The great novels of the nineteenth century could be, and often were of course, read simply for entertainment. The majority of readers, unlike the writers, were women and the novels often read aloud en famille. Richard Ware draws our attention to a contemporary account of the reception of Anna Karenina, according to which most readers regarded the novel simply as entertaining and absorbing reading, an opinion held not only by shortsighted aristocrats but even by some contemporary critics.1
Another account recalls that there was neither singing nor laughter on the days when a new issue of Russkii vestnik appeared with a fresh installment of Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov. When all were gathered, the family took their places round the table with a green shaded lamp in the middle, and the reading aloud began. Everyone took turns to read and there was no pause until they reached the final page. Faces alternately turned pale and burned with excitement; the voice of the reader shook. The reading was then followed by detailed discussion of every movement in the souls of the characters and by attempts to guess what would happen next.2 In a delightful essay on War and Peace, Nikolai
Bakhtin (Mikhail Bakhtin's brother) recalls how, like many Russian readers, he had, by dint of reading and rereading, come to know the characters in the novel like real-life friends and acquaintances. Then he confesses that actually he had never read the whole of Tolstoi's great novel from cover to cover. He had just dipped into it again and again.3
But, whatever its primary appeal to the reading public, the significance of the nineteenth-century novel will not be fully grasped unless it is understood that each new volume to appear was part of the ongoing debates in the literary journals, the salons and the private apartments of the intelligentsia. Neither Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1875-78) nor Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80) can be appreciated as phenomena of their time apart from the discussions on marriage and the family inspired by Chernyshevskii's novel What is to be Done? (1863). No more, in a later period, can Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita be wholly appreciated apart from its satire on the Soviet literary scene and, on a broader scale, on the Soviet system itself. The aim of literature was not merely to entertain, to instruct or even to reflect reality. It was to seek "the measure of life" in all its dimensions, together with an understanding (and this was a particular feature of its Russianness) of the limitations of the human mind in attempting to grasp its meaning. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian culture experienced two irresistible imperatives (both exemplified in Pushkin's and Gogol's work): to grasp and represent in imaginative literature the full range of contemporary reality, exemplified in such concepts as the narod (the Russian people), the rodina "motherland"), the vast, primitive, anarchic Russian countryside, the history and the symbolism of her capital; and to understand their place in history. This latter quest sometimes embraced the idea of national historical mission, which at times, for example in Dostoevskii's hands, became messianic. Though most of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia lived and worked in the city, the two capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and experienced all the strains of urban life, they were fully aware of the countryside, populated by the oppressed peasant classes, their lives lived out among the beasts they tended. Yet, some thought these same peasants were possessed of superior spiritual insights, often associated with ancient peasant beliefs and folk traditions, such as those celebrated in the novels of Leskov in the nineteenth century and the works of the "village prose" writers (Belov, Rasputin and others) in the twentieth. The liberal intelligentsia (Turgenev, Aksakov, Tolstoi) were themselves often landowners and experienced the tension between the landowner's love of the rural idyll and guilt at the price others had to pay to preserve its semblance. Increasingly, as the nineteenth century wore on, the countryside was seen not just as the repository of Russia's
spiritual heritage, but also as the setting for a social and moral degeneration in which all classes were caught up. Although overlaid by more recent historical events, two world wars, the Revolution and Civil War, the collectivization programme, the purges and the collapse of the Soviet Union, these dimensions have continued to dominate the Russian experience and its representation in fiction to the present day.
That the idyll of the Russian countryside was deeply flawed struck some (Saltykov-Shchedrin, Bunin) so painfully that it seemed to plunge them into a grotesque, nightmarish gloom. Others (Goncharov, Aksakov) presented it more ambiguously. Turgenev and Tolstoy, perhaps, preserved their love of the Russian countryside best. What all the nineteenth-century novelists seem to be acutely aware of is the ultimate futility and hubris of Russia's repeated attempts to subject the vastness and majesty of nature to the human will, together with the inadequacy of human reason fully to comprehend life's meaning. The theme has its first memorable expression in Pushkin's great poem "The Bronze Horseman"; it is central to Tolstoi's philosophy of history in War and Peace; it underlies Dostoevskii and the long anti-rationalist tradition in Russian thought, the fate of Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Children, the failure of the Bolshevik experiment in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, the collapse of Platonov's anarchic Che-vengur, and the tragic-comic depiction of a Moscow thrown into confusion by a visit from the devil in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
And its source is to be found, like those of many of the other leitmotifs of Russian intellectual and spiritual life, in the uncompromisingly anti-rationalist traditions of the Orthodox Faith, traditions thrown into relief by its anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant stance. In his essay Jostein Bortnes shows the impact of Russian Orthodoxy on those major novels which most strikingly exemplify its influence, but its pervasive effect is very widely evident in Russian culture, in the structuring function of religious myths (for example the Easter myth or the Apocalypse), in the presence of folk religious types (for example the Holy Fool) and artefacts (the icon), as well as in a pervasive Anti-Rationalism and preference for apophatic (negative) theology. Elsewhere, John Garrard4 has reminded us that, for better or for worse, Russia was not a part of the Roman Empire, nor did it experience directly the fruits of the Renaissance; nor was it a part of the Roman Catholic tradition which the Roman Empire adopted and which embraced the Renaissance. This made the grafting on of European culture in the modern period all the more problematic and the attempt all the more fascinating. Even where Anti-Rationalism was not explicitly made a virtue, as with the progressive Westerners, its influence ran very deep, until in the twentieth century, in one of those periodic attempts by Russia's rulers to
seize history and nature by the scruff of the neck, the power of science and technology to overcome all natural obstacles temporarily became Holy Writ and gave rise to a completely new dominant in Russian culture.
It seems momentarily to have escaped Gerhardie's attention that one prominent feature of the Russian novel is its deep moral seriousness, its uncompromising wrestling with seemingly intractable social and political problems no less than with the "accursed questions" of philosophy and religion, questions which, as Tolstoi was aware, professional philosophers often consider to be unanswerable because misconceived and which the great novels of Western Europe address only obliquely, if at all. It is a signal characteristic of the Russian novel that it takes seriously (i.e. as indicative of what is essential in life) aspects of human experience frequently banished to the fringes of the secular European novel, to the extent that they may actually become organizing principles of the narrative, and hence, by implication, of that everyday experience which the narrative seeks to express. Not only does religion sometimes play this organizing role, but so do folklore, the dream, the supernatural, metaphysics, and that peculiarly Russian state of mind which critics call poshlost' ("self-satisfied mediocrity") and which, in Gogol's work, facilitates that strange slippage between the material and the surreal (and/or supernatural) which is his hallmark.