The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Nekrasov’s narrator in On the Weather strolls through the town, taking in the sounds and sights, each one more cruel than the other. Before sundown he comes upon a crippled mare [ loshad -kaleka] dragging an impossibly heavy load. She staggers; her driver grabs a log: “(the knout, it seems, isn’t enough) - / And he set to beating her, beating her!” The mare sinks back, legs splayed, “sigheddeeply/And gazed...(as people gaze,/Succumbing to unjust attacks).” The driver beats her across the back, the sides, “across her weeping, gentle eyes.” Throughout this ghastly scene the narrator gazes at the tortured horse, grows angry and then depressed. “And shouldn’t I intercede for her?” he asks himself mournfully. “Nowadays it’s all the fashion to sympathize, / We’d have nothing against helping you, / A mute victim of the people, - / But we cannot even help ourselves!”32 In the end the narrator-voyeur does nothing. The wretched mare rallies and sets off jerkily down the street, rewarded for her efforts by more blows. When Rodion Raskolnikov dreams this scene in the novel, it is the passivity of Nekrasov’s spectator-poet (duplicated in his own cautious father, who assures his son “it’s not our business”) that impels the young boy to rush to the dying mare and kiss her bleeding eyes. Little Rodya will not “sympathize and do nothing.” He will “help himself - by murdering the pawnbroker and thereby righting injustice. That solution too proves to be a disaster. Neither Dostoevsky later nor Nekrasov in this poem offers an easy exit from this moral paralysis. But Nekrasov does demonstrate that poetry, even the most fragile lyric, is fully capable of carrying a civic burden and obligating the reader to respond to it. In 1856, he published in The Contemporary an eight-line poem that would also resonate with Crime and Punishment a decade later: “Yesterday, a bit after five /I walked out on Haymarket Square; / A woman was being beaten with the knout, / A young peasant woman. / No sound came forth from her chest, / only the whip whistled, playing... / And I said to the Muse: ‘Behold! / Your sister!’” To insist, as Nekrasov does, that a violated woman is sister to the Muse would have been alien to the poetics of Pushkin and Lermontov but was well within the realm of the great moral Realists, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It provides an appropriate transition to Chekhov. As a seer, Chekhov was both of the spirit and of the flesh. As a writer he was far less obsessed with mortality, very possibly because he was forced - both professionally as a medical man and on the testimony of his own organism - to confront it far earlier.

156 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Anton Chekhov: lesser expectations, smaller forms

Chekhov’s relations with Dostoevsky were not profound. He referred to him rarely in his letters, ironically in his works, and had to force himself to finish Crime and Punishment (by age forty, he promised himself, he would get to the end; he did, and he was not impressed). Tolstoy, however, was an abiding presence in Chekhov’s life. The two writers were on very friendly terms. Beginning in the late 1890s, both were obliged to winter in the Crimea for health reasons, although Chekhov, thirty years younger, was by far the sicker man. Chekhov’s “Tolstoyan period”began in themid-1880s, when he wastwenty-five, andlasted for ten years. As Chekhov wrote to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, he had been swept up by Tolstoy’s immense energy and intellect, his authority, by his “very reasonableness, and no doubt a species of hypnotism peculiar to him.”33 The “reasonableness” or common sense of Tolstoy’s prose – its reliance on sober observation, logical clarity, and its subtle depiction of nuanced emotional states – offered special benefits to a young writer like Chekhov, who specialized in short forms. Before the 1880s, the short story had been largely a Sentimental or Romantic genre: nostalgic, conventionalized, felt to be a relic or fragment from an earlier era. Literary seriousness meant the big serialized novel, a cutting edge acknowledged by all writers. Even short-story masterpieces, such as Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), were gathered together and sequenced by their author into a cycle. Realism was descriptive, full of ideas, fearless in its psychological probing, and long.