with a relentless series of shabby rooms and stinking streets. Like Dickens, with whom he is often compared, Dostoevskii is well aware that poverty has no history. That is perhaps why he offers few glimpses of the famous sights and monuments, which would of course open into the past. He keeps us focused on the present; and by compressing this present into a mere two weeks, he creates a suffocating psychological enclosure from which escape seems impossible. While taking full advantage of the enormous variety of human types present in any large modern city, he contrives to have all the characters touched in one way or another by Raskolnikov's thoughts and actions. Yet by adopting a third-person narration, he makes the point that Raskolnikov himself is subject to larger forces, and is not simply projecting his own mind onto the city. In this hermetically sealed literary world, objects, events, and people are intertwined; any action, however trivial, can generate enormous consequences, like the conversation Raskolnikov overhears in the eating-house between two people he does not know (part 1, chapter 6), which he takes as permission to commit the murder. Ironically, Raskolnikov, once convicted of the crime, exchanges the prison of Petersburg for the "freedom" of exile in Siberia. But as his dreams in the Epilogue show, the city, and all it has come to stand for, cannot be readily forgotten. Indeed, Dostoevskii, in a major revision of the tradition, does not regard Petersburg as an aberration. He offers no mitigating or contrasting order, be it the countryside, nature, or Moscow; the city focuses and intensifies what is happening in Russia at large. As Luzhin puts it: "All these innovations, reforms and ideas of ours - all these have touched us in the provinces too; but in order to see everything and see it more clearly, one must be in Petersburg."8 Many later writers would take note.
Dostoevskii's achievement as an urban novelist is all the more striking when we consider the far more conventional Petersburg set forth in the writings of three of his illustrious contemporaries, Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoi. In Goncharov's first novel, A Common Story (1847), Aduev, a naively idealistic young man, moves to the capital from his country estate in hopes of becoming a famous writer. But he cannot cope with the pitiless demands of the city and with the cynicism of his wealthy uncle, and settles for an undistinguished existence. Oblomov (1859), Goncharov's masterpiece, restates many of the same situations in a far more mature and compelling way. Ilia Ilich Oblomov comes to St. Petersburg from Oblomovka, his estate, to take up a job in the civil service, and to find a wife. He abandons the first after two years, and fails totally with the second. When the novel opens, a decade later, he occupies a spacious, centrally-located apartment, but remains uninvolved in the life of the city, which casts only a shadowy presence throughout. Instead, he lies
on a couch in one room, attended by his elderly servant Zakhar, and reminisces about Oblomovka, a paradise that owes much to literary idylls of the eighteenth century. In fact, his estate has fallen on hard times, and, as the sole heir, he has plenty of work awaiting him there. Though intelligent and well-meaning, he cannot bestir himself to return, any more than he can seek a purposeful life in the city. He is the most celebrated instance of the kind of displaced, or "superfluous" character initiated by Onegin, which throughout the nineteenth century was often regarded as regrettably typical of the Russian character. Turgenev, for one, usually killed such characters off. Goncharov's solution is more ingenious. He decides to bestow happiness on his hero by moving him to a location that combines city and country: the suburb. (Oblomov may in fact be the first piece of suburban literature in Russia.) There he settles down in the well-run house of the widow Pshenitsyna, who becomes a mother-wife figure and makes his life a "living idyll," like the Oblomovka of old. Eventually he dies of inactivity and gluttony. Although he has achieved personal fulfillment, it is devoid of the kind of social concerns that Russian readers had come to expect in literary characters.
Turgenev writes mostly about provincial Russia. But the city, particularly Petersburg, is a constant if nearly silent presence in his six novels. The best is Fathers and Children (1862). It is set in 1859; but in a long flashback, we are told that the young Kirsanov brothers left their estate in the 1840s and went to Petersburg for formation, Pavel as a Guards officer, and Nikolai as a civil servant. Pavel is ruined by the experience, and becomes one of those deracinated characters that literary tradition had already taught readers to associate with the capital. It is probably not coincidental that his patronymic is Petrovich, or "son of Peter," meaning perhaps Peter the Great, and if so, reminding us of the perennial question of the national identity. That question is more palpably raised by Pavel's Western habits, like his Anglophilia and his fondness for European spas, and, contrastively, by certain "Eastern" features of his dress and rooms, such as a fez, Chinese slippers, and Turkish carpets. Nikolai is in danger of displacement, also being a Petrovich, and, like Oblomov, having resigned his government job in disillusionment. What saves him is his decision to return to and manage the family estate, where he forms a liaison with his housekeeper's young daughter, who exemplifies deeply Russian values. As the novel opens, he is being visited by his son, Arkadii, who has brought with him Bazarov, a friend and mentor. Both are recent graduates of St. Petersburg University. There Bazarov has become infected with Western ideas, and is now an exponent of "nihilism" (nigilizm), a foreign word for a foreign concept, around which the intellectual and moral conflicts of the book cluster.
Structurally, Turgenev honors a pattern that goes back to Pushkin and Gogol, whereby alien, usually urban values are suddenly introduced into a vital, self-contained world, often a country estate. In Gogol it is the entity that disintegrates (as in "Old-World Landowners" or The Inspector General). In Turgenev the opposite occurs. Bazarov dies; Pavel ends his visit to resume a life of aimless wandering in Europe. Arkadii, however, comes to see that the "soil" is where he belongs, with a wife and children in his future. As the son of a country doctor, Bazarov really belongs there too; and Turgenev, an accomplished ironist, makes the point by having him buried in his parish churchyard. We are meant to conclude that Petersburg at best serves as an arena where young men may test themselves, but that it cannot provide an authentic way of life for a Russian.
Much the same idea shapes Tolstoi's novella Family Happiness (1859). Here Masha has to leave her idyllic family estate, plunge into the empty social round in Petersburg, and jeopardize her marriage in order to learn that true values reside in the country, with husband and children. An antipathy to Petersburg is apparent from the opening pages of War and Peace (1865-69). For Tolstoi it is a foreign, upper-class city, whose inhabitants lead lives that are "insignificant, trivial, and artificial . . . concerned only with phantoms and reflections of life." Pierre Bezukhov, the hero, feels out of place there, and his marriage to the socially accomplished but stupid Hélène is a disaster. Still, the experience shows him what he is not, and points him toward discovering an authentic self. The most important stopping-place on that long route is Moscow, which is treated as the antithesis of Petersburg in virtually every respect. Tolstoi does not dwell on topographical realia, but he brings in all levels of society to show that this city is a vital, organic entity, and stands for Russia as a whole. Even though Moscow's upper classes have been somewhat tainted by foreign ways, as the celebrated scene of Natasha's evening at the opera reminds us, the solid Russian core remains, waiting to be uncovered. That happens in 1812. Tolstoi's graphic account of Napoleon's occupation of the city re-enacts the old Russian pattern of borrowing from abroad, and shows a way out that Petersburg never took, as the inhabitants burn and then desert the city. Burning of course is a traditional symbol of purification, and it enables Tolstoi to make the important point that Moscow - and by extension, Russia - is less a place than a state of mind: "Everything had been destroyed, except something intangible, yet powerful and indestructible." It is here that Pierre, as a prisoner of the French, "attained the serenity and contentment which he had formerly striven in vain to reach," an "inner harmony" which creates in him a feeling of oneness with all humans, nature, and the universe.9 Eventually he settles in the countryside; but the