Recent literary news from the Soviet Union indicates that a number of interesting—and possibly important—writers are coming out of a long “internal emigration.” They were never believers in Communism, but they did not dissent or write for underground circulation. Rather, they cultivated the muse privately, thinking back to the 19th century, its attitudes and achievements.

Those among us who read the Russian novels and plays of that time in translation reserve for them a special place. They are regarded as masterpieces on a par with those of the West, they are praised for their psychological penetration, but they are also felt to belong to an alien and static world. The conventional impression is: when the hero is not doing mad, violent things, he is lying in bed introspecting himself to death; alternatively, the family sits about talking emotional subtleties instead of taking steps to avert disaster. By comparison with the activism found in Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Galdós, or Stendhal, Russian characters seem both helpless and complacent about their failure to change the world.

It is easy to guess which Russian novels have given grounds for this conclusion. The truth is that they are few, and even those few contain figures that start out energetic and public-spirited. The rest of the classic works were in fact written to show the need for action and the obstacles to be removed: they are political in the broad sense of criticizing the polis—the society—for its defects. If they also show how the best minds and hearts fail to reform it, that too is apt criticism: the stasis is due to public facts and ancestral burdens, not to indolence or complacency.

What has followed the current change of direction in Russia strongly suggests that the obstacles have not changed much; the will is there but something is missing. So a second look at those earlier fictions is instructive, whereas a parallel survey of English or French novels would tell us only about the past: they have won their case, furthered the political evolution. Not so the score of Russian works that we mistake as being exclusively studies of human character in an exotic setting. They convey a social anguish not yet dispelled; the Western reader has justly, but incompletely, admired them.

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Like the Germans, the Russians call their 19th-century literature classical because it was the first great burst of original work. Actually, that literature was part of the Romantic movement, which throughout Europe tackled the problems of reconstruction after the collapse of the ancien regime and the Napoleonic wars. In Russia after 1815, it was known that the Emperor Alexander I had been educated by a French tutor in liberal beliefs. Would he adhere to them and act accordingly?

For an answer we turn naturally to Pushkin (1799-1837) and his great narrative poem known in the West as Eugene Onegin—a very different work from Tchaikowsky’s opera. In the poem we find a hero evidently characteristic: the young aristocrat who is alive to social and ethical issues, but idle, bored, aware of being useless. He wastes his time in love affairs, duels, and the pointless round of entertainments.

Pushkin coined for him the term Superfluous Man, a name that became quickly popular because it indicated so much in two words. You will ask: is this a political trait? Negatively it is: it defines a political situation and it is the result of a political act. In 1762, when Catherine the Great became Empress, the nobility were no longer compelled to serve in the government. They were set free, as the serfs—the peasants—were to be exactly 100 years later. Eugene Onegin is superfluous, useless, because the regime offers him no political role. He has nothing to do but spend money and kill time. He has not even a public outlet for political discussion, such as a free press.

An important point to note is that Onegin has a counterpart in a young woman, Tatyana, who loves him. He feels or affects indifference. She is a strong character, intelligent, self-respecting. When he discovers his own love for her, she turns him down and marries someone else. She is the living criticism of the Russian male of the 1820’s and 30’s; we shall meet her kind again in later Russian fiction and on the stage.

A second question raised by Pushkin (this time in “The Bronze Horseman,” another story in verse) is that of the social cost of change. Does a survivor of the great flood of 1824 in St. Petersburg have the right to criticize the creation of that city by Peter the Great a century earlier, since it cost so many lives? Pushkin does not answer the question, and it persists: Lenin and Stalin thought their plans worth any number of lives, like Peter. The victim in “The Bronze Horseman” is not a nobleman, but a helpless creature representative of the oppressed majority—another fictional type we shall meet more than once.

Shorter poems by Pushkin that criticized serfdom led to his exile and other restraints. Yet the Czar admired, and on one occasion pardoned, him. Repression was not yet terrorist or from the throne; it was bureaucratic. Its temper was shown in the remark of the chief of police when Pushkin died and was mourned as a national poet: “Why so much fuss about somebody who did not even hold an important post?” Classic Russian literature is filled with bureaucrats who hate the aristocrats who hate the system.

Pushkin’s contemporary Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) propelled the Superfluous Man one step further in A Hero of Our Time. That new hero, Pechorin, is no longer indolent but angry, vindictive, devious, and violent. He wastes his great abilities in pointless adventures, ruins the women who love him, and ends in self-disgust. In 1825 an aristocrats’ revolution had failed. The galling memory of that fiasco contributed to this new, misdirected energy and guilty despair in Lermontov’s Superfluous Man.

So far, political ideas are being expressed in poems and stories. They continue to occupy that place down to the Bolshevik Revolution. But from about 1840 there appeared literary magazines, the so-called “thick journals,” where poets and novelists first published their works and where critics interpreted in direct terms the literature that was or seemed political.

That added phrase—seemed political—is necessary because of the peculiar thing that happened to the next great writer, Nikolai Gogol (1809-52). He was a comic satirist. His play, The Inspector General, tells the story of the leading people in a small town who hear that an Inspector from the capital is about to arrive. He will examine their doings as mayor, health officer, head of charities, school superintendent, municipal judge, and so on. Since they have all been neglecting their duties, taking bribes, and embezzling public funds, they are nervous. When a young man, Khlestakov, a penniless adventurer, puts up at the hotel, the bureaucrats take him for the Inspector. They tremble, they grovel, they flatter, they lie—and they allow him to borrow 300 rubles from each of them and to make love to the mayor’s wife and daughter both. A point worth noting is that Khlestakov is a small, insignificant looking man. It is his presumed rank that counts.

The play is based on a true anecdote that Gogol heard from Pushkin. It is crowded with social types who freely criticize one another. One specimen is accounted for with the remark: “He fell on his head when he was three years old and he’s smelled of vodka ever since.” The Czar enjoyed the comedy and did not mind its purport, but again the police and the censor scented danger and banned both publication and further performance. The independent critics took it as an attack on the corruption, servility, and ignorance of Russian officialdom.

But the bitterest joke was that Gogol had no intention of being political at all. He was shocked to hear that his work was taken literally, as an attack. To him the play, like his later novel, Dead Souls, was first a good funny story and beyond that an allegory of the spiritual life.

In his novel, the “dead souls” are serfs whose recent death has not yet been registered (serfs in Russia were numbered as so many souls). An enterprising low-grade bureaucrat, Chichikov, goes about “buying” these souls from the previous owners for a nominal sum, since it will relieve them of so much taxation. Chichikov then buys cheap land on which to “settle” the dead serfs; he mortgages the place and makes off with the money.

For sophisticated readers, here was a picture of the incompetent state. But Gogol, appalled by reports of his impact on public opinion, underwent a religious crisis, sickened at the thought of his imputed disloyalty, and finally became deranged and died of self-starvation.

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By the time we come to the next great writer, Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), the vast reforms of the next Czar, Alexander II, were about to take place. Serfdom would be abolished and various institutions set up to accommodate the change. It had been hastened by the “thick journals.” Although most of these were short-lived because of censorship or lack of funds, they kept up a true ferment about political ideas. Chief among them was The Contemporary, owned and edited by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who published in both serial and book form the leading writers of the generation born around 1820. Turgenev was one of these. Among us he is best known for his novel, Fathers and Sons, but he also wrote plays, and one of them, A Month in the Country, contains subversive ideas—else it would not have been censored for five years, published in expurgated form, first produced 22 years after it was written, and often misinterpreted till Stanislavsky put it on effectively in 1909.

In the country house that Turgenev depicts, dullness prevails. A permanent guest there, Rakitin, is a Superfluous Man who carries on a bloodless love affair with the squire’s wife. She is no Tatyana, but a bored, fretful, capricious reader of foreign poems and novels. Into the family comes, as tutor to the younger sister Vera, a crude lower-class fellow named Belaev. He is naive, honest, lively in thought and act. Vera is sweet and lively too; she falls in love with Belaev—and so does the bored wife. In a word, the upstart embodies the energy of life as against the moribund upper class.

Meanwhile, the squire, who is kind enough to his wife, is glad that she is entertained by the listless lover, because he himself cares for nothing but improving his property and supervising the work—another exemplar of energy. When we hear from him, he strikes a significant note. He says:

The Russian peasant is quite sharp and shrewd and I have great respect for him. Yet there are times when you can talk to him till you’re blue in the face explaining something; you think you’ve made it all clear as can be, but there’s no use at all. The Russian peasant lacks—well, he has no love of work. That’s what’s lacking. “Yes, sir,” he says, but he hasn’t understood a thing. The German is quite different. . . .

These words contain a double anticipation of political import. One is the root idea of all Tolstoy’s attempts at reforming the world, namely, that the peasant, the Russian peasant, is the model human being, the material of the good society. The other foreshadowing is the ambivalent view that Russian writers have of Russia itself. The Russian peasant is sharp and shrewd, but stupid and unwilling to work. He is the great natural resource and the cause of failure.¹

The contradictory view of the Russian peasant takes a second political form in the century-long conflict between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers. The Slavophiles say: we need only follow our old traditions; with a few practical reforms we shall do great things; what stands in the way is the poisonous ideas from Western Europe. The Westernizers say: what is strictly Russian is barbarism; it will never change from within; we need the knowledge of the West.

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Turgenev was a Westernizer. He lived most of his life in France, with occasional trips back home, where he divided opinion as to his literary merits and also on this issue of East versus West. His novel, Smoke, written five years after the emancipation of the serfs, is less a novel than a sociopolitical argument on this very theme. At one point in it the hero Potughin declares:

I am tired of hearing about [our] “rough diamonds.” People keep talking about the “rich Russian nature,” about our superior instinct. . . . Instinct! That’s worth bragging about, isn’t it? You can take an ant from its ant-hill miles away and it will find its way home, which a man couldn’t do. Does that mean that he’s inferior to the ant? . . . We keep arguing about the great originality of our art and manufactures. [Some] have even discovered a Russian science and a Russian arithmetic. Two and two are four with us as with everybody else, but “more cleverly.” Why, even our most important products—the samovar, the knout, the rope-soled sandal—weren’t invented by us. I say that if our little mother Holy Russia were to disappear, not a single nail in the world, not one pinhead would be disturbed.

Elsewhere in the book, Turgenev’s own position is defined:

Yes, I am a Westerner, I am devoted to Europe, or more exactly to civilization, that civilization which is so denigrated among us today. I love it with all my heart. I believe in it. . . . The word civ-il-iz-a-tion is intelligible, immaculate, and sacred, whereas all the others—nation, glory—only smell of blood.

These are words to remember when we come to the politics of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who keep vacillating on the central question of whether Russia is in Europe or in “the East.” Compared with them and the other would-be reformers, Turgenev stands out as the best political mind among the Russian literati of his time. He warned and predicted and his forebodings came to pass. He saw the need to replace the old patriarchal system by the rule of law, and to make bureaucratic suppression and secrecy give way to an open society with free discussion—glasnost.

In his greatest work, Fathers and Sons, Turgenev shows the turn taken by intellectual conflict after the emancipation of the serfs. From that book has come the term nihilism, which he used to describe the new radicals. They took Westernizing to mean materialistic science and technical training exclusively. In relation to everything else they were nihilists, destroyers, and that did not fit Turgenev’s idea of civilization. To him, the narrow technocratic program of these Westernizers was hardly better than the diehard stance of the Slavophiles. For Turgenev himself, the outcome was that he was reviled by both sides.

To sum up, neither instinct, or what might be called the Peasant Principle, nor a materialist ideology, let’s call it the Intellect Principle, provided an adequate answer to Russia’s predicament. But in retrospect, the two together help to explain why Communism succeeded first in Russia, contrary to Marx’s belief that it would come in a highly industrialized nation. Lenin and his group were scientific materialists and Marx had no use for peasants, but once the kulaks had been massacred in traditional fashion, it was peasant docility that sustained the Soviet regime. It was also “peasant” resistance—the dumb refusal to work which Turgenev described in his play—that ruined the. Soviet economy.

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At this point it is appropriate to introduce the word intelligentsia, a Russian coinage of the same period that refers to an actual class. It came into being there and in no other country at the time. The Russian intelligentsia includes whoever is devoted with high moral fervor to intense, incessant critical thought. Two features set such people apart from ordinary intellectuals: attachment not just to ideas in general, but to an ideology—a system—plus the consciousness of itself that a class must possess to deserve the name.

Members of the intelligentsia came from every layer of society, but they all, necessarily, had some education. Many adhered to Hegel’s philosophy of idea generating reality, then considered a revolutionary creed. The number of universities had been much enlarged along with the other reforms of the mid-19th century, and Hegelianism flourished there, at least among the students. With the literary journals and the sociopolitical novels and plays stoking up the zeal for systematic change, the intelligentsia kept making recruits automatically.

Meanwhile, government repression, which came and went in spurts, made the intelligenty cohere in their opposition despite disagreements among themselves. One thinks of Voltaire and the philosophes in 18th-century France, similarly united while divided. Thus in the space of 30 years since the Superfluous Man, there were now in Russia four classes instead of three—aristocrats and peasants, bureaucrats and intelligenty, the latter bent upon some aspect of nihilism, resolved to destroy a large part of the existing state and society.

Since it failed in spite of all the writing and discussing, nihilism came to mean total negation, the apathy of despair, and also the bomb-throwing of the desperate when they happened to be of violent temperament.

An early case of apathetic defection from the intelligentsia is that of Oblomov, the hero in Goncharov’s novel of that name. He loses faith, goes to pieces, and takes to his bed. He is too painfully aware of the gap between the ideal in his head and the intractable conditions of Russian society. But first he has gone through much travail: he tries to manage his estate along modern lines, but cannot. He cannot marry the girl he loves and, wholly deprived, cannot accept the commonplaceness of existence. Despite his making these efforts, his is the figure that has created in the West the cliché of the Russian novel as populated entirely by do-nothing characters who talk without end.

I have said that with the intelligentsia Russia had four classes instead of two. Looking at another great writer, Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1823-86), I should perhaps have said four-and-a-half classes. Ostrovsky is accounted the greatest Russian playwright. His works and Shakespeare’s have kept the lead in Russian stage productions for 150 years; with us he is virtually unknown. The people he portrays are neither peasants nor nobility nor the intelligenty but an ill-defined, ill-at-ease class of merchants and low-grade civil servants. All are just emerged from the peasantry and trying to rise further by their wits—a pathetic and often hateful group with no clear status and no ideology other than getting on.

In Ostrovsky’s masterpiece, The Storm, we find such a group living in a small town under the patriarchal system, just as if it were the countryside. Old habits, bigotry, prejudice, and petty oppression govern everything. The main character, Dikoy the tradesman, is cynical about it all. He says to his employee: “If I decide to forgive you, I’ll forgive you. If I decide to step on you, I’ll crush you.” Among his less vicious traits is his habit of taking a small coin each week from everybody’s pay—who would dare complain? The watchmaker Kuligin, self-taught, has dreams of becoming an engineer. Dikoy shows him his place: “Do you imagine by any chance that we’re equals, a couple of pals or something? What important business entitles you to put your snout in my face?”

Dikoy’s wife Katerina, a woman of intelligence and sensibility, has an affair with a young man who, unable to rescue her, manages to get sent to Siberia. Katerina’s mother-in-law persecutes her till the young woman, unnerved by a thunderstorm, commits suicide. Kuligin sums up: “It’s a cruel life, here in our town, real brutal. . . . ”

The play was acclaimed from the first, occasionally with curious comments. Some Slavophiles found that the characters as a group had “hidden virtues”—well hidden, I should say. Another critic, eager for realism on the stage, said that this grim play was “a ray of sunshine in the realm of darkness.”

On reflection, the play appears as yet another variation on the Superfluous Man, no longer an aristocrat. Neither Boris the lover of Katerina nor Kuligin the aspiring engineer can give effect to their half-baked volitions. It is not alone circumstance and tyranny that hold them back: it is also an inherited flaw, as the author tells us. It seems as though any man who wrestled with his own adversity or with Russia’s need of reform proved incapable. Contrariwise, the women—not all, but most—had strength and brains, and were ready to act. Their action entailed a sacrifice, but they chose to make it. One concludes that the men, besotted with ideology or crippled by bureaucracy, had never heard of compromise. When rigid rule or ideal solutions fail them, they give up.

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The remaining works on the classic list do not refute this conclusion. With Tolstoy (1828-1910), the Superfluous Man assumes several guises. In Anna Karenina, Anna’s lover Vronsky is a useless member of society and politically a non-being. Anna’s husband is a civil servant and colorless. But Levin and his bride find that hard work on the estate is a self-justifying activity—the peasant solution at the landlord level, as in Turgenev’s play.

Earlier, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the two principles, Instinct and Intellect, are divided between the hero Pierre and his counterpart Prince Andrey. The latter has a powerful mind, but once Andrey is wounded in war, all his mind can work on in his slow agony is the meaning not of life but of death. Pierre, the prince’s equal in rank, is clumsy, ignorant, provincial. But he has a dumb urge to find at least the right view of himself and his social situation. Like the intelligentsia, he wants not so much culture as an ideology. He tries several, including Freemasonry. Finally, he is taught by the peasant Karatayev that to be of use to himself and others, no ideas are any good. What is needed is simplicity and naturalness, in short, the antithesis of Intellect.

Elsewhere in the same tremendous novel, a parallel contrast is embodied in the armed struggle between Napoleon and the head of the Russian army, Kutuzov. Napoleon is a man of ideas, a Westerner reputed a genius. But his ideas have no influence on events, his battle plans are mere wind; whereas Kutuzov, the genius by Instinct—a four-star peasant, so to speak—allows events to take their course. His role is to be simple and natural like Pierre, giving now and then a dumb, obvious response to what happens. He is dumb also in manner, inarticulate, impenetrable to others. Such is the greatness of Russia, the reason for its survival in this vast war with the West.

Tolstoy marred his greatest novel by stuffing into it an untenable and inconsistent theory of history, but in most of his fiction he rightly followed his genius and not his theorizing mind. In Anna Karenina, for instance, he plays fair and shows that Levin’s efficient working of the estate is boring and lacks moral grandeur. In the story “Confession,” it is the peasant who is right, but to make him the basis of a political principle, Tolstoy has to endow the creature with the necessary virtues—patience, generosity, cooperativeness, courage in the face of death. With all that, it is no wonder he has no need of science and philosophy.

As everybody knows, Tolstoy at the end of his life tried to turn these visions into realities on his own estate and in his own life. The attempt brought him alternately to despair and to maniacal efforts, and finally to a flight from home ending in death, not in some peasant shack, but in a railroad station. The West had the last word.

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In Tolstoy’s somewhat older contemporary, Dostoevsky (1821-81), one finds yet another twist given to the figure of the Superfluous Man and at the same time to the conflict between Instinct and Intellect. The Karamazov brothers represent the various traits split up and redistributed. Dmitri is Instinct. He goes stumbling and bumbling around, a passionate brute who only does harm from impulsiveness and the inability to think for two minutes consecutively. This lands him in court for the murder of his father, which he has not committed, and he is packed off to Siberia with the equally passionate Grushenka. There he may learn to reflect before acting and talking.

Dmitri obviously incarnates the spirit of Russia. He is also the best example of the Discontinuous Man (or Woman), yet another type so frequent and so exasperating in Russian literature—the character who grieves one minute, is terrified the next, and then bursts out laughing wholeheartedly. Is this really spontaneity, as the writers believe, or is it the trait of the mistreated child, the cultural product of arbitrary government, of petty tyranny, which keeps the individual perpetually uncertain about what the all-powerful superior will do next?

Be this as it may, Dmitri is Russia without one powerful element, reserved, as we shall see, for the youngest brother Alyosha. Between the two and sympathetic to both is Ivan, Intellect coupled with a poetic imagination. He is a Westernizer who has read everything and thought it through. The upshot is skepticism, which is crippling. Believing in God, but not in God’s world full of horrors—disease, starvation, ignorance, crime, and the suffering of innocent children—Ivan revolts against the universe. As he puts it, he gives back to God his entrance ticket. There is for him no field of action; he is the Superfluous Man bred by the intelligentsia.

Alyosha, the youngest and most lovable of the quartet, is the personification of religious faith in its simplest form. Everybody loves and trusts him without its making him proud. He does good by reflex action; his mere presence is a comfort, and the book ends with him being cheered in a spontaneous cry of “Hurrah for Karamazov!”

Alyosha no more than his brothers can be considered political in any immediate sense; they represent rather the unsatisfactory political material at hand. One concludes that Dostoevsky was teaching the lesson of resignation, even of indifference to the status quo. He seems to say that temperaments are so diverse that the only possible reform is self-reform, which improves the world haphazardly and temporarily. This view of what the author implies seems borne out by his political writings, which are mean-spirited and which swing from liberal to reactionary after having begun with revolution. Dostoevsky as a youth narrowly escaped execution and spent some years in Siberia reflecting on God, the individual, and the state.

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But this interpretation wears a different meaning when we come to another part of The Brothers Karamazov—a chapter which is a masterpiece within the masterpiece. I refer to “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” This is a tale written by Ivan, who calls it a poem and who reads it aloud and discusses it with Alyosha—with him, because it involves religion. The scene of the story is Spain in the 16th century, where the Grand Inquisitor comes to interrogate a prisoner in his cell. The prisoner is Jesus, who has been caught preaching in the streets of Seville.

What the Inquisitor does is rather to lecture and rebuke his prisoner than to interrogate him, for the main question, insistently repeated, is: why did you come on earth and refuse to give humankind what would make them happy? What the nations want is bread, mystery, miracles, and authority. You had the chance to provide them when Satan tempted you with his three offers. You turned them down. You could have established a universal state guaranteeing peace. Instead you gave a moral law to be followed or not, at one’s choice. You gave them Freedom. That was cruel. Men are slaves, though born rebels, and your plan was bound to fail. So it was left to us Inquisitors—some 100,000 of us—to set up a system that supplies the real human needs. We organize everything, ensure its operation by force—all this in your name—and we ourselves are deprived of all happiness. We suffer the knowledge that the whole scheme is a deception, religion a device, mystery and miracles a fraud. Only the bread is genuine, for that is a condition any system must fulfill.

Jesus keeps silent but looks with compassionate eyes at his accuser, who goes on to point out that the regime of Christ—being that of liberty, of choice and error, of sin and penance—breeds crime, war, tyranny, injustice, horror, and despair. These dreadful things have to be put down, or rather, held in check by the Inquisitors, on top of their other, positive obligations. The burden is intolerable. On the one hand, they have an impossible task; on the other hand, they know that their every word and thought is an imposture. It bears down on the best minds and most unselfish spirits, who not only receive no thanks but who are compulsory hypocrites and damned for their good deeds.

The end of the legend is unforgettable. The Grand Inquisitor lets Jesus go free. Before he goes, Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor on the lips. Ivan adds one magical sentence about the Inquisitor: “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”

Though Ivan the skeptic is the author of the legend, and the pious Alyosha listens with dismay, the parable offers no guidance to action except the stiffening of state control. Freedom means conflict and injustice, as everybody knew before; but a totalitarian utopia is illusory. As was learned later, it is hell on earth, especially since the Inquisitors are not likely to be Grand—that is, dedicated—but cynical and grasping. And even for them, the system is a perpetual nightmare.

Fortunately or not for the future, we have still one Karamazov brother on our hands, the illegitimate Smerdiakov, son of the old lecher Fyodor Karamazov and the servant Stinking Lizaveta. At first sight, Smerdiakov, a morose epileptic, also seems lacking in political significance; his very name is a portrait and a reproach. But Ivan makes a passing remark worth noting: he calls his bastard brother “material for revolution when the time comes.” How so? Smerdiakov is the one who actually murdered the father, and he maintains that Ivan made him do it, though Ivan only taught him that there is no divinely ordained right and wrong. We see here the twisted reasoning of all the Smerdiakovs to come.

Smerdiakov had been sent to the capital to train as a cook. He comes back a kind of lower-middle-class dandy, who reads books, hates women, envies the rich, and, with contempt for all, thinks himself everybody’s equal. In short, he is the new half-educated and fully conceited common man. Like his father Fyodor, he says: “How I hate Russia!”

Smerdiakov comes to a bad end, but I have never believed in it. In a sudden turnabout he hangs himself, a would-be Judas figure. Dostoevsky gives no reason for Smerdiakov’s change of heart, which presupposes revulsion against Ivan’s ideas. Smerdiakov seems to commit suicide for Dostoevsky’s convenience. It is a pity he dies: he had over his literary ancestors in Gogol and Ostrovsky the advantage of being an atheist; he might have made an excellent commissar.

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Dostoevsky gets rid of Smerdiakov before he does more harm, but the wretch has left a descendant in the work of a later writer named Fyodor Sologub (1863-1927). He is not widely known in the West, though his novel, The Petty Demon, has been translated. It is a wonderful book. The title gives an inkling of what is in it: the petty demon is Peredonov, a provincial schoolteacher, who comes into relation with some 35 other characters—too large a cast to permit a summary of the tale. Suffice it to say that Peredonov is the quintessence of egotism, philistinism, brutality, fear of ridicule, gluttony, and finally paranoia. His acts and opinions contain all that literature can tell about Russia at the turn of the century. To take a single glimpse into his soul, Peredonov, always guarding his status, gets furious when at a dinner he is not given a fresh jar with better jam than a lower-ranking guest. Barely retold in this way, the incident sounds trifling; in context, it causes a shudder of horror.

Indeed, the account of this seething, closed-in society is almost more than one can stand, except for the contrasting story of the tender, touching love between an older woman and a young boy.

We have now reached the last name on the roster: Chekhov (1860-1904). In his fiction the narrative is so delicately managed that many critics have said the author merely portrays; he holds no views about current misgovernment and no hope of reform. That may be true as to Chekhov’s intention, but not as to his effect. Granted that in the plays lifelikeness requires equilibrium; everybody in turn must be seen as being right. So I pass by the plays, although I think close attention would show certain biases that would turn out to be political.

But the best short stories are certainly explicit. Take “The Man in a Case,” where a village teacher is represented as boxed up—in a case—by his training and his petty soul:

The only things clear to him were government circulars in which something was forbidden. There was always something doubtful, vague, not fully clear in any permission. When a teashop was licensed in town, he would say, “It’s all right, very nice, of course, but I hope it won’t lead to anything.” People late at church, a schoolboy prank, a woman teacher out with an officer—well, he hoped “nothing would come of it.”

For comic effect Chekhov has this Byelikov encased physically, too—overcoat, scarf, galoshes, umbrella even in fair weather and on warm days. He almost gets married to a girl who laughs all the time and sings Russian folksongs. It is once more the feckless man and the woman with peasant instincts embodying the life-force. Half-engaged, Byelikov keeps going around town buttonholing everyone he meets. “Marriage,” he says, “is a serious step.” And he adds: “One may find oneself in an unpleasant position.”

A significant fact is that Byelikov is universally respected. He may act like a fool, but he is after all an appointed official. Only the girl’s brother, something of a brute, despises him as well as the other teachers. “You are nothing but government clerks.” Then some prankster puts up a caricature entitled “Byelikov in love.” His fiancée laughs as usual; he is shattered, takes to his bed, and dies.

Byelikov seems an anthology of all previous Russian heroes other than the two or three endowed with great gifts. The rest are governed by routine, petty-minded in bureaucrat fashion, bewildered by ideas from outside, gabbling promiscuously about their troubles, and when aware of ineffectuality, ready to die, preferably in bed. Surely, a writer who presents such a character does not remain impartial in the face of the social reality he has reconstructed. Chekhov is not simply saying: “Look and enjoy.”

Another story of his confirms the point in so many words. Called “A Dreary Story,” it is in the form of an old man’s diary, the old man being a doctor, like Chekhov himself. Much adulated in his retirement, this man of science feels oppressed by his visitors; they are dull and he knows they have no idea of what he is like. They only respect his title. Having no one to talk to, he reads a great deal and this is his opinion:

With the exception of two or three of our older writers, all our literature today strikes me as not being literature so much as a sort of home industry that exists solely to be kept going. I don’t say the French books [are better]. They don’t satisfy me either, but they are not so tedious as the Russian, and it is not rare to find in them the requisite of artistic creation—the feeling of personal freedom—which is lacking in the Russian authors.

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There you have it. The wheel has come full circle. Pushkin’s Superfluous Men were stifled for lack of freedom to act in the public arena. After Pushkin, ranging up and down the social scale in books, we have seen nothing but pitiful attempts to break out of the patriarchy. When somebody gets out, like Ivan, it is at the cost of something essential, faith of some sort, public hope. Not finding it, Ivan goes half mad. The other, weaker natures suffer tyranny like dumb animals or turn fierce and inflict it on the rest, nihilist destroyers of their surroundings. The choice is: to be a bully like Dikoy or a government clerk like Byelikov.

And so the debate about Russian reform, by Instinct or by Intellect, by the peasant or the Westernizer, goes ‘round and ’round with no exit in political action for lack of political institutions. To its most gifted observers Russia remains holy and great, but it is landlocked in spirit and social forms just as it is in geography. Readers of its classic novels and plays are bound to ask, will the age of Gorbachev find a break through the ancestral barrier?

¹ I cannot resist a digression into the present. In a special issue of the (London) Financial Times on Russia last year, the director of a machine-tool factory in Minsk was quoted as saying, “Unemployment is bad, but we have long had hidden unemployment here in the factory—people who had nothing to do and people who did not want to work.” The comrade-director’s name, by the way, was Eugene Onegin.