Lists varied, but the cult of the Russian novel reached its apogee in England in the years following the First World War. In 1931, by which time he had established himself as one of the most promising young English novelists of his generation, William Gerhardie sketched the stylistic features which, in his view, young writers of his time most admired and strove to cultivate. He included among his exemplars Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Turgenev. Gerhardie was showing off, his judgments more witty than profound. Yet on an impressionistic level the notes that he strikes are instantly recognizable: Pushkin's lyrical power and paganism; Lermontov's elegiac quality combined with his Byronism;
1 Harold Orel, "Victorians and the Russian Noveclass="underline" A Bibliography," Bulletin of Bibliography (January-April 1954), 61; quoted in George Zytaruk, D. H. Lawrence's Response to Russian Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 36.
Chekhov's miraculous naturalness and consumptive cough; Tolstoi's life-imparting breath conjoined, alas, to his foolishness; Dostoevskii's pathological insight but extravagant suspiciousness; Turgenev's purity in reproducing nature marred by his sentimentalism.2 These are the familiar burdens of the Russian soul, mediated through the great prose works of the nineteenth century, as familiar to us as the strains of Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, James, Twain, Hemingway, Conrad, an inalienable part of the modern literary sensibility and, in the view of many, its crowning achievement. Born in St. Petersburg in 1895, Gerhardie himself has some slight claim to being regarded as a "Russian novelist" and might be suspected of favoritism. Yet, with his polyglot background, he was able to draw inspiration from a wide range of European literature. The significant thing is that, once again, the Russians occupy a dominant place.
By adoption, or perhaps by absent-mindedness, we recognize the great Russian realist novels as our classics, an integral part of that interactive web of the modern imagination which found one of its most notable expressions in the novel and which prompted D. H. Lawrence to declare (and the world-famous Russian theorist of the novel Mikhail Bakhtin to imply by his choice of subject) that the novel is among the greatest intellectual achievements of the modem mind.3 We think of them, as we do of the works of Tchaikovsky or Kandinskii, as part of our common heritage, yet extending it in ways which eluded our native-born writers. For they are also in some ways strangely alien to us - strangely Russian - and it is perhaps unsurprising that the Russians themselves have made concepts such as "defamiliarization," and the distinction between "one's own word" and "the alien word," central features of their theories of the novel. Russia, and its literature, has always been conscious of being torn between East and West, where "East" has ranged from Constantinople to the Tatar hordes, and "West" has incorporated the whole of Europe and its cultural progeny.
Before exploring that thought further, it is worth pausing to raise a further question prompted by Gerhardie's list: what Russian names would an anglophone novelist of the 1990s wish to add to it and what would be his or her comments on them? This is a quite difficult question. In 1834, the Russian critic Vissarion Belinskii concluded that there was no such thing as Russian literature, only a few isolated peaks of achievement by outstanding individuals. That might seem to be the common judgment on the Soviet
2 William Gerhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot (London: Robin Clark, 1990; first published 1931). PP- 164-65.
3 Zytaruk, D. H. Lawrence's Response, p. 74.
novel some 160 years later. In Cancer Ward Solzhenitsyn's narrator says of one of his characters that he was rather frightened at the thought of how many writers there were. In the last century there had only been about ten, all of them great. In this century there were thousands; you only had to change a letter in one of their names and you had a new writer. There was Safronov and there was Safonov, and more than one Safonov apparently. And was there only one Safronov? No one could possibly have time to read all their books, and when you did read one, you might just as well not have done. Completely unknown writers floated to the surface, won Stalin prizes, then sank without trace.4 Solzhenitsyn's character is, of course, caricaturing the achievements of the Soviet novel, which are greater than he would allow. But, searching his or her mind for familiar names, our contemporary writer would probably begin by reciting the same ones as Orel or Gerhardie, the "ten" great novelists of the last century. Then, depending on his or her knowledge of the twentieth-century Russian literary scene, a number of others would tumble out: Solzhenitsyn for certain, and then perhaps Belyi, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Bulgakov . . . The cognoscenti might add Zamiatin or Pilniak, Olesha or Platonov. And those with an even more intimate knowledge of the tradition would no doubt wonder whether they should include Karolina Pavlova, Goncharov, Aksakov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leskov, Gorky, Sologub, Bunin, Fedin, Leonov, Aleksei Tolstoi, and more recent writers such as Vasilii Grossman, Tendriakov, Trifonov, Bitov, Voinovich, Petrushevskaia, Tatiana Tolstaia, Rasputin, Erofeev, Aksenov or Zinoviev, who have been quite extensively published and written about in the West. But there is an important difference. The Russian writers in Gerhardie's list repaid their debt to Western literature a hundredfold. They inspired both admiration and imitation across the globe. Those in our supplementary list, while having undoubted claims to the attention of the well-read reader of our time, and in the cases of Bunin (1933), Pasternak (1958), Sholokhov (1965), and Solzhenitsyn (1970) even attracting Nobel Prizes, have not significantly fed back into the Western literary tradition and seem unlikely ever to do so. The two exceptions are perhaps Belyi, whose novel Petersburg has been much admired as a modernist classic, and Bulgakov, whose influence Salman Rushdie has openly and gladly acknowledged.5 The great mass of Soviet novelists, even the good ones, seem unlikely ever to achieve ongoing international acclaim, let alone classic status.
4 A. Solzhenitsyn, Rakovyi korpus (Paris: YMCA Press, 1968), p. no.
5 See Arnold McMillin, "The Devil of a Similarity: The Satanic Verses and Master i Margarita," in Lesley Milne (éd.), Bulgakov, the Novelist-Playwright (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 2.32…
In Belinskii's time, the problem was to escape the thrall of Western European literature and establish an "organic" tradition on a comparable or superior level, which Russia could call its own. This it did, it is commonly claimed, through the dual heritage of Pushkin and Gogol, establishing, as Robert Belknap shows in his essay, a new conception of narrative technique, resulting in what Henry James called "baggy monsters" and "fluid puddings," but which later readers came to regard as a key discovery of the Russian novel,6 which has spiralled back into Western literature in the modernist period. Caryl Emerson, in her essay, shows how the Russians themselves have theorized this achievement.