The Roots of Russian Realism: From Borrowed Forms to a National Voice

IT IS NOT MY PURPOSE here to formulate a conclusive definition of realism in the course of a comprehensive examination of Russian fiction. My objective is a much more modest one—to explore and analyze the inception and development of certain aspects of realism in significant works of six major Russian authors.

Frankly I distrust efforts to define realism with the finality which scientists define physical laws of nature. A literary critic ought to be guided by the humility of common sense when confronted by a problem so complicated by human imponderables of life and art. In any event, he ought not to begin, as a Madison Avenue mogul might, with the clinching assertion that the product, like a doctor’s prescription, contains twelve ingredients.

If it is anything, realism in fiction is a literary artist’s way of looking at life. Although this harried word, realism, which comes to us from the fine arts, is supposed to signify life as it actually is, we know perfectly well that in the art which grapples with, assimilates, and interprets reality, the subjective element plays an enormous role, to say nothing of the purely subjective element in the reader, viewer, or listener reacting to the artist’s reactions to reality.

With disarming frankness Maupassant, in the preface to Pierre et Jean, tells of the artist’s subjective involvement in the realism of his fiction: “Into the characters whose hidden, unknown being we pretend to reveal, we can only partly transplant our own vision, our own knowledge of the world, our own ideas of life…. The writer’s skill lies in not allowing the reader to recognize his ego behind the various masks which he assumes to hide it.”

When Henry James described the novel as “felt life,” he was at once criticizing the conventional conception of realism and emphasizing the author’s personality and imagination in embodying the images of characters, situations, and scenes. In short, though the novelist must use his senses and intellect to explore reality, he observes things and persons and their activities in the external world not always objectively, but through the prism of his own impulses and emotions. In fact, he is often concerned with man not only as he is, but as he ought to be, and to this extent the novelist can be an illusionist, though we would all agree that illusion may also be a definite feature of reality.

In our own day realism in fiction has taken on still other dimensions which some critics believe are bringing about the demise of the novel as we understand it, although this judgment seems rather premature. The realistic novelist has often been critical of some of the conventions of existence, but nowadays he can be in violent conflict with reality in his effort to fashion a truthful picture of the world. And this picture can and does represent a reality which the reader has never experienced, a personal, ambiguous world of the novelist himself—a symbol of contemporary “reality.” Carried a bit further, this trend has developed into the nonrealistic novel of our time.

It has been argued that realism in fiction, because it assumes an impossible point of view—one that lacks a viewer—can never correspond to the reality of life. This is being semantically absolutist to an intolerable degree, as though art did not always involve artifice. To say that a novelist does not reflect the world but creates an entirely imaginary world true to his personal vision is to place an unwarranted limitation on his function as an artist. The purely imaginary does not exist. In L’Homme révolté Camus correctly observes that art cannot reject reality, and with insight he adds that real literary creation “uses reality and only reality with all its warmth and its blood, its passion and its outcries. It simply adds something which transfigures reality.”

It has been said that every age has its own realism, a somewhat sweeping generalization that gains nothing in convincingness if we add that so does every country. However, one does not have to be a devotee of Marxian determinism to observe a striking correlation between social change in historical time and the birth and subsequent growth of realism in fiction. It will be instructive to say something briefly about this pattern of cause and effect in Western Europe, for its impact on the beginnings of Russian realism proved to be significant.

The wealth of fiction from the ancient and medieval worlds contributed nothing to the conception of the modern novel except an interest in sheer storytelling and a passing curiosity about men and women. If the classical epic and the medieval romance, the first of which glorified a ruling military society and the second a courtly one, have left any mark on the novel today, it is an idealized reflection of social aspects that still have some relevance. After all, the military is a well-known staple of society in all ages, and even hard-bitten modernists sometimes dwindle into romance, both risqué and roseate. The tunnel of romantic escape from a reality too much with us is as irresistible now as it was in the medieval past. As for ancient myth, well we are more than partial to it in the novel today where centaurs and unicorns in modern dress only go to show that there is nothing new under the sun in life or in fiction.

Rabelais and Cervantes, spanning the expansive Renaissance transition between medieval feudalism and the first stirrings of capitalism, created something less than the form of the modern novel and something more than its traditional content. For if Gargantua and Pantagruel discovered the human body with all its coarse delights, Don Quixote placed a soul in it. The result was a heavy brew of realism that intoxicated the mind and exhilarated the spirit. Toward the end of his famous quest, the good Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance confessed that heaven can be conquered but not the world of men, that inaccessible goal of both heroes and antiheroes in so much modern fiction. Unlike later philosophical novels, such as those of Kafka, Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Camus, where the burden of weighty speculation tends to disintegrate the absorbing fabric of life, the philosophy of Don Quixote, perhaps the most philosophical novel of Western literature, is carefully sublimated in an atmosphere of riotously funny adventures. In this burlesque of outmoded romances of chivalry, the Don is a tragic hero who is compelled to realize in the end that man cannot shape reality and his own destiny in the image of his chosen ideal. Turgenev and Tolstoy regarded the work as a supremely great book. Its hero influenced the creation of that positively good man, Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot, and the grateful Dostoevsky declared: “In all the world there is nothing more profound and more powerful than Don Quixote. Further than this, it is the last and greatest word of human thought, the most bitter irony that man can express.” Such praise is not accidental. The art of Cervantes in his masterpiece and that of these great Russian realists had much in common.

If a country’s dominant social class tends to create the art form which will provide the fullest and most accurate expression of its behavior pattern and economic consciousness, then it would seem almost inevitable that England’s rising middle class, a product of the burgeoning eighteenth-century industrial revolution, would create the novel. Its inevitability, however, might just as easily be accounted for by the widespread commercialization of printing at this time and by the development of publishing as a big business. For English novelists of the eighteenth century would perhaps have echoed Arnold Bennett’s answer in the twentieth to a starry-eyed worshiper who asked what inner urge had driven him on to create his masterpiece, Old Wives’ Tale: “I needed the money,” he replied.

Certainly a merchandizing value was not far removed from Daniel Defoe’s mind when he created Robinson Crusoe, often regarded as the first English novel and even as the very first of all novels. But material rewards have never been incompatible with man’s compulsion to express himself artistically, and Robinson Crusoe is art of a high order. It defined the novel, however inadequately, as the art form of bourgeois society. For if Defoe was unaware that the novel’s distinguishing feature, as E. M. Forster put it, was to make the secret life of man visible, he did recognize that it must deal with man’s struggle against society and against nature, but a struggle waged in a real world where the balance between man and society is often lost.

Like Defoe, other great English novelists of the eighteenth century, such as Fielding in Tom Jones and Smollett in Humphry Clinker, were concerned primarily with an objective picture of society. The inner life of their characters they either evaded or did not think important. As writers in the grand epic tradition of the ancient past, action and not the analysis of its motives or of the feelings of the hero of action claimed their principal attention. The lack of this important dimension of realism, so pervasive in the novel today, was overcome by the discovery of sensibility which so markedly affected those other masterpieces of eighteenth-century fiction—Richardson’s Clarissa, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse. Here the consciousness of the individual and an intense preoccupation with motives and the intimate feelings of the heart became the focus of the novelist’s view of reality. In truth, Sterne went even further. For him analysis was an end in itself, and he substituted relativism for the “tapeworm of time,” that temporal framework of all fiction up to this point. It was an approach anticipating in certain respects that of Proust and Joyce more than a century later. But one danger of excessive emphasis on analysis is the separation of the individual from society which ultimately marks a retreat from reality.

Despite the contributions of the eighteenth century, especially in England, to a definition of the modern novel, they had failed to bring within the compass of a single work a comprehensive picture of developing middle-class society involving, let us say, an artistic treatment that combined the epic approach of action of a Fielding with the close analysis of motive and feeling of a Richardson.

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The English realistic novel caused a literary stir in eighteenth-century France and Germany where it influenced fiction writing. The response in Russia was considerably different. Though Russia had existed as a separate nation for several hundred years, it was still struggling to achieve national self-consciousness, a necessary condition for the development of an original literature and culture. Various political, economic, and social factors had caused the delay. Among them may be mentioned the continued existence of serfdom, which had begun to disintegrate in the West as early as the twelfth century, and the country’s isolation and fear of foreigners, perhaps more a heritage of the long Tatar yoke than a fault of the insularity and xenophobia of the Church, as has sometimes been charged. Though Peter the Great, in the early years of the eighteenth century, is credited with ending this segregation by opening his famous window to the West, it must be said that it was hardly a bay window but rather one of those Russian fortochkas, a tiny pane of glass in a large sealed window which allows just enough fresh air into the room to keep one from suffocating in the winter. Without minimizing Peter’s service in introducing Russia to many features of the most advanced civilization of the West, he plainly overlooked one of Europe’s greatest glories—its literary culture. The only books that concerned him were those that could be put to practical use in his reforming zeal. Belles lettres he scornfully described as “mere tales that simply waste time.” Historically speaking, perhaps he was right. Before Russia could absorb the finer aspects of European culture, a great deal of elementary preparation had to take place.

Culture is international common tender and over the centuries the coins of literary and artistic achievement of each of the major countries of Western Europe made their wav from one to the other multiplying and enriching the culture of all. In addition, these countries were cultural beneficiaries of Greece and Rome and the brilliant literary and artistic efflorescence of the Renaissance. Circumstances deprived Russia of these influences throughout its formative period, and its contacts with Byzantium in no way compensated the country. An indicator of its relative backwardness is the fact that printing did not begin in Russia until 1564—the year of Shakespeare’s birth!

By the time of Peter’s death in 1725 Russia was nearly ready for invasion of European literature and thought. During the transition period from Catherine I to Catherine II (1725-62), a span of thirty-seven years, German and French favorites close to the throne furthered Peter’s open-door policy to the West. By this time the grand tour in Europe had become a kind of social status symbol among members of the gentry. New educational institutions—the Academy of Sciences, a university at St. Petersburg and one at Moscow, and several preparatory and special schools—were staffed largely by French and German teachers. In fact, the education of the generation of writers who now inaugurated Russia’s continuous literary development was more European than Russian. After being exposed to a foreign-oriented initial training in Russia, such future authors as Lomonosov, Kantemir, Tredyakovsky, and Sumarokov traveled to countries of Western Europe to finish their education.

The Russian cultural time-lag was also reflected in the foreign literary influences that dominated these early writers; they succumbed completely to the French neoclassical school without being aware that its contemporary significance was fast waning. Corneille, Molière, Racine, Boileau, and later Voltaire and the Encyclopedists were imitated, often slavishly, and the vogue of French neoclassicism lasted for years in Russian literature.

During the long reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96) which, culturally, marks the beginning of modern Russia, this Gallomania swept all before it. It has been estimated that three fourths of the books read in Russia over these years were French. Anything regarded as comme il faut in Paris was sure to be imitated in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Among the upper classes French virtually usurped the place of the Russian vernacular as a medium of polite communication. Years later the critic Belinsky, whose combination of ignorance and knowledge resulted somehow in remarkable judgments on literature, wryly commented on this situation: “Imagine a [Russian] society that spoke, thought, and prayed to God in French.” In Fonvizin’s satire of this pervasive foreign influence on social life in his well-known comedy, The Brigadier, the character Ivanushka, who in default of his body hoped that his soul might be French, limned the Frenchified Russian type for all time: “Everyone who has been in Paris has the right, in speaking about Russians, not to include himself in their number, for he has already become more French than Russian.”

The example of Catherine herself, who had some pretension to authorship, encouraged the growth of belles lettres. Although this activity centered mostly in court circles and readers were not numerous, still the long, slow task of creating a national literature had begun in real earnest. Poetry was emphasized, most of it uninspired imitations of French verse, and dramas, largely modeled on neoclassical French plays, conformed to the unities and were devoted to themes of love and duty. Only two figures, Derzhavin in poetry and Fonvizin in comedy, rose above the dreary level of imitativeness and created works that were original and belong to the body of enduring Russian literature.

Catherine was the prime mover in promoting an interest in moral and satirical journals, many of which were published during her reign. Nothing is so calculated to convince one of the derivative nature of Russian literary efforts at this time than a close examination of these periodicals. Their origin was not only inspired by foreign models, but their contents were often made up partly or entirely of translations from English, French, and German journals. And sometimes the social abuses satirized in the few original articles had more relevance to foreign countries than to Russia.

English eighteenth-century satirical and moral journals were heavily drawn upon, especially the Spectator, and this wealth of material on English life, customs, manners, and culture contributed to developing a degree of Anglomania which was welcomed in some Russian quarters as a desirable offset to the devotion to everything French. Here, too, the Empress, with her admiration of English institutions—she even attempted reworkings of several of Shakespeare’s plays—set something of an example. One result was the accumulation in Catherine’s Russia of a rather extensive body of English literature in translation.

It is interesting to observe, however, that this Anglomania was in many respects a kind of by-product of Russia’s Gallomania. For after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, thousands of French Huguenots fled to England. But they did not sever connections with the motherland and for over half a century these refugees, through numerous publications and visits to the Continent, were the means of disseminating a knowledge of English life, thought, and culture in France. Anglophiles among such men of letters as Prévost, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot popularized English literature in France, and an endless stream of translations of poetry, plays, and fiction flooded the country.

Russia, with its inordinate cultural dependence on France, appropriated also this French Anglomania. Since English was then little known in Russia, people read English literature in French translations which in turn were often rendered into Russian. And one of the genres that appealed most, aided no doubt by its popularity in France, was the English realistic novel.

Hitherto fiction in Russia had been limited to translations of medieval heroic romances and a few original tales of the chap-book variety. But in the reigns of Elizabeth and Catherine the French romans d’aventure of such authors as La Calprenède, Scudéry, and Madame La Fayette became a veritable craze. After the establishment of a translation department in the Academy of Sciences in 1767, by far the majority of books issued by the press were these French romances. Although their improbable characters and sensational adventures were sometimes denounced in Russia for poisoning the minds of youth, such romances as Cassandre, Faramond, and Artamène were curiously credited with awakening an intellectual interest among a people who up to this time had not come into contact with any extensive narrative literature.

The sweeping popularity of the English realistic novel in France, which contributed to undermining the vogue of the romances there, also served the same end in Russia. French and German translations of English novels, and imitations or highly original works influenced by this new form, such as Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and Goethe’s Werther, were translated into Russian and eagerly read. In the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, Russian translations of the following English novels appeared, in some cases in several editions: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Richardson’s Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison; Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and Jonathan Wild; Smollett’s Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker,and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (Tristram Shandy, though probably read earlier in French translation, did not appear in Russian until 1804-7).

Here were superb models, among them some world masterpieces of the new modern trend in fiction, which, if conditions had been ripe, might have initiated the great stream of Russian realism decades before it actually began. The age of Catherine, however, was in no sense prepared for such a development. Literature was still largely derivative for it lacked the centuries of continuous growth of the literatures of England and France. And that all-important concomitant of maturity in belles lettres—a sophisticated self-criticism—had not yet got underway. The social and economic conditions that had given rise to the realistic novel—a nascent capitalism and an emerging middle class—were not present in this semifeudal Russia with its vast, amorphous population of serfs, its landed gentry, and ruling aristocracy. Implicit in the realistic novel is the freedom to comment on and even to criticize the social and political institutions that form and condition men’s lives. Yet when Nikolai Novikov attacked serfdom in his satirical journal, Catherine promptly banned all such journals. And when Nikolai Radishchev, in 1790, dared to criticize social and political abuses in his famous book, A Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the Empress had all copies of the work impounded and the author exiled to Siberia. Whatever liberal tendencies she may have displayed before the French Revolution, after it she would tolerate no criticisms of Russian life that reflected on her absolute power. In short, if one of the principal aesthetic problems of realism is adequate presentation of the complete human personality, this problem was quite irrelevant in Catherine’s Russia where the individual as such did not exist in a political and social system that exacted blind obedience to the state from every subject.

Though the unvarnished realism of Fielding’s novels was admired in eighteenth-century Russia, readers, once again bowing to French taste, preferred Richardson and his moral and moralizing heroines. The importation of English sensibility or sentimentalism, also through the medium of France, undoubtedly contributed to this preference.

Russian eulogies on Richardson, especially in introductions to translations of his novels, border on the rhapsodic, as they did in France and Germany. He was praised not as a master of realism, but as the creator of creatures of enchanting sentiment and impeccable virtue. In the 1787 version of Pamela, the Russian translator, after confessing that he experienced every terror of the heroine and wept over her unhappiness, declares: “All families will wish to have in their homes a Pamela who may serve as a shining example of honor and unyielding virtue.” Obviously this Russian admirer would hardly have appreciated Fielding’s sly notion that though Pamela regarded her virtue a pearl of precious price, she tended to place too much emphasis on the price.

In this initial period of Russian fiction it was also Richardson among the English novelists who was accorded the flattery of imitation, and in one case at least also inspired an original effort in his manner. Two years after the translation of Pamela a novel by P. Lvov appeared, entitled A Russian Pamela, or the History of Mariya, a Virtuous Peasant Girl. The author informs us in a foreword that his heroine “was as much honored in her actions as, for example, the heroine of Pamela written by the glorious Richardson. For this reason I have called her a ‘Russian Pamela,’ for there are among us such tender hearts of noble sensibility in lowly circumstances.” It is the story of the love of a young member of the landed gentry for a comely peasant girl, in which the couple are kept apart for many pages by the actions of a cynical friend of the hero. In Mariya we have a sedulous imitation of Pamela. Like her English model, she is modest to a fault and is given to a specious kind of moralizing at great length. Her lover, however, resembles the faultless Grandison more than Pamela’s designing Mr. B., whose traits reappear in the hero’s crafty friend.

A more sophisticated and more independent effort was the short novel, Poor Liza (1792), by the eminent author Nikolai Karamzin. This story, which won fantastic popularity, involves the same general theme as Richardson’s Pamela, but the peasant heroine’s love affair takes a tragic turn and she commits suicide. Richardson’s notions of social equality in marriage are preached in Poor Liza, whose heroine embodies more of the features of Clarissa than of Pamela.

Within a few years Russian readers would laugh over such tales with their exaggerated sentiments and idealized peasants who resembled the utterly unreal shepherds and shepherdesses of French neoclassical poetry. So deeply engrained was the habit of imitation that these Russian authors, with their foreign models too much in mind, failed to observe the native life around them.

It is clear that in this first phase of Russian literature the development of a realistic approach in fiction was incompatible with the spirit and practice of the times. Belles lettres had not yet become a profession. It bore an entirely official character and depended on the patronage of the court for its existence. Instead of faithfully depicting man and society as complete entities, authors were disposed to idealize Russian life and people or even to substitute for them the portrayals found in their French neoclassical models. In fiction alone some conception of the reading public’s inability to overcome their devotion to foreign literature may be gathered from the fact that 463 translations of French, German, and English novels appeared during this period and only 32 by Russian authors, that is, on the average less than one a year!

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At times the Communist Party line has compelled Soviet critics to forsake internationalism in an un-Marxian nationalistic effort to prove that Russian literary development over the centuries was uncontaminated by foreign influences. This chauvinistic “discovery” was apparently dictated by the political need to identify a continuum between pre- and post revolutionary literature without ever running the risk of uncovering Western European skeletons in the Soviet cultural closet.

The literature of no nation fails to benefit from the cultural advances of its neighbors, and only a distorted patriotism would regard such borrowings as in any way demeaning. Belinsky, whom Soviet authorities, after much doctrinal shuffling, have accepted as a kind of early nineteenth-century precursor of the Marxian approach to literature, regarded the matter otherwise. He saw clearly that Russia’s manifold borrowings from the West since the reign of Peter the Great could not essentially alter the country’s emerging nationality which, he declared, was the aggregate of all the spiritual powers of the Russian people. He wisely understood that these foreign riches, which reanimated the people with the spirit of a new and fuller life, were necessary during the early stages of Russia’s cultural growth.

To some extent this conviction was borne out in the reign of the enlightened Emperor Alexander I (1801-25), when vigorous discussions took place on Russia’s need for an original literature of its own, and writers, who increased in number, where held in higher esteem and regarded as important factors in the body politic. Further, the French invasion of 1812, which shook the whole country, revealed unexpected sources of strength. Russia’s victorious participation in the Napoleonic wars stirred up national consciousness and pride, encouraged the birth of publicity as a forerunner of public opinion, and brought the triumphant country face to face with Europe for the first time.

Neoclassical theory and practice continued down into the reign of Alexander but less inclusively so and eventually surrendered important ground to another movement, the cult of sensibility, which had begun to penetrate Russia from England, France, and Germany at the end of Catherine’s reign. Though initially an outgrowth of such novels as Clarissa, Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther, and especially Sterne’s Sentimental Journey,the movement was soon infused with the special qualities of feeling to be found in such English works as Thomson’s The Seasons, Young’s Night Thoughts, and the Poems of Ossian, all of which were translated into Russian and much imitated. A veritable philosophy of feeling absorbed a number of writers and acted as an antidote to the rationalism of neoclassicism.

Karamzin, the author of Poor Liza, became the high priest of the new sensibility, especially after his immensely popular Letters of a Russian Traveler (1797) where the analysis of his own feelings, his “joy of grief,” and tearful sadness before the beauties of nature amounted to a revelation to the reading public. His utter subjectivism and emphasis on his own spiritual experiences, so alien to the neoclassical outlook, were influential among literary disciples in the first part of Alexander’s reign. However, neither his poetry nor tales, written in the spirit of the cult of sensibility, nor those of his followers, contributed anything memorable to Russian literature. Karamzin’s real service was as a historian and the creator of a literary language that was modern and supple enough to be used in a variety of genres, the lack of which hitherto had been a serious hindrance to the development of Russian prose.

As in the previous periods, original fiction was mostly neglected. The literary historian N. I. Grech, in reviewing the total output for the single year 1814, could list only two novels, and these were both translations from the German. Though Karamzin never wrote a full-length novel, some of his later short stories—he was really the first to introduce this form into Russian literature—such as A Knight of Our Times, reveal a degree of artistic form and skill in characterization not to be found in the sparse body of previous fiction. However, in his almost exclusive preoccupation with tearful and noble sentiments of simple hearts, he never comes to grips with reality. The only full-length novel to reflect the manners and customs of the times, perhaps more influenced by Smollett’s blunt realism than by that of Fielding, is Vasily Narezhny’s A Russian Gil Blas, the story of a wretched squire’s adventures in the provinces and in the two capitals. It is a crude effort, for Narezhny lacked the imagination and art to endow reality with life, and hence the work failed to play any part in the future development of the novel.

A writer at this time who observed life closely and possessed the art to charge it with living reality was Ivan Krylov, whose nine volumes of fables appeared between 1809 and 1820. Though the verse fable was an approved and popular neoclassical genre, Krylov easily surpassed his Russian rivals in form and in the realistic, instead of prettifying, manner in which he handled his subjects. The result was a classic of Russian literature. In these fables Krylov, in a style that drew upon the speech of common folk, satirized and ridiculed the foibles, especially arrogant stupidity, of high and low. Though the limitations of the form hardly allow for realistic treatment in depth, Krylov’s animals no less than his peasants come to life. And the world they live in, despite its restricted dimensions, is a very recognizable Russian world filled with healthy humor and good practical common sense. Belinsky once remarked that if the work of any Russian writer up to this point were translated into a major European language, foreign readers would have found it of no interest because they would have long ago read this kind of thing in their own literature, whereas they would have welcomed a translation of Krylov’s fables as something different and quintessentially Russian. Actually these fables were a first step in the direction of that kind of realism which later became the hallmark of Russian literature. They very likely influenced the course of Pushkin’s realism and also Griboyedov’s famous comedy, Woe from Wit, whose characters were so brilliantly stamped out of the common clay of Russian existence, and they no doubt contributed to the “poetry of real life” which characterized so much of Gogol’s fiction.

In truth, during Alexander’s reign decades of preparation were approaching an end and literature advanced from imitativeness to originality in the wonderful flowering of verse described as Russia’s “Golden Age of Poetry.” Though Pushkin emerged as the leading figure of the movement, it included a sizable group of unusual poets of whom Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, and Baratynsky are the most remarkable ones. The intellectual and artistic climate was still that of Western Europe, but it was now an entirely assimilated climate reflected in verse that was European without being imitative. The verse of these poets, nearly all of whom belonged to the gentry class, was distinctly classical, especially in the purity of its form, and also, to a large extent, in its subject matter.

By 1820, however, this movement began to encounter the strident claims of European romanticism and its concomitant German idealism. Soon a critical debate ensued in the monthly reviews, which now played an important role in literature, between proponents of strict rules of French neoclassicism and those who favored romanticism with its greater freedom in form and content. Then the death of Alexander I and the Decembrist Revolt, which ushered in the reign of Nicholas I in 1825, were events that deeply affected cultural developments. The revolt ended in the suppression of many of the intellectual elite among the gentry and new plebeian writers took their place. A growing commercialism started to make inroads on literature, and one result was a decline in the popularity of poetry and a rise in the importance of prose. In the very year of revolt Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, a young poet and later an extremely popular fiction writer, asserted in a letter to Pushkin: “People no longer listen to poetry now that everyone is able to write it. The current murmur has risen to a general outcry: ‘Give us prose! Prose!—Water, plain water.’” With romanticism in the saddle, it was only natural in these circumstances that its greatest representative in fiction, Sir Walter Scott, should have prompted and influenced new developments in the Russian novel.

Unlike the West, in Russia romanticism never assumed social or political dimensions, nor did it reflect individual revolt against real or imaginary evils of society. It never amounted to much more than a narrow and even ephemeral literary movement almost wholly stimulated from abroad. Though the works of certain French writers and German philosophers were eagerly read, the writings and personalities of Byron and Scott were by far the largest influence in introducing romanticism into Russia. In 1827 the able poet and critic Peter Vyazemsky declared, perhaps with some exaggeration: “In our age it seems impossible for a poet not to echo Byron or for a novelist not to reflect Walter Scott.” Abundant evidence indicates that Scott became a kind of literary hero, the object of endless admiration and curiosity in the pages of Russian periodicals. From 1820 to 1830 no less than thirty-nine translations of Scott’s novels were published, often running into several editions and including nearly every title in the long series. These works served to arouse the interest of Russians in their country’s past and also influenced the writing of a considerable number of historical romances.

The most popular of these, and certainly the most enduring, was Yury Miloslavsky, or the Russians in 1612 (1829) by Mikhail Zagoskin, who won the sobriquet of the “Russian Walter Scott.” It was also published in England in 1834, an unusual tribute, for translations of Russian literature into English were very rare at this time. The background of the novel is the Time of Troubles when the Poles occupied Moscow. Yury falls in love with a beautiful noblewoman, and after various adventures, in which Kirsha, the stout bodyguard of the hero performs prodigies of valor, Yury wins his fair damsel. Zagoskin wrote other historical novels but none of them achieved the fame of Yury Miloslavsky.

Faddei Bulgarin also contributed historical romances, such as The False Dmitri (1830) and Mazepa (1834), but he won much more reclame with his picaresque novel, Ivan Vyzhigin (1829), in which the effectiveness of rough but genuine transcripts of Russian life is unfortunately neutralized by the author’s excessive moralizing. Similarly Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, who published an historical romance, Incursions, as early as 1824 and followed it up with others less satisfactory, won his widest popular success with purely romantic tales of his adventures as a soldier in the Caucasus, such as Ammalet Bek (1832). But the author who more than Zagoskin deserved the title of “Russian Walter Scott” was Ivan Lazhechnikov who wrote a series of historical romances. One of his earliest, and in some respect the best, The Last Novik (1831-33), drew from Belinsky these words of praise: “It reveals in the author a considerable talent and establishes his claim to the honorable place of first Russian novelist.”* This tribute is not hard to understand, for The Last Novik, a story centered in the epoch of Peter the Great, is peculiarly modern compared to the archaic flavor of all preceding Russian fiction. Though the hero is most unconvincing, several of the secondary characters emerge as real human beings.

None of these writers occupies a lofty place in the annals of Russian literature, but they are worth mentioning because they came at a point when the Russian reading public first evinced a need for fiction, and by and large they attempted to answer it, in the spirit of the times, with the historical romance. Realism, as the art of trying to envisage the ever-changing and tangible world, is as relevant to the past as to the present, a fact that Balzac recognized when he stated in the introduction to The Human Comedy that he regarded his own novels as continuations of the historical romances of Scott. He saw clearly that Scott emphasized the development of social elements instead of the external glitter of historical events. And Balzac praised him for assigning secondary roles to great historical figures in order to concentrate on the spirit and morals of an age or on the causes which lead to and explain significant events.

For the most part these early Russian writers of historical romances largely missed this concentration, perhaps because they lacked Scott’s extraordinary talent and the long development of literary culture that informed it. They were not endowed with the magical art with which he conjured the varied atmosphere and scenery of his events and incidents, nor did they have his exceptional power of vivifying the past on an extended scale. Though they faithfully imitated his brilliant efforts to provide the local color of a vanished epoch by historical research, they were unable to transcend the trivial and the average in a quest for the deeper essence of reality hidden beneath the surface. The reality of atmosphere of a past age which they sought to grasp conveyed nothing of that wonderful ancient Russianism which, let us say, is conveyed in medieval ikons. They were not analysts of human nature. Scott often fails in his non-Scotch characterizations, but the pulse of real life throbs in his native portrayals, which is rarely the case with any of the characters of these early Russian historical novelists. And though they and Scott are unconvincing in their love scenes, the Russians tend to emphasize the love element, failing to realize that Scott regarded his novels not as romances of love but rather as the romance of human life and its activities. So very often, it seems, the flavor of these Russian historical novels was not that of real life but of make-believe.

4

Throughout the eighteenth century no writer had appeared who possessed the genius to identify himself completely with the national epos in original creative endeavors and give the kind of direction to Russian literature that would enable it to take a worthy place in the stream of world literature. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) performed this service in the early years of the nineteenth century and richly deserves the title accorded him by genealogically minded native critics of “the father of modern Russian literature.”

Of course, no attempt can be made here to evaluate Pushkin’s extraordinary accomplishments in a variety of literary genres, although a fresh assessment that would avoid both the exaggerated praise and depreciation of nineteenth-century critics and the sprightly dullness of Soviet worshipers, who regard him as a kind of predecessor of socialist realism, is very much needed in our own day. Our concern is with Pushkin’s contributions to the Russian novel and, more specifically, to the formation of its realistic traditions.

Within this limited sphere Pushkin’s unusual artistic qualifications conditioned the nature of his contributions in a unique manner. Though writing in the nineteenth century, the qualities of his mind and art were formed largely by the eighteenth. That is to say, he was a classicist in his literary tastes, in his sense of form, and in his habits of thought and feeling. The special intellectual essence which we associate with the classical approach to life and art—nothing over much, a preference for the reality of things, and an intense dislike of excess and insincerity—characterized not only the manner in which he wrote, but also the themes he selected. Unlike such great writers of fiction as Balzac and Dostoevsky, who by becoming emotionally involved at times in the life they observed and in the men and women they created and to this extent distorted the realistic image of their milieu, Pushkin’s artistic detachment enabled him to remain quite objective even when there could be no doubt of his social sympathies or prejudices. Irony appealed to him more than direct criticism, subtle satire more than forthright denunciation. Like Tolstoy, his breeding as a member of the gentry colored his whole outlook on life, but unlike Tolstoy, his “six-hundred-year-old ancestry” never turned him into a conscience-stricken nobleman.

Pushkin, however, did not remain serenely above the battle. In his youth he evinced political sympathies close to those of the Decembrist rebels and literary tendencies that allied him with romanticism. But he was a literary artist and not a political thinker. Disheartened by persecution during the reign of Alexander I, he hopefully made his peace with the new regime of Nicholas I. And the classical discipline of his artistic temperament soon compelled him to repudiate romanticism. Though his magnificent “Southern Verse Tales,” such as The Robber Brothers (1821), The Captive of the Caucasus (1822), and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1824), were clearly inspired by Byron’s “Eastern Verse Tales,” Pushkin was too dedicated to technical mastery to tolerate Byron’s faults of form and too rational to have any sympathy with his pessimism, disillusion, and romantic posing. In rejecting Vyazemsky’s request in 1824 that he write a fifth canto to Childe Harold as a tribute to Byron after his death, Pushkin remarked: “You are sad about Byron, but I am quite happy in his death, as a lofty theme for poetry. Byron’s genius faded from his youth…. There was no gradation; he suddenly ripened and matured, sang and then grew silent, and his first melodies never returned to him.”

The beginning of Pushkin’s transition from romanticism to realism may be discerned as early as 1824 in the exquisite dramatic narrative poem, The Gypsies, in which both strains are curiously mingled. The subject has romantic overtones: the sophisticated hero Aleko deserts civilization for life among the gypsies. Later, enraged by his sweetheart’s betrayal of him, he kills both her and her lover. As punishment these children of nature, who believe that one cannot say to a young girl’s heart: “Love only one, you must not change,” oblige the murderer to leave them. It is possible that some thirty years later Leo Tolstoy had Aleko and the theme of The Gypsies very much in mind when he wrote his novel The Cossacks, in which he poses a somewhat similar conflict between the unreflecting natural life of the Cossacks and the conventional worldly existence of his hero Olenin.

In The Gypsies an effective concentration on descriptive details of setting and action in order to achieve verisimilitude and convey atmosphere strikes an entirely new realistic note in Russian literature. Some notion of these effects may be obtained from a literal, unrhymed rendering of a few of the opening lines, however much violence it may do to the poetic beauty of the original:

The gypsies in a noisy crowd

Wander over Bessarabia.

Today they spend the night

In tattered tents by a river bank.

Like freedom their camp is joyous,

And they sleep peacefully under the sky.

Between the cart wheels,

Half-covered by rugs,

A fire burns; a family round it

Prepares supper; in the open field

Horses graze; before a tent

A tame bear lies untied.

All is lively in the steppe:

Peaceful family cares,

Preparation for the morrow’s short journey,

The singing of women, shouts of children,

And the sounds of a portable anvil.

There is much more in this vein, all of which led Belinsky to date the beginning of Russian realism with this opening passage of The Gypsies.

Aleko is hardly a typical Byronic figure with the usual romantic trappings. This fact is made amply clear in the famous passage at the end of the poem where the old father of the slain girl, speaking for all the gypsies, explains to Aleko: “You for yourself desire freedom,” and he bids him leave them in peace. The individual will is defeated by the will of the community. Pushkin’s resolution of the tragedy is classical in intention—Nemesis presides over the destiny of man. Not the vengeance of the gypsies overtakes Aleko, but a kind of tragic poetic justice.

It is difficult to accept the judgment of so acute a critic as Mirsky that The Gypsies is “the most temptingly universal imaginative work in the Russian language.” Various writers have discovered in it a profound philosophical meaning. Dostoevsky, for example, in his speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow in 1880, acclaimed Aleko as the primordial type of the unhappy Russian wanderer who must learn—as Aleko did from the humility of the gypsies—to humble his pride and thus achieve his freedom. Only when the intelligentsia learns this lesson, Dostoevsky concluded, will it be able to lead the people in fulfilling its manifest destiny of reconciling the proud and discordant Western world to the Russian universal message of humility.

Pushkin’s classical realism eschewed overt philosophizing. The only major Russian author who resembled him in this respect was Chekhov, a fact recognized by Doctor Zhivago many years later. For Pasternak’s hero prefers the modest reticence of Pushkin and Chekhov who, unlike Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, thought it pretentious and presumptuous to indulge in speculation on the ultimate purpose of mankind. To all those who attempt to discover a deep or hidden meaning in his writings, Pushkin would characteristically answer, as he in fact did in the case of Zhukovsky: “You ask what is the purpose of The Gypsies? What should it be? The purpose of poetry is poetry….”

Pushkin had hardly finished The Gypsies when he took another step in the direction of realism. He had discovered Shakespeare, and with that innovating boldness which was a distinctive trait of his genius, he decided to write a historical tragedy that would end the long neoclassical tradition of Racine in the Russian theater and, hopefully, start a new trend in native drama. “Verisimilitude of situations and truth of dialogue—here is the real rule of tragedy,” he wrote his friend Nikolai Raevsky in 1825. “(I haven’t read Calderon or Vega), but what a man is this Shakespeare! I can’t get over it. How small Byron the tragedian looks in comparison with him!”

The play, of course, is Boris Godunov, and though it has failings as a historical tragedy in blank verse, Shakespeare’s full-blooded realism is reflected in the best of the characterizations, in the mob scenes where the dialogue so naturally suits the lowly speakers, and especially in the comic scene of the two miscreant monks in the inn at the Lithuanian border.

At that time Boris Godunov was a unique Russian effort to recreate the historical past in drama. In the same realistic pursuit, but now with a difference, Pushkin attempted to modernize Shakespeare. Impishly wondering what would have happened in The Rape of Lucrece if the lovely victim had only thought of slapping Tarquin’s face at the appropriate moment, Pushkin provided an answer, in a contemporary setting, in his verse tale Count Nulin. The gay count mistakes the coyness of his charming hostess as an invitation to something more intimate. But when he attempts to pursue this idea the resounding slap in the face she gives him forces the count into a humiliating retreat. In short, while he was realistically treating a historical theme in Boris Godunov, Pushkin revealed his ability, in the delightfully narrated Count Nulin, to depict a slice of modern Russian life with convincing realism.

5

This natural movement in Pushkin’s artistic development from neoclassical fugitive poetry, verse epistles, and Anacreontic lyrics of his novitiate, and romantic “Southern Verse Tales” of his youth, to concentration on literature of realism at the outset of maturity found its first major expression in his great master-piece, Eugene Onegin. He announced the beginning of this long narrative poem of over five thousand lines in a letter to Vyazemsky on May 9, 1823: “I’m not writing a novel, but a novel in verse—a devil of a difference—in the manner of Don Juan.” But long before Eugene Onegin was finished eight years later, Byron’s initial influence had vanished in the slow, forward progress of perhaps the most original work Pushkin ever wrote, and one that endeavored to present a comprehensive and realistic picture of one whole segment of contemporary Russian life.

Pushkin did not share the confusion of that estimable Monsieur Jourdain—he knew that he was writing, if not speaking, poetry in Eugene Onegin. Yet he liked to regard this long poem as a novel and actually divided it into chapters instead of cantos. And if one cares to accept Pushkin’s odd but meaningful description of Eugene Onegin, containing much of his finest verse, one may regard it as the first Russian realistic novel, for it possesses the ordinary surface features of the genre: characters, a plot with well-marked beginning, middle, and end, and a treatment of the precise content of life in given circumstances.

A realistic embodiment of this Russian way of life in either poetry or prose was a challenge, for nothing quite resembling it existed in Western Europe, although the eighteenth-century squirearchy of Fielding’s Tom Jones bears points of similarity. Catherine the Great’s charter of 1785, defining the privileges and responsibilities of the nobility, gave moral impetus to the growth of a class of middle nobility or landed gentry. They spent most of their time on estates in the country, except for a few winter months of intense social activity in the capitals or large provincial cities. With their special privileges and similar education and tastes, this class over the years developed a spiritual and cultural consciousness of its own as the significant core of Russian society. Pushkin belonged to this class, and in Eugene Onegin he was the first to present its contemporary image and inner life. To estimate the uniqueness of his achievement, one would have to be aware of prior efforts which amount to so many sketches and crude copies rather than the imaginative re-creation of original art. With his realistic depiction of people, manners, and morals, Pushkin at once rendered laughably obsolete those prodigies of vice and paragons of virtue who had been the main staple of Russian readers of neoclassical and romantic poetry and prose. Eugene Onegin is a perfect expression of the landed gentry of Pushkin’s time.

Though the polished world-weary hero is a product of the society to which he belongs, it would be a mistake to regard Onegin as a simple type. His is a complex nature which changes and matures as does that of Pierre Bezukhov or Prince Andrew over the years of the action of War and Peace. Onegin’s early Byronic posing soon fades and the deeper traits of a type common enough in the society of the time begin to emerge. In reality he is alienated from his class, not because he rejects its values, although there is something of this in him, but because a lack of belief in himself prevents him from playing the part of a leader which inwardly he aspired to be. His cynical behavior is a product of this frustration which also explains his sudden retreat to the simple life of the country, his rejection there of Tatyana’s passionate love, and his callous killing of Lensky in a duel.

Onegin is the first convincing full-length characterization in Russian literature. Pushkin, however, does not employ finespun analysis to bring out the complexities of his nature or to explain the motivation of his feelings, a technique which he must have observed in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and Richardson’s novels. Though the limitations of a novel in verse may have rendered such an approach pecularily difficult, it was also alien to Pushkin’s classical temperament and the objectivity and restraint which were touchstones of his art. The indirect realistic method he used was very much his own. The total image of Onegin emerges from an artistically contrived mosaic of impressions—the furnishings of his room, his toilet articles, the books in his study with special passages marked by the imprint of his fingernail, his actions and statements as they affected others, and their reactions to him. Later Turgenev learned much from this method.

The importance of Onegin as a type for the future of Russian literature can hardly be overestimated. There is perhaps an element of distortion in the familiar claim of critics that he inspired a whole galaxy of so-called superfluous heroes in fiction, for the type was indigenous in Russian life, although the image altered with changing social conditions. But it is safe to say that, without Onegin, the introduction of the type might have been delayed for years, and the portrayals might well have lacked something in convincingness without the perfectly realized model provided by Pushkin.

The realism of Tatyana’s portrait loses nothing in verisimilitude because Pushkin appears to idealize her, for like many romantic country girls of the landed gentry she herself idealizes life, often mistaking its sober prose for sheer poetry. Though she lives entirely in her own feelings, thoughts, and experiences, Tatyana possesses a strong individuality and a mind of her own. When Onegin appears in her rural solitude she falls ardently in love, for she sees in him her ideal hero, an image drawn from her reading of English and French romances. The cynical Onegin is momentarily touched by Tatyana’s wonderful letter to him, but he fails to perceive in this anguished poetic outpouring of a young girl’s heart the innate integrity of her nature and her infinite capacity for self-sacrifice.

The seemingly swift transformation of the shy, dreamy, provincial Tatyana into a majestic queen of Petersburg high society after her mother marries her off to the fat general has often been criticized as unfaithful to the reality of things. However, if one is attentive to the deeper spiritual and moral qualities of Tatyana, revealed particularly at the time of Onegin’s rejection of her love, then the change is no less acceptable and comprehensible than that of Tolstoy’s Natasha in War and Peace when she marries Pierre Bezukhov shortly after the tragic denouement of her love for Prince Andrew.

Similarly Pushkin has been blamed for contriving an unreal ending when he has Tatyana, in turn, reject Onegin, although she frankly admits her continued love for him, after he returns from his wanderings and discovers in this beautiful, matured society leader his ideal woman. However, Tatyana’s declaration to Onegin on this occasion: “I have been given to another and I’ll be true to him forever,” is entirely in keeping with the logic of her developing personality. Back in the country she would have sacrificed anything she held dear because of her love for Onegin, like that other strong-willed woman Anna Karenina who did sacrifice everything because of her love for Vronsky. But Anna found out only too late that her idol had feet of clay and was unequal to her great love. A tragic conclusion was inevitable. Tatyana discovered this fact about Onegin before it was too late. If she could believe that he would return a love as profound and enduring as she was capable of offering, she might well have broken with society and its conventions. But she had learned much about Onegin’s weaknesses, distrusted the genuineness of his motives now, and had become convinced of his incapacity to respond to her love in equal measure. And though she weeps nostalgically over his passionate love letters, over her former dreams and hopes, she now knows that he could never be the hero of her romance.

The relations of Onegin and Tatyana fed the imaginations of future Russian novelists in their creation of unhappy pairs of weak-willed heroes and strong-willed heroines. These charming women have served to convince readers that the female was the better half of the Russian race.

Though Belinsky’s much-quoted declaration that Eugene Onegin is an encyclopedia of Russian life is quite preposterous, there can be no question that Pushkin’s depiction of the country existence of the middle gentry and the city life of its more socially prominent members is realistically perfect and extraordinarily effective. In these respects he went far beyond the small beginnings in The Gypsies and Count Nulin, for he now drew heavily upon village life on his own estate at Milhailovskoe and on his varied experiences in Moscow and Petersburg salon society. One is fascinated not only by his uncanny selection of precise detail, but also by his amazing re-creation of the moral, emotional, and spiritual pattern, the moods and feelings, and the inner rhythm of this order of society.

One catches the beat of this inner rhythm, especially as it applies to the glittering worldly youth of Onegin’s set, in the first stanza of the poem in which the hero contemplates the approaching death of his uncle whose country estate he will inherit:

“My uncle’s life was always upright

And now that he has fallen ill

In earnest he makes one respect him:

He is a pattern for us still.

One really could not ask for more—

But heavens, what a fearful bore

To play the sick-nurse day and night

And never stir beyond his sight!

What petty, mean dissimulation

To entertain a man half dead,

To poke his pillows up in bed,

And carry in some vile potation,

While all the time one’s thinking, ‘Why

The devil take so long to die?’”*

Pushkin swiftly carries his readers through the early upbringing, education, passing love affairs, and social activities of this gilded youth, but he strives, and nearly always successfully, to combine the visual perception of things with their essential atmosphere, adding depth to the total realism of the picture. For example, Onegin visits the ballet theater and this is what he sees:

The house is full, the boxes glitter,

The pit is like a seething cup,

The gallery claps with loud impatience,

The curtain rustles—and goes up.

There, half of air and all aglow,

Obedient to the magic bow,

Circled by nymphs in lovely bands,

Istomina, resplendent, stands.

Balanced on one toe, tremulous,

She slowly whirls the other round,

Then with a sudden leap and bound

Flies as if blown by Aeolus.

She winds, unwinds and, light as feather,

In mid-air beats her feet together.*

With similar evocative power Pushkin portrays the simple life of the landed gentry on their country estates: that of the Larins—Tatyana’s parents and her sister; the neighboring estate of Onegin which he had inherited from his uncle; and the smaller property of the idealistic, romantic poet Lensky whose quarrel with his friend Onegin ended in the fatal duel. Here nature adds its beauty and burden to daily living, and no Russian poet ever described it more realistically and sympathetically than Pushkin, especially when it is tricked out in winter’s snowy splendor. The old-fashioned cultural interests of the Larins; the small talk of country folk when neighbors gather; their simple amusements such as the name-day party at the Larins where the condescending Onegin deliberately provokes Lensky by his excessive attention to the poet’s betrothed, Olga, Tatyana’s sister; the folk superstitions of provincial damsels and the enchanting wintry beauty and eerie terror of Tatyana’s symbolic dream; her old peasant nurse’s captivating account of how she was given in marriage at the age of thirteen; the duel scene with its exquisite lyric ending so strangely prophetic of Pushkin’s own death in a duel—these and many similar scenes constitute an altogether convincing picture of a way of life hitherto unexampled in Russian literature. In truth, this impressive portrayal of the middle gentry became the source that fed the mainstream of Russian nineteenth-century realistic fiction.

6

That Russia’s greatest poet should have eventually turned to prose does not seem so startling in the light of Pushkin’s growing preoccupation with artistic problems of realism. To be sure, other factors were involved. It has been pointed out that by the end of the reign of Alexander I the popularity of poetry began to fade, and as the 1830’s approached the public interest in Walter Scott and the historical novel intensified. Then, too, Pushkin’s increasing financial worries, connected with his marriage, compelled him to turn to prose for which there was a growing demand. When he began his career poetry was still regarded in Russia as the leisure-time avocation of gentlemen who did not design to exploit their talent for money. Though Pushkin was virtually the first to make literature a profession in Russia, it was always difficult for him to overcome the feeling that writing poetry for gain was a violation of the nobleman’s code. Necessity, however, forced him to compromise with his conviction, and he found a way out, equivocal though it may seem, that satisfied both his need and his pride. Once, in answering a pointed question of his brother, he declared: “I sing as the baker bakes, as the tailor sews … as the physician kills—for money, money, money. In my nakedness such is my cynicism.” But more cogently he told Vyazemsky: “I write for myself and print for money ….” That is, he went on to explain, it was all right for an author to sell his manuscripts, but he must never sell his inspiration. And he sincerely lived up to this credo, for he wrote a number of things which he realized would never see the light of day because of the rigorous censorship. Even his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, he began in the firm conviction that it could not be printed.

At the outset Pushkin expressed a scorn for prose. “How sorry are those poets who begin to write prose,” he lamented to a friend. “I confess, if I were not obliged by circumstances, I would not dip my pen in ink for prose.” During the last ten years of his life, however, he dipped his pen deep and often for prose and brought to the practice of it the same innovating power and artistic demands everywhere apparent in his poetry.

A combination of family pride on the defensive and the example of Walter Scott may well have prompted Pushkin’s first effort in prose fiction—an unfinished historical novel about his black great-grandfather, The Negro of Peter the Great (182728). In the manner of Scott, Pushkin intended to provide a careful historical reconstruction of Peter’s reign which would focus on the opposition of the old nobility to the Europeanized reforms of the tsar. In this respect, as well as in creating a prose style suited to the demands of historical fiction, he seemed to be on the way to success. The reticent Scott would have been somewhat shocked over the freedom Pushkin allowed himself in the realistic account of his ancestor’s amorous adventures. But after a most promising beginning of seven chapters, Pushkin abandoned the work because, it is said, of his failure to find a solution to a radical change in the plot which he felt necessary.

In the third chapter of Eugene Onegin, in one of the many half-serious, half-joking digressions which constitute one of the poem’s chief charms, Pushkin anticipates the time when he’ll “dwindle into peaceful prose” and write “a novel in the old style” about the doings of a Russian family. And among the beginnings, sketches, and outlines of some twenty short stories and novels which he wrote down in his copybooks between 1829-36, there are several fragments that may represent attempts to fulfill this design of a family novel. One, for example, is “A Novel in Letters,” which might have been inspired by the epistolary fiction of Richardson or Rousseau. Another, “A Russian Pelham,” might have been suggested by Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, although the few sample pages and rough plan bear little resemblance to the contents and style of the English Pelham. Yet these numerous fragments are evidence of Pushkin’s keen interest in trying his hand at fiction during this period, and his failure to complete any of them perhaps indicates frustration in creating a style and treatment that would satisfy his artistic standards in writing a family novel of manners.

As a matter of fact, Pushkin’s first completed effort in prose fiction, Tales of Belkin (1830), was a conscious experiment in artistic form and narrative approach at a time when both seemed inconsequential to Russian writers of fiction. His intention was to offer models of how a particular type of story ought to be told. The five tales in the collection (The Shot, The Snowstorm, The Stationmaster, The Undertaker, and The Lady-Rustic),which have no connection with each other, are held together by the imaginary personality of the narrator, Belkin, a brief sketch of whose life is given in the preface to the collection. One reason for this mystification may have been a desire to create an illusion of reality, for in the preface each tale is represented as a true story told to Belkin by a real person, a device which Pushkin may have learned from Scott’s Tales of My Landlord. Pushkin may also have wished to disguise his authorship—the collection appeared without his name—perhaps because of his uncertainty about critical reaction to a work so experimental in nature.

His concern was justified, for contemporary critics were baffled by a narrative method entirely unlike anything they were accustomed to, one conscientiously pruned of all the conventional ornaments of fiction writing. The stories are told in an extremely simple, direct style, with a paucity of description, dialogue, and authorial reflection or analysis. They are largely action stories, and in this type, Pushkin believed, nothing should be allowed to get between the reader and the forward progress of the action.

The Tales of Belkin are sometimes described, in the German sense, as novellas, and in several stories, especially in The Snowstorm, they contain the surprise ending that Goethe believed was essential in this genre. More precisely they are anecdotal short stories which Pushkin may well have heard from his friend Delvig, and he tells them with rare narrative skill and conscious restraint.

Apart from innovation in form, Pushkin also strikes a new note in his occasional emphasis on social tensions, as in the clash between the declassed officer and his aristocratic opponent in The Shot, and the seduction of the poor stationmaster’s daughter by the wealthy hussar in The Stationmaster. But compassion for the lowly or the underdog does not lead to a distortion of reality. The declassed officer is not triumphant in the end, and the seduced girl, who would have been represented as the ruined victim of moral depravity by any contemporary treating the theme, happily marries her seducer at the conclusion of the story. Pushkin always perceives the irony of life as a possible solvent of its inequities. And though his and the reader’s sympathies are clearly for the grief-stricken father of the seduced girl, Pushkin does not humiliate him with pity, a fact that led Dostoevsky to value this tale higher than Gogol’s famous story, The Overcoat, which in its concentration on the sad fate of a humble person may owe something to The Stationmaster.

The Tales of Belkin waited a long time before winning general recognition from critics, and one suspects that it was an undiscriminating acceptance connected with Pushkin’s lofty position by then in Russian letters. However, a judge as perceptive as Tolstoy expressed his delight over these tales as perfect models of the art of narration. The work is the first piece of Russian fiction of enduring artistic value.

The social tensions which Pushkin had barely touched upon in The Tales of Belkin assumed a more central position in his next two works of fiction, The History of the Village of Goryukhino (1830) and Dubrovsky (1832). Perhaps the deeper, darker realism of his treatment of the subject explains why he never completed either novel, for they could hardly have been published during the “iron reign” of Nicholas I. It is most regrettable for both gave every promise of becoming outstanding novels on quite different themes.

It occurred to Pushkin to continue the development of Belkin, the fictitious narrator of the Tales, and in The History of the Village of Goryukhino he turns him, even in that incomplete portrayal, into a memorable character—a shy, lovable, wryly humorous individual with timid ambitions to be an author. With the aid of old records he has discovered, he sets out to write the history of Goryukhino, the village in which his estate is situated. Actually this is an amusing parody of The History of the Russian People by Pushkin’s literary enemy Nikolai Polevoi, and at the same time an effective satire on the whole structure of serfdom. Behind Belkin’s distorted historical account of the village and its inhabitants, reflecting the pomposity of pseudo-scholarship in his comic legalistic reverence for forms and titles, looms the somber reality of the ruination of the peasants because of the steward’s calculated repressions. In his naive concentration on historical cause and effect, Belkin never perceives the harsh unchangeability of peasant life or the one peculiarity of his village, namely, that it has no history.

In Dubrovsky the tensions growing out of a different social situation are treated. Troekurov, a swaggering, powerful, and wealthy member of the landed gentry in the reign of Catherine the Great, persecutes and finally brings about the death of his neighbor Dubrovsky, who possesses fewer worldly goods but dares to show his independence. Pushkin finished only about half of this novel which is one of his best examples of sheer storytelling ability. There is perhaps more Scott-like romance than realism in the melodramatic action of a tale that involves the vow of young Dubrovsky to avenge his father’s death; his leading a robber band to steal from the rich and help the poor; his secret love for his intended victim’s daughter and his disguise as a French tutor to gain access to her; his beloved’s forced marriage to Vereisky, another powerful but polished nobleman, and young Dubrovsky’s attempt to foil it; and the attack on the robber band with which the fragment ends. But the plausibility of these romantic adventures is secured by a realistically conceived picture of the social milieu in which they take place—expansive daily life on huge landed estates, the absolute power of their owners over law courts and all who are socially inferior, and the stark horror of the murder of the drunken officer of the law in Dubrovsky’s flaming manor house. Though the hero, young Dubrovsky, is the pure stuff of old-fashioned romance, the characterizations of Troekurov and the sinister Vereisky are among Pushkin’s best and are harbingers of the great realistic portraits to come in Russian fiction.

Pushkin’s zeal for experimentation in prose as well as in poetry, an important service in this early stage of Russian literature, continued during the last few years of his life when he wrote more prose than verse. Another such experiment, the long short story, The Queen of Spades (1834), was his most popular contribution to fiction during his lifetime. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales of the supernatural may well have suggested the plot-line of The Queen of Spades, where the ghost of the old countess conveys to Herman the mysterious secret that will enable him to win at cards, but there is nothing of the German’s romanticism in Pushkin’s narrative manner. A carefully designed pattern of realistic effects compels a suspension of disbelief in the central supernatural device, and the swiftly moving action is heightened by a taut, terse, unadorned prose that subtly contrives an atmosphere of utter credibility. Though Pushkin had read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Herman is hardly a Julien Sorel. However, the Napoleonic type, the man with an overweening thirst for personal success, had already begun to make its way into Russian literature, and Herman’s cold, insatiable ambition is described as Napoleonic. But the retribution of madness that overtakes him in the end is the Pushkinian tragic fate that presides over the destinies of many of his heroes.

Nothing remotely resembling The Queen of Spades had appeared in Russian literature before Pushkin, and though its total artistic impact, more one of manner than of substance, was never successfully duplicated, the story greatly impressed and obviously influenced such writers as Gogol in The Portrait and Dostoevsky in The Gambler.

Once again the works of Walter Scott were in Pushkin’s mind, especially The Heart of Midlothian, in his final effort at fiction—the historical novel The Captain’s Daughter (1834)—a kind of by-product of his scholarly study of an event during the reign of Catherine the Great, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion (1834). Like everything he wrote, however, this novel also bears the stamp of Pushkin’s originality. It is shorter and more compact than Scott’s novels, and it is centered as much on the history of two families, the Grinevs and the Mironovs, as on the re-creation of the historical past. Though Pushkin is exact about historical details and local color, with his usual sense of measure he does not overwhelm the reader with an elaborate superstructure of antiquarian research. His interest is concentrated more on the manners and morals of people than on the dress and loose ornament of history. Perhaps this is why he succeeds so brilliantly in such portrayals as the comically henpecked Captain Mironov, commander of the remote Belogorsk fortress, who, in nightcap and dressing gown, drills his few soldiers without ever being able to teach them the difference between the left and right foot, and his strong-willed wife who with dignity and courage shares her husband’s death at the hands of the rebels. And hardly less striking are the impetuous young Grinev and his stern father, who values a soldier’s duty to his military oath above everything in life. Apparently Pushkin did not favor the institution of serfdom and the few individualized portraits of serfs in his writings reveal a deep and sympathetic understanding of them. One of the most remarkable of such creations is the old servant of the Grinevs, Savelich, whose integrity and crossgrained devotion to his masters illuminate a nature that is as attractively simple as it is morally beautiful. Pushkin is not so effective with the rebel leader Pugachev, no doubt because of the rigorous censorship, but even this necessarily restrained characterization suggests what Pushkin might have done with it if he had had an entirely free hand.

Pushkin has been criticized in The Captain’s Daughter for allowing the interest in events to predominate over the interest in details of feeling. This is essentially true, particularly in young Grinev’s love for Captain Mironov’s daughter which hardly rises above the banality of Scott’s treatment of affairs of the heart. But this criticism could also be applied, with only few exceptions, to the whole development of fiction in the West and in Russia from Cervantes to Pushkin. Of course, the modern critical understanding of realism was still lacking and its practice in fiction remained confused with romanticism with which, historically, it was related. In the chronicling of action, events were an end rather than a means in determining why characters acted or felt as they did. The analysis of feelings by Richardson and Rousseau and their imitators was too dominated by the cult of sensibility to become an effective instrument for probing the multifaceted aspects of human behavior.

In this respect it cannot be said that Pushkin contributed anything startlingly new to the novel. But in other ways—plot-making, situations, narrative methods, characterization, and prose style—he tremendously advanced the whole conception of Russian realism. That is, the life of the landed gentry which he described seemed to readers to be life as it is, free from the bookish stereotyped conventions and artificialities of the efforts of his native predecessors and contemporaries. And this achievement, as well as the finest characters he created, significantly influenced the subsequent development of Russian realism. Just as surely as Pushkin changed the whole context of Russian poetry, he also changed the context of Russian fictional prose. He initiated what is sometimes described in literary history as the “Classical School of Russian Realism.” Indeed, if he had lived longer than his brief thirty-eight years, he might well have written the first great Russian realistic novel in prose, as, in Eugene Onegin, he did write the first great Russian realistic novel in verse.