1 One phase of this problem has been thoroughly covered in Raymond Bauer's excellent study of Soviet psychological thought, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).

2 Bauer's study has special value as one of the first attempts to chart the course of this monumental change in the history of one discipline.

3 The Lay of the Host of Igor has many of the elements of a primitive tragic drama. But Igor is rescued miraculously from the consequences of his irresponsible and unpatriotic acts, and brought home in triumph.

4 A somewhat later but nevertheless typical example of this kind of reading of literature is D. N. Ovsjaniko-Kulikovskij, Istorija russkoj intelligentsii; itogi russkoj khudožestvennoj literatury XIX veka, (Moscow, 1906). Henry Gifford's The Hero of His Time (London, 1950) echoes this conventional Russian approach.

5 In addition to the writings of the radical democratic critics, see the periodical literature of the early 1860's when Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) and Černyševskij's What's To Be Done? (1863), two major efforts to present positive literary heroes, appeared. Typical of this material is Antonovič's attack from the left on Turgenev, “Asmodej nasego vremeni,” which appeared in Russkij vestnik, No. 2 (February, 1862), and is available in M. A. Antonovič, lzbrannye stati (Leningrad, 1938). Typical of the opposite view are: Turgenev's speech, “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (delivered January 10, 1860); other remarks scattered through his letters, and Literary Reminiscences in defense of his novel and its controversial hero, Bazarov, and Dostoevsky's thinly-disguised polemic with Černyševskij, Notes From Underground (1864).

6 Dobroljubov, N. A., “What is Oblomovscina?” in Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1948)Google Scholar. This article, which first appeared in Otečestvennye zapiski (Nos. I-IV, 1859), is the most striking effort to find a lowest common denominator in the behavior and destinies of Russian literary heroes. Although this is not the first discussion of the subject, it may be said to have initiated the major phase of the hero controversy.

7 The term “superfluous man,” from Turgenev's short story, “The Diary of ,a Superfluous Man” (1850), though it became one of the most enduring and seemingly reliable clichés of Russian literary criticism, has a curious ambiguity about it. It is not clear in many cases to whom he is unnecessary nor by whom he is unwanted, nor, indeed, that it is he who has been rejected. Lermontov's Pechorin, for example, cannot be considered a pathetic castoff from society; he himself took the initiative, with some foreknowledge of its tragic consequences, in revolting against a way of life he considered contemptible. The modern concept of “the alienated man” accounts more comprehensively and more precisely for the process of interaction between individual and society which resulted in the individual's final condition of aloneness or defeat or death. In flat contrast, then, we may speak of the revolutionary hero sought by the radicals as the “integrated man”—integrated, that is, with the “scientific” promises and the ethical sanctions of his ideology of dissent, or, after 1917, with the values and goals of the new society. The superfluous man, it must be kept in mind, does not represent retrogressive values, rather he opposes them inadequately; he is their victim, not their advocate.

8 See Simmons, Ernest J., Pushkin (Cambridge, 1937), p. 327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See Simmons, Ernest J., Leo Tolstoy (Boston, 1946), p, 259.Google Scholar

10 Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), p. 63.Google Scholar

11 See Gogol, Nikolai, Dead Souls (New York, Modern Library, 1936), pp. 220–65.Google Scholar

12 Gogol's concern with the virtuous moral agent is expressed quite differently in one of his comments on The Inspector-General: “I regret that no one noticed the honorable person who was in my play. Yes, there was one honorable, noble person acting in it through its entire length. This honorable, noble person was laughter… ,” Gogol, N. V., Polnoe Sobranie Socinenij (1949), IV, 169 Google Scholar. The author, as the creator of laughter, is the hero.

13 See Simmons, Ernest J., Dostoevski: The Making of a Novelist (New York, 1940), p. 137.Google Scholar

14 Dostoevsky's difficulties with the stubborn Raskolnikov also suggest that the active, emblematic man was generally hard to handle in literary terms—as difficult to reclaim from his evils ways as he was to present sympathetically. Dostoevsky's solution invites comparison with Turgenev's disposition of Bazarov. These two outsiders’ views of the radical personality have much in common: both writers, the liberal Turgenev and the conservative Dostoevsky, admire his strength and fear his violence and irresponsibility. But while Turgenev pities his hero and allows him to die defeated but unreconstructed, Dostoevsky apparently felt that his must be brought to a complete reversal of attitude, however implausible it might seem in terms of character and motivation. It is not to be wondered at that the radicals, who, like most of their contemporaries, were inclined to read the imaginative literature of their own time as a more or less literal transcript of experience, were pleased with neither portrait of their champion.

15 M. A. Antonovič, who continued to apply the principles of the revolutionary democrats to literary matters in the seventies and eighties, tends to confirm this hypothesis. In his angry review of The Brothers Karamazov, “Mistiko-asketičeskij roman,” Izbrannye stati (Leningrad, 1938), pp. 243-97, first published in Novoe obozrenie, No. 3 (1881), Antonovič says of Alyosha: “The personality of Alyosha … is extremely pale, unnatural, undefined and incomprehensible, it is simply an invention of the author, a fantasy” (p. 252). Ivan, too, is “undefined, untypical, and unclear,” but “his poem, ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ presents the only poetic pages in the entire novel…” and the “form” in which Ivan's doubts are expressed is “truly artistic” (pp. 266–67). Translating from the critical idiom of this school, which identifies the “poetic” and the “artistic” with the true, and the true with the socially desirable, it is not difficult to read these opinions as judgments about the moral and political significance of the two characters.

16 Lunačarskij's articles on the Russian radicals, written during the twenties and early thirties and collected in Kritika i kritiki (Moscow, 1938) represent the first authoritative challenges to Plekhanov's dicta.

17 Typical of this new evaluation is Lavretskij's Belinskij, Černyševskij, Dobroljubov v bor'be za realizm (Moscow, 1941).

18 A. A. Ždanov, “Doklad o žurnalakh Zvezda i Leningrad,” Literaturnaja gazeta, No. 39 (September 21, 1946), p. 3. It is worth noting that in this fundamental statement of official literary attitudes, the names of Belinskij, Černyševskij and Dobroljubov are mentioned nineteen times, Lenin's seven times, Stalin's six times and Marx's not at all. The only reference to Marxism tends further to confirm the importance of the Russian radicals’ ideas in the formation of Soviet literary theory: “Marxist literary criticism, which carries on the great traditions of Belinskij, Černyševskij, and Dobroljubov, has always supported realistic art with a social stand” (p. 3). It is not intended to suggest by this rough quantitative approach that the Russians have replaced Marx and Engels as theorists of literature. Marxism still supplies the arrière-plan for most thinking about cultural matters. It is, rather, that the radical democrats have moved into the foreground as primary authorities on matters specifically literary.

One of the most authoritative of recent books on Soviet Marxism, Konstantinov, F. V., ed., Istoričeskij materializm (Moscow, 1950)Google Scholar, admits the Russian radicals into the tiny group of thinkers who are credited with the formulation of the official philosophy of history and theory of human society, at least in matters in which they are adjudged competent. L. I. Timofeev's Teorija literatury (Moscow, 1938) which sets forth the Soviet position in the terms of traditional aesthetic theory, makes it evident that the ideas of the Russians pervade all aspects of Soviet literary theory.

19 There is no single comprehensive study of the pivotal ten years between 1855 and 1865 when this split occurred. Chapters ii and iii of Volume III in Ovsjaniko-Kulikovskij's Istorija russkoj literatury XIX v. (Moscow, 1909) offer a compact account of the main social and literary currents of the time. Soviet partisanship in this debate is declared in all post–1934 studies of the main participants, of which the article on Turgenev in Literaturnaja ènciklopedija (Moscow, 1939), Vol. XI, may serve as a typical example. In this entire controversy and in Soviet comment the figure of Turgenev's Bazarov emerges as the most important focal point of the argument.

20 See, for example, M. Iovčuk's introductory essay to Belinskij, V. G., Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948)Google Scholar, in which Soviet indebtedness to Belinskij on this and on other scores is discussed.

21 See, for example, his article “When Will the Day Come?” in N. A. Dobroljubov, Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1948) which contains the kernel of his thought on the matter.

22 Ostrovski, Nicholas, The Making of a Hero (New York, 1937).Google Scholar

23 Pavlenko, Pyotr, Happiness (Moscow, 1950).Google Scholar

24 Černyševskij, Čto delai’? (Moscow, 1947).

25 Černyševskij establishes this point in its most general terms in his dissertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality.”

26 Gorky, Maxim, Reminiscences (New York, 1946), p. 54.Google Scholar The distaste for predetermined resolutions in fiction, and the need, instead, for curbing the didactic function by organically rooting the extra-literary concerns in the substance of the work of art itself (where, of course, they were no longer extra-literary) is neatly summarized in the distinction Chekhov drew in a letter to Suvorin: “In demanding from the artist a conscious attitude to his work you are right, but you confuse two concepts: the solution of the problem and the correct presentation of the problem. Only the latter is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and Evgeny Onegin not a single problem is solved, but they completely satisfy us because they present all their problems in the right way” (October 27, 1888). To this general approach the radicals and Gorky with them would reply that their heroes and the problems they solved were not fabrications, were drawn from life, and offered the most effective way to discharge the obligations under which, everyone agreed, the writer labored.

27 Nekrasov and Saltykov, it is worth noting, are the only two nineteenth-century writers who are favorably mentioned by Ždanov in his historic report, Doklad, op. cit.

28 Timofeev, Teorija … , op. cit., p. 7.

29 Ibid., p. 306.

30 Ibid., p. 307. Critical realism as described by Timofeev was composed under conditions of unresolved contradiction between objective, social reality and man's aspirations toward a better life, and set itself the task of revealing “life's imperfections, the depiction of the crisis man and society were living through,” ibid., p. 306.

31 Ibid., p. 308.

32 See the article on realism in Literaturnaja ènciklopedija, Vol. IX.

33 Timofeev, L. I., Sovremennaja literatura (Moscow, 1947), p. 52.Google Scholar

34 Timofeev, Teorija, op. cit., p. 8.

35 Levin, Harry, “From Priam to Birotteau,” Yale French Studies, III, No. 6 (1950), 75–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 It is noteworthy that the problem of positive heroes has remained almost exclusively a Russian preoccupation. It has not been a major concern in any of the other great literary traditions. On the other hand, the alienated hero of the Russian nineteenth century has many close relatives in Western literature. In this sense, the Russian effort to replace alienation with affirmation is an event with international literary implications.