Anna Karenina / War and Peace

I've recently read both of Tolstoy's most celebrated works - they took me a lot less time than I thought they would, and after War and Peace I got a sudden fancy for Russian literature and read the other one.

What's noticeable in War and Peace is Tolstoy's philosopical leanings; there's an entire second epilogue devoted to the subject, and countless asides along the way. Several major characters undergo spiritual changes brought about by the extreme circumstances they face; Pierre becomes, for a while, a Mason; Prince Andrew discovers religion very near the end of his life, whilst his sister Mary has felt Christian compassion for many years, a kind of reaction in her soul to the treatment she faced from her father.

In Anna Karenina these same changes are presented, though fewer and less profound perhaps; Levin comes late to the game with his agnostic-semireligious conversion, after he marries his darling Kitty, who years earlier, snubbed by Anna Karenina's eventual lover, discovered her faith whilst working in a hospital-resort.

Thankfully, Anna Karenina, written years after War and Peace and the critics' mixed reception of Tolstoy's philosophising, lacks any real epilogue, although a major portion of the final part of the book is given over to thoughts of religious matters: however, the thoughts run through Levin as a conduit, and are not merely dumped on the page for the reader to try valiantly to digest.

There are also countless asides regarding the nature of man and society, both explicitly and implicitly, in both novels. These, at times, form the most interesting aspects of Tolstoy's writings - for me at least. Despite the sixty or so years that separate the two novels, little appears to have changed in Russian society; perhaps by Anna Karenina people are more liberal, but daughters are still married off by their parents' consent, much as they were at the beginning of the century.

One very important feature of the two books, taken as a whole, is the view one gets of life as a peasant. Between the two novels the peasantry were emancipated - given their freedom. In War and Peace this is discussed again through Prince Andrew, who believes in the good work of the peasant, and Pierre, who in a fit of spirituality seeks to rid himself of his land by giving it to the people who work it.

Things are not so rosy later in Anna Karenina. The peasants' lot has not much improved, and in some cases is as bad as ever. Despite the token freedom given to most, the majority suffer from poverty and a lack of education and welfare support; rural hospitals are rare, and only built as a token of goodwill and Christian service.

I'm keen to read more about Russia, the Russia of this period. What I have garnered through a quick reading of these two Tolstoy novels has done little more than whet my appetite; I should be very glad of any suggested further reading.

soylentgreen23:
Since you started at the very top of the greatest period in the Russian novel, the next tier down would be Dostoievsky and Turgenev. In my mind, the greatest of the Dostoievsky novels is the Brothers Karamazov, but some would vote for Crime and Punishment or the Idiot. Turgenev's most famous novel is Fathers and Sons, but my favorites are the Sportsmen's Sketches aka Sketches from a Hunter's Album which were very popular in Russia and contributed to the freeing of the serfs. Even though he didn't write novels, but only plays and stories, I think Chekhov is the greatest Russian writer after Tolstoy, for the breadth of his humanity, his realism, humor, economy of style and lack of preaching.

Excellent suggestions by almigwin. All good ones, but as an introduction to the Russia of about 1840 / 1850 (is that right?), some of the Sketches from a hunter's album, in particular, are wonderful. (Especially "Bezhin Lea").

(almigwin, you might want to change your touchstone here - that one actually links to a different book.)

Also, if you want a great non-fiction guide to the period, try Natasha's Dance.

Thanks for your insightful review, soylentgreen23. I read and enjoyed War and Peace and Anna Karenina many years ago, and the theme having to do with the peasantry had escaped me entirely. I've read more about Tolstoy's life since then, and the class structure of Russian society was indeed a major concern of his - clearly the references to the peasants in both novels were quite deliberate, perhaps central to his purpose in writing these novels. Doctor Zhivago is from a later period, but might be the most relevant extension of Tolstoy's themes, since it takes us to the period when the continuing oppression of the poor classes who had once been peasants finally erupted in the Russian Revolution.

I would put Dostoevsky at the pinnacle of Russian literature, myself. Tolstoy does a masterful job of depicting and critiquing Russian society, and his characters do come to life. But Doestoevsky has a way of plunging us deep into his characters' souls. My personal favorite is The Idiot, which is suffused with a sense of redemption and hope, but The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment are also amazing novels.

3 desultory: Sportsman's sketches and Sketches from a Hunters Album are just different translations of the same stories.
I would be glad to fix the touchstones, but I don't know how, or what you think I should fix.
I would like to suggest some books written after the revolution.
The best of them in my opinion after the Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel are:
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman,
And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov,
and Generations of winter by Vasily Aksyonov.

almigwin, of course you're right about the names, it's just that if you click on Sportsmen's sketches you get "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold.

It's just a square bracket thing - see to the right of the box when you're posting a message.

desultory; thanks for the info; I fixed it.

Tolstoy tops my list for Russian fiction. I loved both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I finally read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment last year, and while I greatly enjoyed it, I don't think it rises to the level of Tolstoy's fiction. I think Dostoevsky is a bit "darker" in his writings than Tolstoy. Tolstoy's writing is so evocative of the peasant class and his view of society, I think, is much more optimistic.

Soylentgreen23's review seems to have tapped a particularly rich vein! Anybody up for a comparison review of two or more books by Turgenyev, Chekhov, Pasternak, Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman, Mikhail Sholokhov, and/or Vasily Aksyonov?

Interesting thread :-)
thanks for inviting me, Margad.

I read a lot of Russian novels a long time ago. Unfortunately, all in translation. I would learn Russian, just to be able to read these novels in their original language.

I didn't like Anna Karenina at all, I didn't even finish War and Pease. But I'm a great admirer of Dostoyewski, I think the Karamazow brothers is his greatest work. Read it a couple of times. I like the Idiot and all his other works too. Gogolj is less accessible, I think, because it's translated. I enjoyed Dead Souls, but I'm not sure I get to appreciate all of it, reading just a translation. That's even more true for Pushkins Jevgeni Onjegin. Works like that shouldn't be translated :-)

The reason I like Dostoyewski more than Tolstoy is that there's more depth in the characters in D's books.

It's been quite a few years since I read Dead Souls, but I remember finding it hysterically funny.

Welcome to the group, xtien. How many languages do you read? Other than my native English, German is the only language I read well enough to get by in. When I reached that point, I discovered I was finding a certain kind of pleasure in the reading that I remembered from when I was a child and reading in itself was still fairly new to me. I was reading word by word instead of in huge gulps of story. So every detail of description was unusually vivid.

I have a big stack of books I've been enticed into reading by all the reviews on this site. When I get started with them, I think I will try to read them in that way, if I can. I have a feeling that Virginia Woolf, in particular, should be read that way.

Dead souls is funny, but it's sad also.
I'm fluent in four languages (English, German, French, Dutch), I read Spanish, I used to read Latin and ancient Greek (mostly in school).

I try to read books in their original language. Currently I read mostly American books, some English, a French novel every once in a while, sometimes a contemporary Dutch novel.

I'm so jealous, xtien! I've been trying to learn Hungarian, which would give me a third language (and I love Hungarian fiction, so much of which is delightfully humorous and so little of which is translated into English), but I just haven't been able to carve out enough time to get over the hump of needing a dictionary five or six times in every sentence.

I think humor does generally come out of sadness.

#3> desultory, I completely agree with your suggestion of Natasha's dance by Orlando Figes. Wonderfully smooth and interesting reading!

soylentgreen23, now that you've read the 'big ones' by Tolstoy', don't neglect his shorter masterpieces: The Cossacks and Hadji Murad are especially good, as is The Kreutzer Sonata.
They contain everything you love about Tolstoy but on a smaller more concentrated scale.

The mid-1800s Russians are definitely amazing, but they are even better with a little bit of context. The main salient detail is that the nobility was suddenly and abruptly westernized by Peter the Great, circa 1700. Even 150 years later, a lot of what is going on is that these guys are caught between two worlds, one feudal, folk, collective, and Russian, the other modern, sophisticated, individual, and largely French. You'll notice in a lot of the novels that the nobility speak French more than Russian, and in fact a lot of them couldn't even speak or write Russian very well. That is, until the mid-1800s, when a real movement to reclaim Russian identity arose. Not coincidentally, a real Russian literature arose at roughly the same time, and a lot of the people who created it were also the people trying to figure out how to integrate their Western and Russian identities.

The sudden Westernization and resulting inferiority complex also meant that they tended to get Western ideas at an extra level of abstraction, and in some cases to take them way more literally and seriously than the people who came up with them in the first place. This is where you get a lot of the wacky radical extremism found in the fringe characters of Dostoevksy, though some of that was doubtless amplified for satirical or socratic purposes. But Turgenev's Bazarov in Fathers and Sons is evidently a pretty accurate portrait of some of the young radicals around at the time he, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were writing, and the sporadic utter ideological wackiness of critics like Belinsky and Chernyshevsky is also pretty established in the records of their interactions with the big three authors of the time.

It was sort of a fundamentalist religious tempermental approach to modern ideas and science. They took these things deadly seriously in some cases, and took lots of things to their logical conclusions and well beyond. It's really interesting because you have very intelligent people who are well-versed in the ideas that would make the 20th Century, for better or worse, but who were also approaching them from a different angle, from outside the traditions they were working in, and without a lot of the assumptions that Europe and the rest of the West were working from. So you get the same attempts to adjust to and define the early modern world, but with very different emphases and insights and approaches.

So you've got all that going on, plus a Victorian-London-esque, chaotic, rapidly urbanizing society in Moscow and St. Petersburg, a debate over serfdom that had similarities to and was contemporaneous with the US debate over slavery, frontier expansion at the expense of indigenous peoples and a manifest destiny sort of tint to the rising nationalism that also mirrored what was going on in the US, a colonialist-like romanticization of both the indigenous people and Muslims they were conquering and their own peasants, who they were just about as alienated from as the former. And looming ominously over all of this ferment, there was an archaic, absurd, dysfunctional, wildly unpredictable autocratic state.

Dostoevsky went through a mock execution and was sent to Siberia for 10 years basically over handing out some flyers. Others at different times got away with much more with impunity. It was all pretty arbitrary and the rules were constantly changing. Things opened up a lot by the mid 1850's, but everything was still subject to the capricious whim of the censors, the social arrangement of the nobility, and the czar. So, there was a lot of subtext and parable and allusion going on to get around that, and the feelings of political powerlessness and precariousness really colored the outlooks of the writers, especially Dostoevsky.

As you can see, I'm kind of an insane Russophile. I picked up most of this from only a few sources though... one college Russian Lit survey class, the excellent notes in the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of many of the works of Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, the abovementioned Natasha's Dance, and most of all, Joseph Frank's insanely thorough 5 volume literary biography of Dostoevsky, which I've been slowly working my way through for years. I'll do another post talking more about specific authors sometime soon here, but this covers a good amount of the background you should know to fully appreciate the stuff from Pushkin on up to Chekhov.

jddunn,
It sounds like you would make an excellent guide to the confusing array of writers and allusions presented in Nabokov's "The Gift."
Many thanks for your leads into the complicated subject.

jddunn, thank you for a wonderfully comprehensive (in such a short space) and clear introduction to mid-1880s Russia!

It occurs to me that the Middle East has been going through a similar process of drastic sudden change, even though it was introduced more by the phenomenon of oil than by an individual like Peter the Great. Russian literature might be especially relevant right now, for this reason.

#16 the big question at the time was - what does it mean to be Russian? It is interesting how many novels of this novel, including those by the Dostoevsky & Tolstoy, are critical of Russians, usually the aristocracy, who adopt French, German or British ideas. This is why the peasants, or enlightened landowners, are often portrayed as the true future of Russia - they have not been corrupted by alien ideas. One of the reasons that Turgenev was increasingly criticised was that he was seen to siding with non-Russian ideas, as he spent much of his adulthood living abroad. (Fathers and Sons was not well-received in Russia when first published but was very successful elsewhere in Europe).

A very good insight, jargoneer!

There are clear pitfalls in, on the one hand, rejecting one's own heritage as somehow less worthy than those of other parts of the world and, on the other hand, becoming overly insular and rejecting useful influences from outside. It appears the Muslim world is also re-evaluating what it means to be Muslim, with many embracing ideas from the outside and integrating them into their understanding of their faith, and others rejecting outside ideas to the point of attempting to annihilate them. Perhaps also the U.S. (and Western nations generally) are being confronted with similar questions, reflected in issues of immigration, trade, etc.

Ok, so the promised short breakdown of individual writers:

Pushkin was pretty much the great founding figure, and the archetype that all who followed reacted to and measured themselves against. He was entangled in the ill-fated and short Decemberist uprising, which was the first real attempt at liberalization by a faction of the nobility, which both inspired the future generations of liberal intelligentsia who would flourish in the 1850's and 60's, and led to the crackdown atmosphere in the 1830s and 40s that sent Dostoevsky to a gulag. I feel like I should know more about Pushkin, as he's obviously a really important piece of context for the later works, but there's not a ton easily available secondary-source wise, and his poetry evidently suffers quite a bit in translation, so I haven't made an effort to tackle Evgevny Onegin or much of his verse at all. The one thing of his I have read is The Queen of Spades and other Stories. There's enough compelling and ahead-of-its-time stuff in there to make me definitely want to look further into his work. And you can very easily see the influence of those stories on Tolstoy in The Cossacks and some of his other early, more Romantic work. Romantic fits Pushkin well in terms of genre. There are definitely a lot of similarities to Byron in his larger-than-life and controversial persona and celebrity. The work of his I've seen is a little more restrained than the Euro Romanticism of the time, but in temperament and approach it fits somewhere in that general category.

Gogol was more immediately relevant, as he was both a trailblazer and an older contemporary of the Big Three. He basically kicked off and defined the future directions of "modern" Russian lit with Dead Souls and smaller works like The Overcoat and The Inspector General. These works blazed trails in two directions: one, a broad attempt to try to encompass and describe the vastness of the country, and to start to figure out just what "Russianness" meant. The second: to abandon Romanticism for more of a realist, socially, politically, and morally concerned and critical approach. Dead Souls more than any other work defined the landscape in which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev would work. It set out a national mythical metaphor of Russia as a speeding troika, powerful, progressing, but also somewhat out of control and frightening. As nationalism increased, this myth would later lose most of the negative aspects, and the troika came to symbolize the strength of the rising power of Russia, whose destiny it was to succeed and save a supposedly dying and degenerate Europe. In this way, it sort of became the Russian version of the American "City on a Hill" mythos. But, aside from all of that baggage, Dead Souls on its own terms was also a rollicking, hilariously satirical but still lovingly drawn road tale, and is a really fun read. Some of Gogol's short stories also laid out the gritty, suffocating, somewhat desperate new urban world that Dostoevsky's characters would later inhabit.

The other person of note from this era is Belinsky, who was the preeminent critic in the 1840's. He helped define Gogol as a towering figure, and basically put Dostoevsky on the map with his effusive praise of his first novel, Poor Folk. He also had the sort of abstract/radical tendencies alluded to in my previous post. He was rigidly dogmatic in his conviction that the only valid purpose of literature and art was social and moral improvement. He latched on to Poor Folk because it was an early example of a social novel exploring the underworld of the new urban poor, and thus furthered his ideals. However, as soon as Dostoevsky tried to branch out artistically in his next novel, Belinsky turned on him. This sort of extreme and rigid ideological / personal conflict would repeat itself many times in the years to come in the Russian literary world.

So, that sets the stage for the era of the great flowering of Russian Lit from the mid 1850's on. But before that could happen, the failed revolutions of 1848 across much of Europe took their toll, and Tsar Nicholas' paranoid crackdown put Dostoevsky in Siberia, and led to Turgenev, Herzen(critical heir to Belinsky, though with a less ideological bent and a journalistic twist), and much of the rest of the rising new generation of liberal intelligentsia into exile in Europe, with the inevitable results of political hopelessness and further confusion about Russian-ness vs. Western-ness. I'll pick up the story from there sometime soon.

Thanks for another great post, jddunn. One can hardly read anything about Russia without realizing what a revered figure Pushkin was and is, so your introduction to him is really helpful. I, too, have not been terribly eager to read his work. Poetry is so much harder to translate well than prose, and the great pitfall in translating epic poetry is the way it tends to sink into doggerel. I think, also, people have less patience with poetry in general now. In the days when poetry more popular than prose, it was much more a spoken medium than written, and rhythm and rhyme helped favorite passages linger in the mind.

I did see the opera of Eugene Onegin many years ago and loved it.

I think I've met a few people like Belinsky!

Wow, so I totally forgot about this and lost the thread for awhile there. What can I say? It's spring.

Anyhoo, we'll pick back up in the mid-1850's, right at the beginning of the era where Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Herzen, and Turgenev were in their prime. Two big events that would forever change the course of Russian history happened in quick succession in 1854-55. The first was the Crimean War. Russia's imperial expansion in the mid-1800's was fairly staggering. After consolidating at least nominal control of Siberia all the way to the Pacific in the 1700's, they turned to the south, gobbling up most of Central Asia and large chunks of the slowly dying Ottoman Empire. Since they were a feudal society, they tended to be really economically inefficient, and so the military and noble classes relied on expansion as opposed to development to keep growth going.

By the 1850's, this constant expansion started to really collide with European interests. The interest in the so-called Eastern Question on the part of most the the European powers at the time was to prop up the Ottomans in a weakened form, so that a neutral party of sorts would control access from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and Asia, and a rough balance of power would be maintained. Russia was getting to the point of threatening to wipe out the Ottomans entirely and seize control of Constantinople and the all-important Straits of the Bosporus, so France and Britain, with the complicity of Austria-Hungary, stepped in to stop that from happening. The details and pretexts are a lot messier than that, but that's what it boils down to.

The Crimean is often called the first truly modern war, in that infrantry with rifled weapons, sustained massed artillery attacks, the tactical use of railroads and the telegraph, and trench warfare all happened on a large scale for the first time. Russia came out looking mighty backward in the face of these new technologies, and were fairly thoroughly spanked, though the war was ugly and dissatisfying for all parties, as wars fought for vague and dubious reasons tend to be. This sense of backwardness and a need for reform that came out the Crimean defeat would be crucial to creating the much freer and more progressive environment in which Russian literature would flourish.

The other important piece of the puzzle fell into place in 1855, as Tsar Nicholas I died and was replaced by Alexander II. The formative event for Nicholas I's politics had been the earlier-mentioned Decemberist uprising, which happened literally as he was succeeding to the throne. He and his loyalist faction crushed the rebellion, and his reign from then on was largely repressive, as we have seen from what happened to Dostoevsky, Herzen, and Turgenev. Alexander was almost his polar opposite in temperament and ideals, and the humbling defeat in the Crimea only reinforced his sense of the need for change. Alexander negotiated the peace in 1856, put out broad hints about his intentions to address the serfdom question and other questions long held dear by the liberal intelligentsia, and relaxed restrictions and censorship. Spurred by this hopeful and progressive new environment, the old intellectuals started to come out of hiding, and plenty of new voices joined them, creating a very dynamic political and intellectual environment almost instantly.

But what of the men who would go on to become the defining authors of the era? Tolstoy had managed to stay out of trouble, at least with the government. He was from an old, rich, and powerful family in the nobility, and spent most of his youth gambling, drinking, and carousing. He seems to have had a crisis of some sort and decided to get on the wagon around 1850-51, volunteering for the army as a private(when his position could have easily entitled him to an officer's commission) and being sent to the Caucases. His first published writings date from around then as well. When the Crimean started up, he was transferred to Sevastopol, the site of the major ongoing battle of the war. His Sevastopol Sketches were in many ways some of the first modern war journalism, of the grittily realist "war is hell" sort of mentality. Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, all semi-autobiographical, pastoral, bildungsroman-ish novels bookended his time in the Crimea, and together these works made his name once and for all as an important Russian and rising international writer.

Herzen and Turgenev were both living and writing in exile in Europe, and would stay there, physically in the case of Herzen, and in spirit in the case of Turgenev, for the duration. Their works and publications were smuggled into the country and read in samizdat form under Nicholas, and they were quite influential on the rising liberal intellectual class who would flourish in the late 1850's and 60's. Herzen acted as a conduit for ideas between Russia and the West during those years, through his periodicals The Polar Star, and later, the Bell. These were technically verboten in Russia, but were open secrets of sorts, and served as a relatively safe space in which to explore and air ideas that couldn't be discussed out in the open during those repressive years. Turgenev, with his Diary of a Superfluous Man, provided a defining archetype for this generation of liberal intellectuals. Many came to view themselves as Superfluous Men, in that they were very well educated and ambitious, wanted to work for social and political change in Russia, and in many cases were wealthy and connected, but could do nothing with their considerable powers and resources under the repressive, autocratic rule of the Tsars. These ideas of superfluity and paralysis, and then a vestigial unsureness and insecurity under the new, more permissive regime of Alexander and in the face of a rising younger generation of much more militant and radical thinkers are referenced all over the place in the literature of the 1850's and 60's.

Dostoevsky was absent from the scene this whole time, and indeed would be until the rather late date of 1859. Arrested in 1849, he spent 5 years at hard labor(later chronicled in the House of the Dead) in a gulag in Omsk, Siberia, and then another 5 in enforced military service in the extremely remote colonial outpost of Semipalatinsk, in what is now Kazakhtsan. He was originally sentenced to 10 years of military service, but eventually in the more relaxed environment of Alexander's regime, old literary friends managed to engineer his release and return to St. Petersburg from internal exile. It probably took longer than it should have because Dostoevsky was a lot less connected and wealthy than most of his literary peers, as he came from a family of petty nobility(his father had been a doctor.) Frank's biography chronicles an almost endless Kafkaesque process of repeatedly petitioning anyone and everyone he could think of who might have the necessary aceess to the Tsar's inner circle to obtain a pardon.

In my final installment, I'll cover the era from 1859 to the early 1880's, a period when almost all of what we think of as the greatest 19th-century Russian novels were written. Anna Karenina came out in 1877, after which Tolstoy went in a drastically different direction, and Dostoevsky died in 1881 followed closely by Turgenev in 1883, so that's probably a good stopping place, and my knowledge gets a lot more sketchy after that anyway.

Fascinating surveys, jddunn, and as you say, understanding the context does help to situate and understand the writers.

I don't know if anyone on LT is also following the project that Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi has launched concerning the Prime Minister of Canada. Martel is upset with what he sees as the government's lack of support for the arts in Canada, so every two weeks he sends the PM a book for his reading pleasure and edification. You can follow this on www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca The connection to this thread is that the first book suggested by Martel is Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych. Introducing the book, Martel says, "I can't think of a work of such brevity, hardly 60 pages, that shows so convincingly the power and depth of great literature." And he has what I think is an excellent passage on why we read:

"That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others, we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, as is the case of this book, it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way we are wiser, we are existentially thicker."

I like that phrase, "existentially thicker" and I think it certainly applies to reading Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and many of the Russian authors listed herre.

jddunn has done (no pun intended) an excellent job of setting the stage and explaining the Great Russian authors and their project. I have learned quite a bit by reading his posts. In so doing several things came to mind.

I feel, as Margad suggests in #21 that the U. S. is undergoing a crisis of identity. I fear different peope have very different visions of what it means to be American. One of the ironies of Ronald Reagan was his creation of mourning (quite often misspelled morning) in America which almost immediately plunged us into the darkness of a day of discontent, demonization, and extreme individualism with no sense of common social cohesion. What does it mean to be an American?

In #22 jddunn brings up the critic Belinsky who thought he owned the direction social thought should take in Russia at the time and rejected Dostoevsky when he tried to branch out in other directions. This episode reminds me of how the folkies in the '60's reacted to Bob Dylan's electric music at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan was the greatest social commentator of his day, at least in my circles, and when he changed his style people couldn't hear Maggie's Farm for the electric guitars. The three albums he created during the two years following are arguably the Laocoon of American social criticism. Of course the folkies still had Phil Ochs, not a bad thing, either.

The discussion of the Crimean War immediately brought to mind one of the iconic pieces of early film making: Alfalfa reciting Charge of the Light Brigade complete with sound effects.

Finally, and a little more to the point, a wonderful book to start any discussion of the New vs. Old Russia is the biography of Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie. Peter's life is the story of Russia's conflict.

{Edit: unsuccessful attempt to make an omelet, oops umlaut, with a PC laptop with no 10 key pad).

So, now that the site is back, time for the final installment(s). It proved way too difficult to compress all of this into one post and still do it justice, so I'll serialize it over the next few days. I know this is getting ridiculously epic, but don't worry, I had already planned on writing all of this out for an essay or series of blog posts and for my own benefit, so I'm not putting in all of this time and effort just for this thread. I do hope it will inform and enrich your reading of the great Russian novels though(or inspire you to read them if you haven't yet), and if it does, I will have happily succeeded in what I set out to do.

As I said in my previous post, soon after Alexander relaxed restrictions, all hell sort of broke loose, in an intellectual and increasingly in an actual sense. Old samizdat journals went above ground, and tons of new ones were founded very quickly, and a vibrant intellectual, cultural, and political scene sprang to life almost instantly. Most of what we know as full novels today were published serially in these journals, in the same way that Dickens' stuff was serialized in Victorian London. So you had great literature, almost real-time criticism of said literature, political polemic, cultural exploration of the "Russianness" and other issues, biting satire and various and sundry slap-fights between critics and ideological factions, all being published and debated in the same spaces, as well as in person in Petersburg and to some extent in Moscow.

This was still mostly an elite and closely-connected scene in the late 1850's, populated largely by the landed noblilty, but that would change rather rapidly as the first generation of young petty bourgeois urban Russians began to come on the scene and make their often more radical voices heard, leading to much class and ideological conflict in the 1860's. Lots of new social movements got going right around then as well. With Alexander's decisions to emancipate the serfs, reform the (extremely arbitrary, corrupt, and capricious) legal system, and edge toward a modern capitalistic economy, huge upheavals were going on, and all that heretofore superfluous energy, talent, and money finally had room to flourish.

This is where you get stuff like Vronsky's hospital project, and Levin's endless discursions on The True Nature of Russian Agriculture in Anna Karenina. The liberal/Westernized component of the landowning nobility were truly in earnest about this stuff, though with wildly varying degrees of success and resolution. Imagine if the American Founding Fathers of the Virginia planter aristocracy had had the courage of their convictions, and tried to make a go of running their estates with hired labor and modern farming methods. That's what the best of these Russian nobles were trying to do; to either run a cooperative farm and village for the benefit of all, or at least to pay their ex-serfs fair wages and give them the freedom to pursue their own interests. Of course, the economic realities of emerging global markets, Russian technological backwardness, and a largely illiterate and unskilled workforce doomed most of these efforts to failure, and these efforts were comparatively rare to begin with, as much of the old noblilty were reactionaries who quickly reduced their ex-serfs to sharecroppers and continued on much as before.

In this vein, there were also lots of movements to try to reach out to the the newly-emancipated peasantry, which fell under the general umbrella of "back to the people" or "back to the land." Lots of idealistic young intellectuals tried to go tramp around the countryside and teach largely illiterate and superstitious peasants to read, write, use modern farming methods and medicine, and to instill them with some sort of self-consciousness as Russians and hopefully as future citizens(or in some cases, proletarians.) These efforts also had predictably mixed and often tragi-comic results. Bazarov in Fathers and Sons is a character study of the more extreme of these back-to-the-people types, and you can see the precursors of Leninism pretty easily in some of the more radical aspects of this. Efforts that bore more fruit were attempts to learn from the peasants rather than to teach them. Lots of ethnographic, anthropological, and artistic expeditions were undertaken, and traditional Russian folk culture was for the first time really widely studied and assimilated by the educated classes. This process is really well-documented in the previously mentioned Natasha's Dance, by Orlando Figes, but it can be found organically especially in Tolstoy(the famous scene in War and Peace from which Natasha's Dance takes its title is a paramount example), and in varying degrees in all of these writers.

As far as they go, as we have seen, Dostoevsky had already had an aborted but promising early career in the 1840's. Turgenev had made his name in the early 1850's with Diary of a Superfluous Man and Sportsmen's Sketches. Tolstoy's rise to literary prominence bookended the Crimean War. By the late 1850's, all three of them were ideally positioned to join in and in many ways define this dynamic new cultural and political era. On returning from the Crimea, Tolstoy was the toast of literary Petersburg and Moscow. But, having turned away from his old drinking and gambling ways, he was not suited to the fast life of the cities, and he was also intellectually too much of a maverick to really fit in any of the new rising movements and ideologies. He soon retreated to his ancestral estate at Yasnaya Polyana, about 100 miles south of Moscow, to write and attempt his own personal "back to the people" projects with his ex-serfs and the other nearby peasantry.

Dostoevsky finally returned from exile in 1859, a rather starkly changed man. Prison and exile had had a profound effect on him, strengthening his religious faith, crushing his youthful naivete and exposing him repeatedly and forcefully to the myriad extremes of faith and love on the one hand, and sadistic cruelty and indifference on the other, of which humanity(and the Russian people in particular) were capable. It all amounted to a sort of conversion experience, to a mystical faith in the power of the capacity for Christ-like love he claimed to have found in the soul of the Russian people. He had always been religious, and in fact his piousness had been the other main point of contention over which he had broken with the atheistic and materialist Belinksy circle early in his career. His epilepsy added to this faith a mystical or transcendental component, as the precursor to many of his attacks was a feeling of incredible well-being, which he likened to being in the presence of God or being suddenly enlightened as to the meaning of existence. All of these themes would inform his whole body of work, and pull him in unique directions, away from both the materialistic radicals and the rigidly dogmatic reactionaries and establishment Slavophiles and into the lifelong spirituo-moral quest for Christian love and a reconciliation of his moral and ideological conflicts.

(up next, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and the radicals slug it out in literary St. Petersburg)

Dostoevsky jumped right into the fray, moving in with his brother Mikhail and his family in a working class area in St. Petersburg(the neighborhood he lived and worked in these years is the setting for Crime and Punishment), co-founding and editing a literary journal(Vremya, or "Time") with him, and writing and serializing several shorter works in fairly quick succession(The Village of Stepanchikovo, The Insulted and Injured, and a fictionalized account of his time in prison, Memoirs from the House of the Dead.) These in part helped him to regain his reputation as an important writer, but his real prominence at this stage was as a remarkably prolific journalist, critic, editor, and pundit in the midst of the dizzying and ferocious new debate on any and all aspects of Russian life, politics, and culture.

This debate ran on two main axes: The first was political, in terms of where people stood on Alexander's reforms. Much of the old nobility more or less opposed them, and did what they could to sabotage or fight them without personally offending the Tsar. The intelligentsia of the older generation were mostly cautious liberals who wanted to make Alexander's reforms work, but didn't want to seriously challenge the authority of the Tsar or the system itself. Many of them wanted a democratic or republican Russia, but at some indeterminate point in the future. Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and to some degree Tolstoy occupied this middle ground, with various leanings and vacillations at different times and under different circumstances. The new younger urban petty bourgeois class came of age in the era of the European Revolutions of 1848, had less personal investment in the old system, and were more radical, wanting at least immediate democratic government, and increasingly tending toward violent revolutionary upheaval and nihilism as time went on.

The second axis was cultural, in terms of Western vs. Russian, and was known as the Westernizers vs. the Slavophiles. Turgenev was firmly a Westernizer, as we have seen. Tolstoy started out a Westernizer, lost faith in that and put it in the Russian People, which made him roughly a Slavophile, but he ended up a sort of a party of one: a Christian anarchist collectivist, incorporating parts of all three political poles. Dostoevsky was a conflicted Slavophile, who would sort of yo-yo between nationalistic bellicosity and messianic views of the Russian people on one side, and his Western cultural touchstones and more a realistic and grim view of his country and people born of his unique and troubling experiences of Russian life as a prisoner and internal exile on the other

Slavophiles generally mapped to political conservatives and reactionaries, and Westernizers to liberals in favor of change, but as we can see from these three examples, this wasn't hard and fast, and the contested middle was where a lot of the interesting synthesis was going on. Still, their inability to fit entirely in any of these ideological matrices or to completely satisfy any of these warring factions would cause quite a lot of grief for all three men over the course of their careers.

So, we enter the Mid-1860's with Dostoevsky working furiously on Vremya as well as his larger literary projects, Tolstoy holed up at Yasnaya Polyana trying out utopian schemes with his local peasants, writing The Cossacks, and soon to begin work on War and Peace. Turgenev's best work was almost behind him, but his Fathers and Sons, which came out in 1862, created a firestorm and served to galvanize and focus all of the debates mentioned above. The book itself is really rather neutral and detached. It's a character study of one Bazarov, a young, fiercely intelligent, radical nihilist doctor and scientist who has "gone to the people" and is working in rural Russia. The plot is rather inconsequential, the young idealistic characters are gently satirized at times, but they are taken on their own terms and certainly not caricatured or dismissed. There is a hint of an elegaic farewell, of Turgenev's generation of Superfluous Men stepping aside in the face of the power and intelligence of the "new men" of modern, urban, industrial Russia, and of regret for the loss of the humane, liberal, moderate old ideals for which he had lived and worked. And in fact, this would pretty much be Turgenev's last work of much significance on the Russian scene, though he would live another 20 years and write a few more novels and stories which were better received in his adopted Western European world.

In short, pretty much everyone with an axe to grind hated Fathers and Sons for one reason or another. The radicals, led by the young firebrand Chernyshevsky, took it as an attack and a satire, and tore it apart. Chernyshevsky's novel What is to Be Done? which was a very early example of socialist utopian(many would say dystopian) literature, was a direct response to and a vehement refutation of it, and of the whole Russian social and political order. And of course F&S was also too Western and too sympathetic in some ways to the radicals for the Slavophiles. The few middle-grounders like Dostoevsky who had more of a dedication to literature-as-craft than ideology did generally treat it favorably, and it was very well received in Europe. To read it, it's really hard to tell how it could have elicited such strong reactions on all sides, but it just sort of came along at the right time and provided a focus for debate to bring all of these simmering issues to a head.

These things were coming to a head in much more immediate ways as well, and things were happening fast in Petersburg. Radical groups multiplied, splintered, and became ever-more radical, and civil unrest started to become more and more of an issue. Alexander may have been liberal in theory, but he was still a Tsar, and so another crackdown was inevitable. Chernyshevsky was already imprisoned when he wrote his novel, and many of his colleagues soon followed him. Dostoevsky had been a vehement opponent to them for the most part, standing up(much as he had earlier against Belinsky) for the integrity of art and creativity for it's own sake, and for traditional Russian-ness, personified by the Tsar, as against their attempts to destroy society and remake it utterly on materialist and socialist terms. It's perhaps debatable whether Dostoevsky was truly that eager to defend the Tsar in a political sense at this time, since by dint of his prior imprisonment and exile he had every incentive to avoid upsetting the Tsar, but he did certainly have strong nationalistic feelings, and in Russia at the time, those were hard to separate from the person of the Tsar. Plus, as a political moderate, he wanted the reforms to work, and felt that the radicals were endangering any chance of that, as well as endangering the rare and fragile tolerant environment which allowed both he and they to exist to begin with.

As it turned out, he was all too right about that. He wrote an editorial in Vremya in mid-1863 about the ongoing Polish uprising, which the re-empowered censors misread as advocating for Polish independence. Despite his general pro-Tsar stance, and possibly since he was already on a very short leash due to his past, Vremya was shut down, plunging he and is brother deep into debt. He scraped whatever living he could from editing, translating, tutoring, and writing articles for other publications, and continued work on a response of his own to Chernyshevsky's novel, set in the underworld of the young urban radicals, which would eventually become his first truly great and modern work, Notes from the Underground. He and Mikhail also went back to petitioning furiously to get permission to start a new journal. They finally succeeded, and in 1864 launched Epoch, in which they serialized Notes and fought the radicals savagely. However, in the newly chilled environment, circulation was down, and their mounting debt forced them to close it down after only a few months.

And this was only the beginning of his misfortunes. His wife Maria, a widow who he had married in Semipalatinsk, was in the last stages of tuberculosis, and died shortly after Epoch failed. Then Mikhail fell ill with a liver disease, and he too died in midsummer of '64. Suddenly, at 42, Dostoevsky was again very much alone in the world, and with the added burdens of the huge debts accrued by the failed literary journals, and the need to provide for his brother's wife and children. He worked on through this turmoil and mounting financial desperation, using his knowledge of and concern about the new radical underground to expand an older false start about the effects of drunkenness and poverty into a much larger and more ambitious work, Crime and Punishment. It was in many ways an immediate sensation, and created a critical firestorm similar to Fathers and Sons due to the complex characterization of Raskolnikov in the context of his earlier antagonism with the radicals. The publication of Crime and Punishment marked the beginning of his relationship with the journal the Russian Messenger and its publisher, MN Katkov. Most of his great novels would be serialized in this journal, and Katkov would serve as a patron of sorts for the rest of his life, helping him out of several tight spots financially with generous advances and other aid.

But, the full extent of that relationship was yet to come, and at this time he found himself in a much more desperate immediate situation. In 1865, he had struck a rather Faustian bargain with another publisher for his next work, to be based on his experiences traveling in Europe and falling prey to a compulsive gambling addiction in the early 1860's. In exchange for a large advance, which would allow him to pay off many of his creditors, he would either deliver the work by the strict deadline of November 1, 1866, or give up the rights to everything he produced in the next ten years to the publisher, with no further compensation. In the time when he was supposed to have been working on it, Crime and Punishment had sort of taken on a life of its own. He attempted to write 12-18 hours a day, and to work on both simultaneously, but between the stresses on him, his fragile health(he was a lifelong epileptic subject to attacks that would sometimes debilitate him for weeks) and the workload, he could not sustain this, and the deadline approached with the the novel nowhere near completion.

With about a month to go before the deadline, in desperation, he decided to engage a stenographer and to attempt to dictate the novel. The young woman who arrived at his apartment, one Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, would be a great aid in an almost miraculous push to complete the novel, titled The Gambler by the day before the deadline. Soon after, she would also become his second wife, with their marriage lasting the remainder of his life, and her care, support, and financial acumen being crucial to helping Dostoevsky achieve the personal and financial stability necessary to create his later novels. Soon after the marriage, Dostoevsky collapsed in a terrible series of epileptic fits. When he had recovered enough to travel, they paid off the most pressing creditors and set up Mikhail's widow and children with adequate means of support with the bulk of the C&P and Gambler money, and then took off for a much needed honeymoon trip in Europe. Contrary to their will and intention, the honeymoon ended up lasting over four years.

(Up next, Tolstoy and War and Peace, plus the Dostoevskys wandering nearly penniless in Europe, and writing of the The Idiot and The Possessed)

jddunn, thank you very very much for your interesting comments. I am learning a lot about a literature I am very attracted to but now very little about. Thanks!

Tolstoy, as noted earlier, was isolated. He had started schools and tried to set up cooperative farming with his former serfs, and served as a magistrate under the new legal reforms. Like most of the other aristocratic liberal reformers, he was rather disappointed in his hopes on that front, and frustrated both by his inability to really connect with and develop and mutual understanding with the peasants and his irresolution in living up to his own convictions. He also read widely in European literature and science, worked on his own spiritual and physical development, and generally gathered strength and experience through to the early 1860s. His brother's death from tuberculosis in 1860 provoked another crisis/conversion stage in his development, and he became increasingly disenchanted with Western and scientific/materialistic ideas, culminating in a public break and near-duel with Turgenev in 1861. In 1862, at age 34, he proposed marriage to Sophie Behrs, and was accepted. Much of this early development and experimentation phase, as well as his courtship with his wife is more or less reflected in the characters of Levin and Kitty in Anna Karenina.

Soon after his marriage, he began work on what would become War and Peace. He started out with the intention of writing a novel about the Decemberists. However, in doing research on them, he became more and more interested in the era of the Napoleonic Wars that immediately preceded them, in which Russia first really burst onto the international scene and was reckoned with as an equal by Europe. He decided instead to look at that era, as the root of both the Decembrists and of all that followed in modern Russian history and culture. He began serializing it, also in Katkov's Russian Messenger, in 1865, and it appeared basically simultaneously with Crime and Punishment. In fact, Katkov had taken on Crime and Punishment because Tolstoy had hit a bit of a lull in his productivity on W&P, and he needed something to fill the gaps in the months when there was no new installment to publish. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky never actually met... as we have seen they occupied greatly divergent socioeconomic spheres, and by the time Dostoevsky got back from exile, Tolstoy had already forsaken the city literary circles for his country estate. They did however read and comment favorably on each other's work, particularly towards the end of Dostoevsky's life as their religious, moral, and Slavophil interests converged more and more, but in terms of direct influence on one another, there is not much direct evidence to go on, and they had wildly different styles and approaches, at any rate.

Tolstoy would continue work on War and Peace until 1869, when it was finally completed and issued in novel form. It was well-received in literary circles, but, like him, it was sort of above the fray and didn't touch off the sort of intense debates that some of the other works we have mentioned did. Insofar as he had an axe to grind in the novel, it was in relation to the rising great-man-theory fetishism and Napoleonic complex on the part of the young radicals. These radical splinter groups became more and more isolated and delusional, and many of them started to get inflated ideas of themselves as potential revolutionary vanguards and Great Men. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov is a rather exaggerated and twisted exemplar of this tendency, and doubtless Dostoevsky drew on the radicals for some of his characterization and psychology. War and Peace was a direct assault on this Great Man theory of history, and a grand attempt to demonstrate the complexity, multipolarity, and interconnectedness of human history as it happened. In fact, it's really as much a theory of history or an experiment in historiography as it is a novel, and that's why the long interspersed historical essays are crucial to the work, even if they do break up the narrative momentum a bit overmuch.

While Tolstoy was laboring with War and Peace, Dostoevsky and Anna were sort of wandering the desert in Europe. They had only intended (and really could only afford) to leave for a couple of months, but Fyodor took a turn for the worse, having epileptic fits and returning to his old compulsively gambling(and invariably losing) ways. Soon they were almost broke, and the situation back home had worsened, with the still-unpaid proportion of his old creditors turning up the pressure. They basically had to stay in Europe until some way out of the long-term debt problem was found, as a return could mean debtor's prison and forfeiture to the rights to his works. They wandered the Russian exile circuit in Europe for quite some time, pawning their belongings and just barely getting by. He even got so low as to have to beg a small loan from Turgenev, to whom he still owed back-royalties for pieces published in Time and Epoch, which added an element of shame and resentment to their growing ideological differences. Anna became pregnant, and they settled in Switzerland in anticipation of the birth, where he eventually came around a bit and began work on his next novel, which would turn out to be The Idiot, and was able to extract the first of many generous and in many ways life-saving advances on it and other proposed and actual projects from Katkov. A daughter was born, and Anna's health was fragile for quite awhile after, and the stress of it eventually drove him back to drinking, gambling, and epileptic problems, but then he would find his footing again, get back to work for awhile, and the cycle would repeat itself. Things went on like this for quite awhile, with Dostoevsky scraping up just enough in advances and fees for articles, reviews, and translations to keep them solvent.

The serialization of The Idiot was completed in 1869, and though it had served an important purpose in keeping he and his family afloat, it was a disappointment critically. This isn't really surprising in retrospect, considering that this was his most religious / spiritual work yet, in a time and place where those values were not exactly ascendant. He also recognized that he had sort of failed on his own terms as well, as he had set out to make his protagonist Myshkin a Christlike but also realistic and fully human figure, and had been unable to follow through on this characterization to his full satisfaction or to achieve the moral and critical effect he was seeking. He still regarded it as a worthy attempt, and the book and character were among his most subtle, personal, and confessional work, but he was soon making plans to revisit many of the themes he explored in the Idiot on a grander scale and from a different angle.

He conceived of a vast 3-part work, to be called "The Life of a Great Sinner," which would be the grand synthesis of his career: a confrontation with and refutation of Western materialism and radicalism, to be replaced by his ideas of a positive world-mission for Russia, driven by the Christlike religious love and brotherhood that he increasingly believed to be inherent in the Russian soul and the Russian Orthodox religion. But before undertaking that, he had two smaller novella-length projects he needed to hammer out to fulfill earlier commitments. The first, The Eternal Husband, a taut and tragic examination of the relationship of a cuckolded husband to his wife's lover in the aftermath of her death, he duly completed in early 1870, after struggling out of another tailspin brought on by the death of his infant daughter. The second, to try to repay Katkov for his continued generous advances, was more uncertain. However, an event in the news, about a case known as the Ivanov murder, the result of a cell of Bakuninite revolutionary conspirators turning on their own back in Russia, provided the spark for the second. He would use this as the fulcrum for his final blow against Western radicalism, and to write a much more topical and current novel that would have hopes of making a big critical and commercial splash. Eventually many of the ideas for the first third of the proposed "Life of a Great Sinner," which he had been tentatively calling "Atheism", went into this new and growing satirical political novel, which would become The Devils, or The Possessed.

The opening installments of The Devils were very well received. As a result of their nasty habit of burning bridges, as well as internecine warfare and government crackdowns, the radicals were very much on the wane in literary circles, and he was presciently correct in his estimation that it would be the right kind of book at the right time. It was also a very entertaining, compelling, hilarious, and at times savage book, and many of its characters became literary and philosophical archetypes for the further examination of pathological extremism in politics and ideology. Its gratuitous lampooning of Turgenev(as the ridiculously pompous Karmazinov in the infamous literary-fete-gone-terribly-wrong scene) represented the final falling-out in what had always been a contentious and prickly relationship. Insofar as Dostoevsky did go too far in the book, it demonstrated an increasingly conservative and at times borderline-reactionary streak in him. He certainly had ugly sides to him... he was fairly openly anti-Semitic(though this was hardly unusual in Russia at that time), and increasingly bellicose in favor of Russian imperialism and against indigenous peoples and regional rivals like the Turks, and in favor of more narrowly Slavophil conceptions of Russian nationalism in general as against Westernization, of which Turgenev was by then an extreme and thoroughly disillusioned exponent, going so far as to almost reject his Russianness entirely in his last meeting with Dostoevsky. In the final accounting though, Dostoevsky's primary commitment to artistic integrity and to going wherever his gifts and his characters took him, demonstrated way back in his first early conflicts with Belinksy, prevented him from ever falling victim entirely to ideological or reactionary zeal, even if he did flirt with it a little to eagerly at times.

(One more installment to go... the Dostoevskys back in Russia, Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, the Brothers Karamazov, and the end of an era.)

The money made by The Possessed, and promised by a proposed new edition of his complete works to be published as a result of his return to the limelight finally allowed the Dostoevskys to settle their debts and return to Russia. On returning, they finally achived the relatively stable family and financial situation that they had so long sought in vain, and Dostoevsky spent his last ten years first writing a column for and then editing the establishment/conservative magazine Grazhdanin(The Citizen), and finally self-publishing his own magazine(Diary of a Writer) and enjoying increasing cachet as a prophetic voice of Russia's future destiny and a literary lion. He was fully rehabilitated at this point, and even enjoyed the favor of the Tsar and his inner circle, who he in turn increasingly identified with his conception of the great Russo-Christian soul and mission. However, he still had one last challenge and crowning achievment left in him; picking up the themes and problems that he had wanted to address once and for all with "The Life of a Great Sinner," but we'll get to that a little later.

Turgenev, as we have mentioned, was pretty much done. His last major novel, Smoke, in 1867, had flopped in Russia, and he had given up on his homeland and decided to be a European. Tolstoy, who unlike Dostoevsky had the luxury of writing only when he wanted to and at his own pace, was relatively quiet in the early 1770's after the huge effort of War and Peace. His doubts in rationalism, Westernization, and himself all mounted during this time, and would eventually inform his other great work, Anna Karenina, which he began in 1875. He serialized it through 1877(sorry, Tolstoy's writing process didn't involve thrilling near-misses with bankruptcy, illness, death, and addction, so there is much less to say on him) and it received mixed reviews in Russia, but was very well-regarded worldwide. Again, Tolstoy's isolation from the literary and society scene, and his addressing of themes and events that weren't always very current to the ongoing debate had a lot to do with the initial mixed reception of his work at home. During and immediately after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy underwent a breakdown in which he became obsessed with death, and with the perceived inability of his ideas and work to give meaning to life in the face of the terrifying inevitability of death and dissolution. This resulted in a sort of conversion experience, to a radical Christianity based directly on the Sermon on the Mount and on brotherly love and communal cooperation in day-to-day affairs, which also had aspects of Quakerism and other separatist sects. From here forward he would view himself more as a moral/religious philosopher than as a novelist, and in fact he repudiated all of his work up to Anna Karenina. He did write fiction after this, but it was of a very different and much more focused, didactic, formalist character, as in The Death of Ivan Ilych and the Kreutzer Sonata.

This primacy of Christian love, along with a sort of mystical attachment to the Russian people, were the two things that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky really shared in common. These themes would also come to the fore in Dostoevsky's last great work, the Brothers Karamazov. In the late 1770's, he finally returned to his Life of a Great Sinner project, initially intending two works in which he would work out all of his inner spiritual and ideological conflicts and outer hopes for the Russian people once and for all. He only lived to finish the first, but in that work he still managed to cover a great deal of the ground he set out to. In many ways this book built on, improved, and summed up his whole ouvre... here we have the perceptive psychology of Crime and Punishment, extended to a variety of different and compelling characters. In Alyosha, we have a second and more fully realized attempt at an exemplary Russo-Christian hero. In Ivan, we have the radicals and westernizers, only now taken seriously and confronted on their own terms, rather than mocked and dismissed. In Dmitri, there is the strength, expansiveness, and love of life of Russians, combined the often fatal flaws and excesses and failures to choose that Dostoevsky and the other writers of his era perceived in their countrymen. We have problems he wrestled with his whole life... belief in a benevolent God and the paramount need to love one another, contrasted with the terrible cruelty and suffering which human beings were capable of inflicting on one another, and the seemindly unreedemed suffering of innocents, things he knew all too well of from his years in prison and exile. We have the need for human freedom to choose and be moral agents, as against fatalism and the materialist determinism of the radicals. We have the need for justice, social order, and social hope, as against the poverty and corruption of the actual systems and people that comprised the Russian state at that time. And above all, we have the question of the destiny of Russia, played out in the drama of a family made up of broad Russian types and on the canvas of the new, chaotic, changing, modern Russia of Alexander.

In that way, the book sums up everything Dostoevsky and his contemporaries had been grappling with, and is in many ways the last word of its era. It contains no pat answers, and each component is taken on its own terms and given its best devil's advocate argument. You can perceive that the author's sympathy and hopes lie with Alyosha, but as Albert Camus notes, the doubting and despairing Ivan sections seem to have much more strength and conviction to them, and the other characters rather more life and realism to them than his hero. If his goal was to sweep away all of the conflicts of his life and his Russia, and replace them with the shining example of Alyosha, then he did not completely succeed. However, if it was a failture, it was a remarkably admirable one, as it compellingly captured and dramatized the great social and moral conflicts of Dostoevsky's life and era, and many of the universal moral and philosophical issues that vex us even to this day. Often the questions and the search are more important than answers, and in his final masterpiece, Dostoevsky dramatized this eternal human search for answers and meaning as well as anyone ever has.

A passage from the end of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina actually sums up what I think about the significance of Dostoevsky and his Karamazovs... their struggles, searchings, and imperfect human failings, and most of all their hope and will to believe in love and the possibility of a better human future:

"I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."

Ultimately, at the end of all of their struggles, quarrels, adventures, failings, and works of genius, this message of struggle, humilty, faith, hope and human connection and love is what all of these writers had to say in one way or another for their time, their people, and themselves. It may seem fairly simple, trite, and inconclusive, but most universal human concerns do, if you fail to dig deeper. They dug deeper than most, as the continuing relevance and power of their works for us today, almost 150 years after the fact, well attests.

Shortly after the publication of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky died of a lung hemorrhage, likely exacerbated by his weakness due to ongoing epileptic attacks. He had one last great moment, a famous speech he made on the anniversary of Pushkin's death in 1880, in which he summed up the development of Russian literature and culture from Pushkin on down, his debts to Pushkin, and his and Russia's place in history and hopes for the future. The speech was almost universally lauded, and happily resulted in his late reconciliation with Turgenev, who would die soon after, in 1883 in Paris. Tsar Alexander also died in 1881, the victim of an assassin's bomb, with the radicals Dostoevsky had fought for so long finally making their mark and striking what turned out to be a futile and counterproductive blow against the Russian order. Tolstoy would live until 1910, become a sort of religious prophet in his own country, an originator along with Thoreau of ideas of nonviolent resistance, and an international celebrity. Late in life, he corresponded with and inspired a young Indian living in South Africa by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and through him and the later work of Martin Luther King, his ideas and example would have a vast moral and political impact on the 20th Century. However, he never fully found peace with his feelings of moral inadequacy and helplessness and meaninglessness in the face of death, and he remained a seeker of sorts his whole life, finally dying in a train station not far from Yasnaya Polyana, in the course of one last spiritual quest, a pilgrimage to a remote monastery.

What a wonderful survey of Russian literature and its creators, jddunn! You've given us so much to reflect on and comment on -- I hope others will join me in adding their own insights.

I'll just mention a couple of things your posts brought to mind:

There's something quite beautiful and appropriate about the fact that Tolstoy corresponded with Ghandi. In skimming your final paragraph much too quickly, I first misread it and got the impression it was Dostoyevsky who had done this. A misimpression, but one that leads to an intriguing comparison. Dostoyevsky's most saintly characters, Alyosha and Prince Mishkin, are rather like Ghandi (and King) in their rejection of violence--but quite unlike in their mystical and rather passive approach to virtue. Ghandi's approach, while nonviolent, was anything but passive, and it emphasized a very tactile involvement with the material world in activities like weaving one's own cloth or marching to the sea to make one's own salt. Alyosha and Prince Mishkin are deeply compassionate characters, but did not have Ghandi's--or Tolstoy's--practicality.

Second, your section about the period when the serfs were freed suggests an interesting comparison with the Civil War period in the U.S. Another huge upheaval, pitting the often impractical idealism of the abolitionists (my goodness--we're circling back to my brief comparison of March and Gilead that launched this group!) against the determination of the white Southern landed class to change as little as possible, resulting in the sharecropping system after the war. There was even an oppressive industrial component in the northern U.S. (child labor, dangerous working conditions, an inhumanly long workday) to parallel the new industrialists in Russia.

There's something quite beautiful and appropriate about the fact that Tolstoy corresponded with Ghandi. In skimming your final paragraph much too quickly, I first misread it and got the impression it was Dostoyevsky who had done this. A misimpression, but one that leads to an intriguing comparison.

Yes, I was quite tickled when I learned that about this little improbable and hopeful episode in history. (You can read the actual letters here, as well.) Gandhi was excellent at bridging divides and assimilating different worlds and creeds, so it's also appropriate and kind of poetic that he was the one who was able to combine the grounded practicality of Tolstoy and the younger back-to-the-landers with the spirituality and sort of mystical connection to and compassion for the people of Dostoevsky's heroes.

Second, your section about the period when the serfs were freed suggests an interesting comparison with the Civil War period in the U.S. Another huge upheaval, pitting the often impractical idealism of the abolitionists

I kind of failed to emphasize this enough in the later posts as I got going on the stories of the individual authors and the literary scene, but these parallels are one of the big things that make Russian literature from that era really relevant and fascinating to me. There are so many similarities there, and you get to sort of go back to the start of the modernization and growth process for both countries that would become the superpowers of the 20th century and compare their early evolution. So the history aspect is a big bonus in addition to how great the literature and characters are on their own.

(my goodness--we're circling back to my brief comparison of March and Gilead that launched this group!)

This is a book that has been popping up on my radar everywhere lately, Baader-Meinhof-style. I actually just got it from Amazon this week, and will be interested to jump into the discussions here on it once I get it read. It sounds really great from everything I have heard about it so far.

Thank you for posting the link to the Gandhi-Tolstoy letters. I loved the story in the final Tolstoy letter about the schoolgirl who faced down the archbishop!

I'll be interested in your comments on Gilead.