This chapter traces the evolution of a specific character type that began with Aleksandr Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina in Eugene Onegin. In the hands of future authors such as Ivan Turgenev and Fedor Dostoevskii, Tatiana came to represent an ideal for the Russian woman based on soulfulness, fidelity, and self-sacrifice. Russian women writers, too, used Tatiana as a model for their heroines. With the rise of the ‘woman question’ in the 1860s, the Russian woman was redefined to reveal her new potentials in a shifting society, with Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s Vera Pavlovna as a new ideal. In the Soviet period, she was rethought yet again to respond to shifting political mandates, variously downplaying or emphasising her maternal, caregiving side. The faithful, all-enduring Tatiana took on a new form in Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and continues to evolve in contemporary feminist writing.

This chapter explores the unique formal features of the Russian novel from its tentative beginnings in the eighteenth century, through its rise in the 1840s, to its full flowering in the second half of the nineteenth century. The founders of the tradition broke with western models, setting a precedent for pushing generic boundaries. This involved experimentation with formal features (novel-in-verse, mixing history and essays with fictional narration, withholding narrative closure, etc.) and an expansion of the subject matter that novels were expected to contain. Given tight censorship, novels and literary criticism became a crucial space for engaging with the most pressing questions of the day. The form was made to accommodate ideological debates about social, political, scientific, and aesthetic issues far beyond the scope of most European novels. The Russian novel became rightfully famous for the depth of its psychological probing and the breadth of the existential questions it addresses.

As Russia went through an age of great reforms during Tolstoy’s adult years, relations between spouses, parents and children, siblings, and extended kin all evolved to match their changing society and its ideals. While Tolstoy was well aware of the debates about the state of the Russian family that raged at mid-century, his critique of the family talked past that of many of his contemporaries to focus on the moral issues closest to his heart. By mid-century many people considered the Russian family to be a backward institution based on patriarchal tyranny. Jurists struggled to rewrite imperial family law, while figures across the political spectrum debated the “Woman Question.” Tolstoy’s views evolved along different lines. He went from idealizing the traditional patriarchal family (through the 1860s), to acknowledging its flaws (1870s), to rejecting the family as an ultimate life goal (1880s onward). His ultimate ideal left no place for sexual love and was based on impersonal service to a higher cause. Ignoring all the quotidian realities of actually belonging to a real family made of real people, Tolstoy infuriated his wife with his abstract talk of living for the soul, while she managed the household and oversaw their large family.