This deep seriousness is in part a consequence of the vastness of Russia and of its searing historical experiences, some self-inflicted, some inflicted by external enemies. It is in part a consequence, according to some, of the passion, the complexity, the broadness of the "Russian soul," combining the spirit of Europe with the spirit of Asia, with a tendency to seek extreme, maximalist solutions to the problems of keeping both individual soul and political body under some sort of control. Undoubtedly it is also in part the consequence of working within the context of an oppressive political order, as Gareth Jones explains. As Alexander Herzen wrote, in his "Open letter to Michelet" (1851), the ghastly consequences that attended the written word in Russia inevitably increased its effectiveness:
The free word is listened to with love and veneration, because in our country, it is uttered only by those who have something to say. The decision to publish one's thoughts is not lightly made when at the foot of every page there looms a gendarme, a troika, a kibitka, and the prospect of Tobolsk or Irkutsk.5
It is as if throughout the history of the Russian novel there was always a third, silent participant in the dialogue, alongside the writer and the reader, the oppressive presence of the Russian state and its apparatus of censorship and repression. Just as in Soviet Russia free conversation on politically sensitive issues was inhibited by fear of being overheard by an agent of the
KGB, so throughout the history of Russian literature the spectre of imprisonment, exile, execution or psychiatric supervision played its role in fashioning what was thought, felt, written and said, and how it was expressed. The frequency with which Russian literature actually deals explicitly with these themes, or some metaphorical equivalent, is therefore hardly surprising. Such a predicament gave rise to ingenious, Aesopian techniques for fooling the authorities, to saying what had to be said metaphorically rather than directly, for cultivating what Bakhtin called "the word with a sideways glance." Most notably it gave rise to the tradition of the satirical novel, to which Lesley Milne's essay is devoted. Of course there were sunny interludes, periods when the censorship was relaxed. But they could never be relied upon to last.
Partly in spite of and partly because of this situation, the imaginative world of the Russian novel seems to stretch out endlessly in space and time and at the same time is capable of focusing on the subtlest movements of the inner world of the individual psyche, from the historical vastness of Tolstoi's War and Peace and Sholokhov's The Quiet Don, to the tense psychological and physical enclosure of a Dostoevskian novel, from the daylight naturalism of Turgenev's Fathers and Children, to the apocalyptic fantasy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, from the unremitting satirical gloom of Shchedrin's The Golovlev Family to the tragic lyricism of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
Each Russian writer mapped out the territory in his own way and although their works certainly echo each other and develop each other's achievements, rarely could the work of one be mistaken for that of any other. There has been much discussion of various categories of "realism" in Russian literature (Critical Realism, Romantic Realism, Fantastic Realism, Revolutionary Realism, Socialist Realism). One could equally well discuss categories of "Russianness" and indeed, though scorn is nowadays often poured on the idea of the "Russian soul," such terms may still focus discussion of similarities and differences.6 The point is that, in spite of their pervasive adherence to the principle of "realism," none of the great Russian novelists was a naive Realist, or even a Naturalist in the French sense. Each of them, as we have noted and as several of the essays demonstrate, sought and discovered organizing principles for their perception of experience in realms beyond the material and the immediate. They all understood the limitations of language in expressing human experience. Some, like Gogol, exploited these for satirical and comic purposes. Others, like Dostoevskii, turned them into a structural principle of their fictional world. As Victor Terras argues, Realism was in some measure a negative conception, a move away from Romanticism.
But it was also a sustained attempt by a series of highly gifted writers of riction to redraw the parameters of human experience, to capture, through their own personal sensibilities, the essence of Russian humanity. This essential Russianness would be recognized by readers in all its splendor and misery and would subsequently stand in for Russia in the minds of generations of foreign admirers and color their perceptions of it. Each novelist absorbed those narrative techniques which the European novel had developed and which suited him best and went on to push those techniques in new directions, sometimes stretching them to their limits and sometimes, as with Gogol or Leskov, importing features of the Russian (or Ukrainian) folk tradition which gave their works new and surprising twists. The traditions of European Romanticism were grist to their mill. The pervasive influence of Rousseau on the widely read Tolstoi is generally conceded. Turgenev drew inspiration from his contacts, literary and personal, with the great French writers of his day, Flaubert, Maupassant, Sand, the Goncourts, Mérimée. Among Dostoevskii's favorite novelists were George Sand, Victor Hugo, Balzac and Dickens (the "Romantic Realists"). He even learnt from the French Gothic novelist Eugène Sue, and from Rousseau.
One aspect of their "realism" is the attention Russian novelists pay to the experience of the everyday {byt as it is called in Russian), the social reality round about. The popularity of the "physiology" ("fiziologiia") and the feuilleton (fel'ton) among the writers of the Natural School, fostered by Belinskii in the 1840s, was an important formative influence, as were the novels of Dickens, Sue and Balzac. This surfaces in Bakhtin's theory of the novel in what Morson and Emerson call his conception of the "prosaic,"7 a theme which Gary Saul Morson takes up in a different context in his contribution to this volume. The feel for the physicality of the experienced world is to be found in all the great Russian prose writers, from Pushkin to Platonov, from Pasternak to Petrushevskaia. It is not, as I have hinted, a naturalistic accumulation of minutiae, but a sense of the telling detail. It is true even of Dostoevskii, whom Merezhkovskii contrasted to Tolstoi as the "seer of the spirit" to the "seer of the flesh". Many of the images we take away from Russian novels are in fact physical details: Akakii Akakievich's overcoat, the smell and the sounds of the Haymarket in Raskolnikov's St. Petersburg, Anna Karenina's unruly little curls, Rusanov's cancer, Zhivago's rowan tree and flickering candles, Pilate's attar of roses. Such examples find parallels in Western realist novels. But in Platonov, whose Chevengur is belatedly becoming recognized as one of the most significant Russian novels of the Soviet period, material reality even takes on metaphysical significance. Thomas Seifrid has written that if Platonov portrays man's