RUSSIAN WRITERS AND SOCIETY IN THE SECOND HALF

OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

By the same author

WRITERS AND SOCIETY DURING THE RISE OF

RUSSIAN REALISM

THE FUTURISTS, THE FORMALISTS AND THE

MARXIST CRITIQUE
(translated with Chris Pike)
Russian Writers and Society
in the Second Half of the
Nineteenth Century

Joe Andrew
Lecturer in Russian Studies
University of Keele
 © J oe Andrew 1982
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1982 978-0-333-25911-5
Ali rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission

First published 1982 by

THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world

ISBN 978-1-349-04420-7 ISBN 978-1-349-04418-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04418-4
Typeset in Creat Britain by
Activity, Teffont, Salisbury, Wilts
For My Parents
Conten ts
Acknowledge ments viii

Introduction ix

Chronology XV

1 Ivan Turgenev 1

Chronology 42

2 Fyodor Dostoevsky 44

Chronology 98

3 Lev Tolstoy 100

Chronology 149

4 Anton Chekhov 152

Chronology 192

Conclusion 194

Endnotes/References 204

Bibliography 220

Index 229

vii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank very warmly all those who have in any
way assisted me in the writing of this book: Sir Isaiah Berlin
whom I consulted at an early stage of research and whose own
writings on the period have proved of immense assistance; and
Professor Eugenie Lampert, who first suggested that I take on
this work and whose studies of the social and intellectual back-
ground have proved consistently stimulating and helpful; and all
the other members of the Russian Studies Department at Keele,
whom I have consulted and who have offered me great service
in reading the manuscript and offering invaluable suggestions -
Roger Bartlett, Chris Pike, Bob Service and Valentina Polukhina.
I would particularly like to mention Katia Lampert, whose
advice, assistance and encouragement were always most import-
ant. Finally I would like to thank Mrs Joan Heath who typed it.

Keele, 1979 joe Andrew

viii
Introduction
It is almost exactly one hundred years since Ivan Turgenev
received an honorary doctorate of civil law at Oxford, in 1879.
He was the first Russian writer to be known outside his home-
land, the first translation of his work having appeared as early as
1855. Oxford's honouring ofTurgenev was simply official recog-
nition of his already established international fame and his
works enjoyed a great vogue in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, on the European continent and in America, as well as
in Britain. Conrad, Galsworthy, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and
many others all attached what now seems an exaggerated import-
ance to his work. In 1911 Ford Madox Ford declared: 'Shakes-
peare, if he had taken time to think upon these matters, would
have been as great an artist as Tourgenieff.' But Turgenev was
only the first to capture a foreign readership. Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy, and to a lesser extent Chekhov, became very popular
towards the end of the last century, and their popularity has
hardly diminished today. Not only are these authors still widely
read: many of them have had a major impact on twentieth-
century literature and culture. Chekhov is rightly seen as one
of the greatest influences on contemporary theatre and the
short story, Dostoevsky is regarded as the forerunner of many
important aspects of twentieth-century thinking, while Tolstoy's
extra-literary activities had (and perhaps still have) great signifi-
cance in the wider, political world, not least through one of his
principal followers, Mahatma Gandhi.
It is an impossible task to explain fully why Russian writers
have attained this position. To say that they are 'great writers'
is clearly insufficient, and myths about the 'Russian soul' do
not lead us very far. However, if one particular factor can be
highlighted, it might well be the intensity of the writers' involve-
ment with their contemporary society which so appeals to
foreign as well as indigenous audiences. Writing towards the end
of the eighteenth century, Alexandr Radishchev comments at

ix
X Introduction

the opening of his celebrated A journey from St Petersburg to

Moscow: 'I looked around - and my soul was wounded by the
sufferings of man. I turned my gaze inward - and saw that the
disasters of man proceed from man, and often because of the
single fact that he does not look directly at the objects which
surround him.' It was Radishchev's aim to turn a ruthlessly direct
gaze at his society, to accuse it and to correct it. The whole work
is inspired by disgust and indignation on the one hand, and self-
lacerating compassion on the other- notes which were, in turn,
to inspire many writers and thinkers who were to follow him in
the nineteenth century. In his work, Radishchev brought to a
culmination the eighteenth-century themes of civic criticism and
established the tradition of a second voice in Russian society,
the 'alternative government' which much of nineteenth-century
literature was to form, and whose dominant notes were to be
intense compassion and civic involvement.
During the first half of the nineteenth century most of the
major writers and thinkers implicitly followed the direction
mapped out by Radishchev- the early Pushkin, Lermontov, the
Decembrist writers and, in particular, the men of the 'remarkable
decade', such as Herzen, Bakunin and Belinsky. Literature and
the criticism of it became almost the only available forum for
political discussion. Both opposition and government viewed
literature as a kind of 'alternative government', a second voice
which was able, if only indirectly, to offer some kind of chal-
lenge to established ideas and behaviour when more obvious
political methods were virtually impossible. It was the aim of
an earlier study by the present author, Writers and Society
during the Rise oj Russian Realism, to trace the development
of this 'alternative government', particularly during the reign
of Nicholas I. The present work continues this discussion, in an
attempt to see how the four great realists of the second half of
nineteenth-century Russia, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and
Chekhov, developed the tradition inaugurated by Radishchev
and built upon by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Belinsky.
As in the previous work, the four writers concerned will be
discussed in terms of their involvement with their contemporary
society, and the method used will largely follow the one I em-
ployed earlier. The link between writers and their society is an
exceedingly complex one, and the problem will be approached
from a number of different points of view. The first priority is
 Introduction xi

to establish the authors' original position in society, that is,

their class origins and the implications these may have in their
particular society. What impact does belonging to a declining or
rising class have on a writer's self-perception? And if writers are
alienated from their own class, to what extent can they join or
identify themselves with another? How important is education
and the general spirit of the age of their early years in modifying
their social origins?
Perhaps the single most important result of the social position
of writers is their financial situation and the impact this inevit-
ably has on their work. Financial independence protects any
artist against the demands of the market, and financially insecure
artists, who have to live off their literary income, for example,
are faced with a difficult struggle if they are not to succumb to
extraneous influences. Some writers obviously, then, regard their
work primarily as a much-needed source of income, but the
motives for artistic creation are clearly much more complicated.
Do they write for a specific readership, and if so, for which one
- the established, conventional market, or do they attempt to
lead, to set new patterns, establish new genres, express new or
oppositional views? Most important of all is the extent to which
writing is to be considered a private or a public activity. That
writers can ever create entirely for themselves, without even a
notional readership in view, is an extremely dubious proposition.
And whatever may be the ostensible integration of any artist
into his society, or a specific audience within it, it is also import-
ant to consider his self-perception. What value, that is, can
artists place on their work, what purpose do they see it serving,
what aims do they have when they write?
The social function of art can also be considered within a
narrower field, since artistic change is almost always closely
linked with social change. New genres and forms usually spring
from new patterns of behaviour, the rise to power of a new class
or the emergence of a new ideology. And so a study of writers'
relationships to the art that immediately precedes them is no
mere formalistic exercise: on the contrary, an examination of
innovatory techniques will give new insights on the changing role
of art in any society. A prominent instance of this is Dostoevsky's
attempt to to put an end to 'landowners' literature' with his
new 'higher realism'.
It is also important to consider the writers' own views of art,
xii Introduction

to discuss what demands from society they accept or reject in

principle, as well as in practice. Do they consider that art should
be useful, or do they regard it as serving its own ends? In either
case writers generally regard art as having a meaningful function,
although the precise meaning varies greatly even within the
development of a single writer, or in a given period. The most
striking example of this diversity of viewpoint in the present
work is the bitter polemics between the 'fathers', particularly
Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the 'sons', Cherny-
shevsky and Dohrolyubov, at the end of the 1850s, precisely
over the issue of the social function of art. Closely linked with
this issue is the way in which a writer chooses to depict society.
Many writers in nineteenth-century Russia followed Radishchev
and turned a ruthless gaze at their relatively backward country;
the tension between writer and publicist can be seen particularly
in Tolstoy. Others attempted to depict 'the body and pressure
of time', as Turgenev quoted Shakespeare, hut even in the least
utilitarian of authors, such as Chekhov and Turgenev himself,
there was a strong undercurrent of moralism. No writer can ever
really be a mere 'mirror' held up to nature.
Just as an artistic work inevitably has a social value and func-
tion - whatever its creator's intentions - so too a writer can
often be more usefully viewed as a member of a particular
group or society rather than as an isolated being. Accordingly a
consideration of the writers' relationships with their society will
play a central part in the ensuing discussion. Usually writers
participate in a literary or intellectual grouping whose opinions
they deliberately or unwittingly express, and their changing
relationships with their intellectual peers tell us much about
both their own artistic development and the meaning of their
art, as well as about the shifting currents of opinion in society.
This applies even more so to the critical reaction to a writer's
work, especially in Russia, where after 1830 almost all literary
criticism was implicitly or explicitly ideological - and usually
the latter. The importance of critical opinion in nineteenth-
century Russian literature, particularly after Belinsky, cannot
be overstated, and we cannot fully understand the role of litera-
ture in the period without careful consideration of how and
why certain books were acclaimed or vilified.
Similarly, an artist's popularity tells us much about both the
aims of a writer and about the changing demands of society. We
 Introduction xiii

need to look at who read a particular work, and why, in an

attempt to understand whether a writer was catering for known
demands or striving to create new ones, to invoke fresh responses
from the public. Innovatory works, it should be noted, generally
fare badly with both the critics and the public. Despite this a
great writer will occasionally succeed in changing public taste,
and will create new perceptions of reality. Indeed, it can be
argued that the sign of great writers is precisely their ability to
force the wider society to reconsider, and even change its accep-
ted view of reality.
A rather different problem is the degree of the writer's inte-
gration within more specific sections of society, that is, oppo-
sitional, even revolutionary forces on the one hand, and the
government or 'establishment' on the other. Superficially, these
relationships may seem to have little to do with a writer's art,
but in nineteenth-century Russia the opposite was usually the
case. Some of the writers considered here not only experienced
censorship difficulties, but found themselves suspect to and in
conflict with the ruling authorities, and some of them, at some
stage in their lives, were associated with radical groups.
All the above questions concern the writer's relationship with
society. We cannot, though, fully understand this, our central
concern, without taking into account what particular writers
thought of the world that surrounded them - both in their
artistic writings and elsewhere. Writers' explicit political and
philosophical views are often interesting in themselves and can
tell us much about their artistic writing. They also usually play
an important part in shaping their actual relationships with
society, and in turn are changed by their experience of the world.
What is rather more problematical is the view of the world ex-
pressed in their artistic writings. While any work of art will
inevitably embody a certain world-view many questions arise.
Can one find a coherent viewpoint in all, or most, of an artist's
creations, and is this the artist's own or that of a social group or
class? To what extent can art best be viewed as visionary - as
propagating an alternative reality rather than the reality which
actually surrounds the artist? In other words, can we best view
art as a challenge to reality as it is perceived by other members
of society? Such questions are particularly important in the
period that concerns us. The nineteenth century in Russia saw
immense social change, bringing with it the final destruction of
xiv Introduction

a semi-feudal society. Industrialisation, the rise of capitalism

and the bourgeoisie, increased secularisation - all this was
carried through alongside the disintegration of old values and
beliefs. It was a century of conflict and dissension culminating
in the establishment of an unprecedented political order. The
role of literature in such a society was inevitably markedly
different from its function in a more stable period and the
demands placed on literature were rather idiosyncratic. And so
we find that literature came to play a part that is always latent
within any art. It came, that is, to work for society, by working
against it; it challenged old beliefs and sought new ones; it acted
as the forum for political discussion when more obvious channels
were closed. From a purely aesthetic point of view, art may have
suffered, but in many other ways its peculiar function as an
'alternative government' enormously enriched it. And for this
reason nineteenth-century Russian literature remains a remark-
able social as well as artistic monument to those who involun-
tarily, or wholeheartedly, followed Radishchev from St Peters-
burg to Moscow.

A couple of technical points should be mentioned. All trans-

lations in the text and notes are my own unless otherwise stated.
The transliteration is that used in The Slavonic and East European
Review.
Chronology
1790 Publication of Radishchev's A Journey from St
Petersburg to Moscow
1796 Accession of Paul I
1799 Birth of Pushkin
1801 Accession of Alexander I
1809 Birth of Gogol
1811 Birth of Belinsky
1812 French invasion of Russia, followed by Russian
entry in Western Europe and occupation of Paris
Birth of Herzen
1814 Birth of Lermontov
1818 Birth of Turgenev
1821 Birth of Dostoevsky
1825 Accession of Nicholas I
Decembrist uprising
1826 Trial, exile and execution of Decembrists
Third Section set up
1828 Birth of Tolstoy
Birth of Chernyshevsky
1830-1 Polish uprising; abrogation of Polish Constitution
1836 Publication of Chaadaev's First Philosophical
Letter
Birth of Dobrolyubov
1837 Death of Pushkin
1841 Death of Lermontov
1848 European revolutions
Death of Belinsky
1849 Petrashevsky 'conspirators' arrested
1852 Death of Gogol
1853-6 Crimean War
1855 Accession of Alexander II
1860 Birth of Chekhov
1861 Emancipation of serfs

XV
xvi Chronology

Death of Dobrolyubov
1863 Polish uprising
1864 Court reform
Introduction of zemstvo and city self-government
1866 First assassination attempt on Alexander II, by
Karakozov
1868 Birth of Maxim Gorky
1870 Death of Herzen
1871 Paris Commune
1874 First 'going to the people' movement
1877-8 Trials of '50' and '193'
1878 Vera Zasulich shoots St Petersburg police chief
Series of anti-terrorist measures
1880 Terrorists succeed in planting bomb in Winter
Palace
Third Section abolished; establishment of new
department of State Police
1881 Assassination of Alexander II
Death of Dostoevsky
Accession of Alexander III
1883 Death ofTurgenev
1889 Death of Chernyshevsky
1892-1903 Witte revolutionises industry, commerce and trans-
port
1894 Accession of Nicholas II
1897 Foundation of Moscow Arts Theatre
1898 Foundation of Marxist R.S.D.L.P. (Social Demo-
cratic Labour Party)
1903 Lenin splits Social Democratic Party into Bolsh-
evik and Menshevik wings
Kishinyov pogrom
1904 Assassination of V. I. Plehve (Minister of Interior)
1905 End of Russo-Japanese War
Bloody Sunday (9 January)
Assassination of Grand Duke Sergei
Abortive revolution
State Duma conceded
1906-11 Stolypin era. Successive dumas
Revolutionary agricultural reforms
Rasputin gains ascendancy over Tsaritsa and Tsar
1910 Death of Tolstoy
 Chronology xvii

1911 Assassination of Stolypin

1914-1917 War with Germany and Austria
1916 Rasputin murdered
1917 Nicholas abdicates (February)
The Provisional Government
October 26: October Revolution