The term povest' has a somewhat fluid meaning in Russian, as a term defining a work of fiction which can range in size between what is normally called a short story and what might also be a short novel. Tolstoy’s most notable fictional works of the 1880s and 1890s fall into this category. They cannot match such masterpieces of the 1860s and 1870s as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but they are manifestly superior to the short works of fiction designed to illustrate his religious ideas and can claim our attention more readily than his dramas or his last novel, Resurrection. They owe their power chiefly to the way they focus upon a single foreground figure and portray that figure’s life as having meaning principally in the light of Tolstoy’s ideas on death, sex, and spirituality. Apparently single-voiced and lacking the multiplicity of central figures and viewpoints of the great novels, the Tolstoyan long short story can demonstrate more directly the purpose of his art as a vehicle for infecting the reader with the author’s feelings.

The Death of Ivan Ilich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Father Sergius illustrate the power of this infection in remarkable ways through depicting the experience of one individual. The psychologizing impulse in Tolstoy turns them not into tracts so much as into semi-autobiographical dramatizations of lives largely lived on false premises; and it is a falsity highlighted by one episode. Apparent authorial absence, an artful documentary objectivity, naturalistic dialogue, and a well-paced narrative drive make them models of a “moodless” povest’ form designed as parables illustrating Tolstoyan doctrine. Inevitably an air of emotional sterility or clinical exactitude suggests withdrawal of sympathy, a literal defamiliarizing of the subject-matter, and, to that extent, a degree of alienation.

The zenith of Russian realistic prose is treated here as beginning in 1855, a date of political significance, the year in which Nicholas I passed from the scene, but also of literary importance, as the year which saw the publication of Chernyshevsky’s Esthetic Relations of Art to Reality. That essay formulated the principles upon which literary critics, by then quite numerous, would judge and interpret the literary masterpieces shortly to be produced. Chernyshevsky’s was a straight-forwardly materialist esthetic, based on the central propositions that “the beautiful is life” and that art is in every meaningful sense inferior to a reality subject to rational comprehension. His critical followers elaborated upon his ideas with such enthusiasm that by 1865 his doctrine had become the dominant critical view. Even those numerous critics and even more numerous writers who rejected Chernyshevsky’s approach had to take it into serious account, and in this sense his ideas defined the course of the literary discussion in large measure until about 1870.

The years from 1855 to 1880 were the time when the Russian realists flourished. A mere listing of names is sufficient to make the point: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Pisemsky, Ostrovsky, Leskov – the literary careers of all these reached their peak during this quarter-century. It was also a stimulating period for criticism, with critics of sufficient stature at least to compare with the writers they interpreted: Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev among the radicals, Grigorev among their opponents.

Is there such a thing as a revolutionary novel? Can one write its history? It would be hard to answer such questions in the context of English literature. In the context of Russian literature the questions can be posed and answered for perfectly good historical reasons. Although the special case of Russian literature is this book's chief concern, the roots of the modern realistic novel as a literary form have their beginnings in English literature, and a reference back to such beginnings, though cursory, may explain the relationship between the novel as realistic literature and its principal purpose as an informative, improving and even revolutionary genre.

Henry Fielding, the most celebrated English claimant to the title of first realistic novelist, attached great importance to the novelist's knowledge of the world. In Tom Jones he insisted that a novelist should lawfully have learning – ‘a competent knowledge of history and the belles lettres’, on the one hand, and ‘another sort of knowledge, beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had by conversation’, by witnessing the acted word, by being conversant with people, the high and low life of society, by being, in short, a historian. This is the term Fielding constantly used to describe his principal function as a novelist. Such criteria were of course in need of an important qualification.

In attempting to identify and define the revolutionary novel in Russian literature, the present study has striven to differentiate it from such phenomena as the anti-nihilist novel, the Populist novel, the intelligentsia novel, the post-revolutionary Soviet novel of reconstruction, the Five-Year-Plan novel and other types of novel in Soviet literature that are concerned to describe the creation of a socialist society. For this reason such famous novels with obvious political content as Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, Turgenev's Virgin Soil, Gladkov's Cement or Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned have been omitted in favour of novels, equally political in content, that have attempted to explore more directly the revolutionary pressures in Russian society and the complexities of revolutionary experience in the wake of revolution and civil war. Simultaneously this study has hoped to show how the revolutionary novel as a genre revolutionised itself in response to revolutionary change while always asserting its literary independence. It has acquired as a result a freedom that has since made it the cornerstone of dissident literature in the Soviet Union.

Another important purpose of this study has been to demonstrate the richness of the novelistic heritage in Russian and Soviet literature. It has sought to draw attention to little-known novels or, in certain cases, novels that have received no attention in Western critical studies and little more than passing mention in Soviet works of literary criticism.

Introduction

In its depiction of the revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war the Russian revolutionary novel of the Soviet period celebrates events that had epoch-making significance for the Russian people. Whatever the political colouring given to these events by historical interpretations then and since, the revolution of 1917 and the civil war were concerned with confrontation between Whites and Reds, between capitalism and socialism, between the pre-revolutionary possessor class and the industrial proletariat in alliance with the poorer peasantry. In the end, the industrial proletariat and the poorer peasantry were the victors. The significance of this victory still reverberates in innumerable ways in all parts of the world.

The Russian revolutionary novel, in its depiction of revolutionary events, offers not so much a record as a multi-faceted re-animation of the human dimensions of events that may all too easily seem to lose their vital meaning in the pages of history books or even in the flickering, unstable images of the silent cinema. The smell and colour of those years of revolution and civil war, the human dimensions of the horror, outrage, terror and blood-letting, the sheer complexity of the experiences involved, the paradoxes of choice and allegiance that changing political and military situations forced upon so many and the problems of daily survival in the face of unbelievable shortages, plagues and catastrophes – these are what the literature of the period reflects. But a literature is by its very nature a survivor of events.

‘Behold’, cried Thomas Carlyle, in an ecstatic aside while describing the initial stages of the French Revolution, ‘the World-Phoenix, in fire-consummation and fire-creation … skyward lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things: it is the Death–Birth of a World!’ It is at such points that history and myth coalesce, but the mythologising process is one that turns history into literature. In the Russian literary response to revolution an imagery of death and birth is paramount and the death–birth concept becomes itself a transfiguring ideal.

Revolution as a fanaticism that would, like some fiery apocalypse, consume the existing world and create a new one, a World-Phoenix, is the legacy that the events of 1789 bequeathed to nineteenth-century history and culture. Many great nineteenth-century minds were influenced by such a vision of revolution giving birth to a new world and a new life and among those most deeply affected by it were the leading minds of the Russian intelligentsia. For if the world needed changing, to put it at its simplest, there seemed no likelihood that God would suddenly alter His creation, any more than would the Tsar. The only phenomenon in recent history that could so alter the known world as to transform it utterly in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity was the French Revolution.

The two novels that illustrate the literary response to the so-called ‘first’ Russian revolution of 1905 more clearly than any others are both concerned to show how capitalist society, whether in its economic or its political forms, dominates and reifies human life. Human beings are represented as at one remove from natural surroundings, divorced from a natural, uninhibited relationship with their environment and themselves by the institutions of economic and political life that dominate them. Throughout the major prose fiction of the decade following the failure of the 1905 revolution there was a tendency to depict human behaviour as partly motiveless – the most obvious example of such an approach was the work of Leonid Andreyev, but it can also be seen in the work of Kuprin, Bunin, Serafimovich, Sologub and others – and in a quasi-impressionistic, symbolic manner that substituted behavioural representation for the psychological motivation so essential to nineteenth-century Russian realism. Arguably a smaller literature with smaller talents and smaller concerns than the literature of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, it could still lay claim to one writer of acknowledged genius and international repute in Maxim Gorky, and it was to throw up probably the most original of literary talents on the European literary scene in the pre-First World War period, Andrey Bely. The depictions of environment in their respective ‘revolutionary’ novels illustrate the evolution of manner and style that occurred in a literature that was naturally responding to the socio-economic and political forces of the time:

In August 1860 Turgenev spent three weeks in Ventnor in the Isle of Wight. During that short period, and in characteristically wet and stormy English summer weather, he conceived the figure of his most significant literary hero, Bazarov, of his most famous novel, Fathers and Children, published two years later. The reasons for Turgenev's apparently sudden creation of such a positive hero, at such a moment in his life and in such an unlikely place, involve the much larger question of the ‘revolutionary’ situation that existed in Russia on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

The reforms upon which the Tsarist government had embarked after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War were designed to modernise certain parts of the machinery of state while ensuring that the principle of autocratic rule remained unchanged. The linch-pin of the reforms was the emancipation of the serfs, but it was a linch-pin that, if allowed to slip, could easily precipitate the kind of peasant unrest that had assumed its most serious form in the revolt of Pugachyov, the Don Cossack, in 1773 and 1774. Worse still, perhaps, it could lead to civil war. Moreover, a change of such magnitude in a semi-feudal society would inevitably mean that the nobility, which depended so greatly upon serfdom for its economic as well as its social raison d'être, would be undermined as the leading class.

Introduction

In a general sense the revolutionary epics of Sholokhov and Aleksey Tolstoy explore revolutionary experience in terms, respectively, of instinct and ideas. Both epics end on a note of optimism for the future that subsumes that their heroes, or principal figures, have undergone some fundamental change in their lives as a consequence of revolution and civil war. If the political implications of this change seem obscure in the case of Grigory Melekhov, they are explicit in the case of Roshchin, Dasha and Katya. Renewal of hope may seem instinctive in Grigory Melekhov's repudiation of his past, his hereditary Cossack militancy, and in his reassumption of a parental role. Such renewal seems to be motivated by ideological fiat in Aleksey Tolstoy's happy ending.

After the adoption of Socialist Realism as the official doctrine for Soviet literature at the First Congress of Soviet writers in 1934, optimism about the outcome of the revolutionary process as depicted in literature became mandatory. Tragedy and revolution became officially incompatible. A concept of ‘optimistic tragedy’ can be seen to absolve Soviet writers of the need to examine the full tragic implications of human mortality. No work of the 1930s in Soviet literature accomplishes this task better than How the Steel was Tempered (Kak zakalyalas' stal') (1934) by Nikolay Ostrovsky (1904–36). Although only the first part of this two-part novel is concerned, strictly speaking, with the events of the civil war in the Ukraine, as a whole the novel is designed to show how the revolution fundamentally changed the life of its youthful hero, Pavel Korchagin, making him physically its victim while fortifying and guiding his spirit in a manner admirably suited to the concept of ‘optimistic tragedy’.

Introduction

The epic novel in Russian and Soviet literature is a branch of historical fiction. Greatly elaborated and enlarged though it may have been, the epic novel in nineteenth-century Russian literature had as its source the novels of Walter Scott and only emerged as a novelistic genre in its own right when the conventionally ‘historical’ features of the historical novel were deliberately ‘made strange’ or defamiliarised by L. Tolstoy and given epic proportions in his famous War and Peace (1863–9). In a strict sense, the term ‘epic’ when applied to a novel meant little more than ‘large in scale’, but the term has grown implicitly to denote an enlarged historical novel describing heroic events of national significance. The pattern and model for all epic novels in this sense are supplied by War and Peace, which has almost automatically been referred to by critics who seek to identify the epic novel in a context of Russian or Soviet literature.

The epic proportions of War and Peace – and therefore the work's novelty – can be identified in several ways. The work's temporal range spans approximately seven years (1805–12), to which can be added the time scale of the first epilogue and the further enhancement of the work's temporal significance through the way it mirrors obliquely the ethos and problems of the decade (the 1860s) in which it was written. The range of settings similarly extends geographically from Moscow to St Petersburg, from Borodino to Smolensk, and so on.