The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Pushkin’s posthumous life is another story. Beginning in the mid-1850s, he became an idol and a myth. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy cultivated a special relationship with Russia’s premiere poet. In 1880, at the unveiling of a statue to the poet in Moscow, Dostoevsky delivered a speech declaring Pushkin a national prophet, the savior and beacon of his people, and his fictive heroes a force for moral good – in terms that would have stunned the poet, but that electrified the audience. Tolstoy, in every way Pushkin’s equal as an aristocrat, was not present at the ceremony (Turgenev had invited him to speak but Tolstoy politely declined; he disapproved of jubilees, for others and for himself). Tolstoy was the first major Russian writer not to pass through the Romantic school. “Read The Captain’s Daughter,” the 25-year-old Tolstoy jotted down in his diary on October 31, 1853. “Alas, I must admit that Pushkin’s prose is now old-fashioned – not in its language, but in its manner of exposition. Now, quite rightly, in the new school of literature, interest in the details of feeling is taking the place of interest in the events themselves. Pushkin’s stories are somehow bare.”29 As regards “details of feeling,” Tolstoy will indeed have no rival. But the “bareness” of Pushkin’s prose remained for him a constant inspiration. Twenty years later, Tolstoy would stumble across an abandoned prose fragment by Pushkin and credit it, together with the Belkin Tales, for providing him with the courage to begin Anna Karenina.

Chapter 6

Realisms: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov

1825–55: Reign of Emperor Nicholas I

1850: Dostoevsky begins term of hard labor in Siberia

1854–55: Tolstoy, age twenty-seven, serves as lieutenant during Siege of

Sevastopol in Crimean War 1855–81: Reign of Emperor Alexander II 1861–64: Great Reforms: liberation of serfs, introduction of jury system,

military reforms, first use of word “glasnost” for officially sponsored

lessening of censorship 1878–80: Tolstoy begins his public opposition to the state, church, and military

institutions of his time 1881: Death of Dostoevsky at age sixty

1881: Alexander II, the “Liberator Tsar,” assassinated by terrorist bomb 1888: Chekhov receives Pushkin Prize 1891–92: Disastrous famine in Central Russia and Ukraine 1894: Nicholas II crowned (will reign until 1917) 1901: Tolstoy excommunicated from Russian Orthodox Church 1904: Chekhov dies of tuberculosis at age forty-four 1910: Tolstoy dies at age eighty-two

At some point between 1845 and 1855, the Russian nineteenth century breaks in two. This watershed was real not only in the judgment of later literary historians (“Romanticism” before that time, “Realism” after it); contemporaries also acutely felt the discontinuity. Political, social, and military markers were overt. In 1848, revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe caused panic among the imperial censors and internal police, recalling Catherine II’s reaction to the Terror in France in the early 1790s. In 1856, a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War finally convinced ruling circles of the need for modernization, railroads, and a mobile labor force. The new tsar Alexander II, succeeding the reactionary Nicholas I in 1855, committed to wide-ranging reforms.

Withinthe alienated creative elite, cultural evolution was more gradual. Since the 1830s, literature had been out of the hands of poets in aristocratic salons or the imperial court and increasingly the business of entrepreneurial booksellers

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and journalists. This new commercial class saw its most lucrative markets not in poetry but in prose – and especially in the long serialized novel, indispensable for retaining and satisfying subscribers with installments stretching (if possible) over years.