However, there are notable novels among the exemplars of Socialist Realism, outstanding examples being Leonov's Russian Forest, A. Tolstoi's A Tour of Hell, and Sholokhov's The Quiet Don. Of these, The Quiet Don is the most widely celebrated in the West. Like no other novel, War and Peace included, it conveys a sense of the vastness, primitiveness and violence of Russia, the Cossack lands, and the instinctual forces and values which impel ordinary, unprivileged men and women in their struggle for survival and supremacy against forces over which the individual has no control. Although it is hailed as one of the great Soviet novels, the irony is that the heroes and heroines belong to the wrong side (the Whites) in the Civil War, as do the Turbins in Bulgakov's novel of 1925, The White Guard. The hero, Grigorii Melekhov, experiences and himself lives the physical violence and mental anguish of his time and place. Sholokhov's masterpiece conveys the life of the Don Cossacks in a period of upheaval through brilliant physical descriptions, but also through his rendering of the timeless values and traditions of the Cossacks themselves.
Not all Russian novels are inspired by a sense of the apocalyptic, even where they display a strong sense of history. Counterbalancing this tendency is another which reminds the reader that beyond the turmoil, the world of nature, of which humanity is a part, continues on its course, ever renewing itself as season follows season and generation succeeds generation. The Turgenevan tradition, as represented by his best-known novels, Rudin, On the Eve and Fathers and Children, in many ways foreshadows the revolutionary novel, but lacks its conviction of the saving power of the Revolution. Nor is it inspired by a vision of impending national doom. In Turgenev's fictional world heroism consists in the constant reaffirma-
tion of humane values by the individual in the face of an unresponsive universe.
Tolstoi was not free of the Russian penchant for philosophizing, prophesying and following through principles to the bitter end. Yet his greatest works of imaginative fiction are structured by quite different principles, in which the physical, the mentally balanced, natural continuity and renewal are underlying structuring principles. Ironically, Bakhtin's principle of dialogue (which he wishes to deny Tolstoi) is actually particularly strong in him. So is his sense of the immediacy of the present moment and of the process of becoming as it is observed, on which Tolstoi is actually stronger than he is on historical processes. Time is cyclical, death and disaster are followed by renewal. This is not apocalyptic time, but it does once again echo a basic Christian structure. It is again the Easter motif, the cycle of death, transfiguration and resurrection, but grafted onto a perception of the world structured by the pagan rhythms and seasons of the natural world rather than, as with Dostoevskii, an apocalyptic framework. Consciously or not he built these motifs into the title of his best-known novel, War and Peace.20Where the apocalyptic occurs in Tolstoi, for example in Pierre's masonic speculations, it appears as a deviation from the norm as it would in an English realist novel. The motif of death and resurrection embraces both the nineteenth century and the revolutionary novel. Only the dark gloom of Saltykovian or Buninesque satire seems to exclude the possibility of rebirth and renewal.
Bakhtin saw Tolstoi's novels as built round such chronotopes as "biographical time" and "the salon." There are, of course, others, particularly in the vast historical panorama of War and Peace, but there is no denying that Tolstoi's salons and his biographies both partake of that sense of breadth in physical time and space which Dostoevskii had sought and found in the inner reaches of the human spirit.
Words and expressions like "measure," "classical mean," or "understatement" do not immediately spring to mind when writing of the major Russian novelists. Yet one only has to mention the names of Pushkin, Turgenev and Chekhov, all, it is true, the writers of shorter fiction, and the enormous influence of the first of these, to be reminded that there is more to the Russian novel than the traditions we have been discussing. The novels of Pushkin and Turgenev have never had the impact on the imagination of the Western reader of the other classics we have discussed (save perhaps those of Turgenev in France), and Chekhov did not write novels at all. Yet they represent vital, lasting strains in the Russian tradition, strains often appreciated better by native Russians than by foreign admirers. Above all they are models of verbal economy, of aesthetic
form, a measure and constant reminder of the ideals which Russian literature is capable of achieving and from which their more unruly successors depart in full knowledge of their parentage.
Pushkin was not simply the first great figure in the tradition, revered continually from his day to this. His spirit has lived in the novels of others, through quotation, allusion, contrast, and more complex forms of inter-textuality, from his immediate contemporaries and successors Lermontov and Gogol, to such contemporaries of ours as Andrei Bitov. The way in which this strain has lived on as an ideal in the world of loose, baggy monsters as well as in the more restrained prose of some of his more direct literary descendants is well shown in Susanne Fusso's essay.
All the novelists mentioned in this introduction are men (which is why some of our contributors use the masculine pronoun when referring to Russian novelists). There have been no outstanding women prose writers in Russia until very recently. It is not entirely clear why this should be. In our own century some of the finest of Russia's poets have been women. A list of the classics of English literature of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries would contain a substantial list of outstanding women novelists, many of whom have long been acknowledged as such and have never been in need of rediscovery. It does not appear to be the case that Russian women were more disadvantaged than English women during either the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries. As Catriona Kelly tells us, the number of women writers grew steadily in the early nineteenth century and writing by women continued to develop its own diverse traditions over the next 170 years, but she nevertheless concludes that "between its origins in the late eighteenth century and the present day . . . Russian women's writing [exists] in the interstices of patriarchal culture."21 The study of Russian writing from feminist perspectives has, however, been developing apace in recent years and as a consequence one of our essays reminds us that the Russian novel is based on an essentially male viewpoint. That this fact does not carry with it the necessary implication that the Russian novel is either inaccessible or an affront to women readers is evident. But it does underline its gender-bias, a fact which Barbara Heldt's essay does something to redress.
The constant balance and counterbalance between the various traditions of the Russian novel - the Pushkinian and the Gogolian, the Dostoevskian and the Tolstoian, the Modernist and the Socialist Realist, the Utopian and the dystopian, above all the tendency towards the fantastic, with the disintegration of the subject and the text, set against the affirmation of the primacy of the physical and the material - have resulted in a literary tradition which, for all its subversive questioning of novelistic discourse,
has never entirely lost its grip on common-sense reality. This is no doubt why its most influential theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, still continued unblush-ingly to use such concepts as "author," "realism" and "subject" in an age when structuralism and post-structuralism was radically problematizing such notions in the West. In one of the final turns of the double helix, it is this twentieth-century theory of the novel, rather than a tradition of Soviet novels, which has come back to invigorate Western literary theory in our own day and once again brought us to recognize the power of the Russian mind to interrogate our own traditions.