Leo Tolstoy.The Bettmann Archive
After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy underwent a religious crisis, which eventually led him to reject his two great novels, formulate a new religion that he thought of as true Christianity, and cultivate a different type of art. To outline his views, he wrote a number of tracts, including Tsarstvo bozhiye vnutri vas (1893; The Kingdom of God Is Within You) and Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1898; What Is Art?). His only long novel of this period, Voskreseniye (1899; Resurrection), is a tendentious failure. But he produced brilliant novellas, many of which were published posthumously, including Otets Sergy (written 1898; Father Sergius), in which he seems to reflect on his own quest for sainthood, and Khadzhi-Murat (written 1904; Hadji-Murad). Smert Ivana Ilicha (1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyitch), which is often considered the greatest novella in Russian literature, conveys the existential horror of sickness and mortality while describing civilization as a web of lies designed to distract people from an awareness of death. Ivan Turgenev
The first Russian writer to be widely celebrated in the West, Turgenev managed to be hated by the radicals as well as by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for his dedicated Westernism, bland liberalism, aesthetic elegance, and tendency to nostalgia and self-pity. He first gained fame with his subtle descriptions of peasant life in Zapiski okhotnika (1852; A Sportsman’s Sketches), which contributed to the climate leading to the abolition of serfdom. He is celebrated for his novels about intelligents and ideology: Rudin (1856), Nakanune (1860; On the Eve), and Dym (1867; Smoke). His most distinguished work, Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons), offers both an evenhanded portrait of the radical nihilists and an allegorical meditation on the conflict of generations.
Ivan Turgenev.David Magarshack
Other prose writers
The mid-19th century produced a number of other fine prose writers. Sergey Aksakov wrote fictionalized reminiscences: Semeynaya khronika (1856; The Family Chronicle) and Detskiye gody Bagrova-vnuka (1858; Years of Childhood). Aleksandr Herzen wrote his greatest works in emigration. In S togo berega (written 1847–50; From the Other Shore), which combines essays and dialogues, he reflects with penetrating skepticism on the idea that history has knowable laws. Herzen’s Byloye i dumy (written 1852–68; My Past and Thoughts) is regarded as the best Russian autobiography. Ivan Goncharov is the author of the comic masterpiece Oblomov (1859), a study of dreamy slothfulness: its hero spends a hundred pages getting out of bed. Nikolay Leskov is remembered for his short stories, including “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda” (1865; “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”), as well as for his novel Soboryane (1872; The Cathedral Folk). Like Gogol before and Mikhail Zoshchenko after him, he was a master of skaz, a written narrative imitating a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, or a particular idiom. A radical satirist and (remarkably) a government official who attained general’s rank, Mikhail Saltykov wrote (under the pseudonym N. Shchedrin) the extremely dark novel Gospoda Golovlyovy (1876; The Golovlyov Family), portraying the relentless decline of a family. The agony of an intellectual who wants to merge with the common people and the intimate link of utopianism to madness figure as prominent themes in the short stories of Vsevolod Garshin, including “Khudozhniki” (1879; “Artists”) and “Krasny tsvetok” (1883; “The Red Flower”). Anton Chekhov
When Tolstoy abandoned the prosaic ethos, Chekhov, one of the greatest short story writers in world literature, remained loyal to it. Indeed, he reinterpreted it 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. Replying to the intelligentsia’s demand for political tendentiousness, which he equated with a stifling intellectual conformity, he maintained that his only “tendency” was a protest against lying in all its forms. In his hundreds of stories and novellas, which he wrote while practicing medicine, Chekhov 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. Especially noteworthy are “Skuchnaya istoriya” (written 1889; “A Dreary Story”), “Duel” (written 1891; “The Duel”), “Palata No. 6” (written 1892; “Ward Number Six”), “Kryzhovnik” (written 1898; “Gooseberries”), “Dushechka” (written 1899; “The Darling”), “Dama s sobachkoy” (written 1899; “The Lady with the Lap Dog”), “Arkhiyerey” (written 1902; “The Bishop”), and “Nevesta” (written 1903; “The Betrothed”).
Anton Chekhov, 1902.David Magarshack
Along with Gogol’s The Inspector General, Chekhov’s plays are the high point of Russian drama. In his four great plays, Chayka (1896; The Seagull), Dyadya Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya), Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters), and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard), Chekhov’s 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. The Silver Age
The period from the 1890s to 1917 was one of intellectual ferment, in which mysticism, aestheticism, Neo-Kantianism, eroticism, Marxism, apocalypticism, Nietzscheanism, and other movements combined with each other in improbable ways. Primarily an age of poetry, it also produced significant prose and drama. Russian Symbolism, which was influenced by French Symbolist poetry and the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), is usually said to have begun with an essay by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury” (1893; “On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature”). A poet and propagator of religious ideas, Merezhkovsky wrote a trilogy of novels, Khristos i Antikhrist (1896–1905; Christ and Antichrist), consisting of Yulian otstupnik (1896; Julian the Apostate), Leonardo da Vinchi (1901; Leonardo da Vinci), and Pyotr i Aleksey (1905; Peter and Alexis), which explores the relation of pagan and Christian views of the world. Symbolists