The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Romanovs; installation of Provisional Government

1917 (fall)Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd (St. Petersburg)

1918–21:Civil War between Reds, Greens (peasants), and Whites (tsarist

forces)

1921:New Economic Policy (NEP) partially restores capitalism at retail

level

1925:Bulgakov begins eleven-year association with Moscow Art

Theatre

1927:Closing down of private publishing houses

1931:Zamyatin emigrates from USSR

1931–33:Collectivization and resultant famine claims 1 million lives

1936–38:The “Great Terror” (two million Soviet citizens repressed)

1937:Death of Zamyatin of heart disease at age fifty-three

1937:Death of Bely at age fifty-four

1940:Death of Bulgakov at age forty-nine, blind from uremia, after

dictating final draft of “The Master and Margarita” (first publ.

1966)

In 1893, eight years before publishing his magisterial study “L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” the Symbolist critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) wrote a curious essay titled “On Reasons for the Decline of Contemporary Russian Literature, and on its New Tendencies.”1 It is often taken to mark the end of the Age of the Novel and the beginning of the Symbolist era. In this essay, Merezhkovsky discusses the arrival in Europe of Impressionism, an artistic movement – he approvingly notes – that cared more about mystical content and a heightened

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Symbolist and Modernist world-building 167

use of the poetic symbol than about art’s responsibility to socioeconomic problems. Russian literature too had experienced the split in European nineteenth-century culture between a materialist-scientific worldview and an idealist one. But Merezhkovsky then insists that the master Russian prose writers – Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Ivan Goncharov (1812–91, author of Oblomov) – are in fact idealists, although Russia’s militant radical critics refused to recognize it. With the exception of the ascetic pamphlets being produced by the aging Tolstoy – who “would take the pipe away from a bachelor, the jug of wine away from a worker, thereby further narrowing and darkening a man’s life that was already sufficiently narrow and dark” – the works of these novelists are permeated with symbols, a mystical concern for other worlds, and a quest for the beautiful in art. If (he concluded) we now sense there has been a “decline,” it is because literary spokesmen have shouted “utility,” critical realism, and sociopolitical relevance for so long that free artistic inspiration no longer seems sufficient.