Russian Literature

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Prose Fiction

The 1830s began a period during which writers produced some of the greatest Russian fiction. Pushkin initiated this trend after 1830, when he largely turned away from poetry in favor of prose. The five short stories that form his Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (1831; The Tales of Belkin) and the story “Pikovaia dama” (1834; “The Queen of Spades”) are witty and sly parodies of current Russian prose as well as models of the short-story form. Pushkin’s only full-length prose novel, Kapitanskaia dochka (1836; The Captain’s Daughter), a historical novel set during a peasant rebellion in 1773, displays his characteristic economical and energetic prose style. Lermontov also wrote memorable prose during this period. His novel Geroi nashego vremeni (1837-1840; A Hero of Our Time) consists of five interconnected stories that paint a detailed psychological portrait of its protagonist, Pechorin. Pechorin is a romantic hero in Russian military uniform, whose sensitivity and nobility are hidden behind his assumed mask of snobbery and coldness.

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a

Gogol

Nikolay Gogol was the most original master of Russian prose of the 19th century. Gogol’s early short stories, collected as Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki (1831-1832; Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka), are comic masterpieces, full of the local color of the Ukraine of his origins. The dark, grotesquely humorous stories in his second collection, Mirgorod (1835), suggest a world built on absurdities. These and other stories, such as “Nos” (1836; “The Nose”), anticipate the 20th-century movement of surrealism with their illogical events. Gogol powerfully expressed his view of the dehumanization of human beings in what may be the most famous short story in Russian, “Shinel” (1842; “The Overcoat”). The story’s protagonist, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, is a poor clerk whose only joy in life is the mechanical copying of official correspondence and whose only relationship is with the new overcoat he acquires. Gogol’s best-known work, the novel Mertvye dushi (1842; Dead Souls), satirizes not only the corruption of provincial Russia, but also human spiritual and intellectual corruption in general.

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Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev refined both the short story and the novel, and he was the first Russian writer to build a substantial following outside Russia. His first fame came with Zapiski okhotnika (1852; A Sportsman’s Sketches), a collection of sketches and stories of rural life that focus not on plot but on vivid portraits of peasants and landowners or lyrical renderings of the overall atmosphere. Because of its sympathetic and sensitive portrayals of peasants as individuals, the book is often said to have contributed to ending serfdom, the agricultural system whereby landowners owned the peasants who worked their land.

Turgenev’s lasting fame comes from a series of compact and carefully crafted novels written in the late 1850s and early 1860s. These novels are more European in form than the sprawling philosophical and psychological works of his contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; the main actions take place over a short period of time, the novels have relatively few characters, and the plots are simple. Turgenev’s novels focus on characters he drew from Russian life, and their plots derive from these characters. He seldom engages in psychological inquiry, but his characters reveal themselves fully, most often in the course of a love affair. His Rudin (1856) exposes the emptiness of a liberal intellectual who is afraid to respond to the love of an idealistic young woman. Dvorianskoe gnezdo (1859; A House of Gentlefolk) portrays the unhappy love of a good-hearted but ineffectual landowner for a pure young woman. Turgenev attempted to create a stronger hero in his novel Nakanune (1860; On the Eve). Here, however, the hero is not a Russian, but a Bulgarian freedom fighter. He marries an idealistic Russian woman and then dies before he can return to take up the struggle in his homeland. Turgenev’s masterpiece, Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons), presents the controversial hero Bazarov. As a young radical of the 1860s, Bazarov holds inflexible views that are challenged by life and love, and he dies prematurely and alone.

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Goncharov, Saltykov, Pisemsky, and Leskov

Four writers who are less known outside Russia than their mid-century contemporaries nevertheless made lasting contributions to Russian prose: Ivan Goncharov, Mikhail Saltykov, Aleksei Pisemsky, and Nikolay Leskov. Ivan Goncharov is best known for his novel Oblomov (1859). The kind, gentle, and sensitive protagonist, Ilya Oblomov, wants only to live a life of absolute tranquility and contemplation, an idyllic existence conveyed by memories of childhood on his family’s estate. In order to hold on to this idyll, he avoids any interaction with the world around him. His energetic friend Stolz and his one true love, Olga, manage to rouse him to action for a time, but when he sees the ideal world of his dreams threatened by real life, he retreats to his couch and eventually dies a premature death.

Mikhail Saltykov, who wrote under the name N. Shchedrin, ranks as 19th-century Russia’s greatest satirist after Gogol. Although much of his work is closer to journalism than literature, his novel Gospoda Golovlevy (1875-1880; The Golovlyov Family) remains a powerful and gloomy family chronicle. The work turns upside-down the pastoral and family idyll celebrated by Goncharov and Turgenev. The members of the landowning Golovlyov family destroy one another and themselves through greed, stupidity, and alcoholism.

The stories and novels of Aleksei Pisemsky also deal with Russian provincial life, portraying it in colors almost as somber as those of Saltykov. The ambitious hero of his novel Tysiacha dush (1858; One Thousand Souls) achieves the success he dreamed of, but only by sacrificing both the woman he loves and many of his principles.

Nikolay Leskov is known primarily as a brilliant storyteller, but he also wrote notable satires. In vivid prose he depicted a broad range of Russian society and conveyed both the virtues and the flaws of his compatriots. Although his talents were not those of a novelist, his Soboriane (1872; The Cathedral Folk) is an entertaining and popular chronicle of provincial clergy. Leskov’s finest works feature individualized narrators who speak in their own often highly stylized language. These works include Ocharovanny strannik (1873; The Enchanted Wanderer), a picaresque novel told by its hero, and Zapechatlennyi angel (The Sealed Angel, 1873), a fascinating tale of a religious sect and its attempt to recover a cherished icon that has been confiscated by the authorities.

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d

Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, like his contemporary Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was more than a novelist: He was a social and political thinker and an enormous moral force. In his writings, as in his life, he tried to uncover essential truths to give meaning to existence. His first published work, Detstvo (1852; Childhood), reveals at least two traits that run through all his fiction: penetrating psychological analysis of individuals and moral judgment of their behavior. These trends continue in various sketches of military life, such as Sevastopolskie rasskazy (1855-1856; Sebastopol Tales) and Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks).

Tolstoy’s novel Voina i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace) is both a family novel and a historical novel, and these two parts are linked by a quest for meaning. The novel is vast in every respect. The story takes place over a span of 15 years; its settings range from the drawing rooms of Saint Petersburg and Moscow to country estates and battlefields in Europe and Russia; and it has a cast of more than 500 characters, both fictional and historical, all vivid and sharply drawn. The book’s two major heroes are the skeptical, intellectual Andrei Bolkonsky and the enthusiastic, weak-willed Pierre Bezukhov. Bolkonsky and Bezukhov look for meaning for their own lives amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, which took place between France and other European nations from 1799 to 1815, and the French invasion of Russia in 1812. At the same time, Tolstoy looks for an explanation of the process of history itself. The meaning of both personal existence and the historical process, Tolstoy argues, lies in the spontaneous, irrational, day-to-day, natural living exemplified by his engaging heroine, Natasha Rostova.

Tolstoy’s second great novel, Anna Karenina (1875-1877) is narrower in focus, although it, too, is painted on a large canvas. Tolstoy here examines marriage and the family. Anna, a married woman of great charm and integrity with a high place in society, has an adulterous love affair with a young army officer. Torn by guilt over abandoning her son and unable to subscribe to the social hypocrisies of her circle that would have her hide her illicit relationship, she is eventually driven to suicide. In contrast to Anna’s tragic affair in the novel is the marriage of Konstantin Levin to Kitty Shcherbatsky. Although Levin and Kitty’s marriage is not uniformly smooth, and although Levin has gnawing doubts about the meaning of his life, the novel ends on a relatively happy note.

Both of these novels show Tolstoy at the peak of his artistry. His characters come alive through vivid descriptions of their external, physical lives and penetrating analysis of their emotions. But at the height of his powers as a novelist Tolstoy turned away from literature. After a spiritual crisis in the late 1870s he elaborated on a doctrine of what he believed to be the essence of Christianity—the practice of universal love and nonviolence. He conveyed his ideas through a large body of nonfiction, but he also produced powerful short fiction, such as Smert’ Ivana Ilicha (1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyich). In addition, he also produced a final novel, Voskresenie (1899; Resurrection), a much darker and more opinionated work that contains passages of great force.

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