The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The two men chose never to meet, but much lore circulated about their opinions of each other. Dostoevsky deplored Tolstoy’s tendency to write “landlord novels” set in an historical period irrelevant to the teeming present. Gorky recalls Tolstoy saying that Dostoevsky lacked the courage to create healthy heroes; indeed, he “didn’t like healthy people. He was convinced that since he himself was sick, the whole world must be sick.” “It’s odd that so many people read him,” Tolstoy later remarked. “I can’t understand why. It’s difficult and futile – all those Idiots, Adolescents, Raskolnikovs, and the rest, things aren’t like that, it’s all much simpler, more understandable.”8 After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Tolstoy wept. But nevertheless he wrote soon after to their common friend, Nikolai Strakhov: “one cannot place on a pedestal for the instruction of posterity a man who was all struggle.”9 These two biographical trajectories – Dostoevsky’s labor-camp martyrdom and return to life, and Tolstoy’s pure trans-historical moral outrage – are the most influential literary variants of a “righteous person” [pravednik] in the Russian literary canon.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), with one-half Tolstoy’s life span to work with, matured as a writer in the all-but-blinding aura of both great novelists. Although he had a marked “Tolstoyan period,” Chekhov took a different path. For him, bigness of form and excessive energy in articulating an idea – or in carrying out an idea – already bordered on the fraudulent. Bodies, voices, ideas, and intentions in Chekhov’s world are more quickly exhausted. Pretensions to pan-humanity (Tolstoy) or to messianic struggle (Dostoevsky) were to him equally flawed. In Chekhov’s life, the most important extra-literary events were training as a doctor, traveling to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island north of Japan in 1890, and dying, for fifteen years, of tuberculosis. An urbane, confident, ironical man, he remarked in 1894, in a letter to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, that he had cooled toward Tolstoy: “Reason and justice tell me that there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat.”10 Chekhov did not seek to propagate a Word. But no writer could ignore the legacy of Russia’s two massive novelists.

134 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Time-spaces (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy)

The Tolstoy/Dostoevsky parallel lives can also help us grasp the organization and value-hierarchies of their respective literary worlds. Very early, during Tolstoy’s lifetime, readers sensed that these two worlds were incompatible. In 1902, the Symbolist poet and critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky published a lengthy comparative study in which he called Dostoevsky a “seer of the spirit” (a poet of faith and mystic revelation) and Tolstoy a “seer of the flesh” (a singer of corporeality and unclouded vision). In 1929, in what proved to be another tenacious opposition, Mikhail Bakhtin defined Dostoevsky as “dialogic” or polyphonic (character-centered) and Tolstoy as “monologic” (author-centered).11 The dialogic writer emphasizes horizontal relations and dispersed, centrifugal, competitive points of view; the monologist, in contrast, stresses the vertical, the centripetal, the absolute. Since there is some measure of truth to these broad binary generalizations as they relate to our two novelists, we expand on them here.

Dostoevsky’s most memorable heroes are depicted in an unstable or borderline phase of their lives. This brief slice of their life is under great pressure. The heroes are being tested at an extreme “threshold” moment; one can almost see the outline of the scaffold behind them, that moment in late December 1849 when Dostoevsky, at age twenty-eight, was led out by drumroll to the Semyonovsky parade ground already dressed in his shroud. We meet Raskol-nikov on the brink of committing a murder. Myshkin is in a pre-epileptic state for much of The Idiot. Three of the (perhaps) four Karamazov brothers are at their father’s throat from the first family reunion in the monastery up to (and beyond) the parricide. Most Dostoevskian heroines live on the brink of hysteria. The Underground Man is liminal in a more metaphysical sense: he never gets off the threshold – eventually an editor must cut him off – because he refuses to let any definitions of himself coalesce. Such contrariness, he thinks, guarantees his freedom. This high energy under maximum pressure can erupt at any moment into tragedy or comedy, for Dostoevsky, like Gogol, is an irrepressibly comic writer. Significantly, in a routine Dostoevskian scene this energy tends to build and then to erupt. It does not leak out slowly or fuel its characters with a steady, stabilizing flame.