We have arrived at a contemplative moment in our relation with the least containable or, to use Melville's own image, most Vesuvian of classic American writers. One sign of this reflective mood is that each contributor to this book takes seriously the word “companion” in its title - a word at odds with the sort of performative criticism in which the literary text becomes a stage upon which the critic feels entitled, even required, to mount a show.

The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, by contrast, is conceived and written in a spirit of deference to, though hardly uncritical reverence for, its subject. We hope the result is a book worth consulting, disputing, and - if it does its job - soon supplanting. One reason a work of this sort may be useful at the present time is that the conditions for thinking about Melville have changed substantially from what they were even a decade ago. Seven years past the centenary of his death, virtually all his writings, including his letters and journals, have now reached print (or are soon to be published) in the Newberry Library-Northwestern University Press edition, which is justly recognized as one of the monuments of modern textual scholarship.

In her Introduction to a 1994 collection of critical essays, Myra Jehlen writes of how in America “Melville has remained canonical through the whole period of canon-busting.” According to Jehlen, new styles of literary evaluation may have found different things to admire in Melville, but they have not sought to devalue his central “importance or brilliance.” Melville has not, however, enjoyed a similar prominence within the British critical domain as it has developed professionally since the Second World War. Whereas Hawthorne and, to an even greater extent, Henry James have evoked a great deal of admiration and explication within British circles, engagement with Melville's more bulbous and erratic texts has remained spasmodic. My purpose in this essay is to suggest reasons for this comparative neglect, and to suggest how some of this discomfort may arise not so much from any simple antagonism on Melville's part toward the British tradition, but from the way he interacts with it in a perverse and parodic manner, turning its apparently legitimating structures inside out.

Readers of Melville cannot help but notice the conjunction of generic innovation, anthropological encounter, and theological quandary that characterizes his fiction. Yet when addressing themselves to the question of Melville and religion, critics have largely viewed these domains separately, agreeing that Melville's fiction is pervasively characterized by his battle, or “quarrel,”with a dying Christianity but that his interests in anthropological encounter and aesthetic experimentation are present because Christianity is absent or, at most, merely vestigial. At war with Christian theology and practice, his literature constitutes an antireligious domain of subversive indictment against a god who has failed man and whose absence has generated a modern voice of recrimination and alienation: “doth not Scripture intimate,”queries the narrator in Pierre, “that He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His hand? - a Hollow, truly!” What is new in Melville is new because it is not religion.

Melville is justly said to be nineteenth-century America's leading poet after Whitman and Dickinson, yet his poetry remains largely unread, even by many Melvillians. Most major studies of premodern American poetry have given him short shrift; the recent Columbia History of American Poetry limits itself to a few passing references. The old impression persists that Melville was “a poet of shreds and patches”who never mastered the art. Such is the curse of being only second best. Among American premoderns, next to Whitman, Melville wrote the best series of Civil War lyrics, Battle- Pieces (1866), and the second-best long poem, Clarel (1876), which indeed is the great Victorian epic of faith and doubt. Only Emily Dickinson surpassed Melville in her development of a gnomic, intellectualized rhetoric that gained intensity by working within the confines of rhymed verse while bending those forms to the limit. Most tellingly, Melville's poetry was second best to his own best prose fiction, which also came first chronologically. Hence it is all too easy to type Melville as “essentially” a prose writer who wrote verse with the left hand.

What does give the classic Russian novel its power over the imagination? There have been many attempts to define its unique features and to account for its rise to pre-eminence in such unpromising soil. Underlying most analyses is the perception that Russian literature achieved its stature in a dialectic (or dialogue) with Western European literary traditions. Bakhtin has provided a theoretical model for this process in a shift from regarding the Western tradition as “authoritative discourse” to regarding it as “inwardly persuasive discourse”; in other words from a mental attitude which saw Western traditions as providing unsurpassable achievements which could only be imitated or rejected, to one which assimilated them to native Russian experience as part of a process of growth-in-dialogue: a complex dance in which the partners now lightly touch, now embrace and now draw apart, at times melting into a common movement and at times loudly asserting their difference.

The first two great satirical novelists in Russian literature are Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) and Mikhail Saltykov (1826-89), who wrote under the pen-name of Shchedrin. Many major Russian writers, from Aleksandr Pushkin through Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, have used satirical depiction in their novels, but it could never be said that satire is characteristic of their work as a whole. It is Gogol and Shchedrin who between them set the points of reference for the Russian satirical novel.

Of course satire existed in Russian literature before Gogol, but not in the form of a novel of European stature.' An important element in the development of the Russian satirical novel was the picaresque tradition. In its classic form, which originated in Spain in the mid sixteenth century and in the following centuries spread throughout Europe, the picaresque novel is the retrospective autobiography of a rogue, the picaro.

From the very beginnings of modern Russian literature, Russia's writers have consciously dealt with politics. Following Peter the Great's death in 1725, there was a danger that his modernizing reforms would be frustrated by conservative forces. Consequently in 1729 Feofan Prokopovich who had been a fervent panegyrist for Peter, proposed to his younger protigt Antioch Kantemir, a writer of satires against the anti-Petrine reactionaries, that they should consider themselves members of a “Learned Watch” dedicated to the defense of the westernizing reforms. Assuming a distinct ideological position, these Russian writers were not content with being mere reflectors of the political scene, but chose to play an active part in the political process. In future, this had serious consequences. By placing themselves close to the seat of autocratic power, writers inevitably encouraged the Russian autocrats to seek to control their production and their lives. At the close of the century, the minor writer I. F. Bogdanovich could even propose that writers be dressed in uniform and given ranks commensurate with the distinction of their service to the state.' The strict discipline implied by that “uniform” has been present throughout most of the history of modern Russian literature; its links with politics have made its writers subject to the control of censorship and to the sanctions of exile, imprisonment or even execution.

Certainly since the time of Theocritus, and doubtless long before that, weary city dwellers have sought - or at least thought about seeking - escape from their noisy, bustling, confining urban world into the tranquillity, spaciousness, and presumed leisure of the countryside. In such moods nature generally appears to them in her most benign aspects: warm but not hot, green, fertile, vivifying, motherly. The country resident, on the other hand, may feel an equally powerful impulse to escape: from the isolation, boredom, discomforts, and dangers of rural life to the security, social connectedness, and relative cultural richness of the town, where people can collectively defend themselves against a nature often not at all benign, as well as against less than benign fellow creatures.

The anti-urban urge has been a theme of literature almost since literature has existed at all. The Western tradition offers a long procession of passionate pastoralists, from Theocritus and Vergil down to Rousseau and beyond. Despite the fact that only a tiny minority of them actually lived in cities, the Russians absorbed the pastoral tradition enthusiastically if belatedly, themselves producing such elegant poetic celebrations of the bucolic life as Gavrila Derzhavin's delightful idyll “To Evgenii; Life at Zvanka” (1807).

It is common to begin discussions of Modernism with caveats about the difficulty or impossibility of adequate definition. In the introduction to his recent study of Russian literature of the 1920s, Victor Erlich reminds us of Irving Howe's use of the terms “elusive” and “protean” to characterize Modernism.' In using these words, Howe may appear to be advocating a free-for-all, permissive attitude to the boundaries of Modernism, and it is, indeed, difficult to see how one can be more prescriptive when faced with the vast range of heterogeneous works of art which are, by common consent, “modernist.” Marshall Berman's view of Modernism is more comprehensive than most. For him, it is the artistic expression of an experience of alienation, struggle, and contradiction that has been the normal human condition for an ever increasing number of people for almost five hundred years Berman's stimulating book contains much that is of value to the student of Russian literature, but I believe that his definition of Modernism, one that includes works by Gogol, Dostoevskii, and even Pushkin, is too capacious. Certainly, given such a definition there can be no opposition between Russian Realism and Russian Modernism; while not coterminous, the two overlap hugely.

Speaking of the “Russian novel,” we often refer to the classical canon of highly individual works by the great nineteenth-century Russian authors. It is, however, also possible to define the “Russian novel” somewhat differently, as an open adaptive system in which the individual works are parts of a continuous development. In this system, characters and events are represented according to a set of patterns, or schemata, that are subject to constant variation when applied to the social world around us and to the processes that take place in people's minds. These are the two basic aspects of narrative - the “landscape of action” and the “landscape of consciousness” - the two landscapes that according to Jerome Bruner characterize this mode of thought as opposed to the logico-scientific, or “paradigmatic” mode.

The outer landscape of action unfolds according to an action pattern, or plot. But in this landscape of action changes occur because of changes taking place in the inner landscapes of the characters involved. To understand a narrative is therefore to have an understanding of the changes both in the characters' inner landscape of thought and in the outer landscape of events. The two are aspects of the same, since, as Michael Carrithers puts it, “the metamorphosis of thought entails the metamorphosis of social relations and vice versa.” In the following, our attention will be centered on the function of art and religion in the “dual landscape” of the Russian novel, understood as an open adaptive system.

Russia is unique among European states for having had two capitals during much of its modern life: St. Petersburg and Moscow. The first was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, and became the administrative, political, and cultural capital. In these respects, it displaced Moscow, whose history went back at least four hundred years. But Russians continued to regard the older city as the spiritual center of the country; even the tsars, who presided in Petersburg, went to Moscow to be crowned; and the Bolsheviks reconfirmed its traditional importance by moving the government back there in 1924. Each city has come to represent very different and often conflicting values, as we shall see, and each has functioned as a pole around which the vexed question of Russia's character and destiny has revolved.

Since the early nineteenth century, St. Petersburg and Moscow have figured prominently in the Russian novel. But many of the issues that attach to them are far older. In Kievan Rus, the first East Slavic state, cities were not only centers of culture, but enclosures against domestic and foreign enemies. It is instructive, and perhaps psychologically significant, that in Slavic languages, the word for “city,” as in Russian gorod and Church Slavonic grad, has no etymological connection with the Latin civis and its derivations in English and the Romance languages, but instead goes back to the Indo-European root designating an enclosed place.

It is by now a commonplace that the classic Russian novelists - Dostoevskii, Turgenev, Tolstoi - are distinguished by an unparalleled ability to portray the complex inner mental states of their characters. As early as 1856, the Russian critic Chernyshevskii praised Tolstoi for his superlative rendering of the “dialectics of the soul,”by which he meant Tolstoi's painstaking dissection of the inner life of his heroes. And in the Englishspeaking world, Virginia Woolf summed up a review of Tolstoi's The Cossacks by remarking: “They do not rival us in the comedy of manners, but after reading Tolstoi we always feel that we could sacrifice our skill in that direction for something of the profound psychology and superb sincerity of the Russian writers.”

I have no wish to dispute the near unanimous critical opinion that the Russian novel is particularly attuned to psychological analysis. Instead, in the essay that follows, I would like to ask why Russian novelists have been so concerned with psychology, and, as a corollary question, when this concern has been most in evidence. My central points will be two. First, that Russian novelists, with few exceptions, are concerned with individual psychology because it provides a window onto what might be called social psychology; that is, the individual is crucial not primarily for him or herself, but because he or she is seen to be representative of a larger group.

The power of the Russian nineteenth-century novel depends in part on earlier techniques of novel-writing which most Western novelists had abandoned. This study will concentrate on the particularly Russian relation between plotting and narration, though it must also reckon with the interplay between Russian and the Western novelistic practices in the nineteenth century. In the first Western book on the Russian novel (1881), Melchoir de Vogüé, the eloquent French diplomat, journalist, and gossip, says that for Turgenev the study “of our masters and the friendship and the advice of Mérimée offered precious help; to these literary associations he may have owed the intellectual discipline, the clarity, the precision, virtues which are so rare among the prose writers of his country.” This denial that Turgenev is a fully Russian novelist shows that Vogüé recognized something special about Turgenev, but it also led Western Europeans from the 1880s on to recognize that there was something special about most Russian novels.

In his preface to The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879-80 and surely the grand finale of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, Dostoevskii as author introduces Alesha as his hero, a hero for the present. The author thereby follows a line of European Romanticism that sees the hero as conveying his time and place, not just literally but also symbolically for others. As Dostoevskii goes further, into the future, he argues that such a hero, though strange, “carries within him sometimes the core of the universal” which his other contemporaries have been torn away from. One could not imagine a woman writer speaking to the universal or prophesying in this unambiguously assertive manner (except in sorrow), much less inventing a heroine to incarnate such prophecy. The heroine of her time in Russia, perhaps because she would have had to be similarly exceptional without any irony on the part of her author, remains unwritten. Women lived within a tradition of total truth, which included their own reality as defined by male writers in the Russian novelistic canon from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn.

Russian, like Western Realism, is best understood as a reaction against Romanticism, as an attempt, then, to reach out to topical mundane reality (Balzac's actualité), renouncing romantic fantasy or escape into an imaginary past and Sentimentalism's abstract discourses on virtue. Realism meant a concern with concrete Russian life, while Romanticism often pursued the exotic and Sentimentalism dealt with humanity in the abstract. In contrast to Romanticism's preoccupation with the extraordinary individual, Realism meant an interest in the concerns of ordinary men and women, in social problems and in the life of the lower classes. Also, Realism meant a faith in literature's calling to be involved in the affairs of real life.

The Russian realist novel, like the realist novel in the West, grew out of existing genres, while often using them as a foil. Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) is formally a picaresque novel. Dostoevskii's Poor Folk (1846) uses the sentimentalist form of the epistolary novel. His The Double (1846) is a “realized”version of a Gothic novel. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Tolstoi's Cossacks (1863) “realize” the exotic novel made popular by Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii in the 1830s.