Apart from these literary giants, the mid-nineteenth century produced a number of other fine prose writers. Among them are Sergey Aksakov (The Family Chronicle, 1856, and Years of Childhood, 1858), Aleksandr Herzen (From the Other Shore, 1851, and My Past and Thoughts, 1861-7), Ivan Goncharov (Ohlomov, 1859), Nikolay Leskov ("Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", 1865), Mikhail Saltykov
LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910)
Russian writer, one of the world's greatest novelists
The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy spent much of his life at his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, After a somewhat dissolute youth, he served in the army and travelled in Europe before returning home and starting a school for peasant children. He was already known as a brilliant writer for the short stories in Sevastopol Sketches (I85S-6) and the novel The Cossacks (1863) when War and Peace (1865-9) established him as Russia's pre-eminent novelist. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the novel examines the lives of a large group of characters, centring on the partly autobiographical figure of the spiritually questing Pierre. Its structure, with its flawless placement of complex characters in a turbulent historical setting, is regarded as one of the great technical achievements in the history of the western novel. His other great novel, Anna Karenina (1875-7), concerns an aristocratic woman who deserts her husband for a tover and the search for meaning by another autobiographical character, Levin.
After the publication of Anna Karenina Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis and turned to a form of Christian anarchism. Advocating simplicity and nonviolence, he devoted himself to social reform. His later works include The Death of Ivan llyich (1886) and What Is Art? (1898), which condemns fashionable aestheticism and celebrates art's moral and religious functions. Tolstoy lived humbly on his great estate, practising a radical
asceticism and in constant conflict with his wife. In November 1910, unable to bear his situation any longer, he left his estate incognito. During his flight he contracted pneumonia, and he was dead within a few days.
{The Golovlyov Family, 1876}, and Vsevolod Garshin ("Artists", 1879). But by the early 1880s the hold of the realist novel was waning. Russian poetry had not played a central role in the literary process since the 1830s, and drama, despite the able work of Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1823-1886), was a marginal literary activity for most writers.
The only major prose writer to emerge in the 1880s and 1890s was Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the greatest short story writers in world literature. Chekhov reinterpreted the short story genre within his essentially bourgeois values, stressing the moral necessity of ordinary virtues such as daily kindness, cleanliness, politeness, work, sobriety, paying one's debts, and avoiding self-pity - a rejection of the intelligentsia's demand for political tendentiousness. In his hundreds of stories and novellas Chekhov - a practising doctor - adopts something of a clinical approach to ordinary life. Meticulous observation and broad sympathy for diverse points of view shape his fiction. In his stories, an overt plot subtly hints at other hidden stories, and so the experience of rereading his fiction often differs substantially from that produced by a first reading. In his greatest stories - including "The Man in a Case" (1898), "The Lady with a Lapdog" (1899), "The Darling" (1899), "In the Ravine" (1900), "The Bishop" (written 1902), and "The Betrothed" (written 1903) - Chekhov manages to attain all the power of his great predecessors
MAKSIM GORKY (1868-1936) Russian writer
Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov was born in Nizhny Novgorod. After a childhood of poverty and misery he became a wandering tramp. He assumed the name Gorky, meaning "bitter". His early works offered sympathetic portrayals of the social dregs of Russia: they include the outstanding stories "Chelkash" (1895) and "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" (1899), and the successful play The Lower Depths (1902). For his revolutionary activity, he spent the years 1906-13 abroad as a political exile. His works include the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood (191314), In the World (1915-16), and My Universities (1923).
Though initially an open critic of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, after 1919 Gorky cooperated with Lenin's government. He lived in Italy from 1921 to 1928. Upon his return to the USSR, he became the undisputed leader of Soviet writers. When the Union of Soviet Writers was established in 1934, he became its first president and helped establish socialist realism. He died suddenly while under medical treatment, possibly killed on the orders of Joseph Stalin.
in a remarkably compact form. Towards the end of his career, Chekhov also became known for his dramatic work, including Such pillars of the world theatrical repertoire as Uncle Vanya (1897) and The Cherry Orchard (first performed 1904). In these, his belief that life is lived at ordinary moments and that histrionics are a dangerous lie found expression in a major innovation, the undramatic drama - or, as it is sometimes called, the theatre of inaction.
IVAN BUNIN (1870-1953) Russian poet and novelist
Bunin worked as a journalist and clerk while writing and translating poetry, but he made his name as a short- story writer, with such masterpieces as the title story of The Gentleman from San Fronc/sco {1916). His other works include the novella Mityo's Love (1925), the collection Dark Avenues, and Other Stories (1943), fictional autobiography, memoirs, and books on Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. He was the first Russian awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature {1933) and is among the best stylists in the language.
Chekhov's heirs in the area of short fiction were Maksim Gorky (later the doyen of Soviet letters), who began his career by writing sympathetic portraits of various social outcasts, and the aristocrat Ivan Bunin, who emigrated after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933.
The Twentieth Century
The interplay between art and life, literature and politics, came once more to the fore, sometimes in dramatic and bloody fashion, in the twentieth century. By way of example, the poet Nikolay Gumilyov (first husband of the poet Anna Akhmatova) was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921; Akhmatova's son Lev was twice imprisoned under Stalin; Osip Mandel- shtam, considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, died in a Soviet prison camp; and among tlie millions whose lives were taken during the Stalinist purges (see Chapter 2), were the writers Isaak Babel, Daniil Kharms, and Boris Pilnyak, the peasant poet Nikolay Klyuyev, and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold.