
shared by Turgenev, whose liberalism
could accept gradual change but opposed
anything more radical, especially the
idea of an insurgent peasantry.
The novel On the Eve (1860) deals with
the problem facing the younger
intelligentsia on the eve of the Crimean
War and refers also to the changes
awaiting Russia on the eve of the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861. It is
an episodic work, further weakened by
the shallow portrayal of its Bulgarian
hero. Although it has several successful
minor characters and some powerful
scenes, its treatment of personal
relations, particularly of love,
demonstrates Turgenev’s profound
pessimism toward such matters. Such
pessimism became increasingly marked in
Turgenev’s view of life. It seems that
there could be no real reconciliation
between the liberalism of Turgenev’s
generation and the revolutionary
aspirations of the younger
intelligentsia. Turgenev himself could
hardly fail to feel a sense of personal
involvement in this rupture.
Turgenev’s greatest novel, Fathers and
Sons (1862), grew from this sense of
involvement and yet succeeded in
illustrating, with remarkable balance
and profundity, the issues that divided
the generations. The hero, Bazarov, is
the most powerful of Turgenev’s
creations. A nihilist, denying all laws
save those of the natural sciences,
uncouth and forthright in his opinions,
he is nonetheless susceptible to love
and by that token doomed to unhappiness.
In sociopolitical terms he represents
the victory of the nongentry
revolutionary intelligentsia over the
gentry intelligentsia to which Turgenev
belonged. In artistic terms he is a
triumphant example of objective
portraiture, and in the poignancy of his
death he approaches tragic stature. The
miracle of the novel as a whole is
Turgenev’s superb mastery of his theme,
despite his personal hostility toward
Bazarov’s antiaestheticism, and his
success in endowing all the characters
with a quality of spontaneous life. Yet
at the novel’s first appearance the
radical younger generation attacked it
bitterly as a slander, and the
conservatives condemned it as too
lenient in its exposure of nihilism.
Turgenev’s novels are “months in the
country,” which contain balanced
contrasts such as those between youth
and age, between the tragic ephemerality
of love and the comic transience of
ideas, between Hamlet’s concern with
self and the ineptitudes of the quixotic
pursuit of altruism. The last of these
contrasts he amplified into a major
essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860).
If he differed from his great
contemporaries Fyodor Dostoyevsky and
Leo Tolstoy in the scale of his work, he
also differed from them in believing
that literature should not provide
answers to life’s question marks. He
constructed his novels according to a
simple formula that had the sole purpose
of illuminating the character and
predicament of a single figure, whether
hero or heroine. They are important
chiefly as detailed and deft
sociopsychological portraits. A major
device of the novels is the examination
of the effect of a newcomer’s arrival
upon a small social circle. The circle,
in its turn, subjects the newcomer to
scrutiny through the relation that
develops between the heroine, who always
belongs to the “place” of the fiction,
and the newcomer-hero. The promise of
happiness is offered, but the ending of
the relation is invariably calamitous.
Self-exile and fame.
Always touchy about his literary
reputation, Turgenev reacted to the
almost unanimously hostile reception
given to Fathers and Sons by leaving
Russia. He took up residence in
Baden-Baden in southern Germany, to
which resort Viardot had retired.
Quarrels with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
and his general estrangement from the
Russian literary scene made him an exile
in a very real sense. His only novel of
this period, Smoke (1867), set in
Baden-Baden, is infused with a
satirically embittered tone that makes
caricatures of both the left and the
right wings of the intelligentsia. The
love story is deeply moving, but both
this emotion and the political
sentiments are made to seem ultimately
no more lasting and real than the smoke
of the title.
The Franco-German War of 1870–71 forced
the Viardots to leave Baden-Baden, and
Turgenev followed them, first to London
and then to Paris. He now became an
honoured ambassador of Russian culture
in the Paris of the 1870s. The writers
George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, the
Goncourt brothers, the young Émile Zola,
and Henry James were only a few of the
many illustrious contemporaries with
whom he corresponded and who sought his
company. He was elected vice president
of the Paris international literary
congress in 1878, and in 1879 he was
awarded an honorary degree by the
University of Oxford. In Russia he was
feted on his annual visits.
The literary work of this final period
combined nostalgia for the
past—eloquently displayed in such
beautiful pieces as “A Lear of the
Steppes” (1870), “Torrents of Spring”
(1872), and “Punin and Baburin”
(1874)—with stories of a quasi-fantastic
character—“The Song of Triumphant Love”
(1881) and “Klara Milich” (1883).
Turgenev’s final novel, Virgin Soil
(1877), was designed to recoup his
literary reputation in the eyes of the
younger generation. Its aim was to
portray the dedication and
self-sacrifice of young populists who
hoped to sow the seeds of revolution in
the virgin soil of the Russian
peasantry. Despite its realism and his
efforts to give the war topicality, it
is the least successful of his novels.
His last major work, Poems in Prose, is
remarkable chiefly for its wistfulness
and for its famous eulogy to the Russian
language.
Evaluation.
Turgenev’s work is distinguished
from that of his most famous
contemporaries by its sophisticated lack
of hyperbole, its balance, and its
concern for artistic values. His
greatest work was always topical,
committed literature, having universal
appeal in the elegance of the love story
and the psychological acuity of the
portraiture. He was similarly a letter
writer of great charm, wit, and probity.
His reputation may have become
overshadowed by those of Dostoyevsky and
Tolstoy, but his own qualities of
lucidity and urbanity and, above all,
his sense of the extreme preciousness of
the beautiful in life endow his work
with a magic that has lasting appeal.
Richard H. Freeborn
|
Other prose writers
The mid-19th century produced a number of other fine
prose writers. Sergey Aksakov wrote
fictionalized reminiscences: Semeynaya khronika
(1856; The Family Chronicle) and Detskiye gody
Bagrova-vnuka (1858; Years of Childhood).
Aleksandr Herzen wrote his greatest works in
emigration. In S togo berega (written 1847–50; From
the Other Shore), which combines essays and
dialogues, he reflects with penetrating skepticism
on the idea that history has knowable laws.
Herzen’s Byloye i dumy (written 1852–68; My Past
and Thoughts) is regarded as the best Russian
autobiography. Ivan Goncharov is the author
of the comic masterpiece Oblomov (1859), a study of
dreamy slothfulness: its hero spends a hundred pages
getting out of bed. Nikolay Leskov is
remembered for his short stories, including “Ledi
Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda” (1865; “Lady Macbeth of
the Mtsensk District”), as well as for his novel
Soboryane (1872; The Cathedral Folk). Like
Gogol
before and Mikhail Zoshchenko after him, he
was a master of skaz, a written narrative imitating
a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect,
slang, or a particular idiom. A radical satirist and
(remarkably) a government official who attained
general’s rank, Mikhail Saltykov wrote (under
the pseudonym N. Shchedrin) the
extremely dark novel Gospoda Golovlyovy (1876; The
Golovlyov Family), portraying the relentless decline
of a family. The agony of an intellectual who wants
to merge with the common people and the intimate
link of utopianism to madness figure as prominent
themes in the short stories of Vsevolod Garshin,
including “Khudozhniki” (1879; “Artists”) and
“Krasny tsvetok” (1883; “The Red Flower”).
Sergey Aksakov

Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov, (b. Sept.
20 [Oct. 1, New Style], 1791, Ufa,
Russia—d. April 30 [May 12], 1859,
Moscow), novelist noted for his
realistic and comic narratives and for
his introduction of a new genre, a cross
between memoir and novel, into Russian
literature.
Brought up in a strongly patriarchal
family, Aksakov was educated in the
pseudoclassical tradition at home, at
school, and at the newly founded
university in Kazan. He became a
translator in the legislative commission
of the civil service, served in the
militia in the struggle against Napoleon
in 1812, married in 1815, and in 1816
retired to the family estate. After a
decade as a sporting country squire, he
returned to the civil service in Moscow
and became literary censor, inspector,
and, later, director of the college of
land surveying. Inheriting money, he
retired in 1839 and lived in and near
Moscow, entertaining his friends—mainly
writers and Slavophiles.
Before 1834, when his successful Buran
(“Blizzard”) was published, Aksakov’s
writings reflected outmoded literary
tastes: translations of Nicolas Boileau
and Molière, undistinguished verse, and
articles on the theatre. But then he was
inspired—by his love of rural Russia in
the days of serfdom, by his Slavophile
sons Ivan and Konstantin, and by his
admiration of the novelist Nikolay
Gogol—to set down the story of his
grandfather, his parents, and his own
childhood, transposed into realistic
fiction. This effort resulted in three
books that have become classics:
Semeynaya khronika (1856; The Family
Chronicle), Vospominaniya (1856;
“Reminiscences”; Eng. trans. A Russian
Schoolboy), and Detskie gody
Bagrova-vnuka (1858; Childhood Years of
Grandson Bagrov). Aksakov unfolds his
chronicles objectively in an unaffected
style with simple language. Their
interest lies in the illusion of reality
and intimacy created by his vivid
remembrance of his own and his
forebears’ past. These works, blending
personal reminiscence with the
techniques of the novelist, brought
Aksakov fame. The finest book of the
trilogy, The Family Chronicle, also
shows a remarkable understanding of
family psychology.
Also of interest are Aksakov’s books on
shooting, fishing, and butterfly
collecting and his recollections of
Gogol, which are firsthand material on
his friend’s complex personality.
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Aleksandr Herzen

Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen, Herzen also
spelled Hertzen, or Gertsen (b. April 6
[March 25, Old Style], 1812, Moscow,
Russia—d. Jan. 21 [Jan. 9], 1870, Paris,
France), political thinker, activist,
and writer who originated the theory of
a unique Russian path to socialism known
as peasant populism. Herzen chronicled
his career in My Past and Thoughts
(1861–67), which is considered to be one
of the greatest works of Russian prose.
Early life.
Herzen was the illegitimate son of a
wealthy nobleman, Ivan Alekseyevich
Yakovlev, and a German woman of humble
origins. Reared in his father’s house,
he received an elite and far-ranging
education from French, German, and
Russian tutors. Still, the “taint” of
his birth, as he regarded it, made him
resentful of authority and, ultimately,
of the autocratic, serf-based Russian
social order. This resentment also bred
in him an ardent commitment to the cause
of the Decembrists, a revolutionary
group that staged an unsuccessful
uprising against the emperor Nicholas I
in 1825. Herzen and his friend Nikolay
Ogaryov, who, like Herzen, was
influenced by the heroic libertarianism
of the German playwright Friedrich
Schiller, took a solemn oath to devote
their lives to continuing the
Decembrists’ struggle for freedom in
Russia.
Attending the University of Moscow
between 1829 and 1833, Herzen evolved
from “romanticism for the heart to
idealism for the head” and became an
adept of the German philosopher
Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.
Eventually Herzen and Ogaryov and their
circle fused the pantheistic idealism of
Schelling with the utopian socialism of
the French social philosopher Henri de
Saint-Simon to produce a philosophy of
history in which the “World Spirit”
evolved ineluctably toward the
realization of freedom and justice.
This metaphysical politics was
sufficient, however, to lead to the
arrest of the entire circle in 1834.
Herzen was sent into exile for six years
to work in the provincial bureaucracy in
Vyatka (now Kirov) and Vladimir; then,
for an indiscreet remark about the
police, he spent two more years in
Novgorod. The misery of this period was
relieved by an extravagantly romantic
courtship and an initially happy
marriage with his cousin, Natalya
Zakharina, in 1838.
Herzen’s eight-year experience with
injustice and the acquaintance it
afforded with the workings of Russian
government gave firmer contours to his
radicalism. He abandoned the nebulous
idealism of Schelling for the thought of
two other contemporary German
philosophers—first the “realistic logic”
of G.W.F. Hegel and then the materialism
of L.A. Feuerbach. Herzen thus became a
“Left-Hegelian,” holding that the
dialectic (development through the
reconciliation of conflicting ideas) was
the “algebra of revolution” and that the
disembodied truths of “science” (i.e.,
German idealism) must culminate in the
“philosophy of the deed,” or the
struggle for justice as proclaimed by
French socialism. In later life Herzen
explained that this metaphysical
approach to politics was inevitable for
his generation, since the despotism of
Nicholas I made action impossible and
thus left pure thought as the only free
realm of expression.
Armed with these philosophical weapons,
Herzen returned to Moscow in 1842 and
immediately joined the camp of the
Westernizers, who held that Russia must
progress by assimilating European
rationalism and civic freedom, in their
dispute with the Slavophiles, who argued
that Russian development must be founded
on the Orthodox religion and a fraternal
peasant commune. Herzen contributed to
this polemic two able and successful
popularizations of Left-Hegelianism,
Diletantizm v nauke (“Dilettantism in
Science”) and Pisma ob izuchenii prirody
(“Letters on the Study of Nature”), and
a novel of social criticism, Kto
vinovat? (“Who Is to Blame?”), in the
new “naturalistic” manner of Russian
fiction.
Soon, however, Herzen fell out with the
other Westernizers because the majority
of the group were reformist liberals,
whereas Herzen had by now embraced the
anarchist socialism of the French social
theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. At this
point, in 1846, Herzen’s father died,
leaving him a considerable fortune; and
the following year Herzen left Russia
for western Europe—as it turned out, for
good.
Life in exile.
Herzen went immediately to the capital
of European radicalism, Paris, hoping
for the imminent triumph of social
revolution. The revolutionary upheavals
of 1848 that he witnessed in Paris and
Italy soon disabused him: he became
convinced that the Western “matadors of
rhetoric” were too imbued with the
values of the past to level the existing
social order, that Europe’s role as a
progressive historical force was
finished, and that Western institutions
were in fact “dead.” He concluded
further that, contrary to the teachings
of the Hegelians, there was no
“rational” inevitability in history and
that society’s fate was decided instead
by chance and human will. He developed
these themes in two brilliant but rather
confused works, Pisma iz Frantsii i
Italii (“Letters from France and Italy”)
and S togo berega (From the Other
Shore). His disillusionment was vastly
increased by his wife’s infidelity with
the radical German poet Georg Herwegh
and by her death in 1852.
Loss of faith in the West, however,
provoked a spiritual return to Russia:
though “old” Europe, “fettered by the
richness of her past,” had proved
incapable of realizing the ideal of
socialism, “young” Russia, precisely
because its past offered nothing worth
conserving, now seemed to Herzen to
possess the resources for a radical new
departure. And Herzen (borrowing an idea
from his old foes, the Slavophiles)
found these resources above all in a
collectivist peasant commune, which he
viewed as the basis for a future
socialist order. This new faith in
Russia’s revolutionary potential was
expressed in Letters to the French
historian Jules Michelet and the Italian
revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini in 1850
and 1851.
In 1852 Herzen moved to London, and the
following year, with the aid of Polish
exiles, he founded the “Free Russian
Press in London,” the first uncensored
printing enterprise in Russian history.
In 1855 Nicholas I died, and soon
thereafter Alexander II proclaimed his
intention of emancipating the serfs.
Responding to this unprecedented “thaw,”
Herzen rapidly launched a series of
periodicals that were designed to be
smuggled back to Russia: “The Polar
Star” in 1855, “Voices from Russia” in
1856, and a newspaper, Kolokol (The
Bell), created in 1857 with the aid of
his old friend Ogaryov, now also an
émigré. Herzen’s aim was to influence
both the government and the public
toward emancipation of the peasants,
with generous allotments of land and the
liberalization of Russian society. To
this end, he moderated his political
pronouncements, speaking less of
socialist revolution and more of the
concrete issues involved in Alexander’s
reforms. For a time he even believed in
enlightened autocracy, hailing Alexander
II in 1856 (in words that echoed the
famous dying tribute of Julian the
Apostate to Christ) with: “you have
conquered, oh Galilean!” Kolokol soon
became a major force in public life,
read by the tsar’s ministers and the
radical opposition.
Soon, however, the ambiguity of Herzen’s
position between reform and revolution
began to cost him support. After 1858
moderate liberals, such as the writer
Ivan Turgenev, attacked Herzen for his
utopian recklessness; and after 1859 he
quarreled with the political writer N.G.
Chernyshevsky and the younger generation
of radicals, whose intransigent manner
appeared to him as “very dangerous” to
reform. He also lost faith in the
government; when the Emancipation Act
was finally enacted in 1861, he
denounced it as a betrayal of the
peasants.
He therefore veered again to the left
and called on the student youth to “go
to the people” directly with the message
of Russian socialism. Furthermore, on
the urging of the anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin, he threw the support of Kolokol
behind the unsuccessful Polish revolt of
1863. He immediately regretted this
rashness, for it cost him the support of
all moderate elements in Russia without
restoring his credit among the
revolutionaries. Kolokol’s influence
declined sharply. In 1865 Herzen moved
his headquarters to Geneva to be near
the young generation of Russian exiles,
but in 1867 public indifference forced
Kolokol to cease publication.
Amidst these political reverses, Herzen
turned his energies increasingly to his
memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, which
were designed to enshrine both his own
legend and that of Russian radicalism. A
loosely constructed personal narrative,
interspersed with sharp vignettes of
both Russian and Western political
figures and with philosophical and
historical digressions, it provides a
masterful fresco of contemporary
European radicalism. At times witty,
irreverent, and playful in style, and at
other times lyrical, passionate, and
rhapsodical, it is one of the most
original and powerful examples of
Russian prose. My Past and Thoughts was
published principally between 1861 and
1867, and its scope and quality have
placed it alongside the great Russian
novels of the 19th century in artistic
stature.
In 1869 Herzen wrote letters K staromu
tovarishchy (“To an Old Comrade”;
Bakunin), in which he expressed new
reservations about the cost of
revolution. Still, he was unable to
accept liberal reformism completely, and
he expressed interest in the new force
of the First International, Karl Marx’s
federation of working-class
organizations. This wavering position
between socialism and liberalism, which
characterized so much of his career,
proved to be his political testament.
The ambiguities of his position have
made it possible ever since for both
Russian liberals and socialists to claim
his legacy with equal plausibility.
Martin E. Malia
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Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, (b. June
18 [June 6, old style], 1812, Simbirsk
[now Ulyanovsk], Russia—d. Sept. 27
[Sept. 15, O.S.], 1891, St. Petersburg),
Russian novelist and travel writer,
whose highly esteemed novels dramatize
social change in Russia and contain some
of Russian literature’s most vivid and
memorable characters.
Goncharov was born into a wealthy
merchant family and, after graduating
from Moscow University in 1834, served
for nearly 30 years as an official,
first in the Ministry of Finance and
afterward in the Ministry of Censorship.
The only unusual event in his uneventful
life was his voyage to Japan made in
1852–55 as secretary to a Russian
admiral; this was described in Fregat
Pallada (1858; “The Frigate Pallas”).
Goncharov’s most notable achievement
lies in his three novels, of which the
first was Obyknovennaya istoriya (1847;
A Common Story, 1917), a novel that
immediately made his reputation when it
was acclaimed by the influential critic
Vissarion Belinsky. Oblomov (1859; Eng.
trans., 1954), a more mature work,
generally accepted as one of the most
important Russian novels, draws a
powerful contrast between the
aristocratic and capitalistic classes in
Russia and attacks the way of life based
on serfdom. Its hero, Oblomov, a
generous but indecisive young nobleman
who loses the woman he loves to a
vigorous, pragmatic friend, is a triumph
of characterization. From this character
derives the Russian term oblomovshchina,
epitomizing the backwardness, inertia,
and futility of 19th-century Russian
society. Goncharov’s third novel, Obryv
(1869; The Precipice, 1915), though a
remarkable book, is inferior to Oblomov.
In all three novels Goncharov contrasts
an easygoing dreamer with an opposing
character who typifies businesslike
efficiency; the contrast illumines
social conditions in Russia at a time
when rising capitalism and
industrialization uneasily coexisted
with the aristocratic traditions of old
Russia.
Of Goncharov’s minor writings, the most
influential was an essay on Aleksandr
Griboyedov’s play Gore ot uma (Wit Works
Woe).
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Nikolay Leskov

Nikolay Semyonovich Leskov, pseudonym
Stebnitsky (b. Feb. 16 [Feb. 4, Old
Style], 1831, Gorokhovo, Russia—d. March
5 [Feb. 21], 1895, St. Petersburg),
novelist and short-story writer who has
been described as the greatest of
Russian storytellers.
As a child Leskov was taken to different
monasteries by his grandmother, and he
used those early memories of Russian
monastic life with good effect in his
most famous novel, Soboryane (1872;
Cathedral Folk, 1924). A junior clerk of
a criminal court in Orel and Kiev, he
later joined an English firm and
traveled all over Russia; it was during
these travels that he obtained the
material for most of his novels and
short stories. Leskov began his writing
career as a journalist. In 1865 he
published his best known story, Ledi
Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda (Lady Macbeth of
the Mtsensk District, 1961), the
passionate heroine of which lives and
dies by violence. His most popular tale,
however, remains Skaz o Tulskom kosom
Levshe i o stalnoy Blokhe (1881; “The
Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and
the Steel Flea”), a masterpiece of
Gogolesque comedy in which an illiterate
smith from Tula outwits the skill of the
most advanced British craftsman. Another
story, the picaresque Ocharovanny
strannik (1873; Enchanted Wanderer,
1961), was written after a visit to the
monastic islands on Lake Ladoga in 1872.
His early novels Nekuda (1864; “Nowhere
to Go”) and Na nozhakh (1870–71; “At
Daggers Drawn”) were violently attacked
by the Russian radicals as revealing an
attitude of uncompromising hostility
toward the Russian revolutionary
movement, an attitude Leskov later
modified. In 1969 W.B. Edgerton
translated into English, for the first
time, 13 of Leskov’s stories, with a new
translation of “The Steel Flea.”
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Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

Mikhail Yevgrafovich, Count Saltykov,
pseudonym N. Shchedrin (b. Jan. 27 [Jan.
15, old style], 1826, Spas-Ugol,
Russia—d. May 10 [April 28, O.S.], 1889,
St. Petersburg), novelist of radical
sympathies and one of greatest of all
Russian satirists.
A sensitive boy, he was deeply shocked
by his mother’s cruel treatment of
peasants, which he later described in
one of his most important works,
Poshekhonskaya starina (1887–89; “Old
Times in Poshekhona”). In 1838 he was
sent to the Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoye
Selo (now Pushkin), Russia’s training
ground for high officers of state, where
he began to compose and publish verses.
Reacting violently against its
bureaucratic regime, he joined the
revolutionary circles in St. Petersburg
and met the critic Vissarion Belinsky.
In 1847 he began his literary career as
a reviewer in the radical periodicals
Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) and
Otechestvennye zapiski (“Notes of the
Fatherland”). As a result of the
sympathy he expressed for French utopian
socialists in his story Zaputannoye delo
(1848; “A Complicated Affair”), he was
exiled to Vyatka (now Kirov), where he
worked in the provincial governor’s
office. After he returned to St.
Petersburg in 1855, he published his
first successful book, Gubernskiye
ocherki (1856–57; selections in English
translation, Tchinovnicks. Sketches of
Provincial Life, 1861), in which he
satirized Vyatka officials. In 1857 he
wrote his only comedy, Smert Pazukhina
(performed 1893; The Death of Pazukhin,
1924), about Russian merchants.
From 1858 he served as a provincial vice
governor of Ryazan and then Tver and as
president of the taxation boards at
Penza, Tula, and Ryazan, successively.
In 1862 Saltykov retired from government
service and devoted himself to
literature. He was editor of Sovremennik
and then joined the radical poet Nikolay
Nekrasov as co-editor of Otechestvennye
zapiski, becoming editor after
Nekrasov’s death (1878). His major works
include Istoriya odnogo goroda (written
1869–70; “History of One Town”) and
Pompadury i pompadurshi (written between
1863 and 1874; “Pompadours and
Pompadouresses”), two biting satires on
the highest Russian officials. His last
works include a novel that traces the
falling fortunes of a family of landed
gentry, Gospoda Golovlyovy (1876; The
Golovlyov Family, 1955); and Skazki
(1880–85; Fables, 1931), a trenchant
commentary on society.
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Vsevolod Garshin

Vsevolod Mikhaylovich Garshin, (b.
February 2 [February 14, New Style],
1855, Bakhmutsky district, Russian
Empire—d. March 24 [April 5], 1888, St.
Petersburg), Russian short-story writer
whose works helped to foster the vogue
enjoyed by that genre in Russia in the
late 19th century.
Garshin was the son of an army officer
whose family was wealthy and landed. The
major Russo-Turkish war of the 19th
century broke out when Garshin was in
his early twenties, and, perhaps feeling
obligated by his father’s profession, he
renounced his youthful pacifism to
serve.
He wrote of the plight of injured
soldiers in his first story, “Chetyre
dnya” (1877; “Four Days”), the title of
which refers to the length of time the
wounded main character remains
unattended on the battlefield. The theme
of wartime casualty is continued in his
“A Very Short Novel,” the story of a
soldier whose injury precipitates an
emotional crisis when he returns home.
In perhaps his most famous story,
“Krasny tsvetok” (1883; “The Red
Flower”), a madman dies after destroying
a flower he believes to contain all of
the world’s evil. Haunted by similar
delusions in his own life, Garshin
committed suicide by throwing himself
down a stairwell.
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Anton Chekhov
When
Tolstoy
abandoned the prosaic ethos,
Chekhov, one of
the greatest short story writers in world
literature, remained loyal to it. Indeed, he
reinterpreted it within his essentially bourgeois
values, stressing the moral necessity of ordinary
virtues such as daily kindness, cleanliness,
politeness, work, sobriety, paying one’s debts, and
avoiding self-pity. Replying to the intelligentsia’s
demand for political tendentiousness, which he
equated with a stifling intellectual conformity, he
maintained that his only “tendency” was a protest
against lying in all its forms. In his hundreds of
stories and novellas, which he wrote while
practicing medicine, Chekhov adopts something of a
clinical approach to ordinary life. Meticulous
observation and broad sympathy for diverse points of
view shape his fiction. In his stories, an overt
plot subtly hints at other hidden stories, and so
the experience of rereading his fiction often
differs substantially from that produced by a first
reading. Especially noteworthy are “Skuchnaya
istoriya” (written 1889; “A Dreary Story”), “Duel”
(written 1891; “The Duel”), “Palata No. 6” (written
1892; “Ward Number Six”), “Kryzhovnik” (written
1898; “Gooseberries”), “Dushechka” (written 1899;
“The Darling”), “Dama s sobachkoy” (written 1899;
“The Lady with the Lap Dog”), “Arkhiyerey” (written
1902; “The Bishop”), and “Nevesta” (written 1903;
“The Betrothed”).
Along with
Gogol’s The
Inspector General,
Chekhov’s plays are the high point of
Russian drama. In his four great plays, Chayka
(1896; The Seagull), Dyadya Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya),
Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters), and Vishnyovy sad
(1904; The Cherry Orchard),
Chekhov’s
belief that life is lived at ordinary moments and
that histrionics are a dangerous lie found
expression in a major innovation, the undramatic
drama—or, as it is sometimes called, the theatre of
inaction.
Anton Chekhov
"Uncle Vanya"

Russian author
in full Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
born Jan. 29 [Jan. 17,
Old Style], 1860, Taganrog, Russia
died July 14/15 [July 1/2], 1904, Badenweiler, Ger.
Main
major Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. He was a
literary artist of laconic precision who probed below the surface of
life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters. Chekhov’s best
plays and short stories lack complex plots and neat solutions.
Concentrating on apparent trivialities, they create a special kind of
atmosphere, sometimes termed haunting or lyrical. Chekhov described the
Russian life of his time using a deceptively simple technique devoid of
obtrusive literary devices, and he is regarded as the outstanding
representative of the late 19th-century Russian realist school.
Boyhood and youth
Chekhov’s father was a struggling grocer and pious martinet who had
been born a serf. He compelled his son to serve in his shop, also
conscripting him into a church choir, which he himself conducted.
Despite the kindness of his mother, childhood remained a painful memory
to Chekhov, although it later proved to be a vivid and absorbing
experience that he often invoked in his works.
After briefly attending
a local school for Greek boys, Chekhov entered the town gimnaziya (high
school), where he remained for 10 years. There he received the best
standard education then available—thorough but unimaginative and based
on the Greek and Latin classics. During his last three years at school
Chekhov lived alone and supported himself by coaching younger boys; his
father, having gone bankrupt, had moved with the rest of his family to
Moscow to make a fresh start.
In the autumn of 1879
Chekhov joined his family in Moscow, which was to be his main base until
1892. He at once enrolled in the university’s medical faculty,
graduating in 1884 as a doctor. By this time he was already the economic
mainstay of his family, for his father could obtain only poorly paid
employment. As unofficial head of the family Anton showed great reserves
of responsibility and energy, cheerfully supporting his mother and the
younger children through his free-lance earnings as a journalist and
writer of comic sketches—work that he combined with arduous medical
studies and a busy social life.
Chekhov began his
writing career as the author of anecdotes for humorous journals, signing
his early work pseudonymously. By 1888 he had become widely popular with
a “lowbrow” public and had already produced a body of work more
voluminous than all his later writings put together. And he had, in the
process, turned the short comic sketch of about 1,000 words into a minor
art form. He had also experimented in serious writing, providing studies
of human misery and despair strangely at variance with the frenzied
facetiousness of his comic work. Gradually this serious vein absorbed
him and soon predominated over the comic.
Literary maturity
Chekhov’s literary progress during his early 20s may be charted by
the first appearance of his work in a sequence of publications in the
capital, St. Petersburg, each successive vehicle being more serious and
respected than its predecessor. Finally, in 1888, Chekhov published his
first work in a leading literary review, Severny vestnik (“Northern
Herald”). With the work in question—a long story entitled “Steppe”—he at
last turned his back on comic fiction. “Steppe,” an autobiographical
work describing a journey in the Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a
child, is the first among more than 50 stories published in a variety of
journals and selections between 1888 and his death in 1904. It is on
this corpus of later stories, but also on his mature dramas of the same
period, that Chekhov’s main reputation rests.
Although the year 1888
first saw Chekhov concentrating almost exclusively on short stories that
were serious in conception, humour—now underlying—nearly always remained
an important ingredient. There was also a concentration on quality at
the expense of quantity, the number of publications dropping suddenly
from over a hundred items a year in the peak years 1886 and 1887 to only
10 short stories in 1888. Besides “Steppe,” Chekhov also wrote several
profoundly tragic studies at this time, the most notable of which was “A
Dreary Story” (1889), a penetrating study into the mind of an elderly
and dying professor of medicine. The ingenuity and insight displayed in
this tour de force was especially remarkable, coming from an author so
young. The play Ivanov (1887–89) culminates in the suicide of a young
man nearer to the author’s own age. Together with “A Dreary Story,” this
belongs to a group among Chekhov’s works that have been called clinical
studies. They explore the experiences of the mentally or physically ill
in a spirit that reminds one that the author was himself a qualified—and
remained a sporadically practicing—doctor.
By the late 1880s many
critics had begun to reprimand Chekhov, now that he was sufficiently
well known to attract their attention, for holding no firm political and
social views and for failing to endow his works with a sense of
direction. Such expectations irked Chekhov, who was unpolitical and
philosophically uncommitted. In early 1890 he suddenly sought relief
from the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a one-man
sociological expedition to a remote island, Sakhalin. This is situated
nearly 6,000 miles (9,650 km) east of Moscow, on the other side of
Siberia, and was notorious as an imperial Russian penal settlement.
Chekhov’s journey there was a long and hazardous ordeal by carriage and
riverboat. After arriving unscathed, studying local conditions, and
conducting a census of the islanders, he returned to publish his
findings as a research thesis, which retains an honoured place in the
annals of Russian penology: The Island of Sakhalin (1893–94).
Chekhov paid his first
visit to western Europe in the company of A.S. Suvorin, a wealthy
newspaper proprietor and the publisher of much of Chekhov’s own work.
Their long and close friendship caused Chekhov some unpopularity, owing
to the politically reactionary character of Suvorin’s newspaper, Novoye
vremya (“New Time”). Eventually Chekhov broke with Suvorin over the
attitude taken by the paper toward the notorious Alfred Dreyfus affair
in France, with Chekhov championing Dreyfus.
During the years just
before and after his Sakhalin expedition, Chekhov had continued his
experiments as a dramatist. His Wood Demon (1888–89) is a long-winded
and ineptly facetious four-act play, which somehow, by a miracle of art,
became converted—largely by cutting—into Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya), one
of his greatest stage masterpieces. The conversion—to a superb study of
aimlessness in a rural manor house—took place some time between 1890 and
1896; the play was published in 1897. Other dramatic efforts of the
period include several of the uproarious one-act farces known as
vaudevilles: Medved (The Bear), Predlozheniye (The Proposal), Svadba
(The Wedding), Yubiley (The Anniversary), and others.
Melikhovo period: 1892–98
After helping, both as doctor and as medical administrator, to
relieve the disastrous famine of 1891–92, Chekhov bought a country
estate in the village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles (80 km) south of
Moscow. This was his main residence for about six years, providing a
home for his aging parents, as also for his sister Mariya, who acted as
his housekeeper and remained unmarried in order to look after her
brother. The Melikhovo period was the most creatively effective of
Chekhov’s life so far as short stories were concerned, for it was during
these six years that he wrote “The Butterfly,” “Neighbours” (1892), “An
Anonymous Story” (1893), “The Black Monk” (1894), “Murder,” and
“Ariadne” (1895), among many other masterpieces. Village life now became
a leading theme in his work, most notably in “Peasants” (1897).
Undistinguished by plot, this short sequence of brilliant sketches
created more stir in Russia than any other single work of Chekhov’s,
partly owing to his rejection of the convention whereby writers commonly
presented the Russian peasantry in sentimentalized and debrutalized
form.
Continuing to provide
many portraits of the intelligentsia, Chekhov also described the
commercial and factory-owning world in such stories as “A Woman’s
Kingdom,” (1894) and “Three Years” (1895). As has often been recognized,
Chekhov’s work provides a panoramic study of the Russia of his day, and
one so accurate that it could even be used as a sociological source.
In some of his stories
of the Melikhovo period, Chekhov attacked by implication the teachings
of Leo Tolstoy, the well-known novelist and thinker, and Chekhov’s
revered elder contemporary. Himself once (in the late 1880s) a tentative
disciple of the Tolstoyan simple life, and also of nonresistance to evil
as advocated by Tolstoy, Chekhov had now rejected these doctrines. He
illustrated his new view in one particularly outstanding story: “Ward
Number Six” (1892). Here an elderly doctor shows himself nonresistant to
evil by refraining from remedying the appalling conditions in the mental
ward of which he has charge—only to be incarcerated as a patient himself
through the intrigues of a subordinate. In “My Life” (1896) the young
hero, son of a provincial architect, insists on defying middle-class
convention by becoming a house painter, a cultivation of the Tolstoyan
simple life that Chekhov portrays as misconceived. In a later trio of
linked stories, ”The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love”
(1898), Chekhov further develops the same theme, showing various figures
who similarly fail to realize their full potentialities. As these pleas
in favour of personal freedom illustrate, Chekhov’s stories frequently
contain some kind of submerged moral, though he never worked out a
comprehensive ethical or philosophical doctrine.
Chayka (The Seagull) is
Chekhov’s only dramatic work dating with certainty from the Melikhovo
period. First performed in St. Petersburg on Oct. 17, 1896 (O.S.), this
four-act drama, misnamed a comedy, was badly received; indeed, it was
almost hissed off the stage. Chekhov was greatly distressed and left the
auditorium during the second act, having suffered one of the most
traumatic experiences of his life and vowing never to write for the
stage again. Two years later, however, the play was revived by the newly
created Moscow Art Theatre, enjoying considerable success and helping to
reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist. The Seagull is a study of the clash
between the older and younger generations as it affects two actresses
and two writers, some of the details having been suggested by episodes
in the lives of Chekhov’s friends.
Yalta period: 1899–1904
In March 1897 Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by
tuberculosis, symptoms of which had become apparent considerably
earlier. Now forced to acknowledge himself a semi-invalid, Chekhov sold
his Melikhovo estate and built a villa in Yalta, the Crimean coastal
resort. From then on he spent most of his winters there or on the French
Riviera, cut off from the intellectual life of Moscow and St.
Petersburg. This was all the more galling since his plays were beginning
to attract serious attention. Moreover, Chekhov had become attracted by
a young actress, Olga Knipper, who was appearing in his plays, and whom
he eventually married in 1901; the marriage probably marked the only
profound love affair of his life. But since Knipper continued to pursue
her acting career, husband and wife lived apart during most of the
winter months, and there were no children of the marriage.
Never a successful
financial manager, Chekhov attempted to regularize his literary affairs
in 1899 by selling the copyright of all his existing works, excluding
plays, to the publisher A.F. Marx for 75,000 rubles, an unduly low sum.
In 1899–1901 Marx issued the first comprehensive edition of Chekhov’s
works, in 10 volumes, after the author had himself rejected many of his
juvenilia. Even so, this publication, reprinted in 1903 with
supplementary material, was unsatisfactory in many ways.
Chekhov’s Yalta period
saw a decline in the production of short stories and a greater emphasis
on drama. His two last plays—Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters) and
Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard)—were both written for the
Moscow Art Theatre. But much as Chekhov owed to the theatre’s two
founders, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstanin Stanislavsky, he
remained dissatisfied with such rehearsals and performances of his plays
as he was able to witness. Repeatedly insisting that his mature drama
was comedy rather than tragedy, Chekhov grew distressed when producers
insisted on a heavy treatment, overemphasizing the—admittedly
frequent—occasions on which the characters inveigh against the boredom
and futility of their lives. Despite Stanislavsky’s reputation as an
innovator who had brought a natural, nondeclamatory style to the
hitherto overhistrionic Russian stage, his productions were never
natural and nondeclamatory enough for Chekhov, who wished his work to be
acted with the lightest possible touch. And though Chekhov’s mature
plays have since become established in repertoires all over the world,
it remains doubtful whether his craving for the light touch has been
satisfied except on the rarest of occasions. Yet oversolemnity can be
the ruin of Three Sisters, for example—the play in which Chekhov so
sensitively portrays the longings of a trio of provincial young women.
Insisting that his The Cherry Orchard was “a comedy, in places even a
farce,” Chekhov offered in this last play a poignant picture of the
Russian landowning class in decline, portraying characters who remain
comic despite their very poignancy. This play was first performed in
Moscow on Jan. 17, 1904 (O.S.), and less than six months later Chekhov
died of tuberculosis.
Though already
celebrated by the Russian literary public at the time of his death,
Chekhov did not become internationally famous until the years after
World War I, by which time the translations of Constance Garnett (into
English) and of others had helped to publicize his work. Yet his
elusive, superficially guileless style of writing—in which what is left
unsaid often seems so much more important than what is said—has defied
effective analysis by literary critics, as well as effective imitation
by creative writers.
It was not until 40
years after his death, with the issue of the 20-volume Polnoye sobraniye
sochineny i pisem A.P. Chekhova (“Complete Works and Letters of A.P.
Chekhov”) of 1944–51, that Chekhov was at last presented in Russian on a
level of scholarship worthy—though with certain reservations—of his
achievement. Eight volumes of this edition contain his correspondence,
amounting to several thousand letters. Outstandingly witty and lively,
they belie the legend—commonly believed during the author’s
lifetime—that he was hopelessly pessimistic in outlook. As samples of
the Russian epistolary art, Chekhov’s letters have been rated second
only to Aleksandr Pushkin’s by the literary historian D.S. Mirsky.
Although Chekhov is still chiefly known for his plays, critical opinion
shows signs of establishing the stories—and particularly those that were
written after 1888—as an even more significant and creative literary
achievement.
Ronald Francis
Hingley
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APPENDIX
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Pyotr Chaadayev

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pyotr
ChaadayevPyotr or Petr Yakovlevich Chaadayev
(Russian: Пётр Яковлевич Чаадаев; born June 7
[May 27, old style], 1794, Moscow died April 26
[April 14, O.S.], 1856, Moscow) was a Russian
philosopher born in Moscow.
Chaadayev wrote
eight "Philosophical Letters" about Russia in
French between 1826-1831, which circulated in
Russia as manuscript for many years. The works
could not be published in Russia because of its
highly critical nature of Russia's significance
in world history and politics.
The main thesis
of his famous Philosophical Letters was that
Russia had lagged behind Western countries and
had contributed nothing to the world's progress
and concluded that Russia must start de novo. As
a result, they included criticism of Russia's
intellectual isolation and social
backwardness.[1].
When in 1836
the first (and only one published during his
life) of the philosophical letters was published
in the Russian magazine Telescope, its editor
was exiled to the Far North of Russia. The
Slavophiles at first mistook Chaadayev for one
of them, but later, on realizing their mistake,
bitterly denounced and disclaimed him. Chaadayev
fought Slavophilism all of his life. His first
Philosophical Letter has been labeled the
"opening shot" of the Westerner-Slavophil
controversy which was dominant in Russian social
thought of the nineteenth century.
The strikingly
uncomplimentary views of Russia in the first
philosophical letter caused their author to be
adjudged insane, and his next work was entitled,
fittingly, The Vindication of a Madman (1837).
In this brilliant but uncompleted work he
maintained that Russia must follow her inner
lines of development if she was to be true to
her historical mission.
His ideas
influenced both the Westerners (who supported
bringing Russian into accord with developments
in Europe by way of various degrees of liberal
reform) and Slavophils (who supported Russian
Orthodoxy and national culture.)
During the
1840s Chaadayev was an active participant in the
Moscow literary circles. He befriended Alexander
Pushkin and was a model for Chatsky, the chief
protagonist of Alexander Griboyedov's play Woe
from Wit (1824).
Most of his
works have been edited by his biographer,
Mikhail Gershenzon (two volumes, Moscow,
1913-14), whose excellent little study of the
philosopher was published at St. Petersburg in
1908.
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