Russian Literature

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Dostoyevsky

Tolstoy’s works depict a world that seems ordered, comprehensible, and normal. The world created by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is one of disorder and extremes of human behavior, a world in which characters act out dramas of ideas.

Dostoyevsky’s early writings include some remarkable psychological studies. It was only after 1860, however, when he returned from ten years of prison and exile in Siberia, that his works achieved real depth and power. Dostoyevsky’s novels examine the political and social issues of his day and explore eternal philosophical and moral problems. His Zapiski iz podpol’ia (1864; Notes from Underground), for example, is a deeply philosophical work that explores such questions as free will and determinism; it is also a profound psychological portrait of its alienated narrator. Prestuplenie i nakazanie (1866; Crime and Punishment) tells the gripping story of a young student, Raskolnikov, who tests his freedom by committing a murder. His intellectual justifications of the crime cannot prevent him from being haunted by what he has done. After terrible emotional and spiritual suffering, Raskolnikov begins a process of repentance that apparently will lead him to accept his place in the world.

Dostoyevsky’s novel Idiot (1868-1869; The Idiot) focuses on a Christlike figure, Prince Myshkin, whose goodness and innocence lead only to disaster. Myshkin finds himself in a society motivated by greed, passion, and jealousy and becomes involved in a complex love intrigue that ends with the murder of one heroine and his own mental collapse. Besy (1871-1872; Devils, also known as Demons or The Possessed), a dark political satire, attacks Russian liberals and radicals who wish to build a godless society without genuine moral principles. At the same time, through its enigmatic central character, Stavrogin, the novel explores the limits of human behavior and dramatizes the human potential for both good and evil.

Dostoyevsky’s last and longest novel, Brat’ia Karamazovy (1879-1880; The Brothers Karamazov), sums up and expands on the issues he had explored in his earlier fiction. The murder of the cynical and greedy head of the family, Fyodor Karamazov, implicates each of his three sons in different ways. Each son demands justice according to his own character. Dmitry, passionate and emotional, wants his fair share of the inheritance. Ivan rebels intellectually against the injustices of God’s world, presenting a powerful argument for his loss of faith in justice. Alyosha fails to love his unlovable father sufficiently and has his faith in justice shaken by the death of his spiritual father, the wise elder Zosima. By the end of the novel, the brothers are redeemed, as each begins to accept his own responsibility for the world’s injustices.

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Chekhov

Late in the 19th century Anton Chekhov revolutionized the short story. Chekhov began as a humorist, churning out hundreds of brief comic stories for humor magazines and daily newspapers. Gradually he began to take his talent more seriously. He developed a coolly objective style that presents, in compact form, the specific circumstances of a character’s life and allows the reader to make final judgments about that character. The subject matter of his stories is the common and unexceptional in everyday life, related in ordinary yet poetic prose. The typical Chekhovian story has little external plot. The point of the story is most often found in what happens within a given character, and that is conveyed indirectly, by suggestion or by significant detail. The protagonist of one of his finest stories, “Dama s sobachkoi” (1899; “The Lady with the Little Dog”), for instance, begins to realize that what began as a brief, adulterous affair has become the great love of his life. Chekhov’s stories also present a panorama of Russian life in the last decades of the 19th century. They portray children (“Vanka,” 1886), clergymen (“Arkhierei,” 1902; translated as “The Bishop”), peasants (“Muzhiki,” 1897; “Peasants”), intellectuals (“Skuchnaia istoriia,” 1889; “A Dreary Story”), and other characters from a broad range of professions and social circumstances.

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Drama

Before the 19th century, drama received little attention from Russian writers. By the end of the century, several memorable plays and the masterpieces of Anton Chekhov had been written.

Two genuine classics of Russian drama originated early in the century. Aleksandr Griboedov satirized Muscovite society in lively and witty verse in his Gore ot uma (1833; The Woes of Wit). His protagonist, Chatsky, belongs to a long line of alienated and cynical heroes. Gogol’s dramatic masterpiece, Revizor (1836; The Inspector General), uses the well-worn device of mistaken identity to create a brilliantly inventive satirical comedy. The play centers on Khlestakov, a young good-for-nothing who, while traveling through Russia’s provinces, is mistaken for a government inspector. Before escaping, Khlestakov cheerfully accepts the attention and the bribes that local officials lavish upon him. Pushkin and Lermontov also wrote several significant dramas in the 1830s. Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov (1831), a tragedy based on events from Russian history, is now seldom performed, but it survives as an opera by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Pushkin’s “little tragedies” are brief but intense dramatic dialogues in verse that best reveal his dramatic talents. Lermontov produced Maskarad (1835; Masquerade), a melodrama of passion and murder.

Aleksandr Ostrovsky is the best known of Russia’s mid-century dramatists. The most famous of his 50 plays, Groza (1860; The Thunderstorm), focuses on a liaison between a young married woman and her lover in the tradition-bound merchant milieu of a town on the Volga River. Other authors who wrote dramas include Turgenev, Pisemsky, and Tolstoy. Turgenev’s play Mesiats v derevne (1850; A Month in the Country) was innovative in that it concentrated on the revelation of character rather than on plot. Its complex psychological currents and evocation of atmosphere anticipate the plays of Chekhov. Pisemsky’s most important play, Gor’kaia sud’bina (A Bitter Fate, 1859), details a tragic love affair between a landowner and a married peasant woman. Tolstoy’s grim and powerful Vlast’ tmy (1888; The Power of Darkness) dramatizes the brutality of peasant life.

Late in the century, Chekhov transformed drama, as he had done with the short story. Like his stories, Chekhov’s plays moved away from traditional ideas of plot and dramatic dialogue. The plays convey the feel of ordinary life unfolding, with seemingly haphazard dialogue and few conventionally dramatic scenes. True, his first real success on the stage, Chaika (1896; The Seagull), ends with the suicide of the central character, but the suicide happens offstage and the unconcerned chatter of the characters onstage undercuts its impact. Diadia Vanya (1899; Uncle Vanya), the bleakest of Chekhov’s four major plays, dramatizes the futility and waste of life in provincial Russia. Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters), also set in the depths of the Russian provinces, focuses on tragic subject matter that is undercut by comic absurdities. Chekhov’s last play, Vishnevyi sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard), likewise blends pathos and humor, never allowing the audience to be dominated by one mood for long. Although the complex texture of Chekhov’s plays cannot be properly summarized in a single sentence, they all deal with the loss of illusions, a subject that can be both painful and enriching.

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Turn of the Century: The Silver Age

In the 1880s the Russian literary temperament began to change. For the previous 40 years, literature had been dominated by social realism—the objective depiction of life as it is—expressed primarily through the form of the novel. Writers then began to rebel against the values and assumptions of realism. The era of the great novelists had passed: Dostoyevsky and Pisemsky died in 1881, Turgenev in 1883, and Tolstoy essentially abandoned the novel after his religious conversion in the 1880s. Although authors continued to write novels, short fiction and poetry became the dominant genres of Russian literature for the next several decades, which became known as the Silver Age. New types of prose fiction emerged in which innovative movements, such as impressionism and symbolism, gradually replaced the social realism of the previous age. Poetry in particular underwent revolutionary change. A new generation of Russian poets found inspiration in Western European literary movements, especially a revival of romanticism known as symbolism. Other arts also benefited from contact with cultural movements abroad: Music, ballet, theater, and painting flourished, often in very close contact with one another and with literature. Russian intellectual and cultural life became very lively, often experimental, and much more cosmopolitan. Russian culture, particularly music and ballet, became highly regarded in Europe.

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Symbolism

Symbolism dominated Russian literature in the years between 1893 and 1914. Although it was a complex movement with many variations, the different strains shared some fundamental premises. Symbolism reacted against the realism of the previous age, arguing that art was not mimetic—that is, it did not imitate reality—but was symbolic by its very nature. The symbolists assigned highest value to the individual rather than to society generally, so their art paid little attention to social issues. Like the romantics of the early 19th century (to whom they often looked for inspiration), the symbolists sought to revive a religious sensibility in art. They saw art in general and poetry in particular as means to reveal the true essence of life.

Valery Bryusov, a poet, novelist, literary critic, and scholar, introduced symbolism to the Russian public and helped win it an audience through his essays and poetry. Poet and novelist Andrey Bely attempted to create a comprehensive theory of symbolism, not merely as a literary force but also as a spiritual movement. His poetry is marked by this spiritual quest and by its bold experiments with rhythm and sound. The poetry and essays of Vyacheslav Ivanov, the most scholarly of the symbolist poets, saw the poet as a mythmaker who sought to touch the divine and achieve cosmic harmony. The most gifted poet among this brilliant generation was Aleksandr Blok. His rhythmic and lyrical poetry blends the purely personal with the universal, combining elements of the everyday with mythological motifs. His greatest work, Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve, 1920), brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in the winter of 1918 as it follows a military squad through the icy streets of the city after the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Symbolism was not exclusively a poetic movement, however. Dmitry Merezhkovsky, a poet, literary critic, and religious philosopher, produced a series of notable historical novels in the symbolist style. Bryusov also wrote stylistically accomplished short stories and a historical novel. Fyodor Sologub, himself a symbolist poet, created a remarkable novel, Melkii bes (1907; The Petty Demon, 1983). It is an almost clinical study of the paranoia of a provincial schoolteacher. The most inventive and fully realized symbolist novel, Peterburg (1913-1922; Petersburg, 1959) by Andrey Bely, presents a harrowing yet satirical portrait of Saint Petersburg during a time of political and social unrest. It is simultaneously a political thriller, a family drama, a meditation on the fate of Russia, and a philosophy of history.

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