For all the depth of his debt to European novelists, Dostoevsky was standing on the shoulders of Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), and Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), the giants who founded nineteenth-century prose fiction in Russia. The first and the last of these authors were both called “the Russian Sterne,” and Dostoevsky called the last two his “demons.” Culturally, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia resolutely faced West; even its use of the literature and art of its Asian empire emulated European Orientalism. In the non-literary world, architects, engineers, admirals, musicians, cooks, and religious cultists moved between the Russian Empire and the West with no break in their careers; yet in the history of the novel, where the Russian Empire arguably made its greatest contribution to world culture, the plot assumed a different role.
It has been argued that Sterne’s mockery of eighteenth-century novels was so devastating that serious authors stopped writing them, driving Walter Scott and the Gothic novelists in England to invent a new kind of novel, which flourished throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter will argue that the nineteenth-century Russian novel escaped that devastation and offered Dostoevsky and other Russians an eighteenth-century energy, especially in Sterne’s specialty, narrative technique.
Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and many others construct a narrator who sometimes becomes a friend and almost a coconspirator of the reader. One of Thackeray’s narrators, Pendennis, even becomes a character in a later novel. This tight link between narration and character gives verisimilitude to the European novel. In the same years, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and many other Russians were moving in a different direction, elaborating a link between narration and plot.
Melchior de Vogüé, the French diplomat, journalist, and gossip, called Dostoevsky a “true Scythian,” a non-European, but the split between Russian and European prose fiction owes no more to Dostoevsky’s forced stay in Omsk than to Tolstoy’s education in Eastern culture at Kazan, or to the travels of Pushkin, Lermontov, Leskov, Ivan Goncharov, Vladimir Korolenko, Anton Chekhov, or others through Russia’s vast empire in Asia. Rather, it reflects Russia’s status, which Alexis de Tocqueville compared to America’s, as one of Europe’s cultural colonies, where partial outsiders found riches in the hegemonic culture to which proximity, familiarity, or the pressures of fashion blinded those at the center. No culture can either be fully independent or use its own resources fully. When a hegemonic artistic tradition reaches a crossroads, its subcultures sometimes realize possibilities excluded by the course the dominant culture takes.
In the first Western study of the Russian novel, de Vogüé refers to “the intellectual discipline, the clarity, the precision, virtues which are so rare among the prose writers of Russia” (The Russian Novel, 197). A generation later, Henry James praised the power and richness of Russian novels, but his famous letter to Hugh Walpole called them “fluid puddings” (Letters, 4:619), and he complained to Mrs. Humphrey Ward about Tolstoy’s “promiscuous shifting of viewpoint and center” (112), perhaps reflecting de Vogüé’s description of what he felt on reading Dostoevsky: “The shiver that seizes us on encountering some of his characters makes one wonder whether one is in the presence of genius, but one quickly remembers that genius in letters does not exist without two higher gifts, measure and universality” (The Russian Novel, 267).
James’s prefaces contain the first subtle exposition of the novelistic techniques that evolved in the West in the nineteenth century, and his novels may be the least provincial ever written. Yet, somehow, he failed to realize that the rules for narrative technique, “viewpoint and center,” that he presented were not universal aspects of the psychology of art but the conventions of a particular time and place.
The Russian interdependence between plotting and narration constituted a very different, but no less demanding, kind of technical mastery than that developed by Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and James. Western critics sometimes distinguish novels that tell readers what happens from novels that show them what happens; the Russian novelistic techniques let Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and others go beyond both of these Western practices and manipulate readers into experiencing for themselves what the characters in the novel are feeling and arguing. The Russians adopted this manipulative goal from Rousseau, Sterne, and other Sentimental novelists of the eighteenth century.
Written in the generation before Dostoevsky, Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time (1840) links plot with narration in a particularly vivid way. It is almost an encyclopedia of alternative causal connections between incidents. Narratively, the voices, experiences, and actions of the characters reach the reader through the accounts of the old soldier Maksim Maksimich or the Byronic aristocrat Pechorin, which are filtered through the voice of an “editor,” who sometimes selects the materials from “a thick notebook” and always edits at least the names to protect the “real” people the novel imagines. And from the 1841 edition on, a preface interposes the outermost voice of an authorial figure who knows that all the others are fictional. Such narrative layering was commonplace in Russia and the West in the 1830s, but Lermontov’s different figures inhabit very different worlds, knowing about different incidents and, more importantly, seeing totally different causal mechanisms as organizing these incidents.
In most novels, as we have said, the dominant relationship among the incidents in the fabula is cause and effect, or its psychological reflex, motivation, but A Hero of Our Time goes beyond this practical use of causality and becomes a philosophical dialogue among the characters and the narrators on the nature of causality. On the first page of the novel, the “editor” introduces the topic with a question that naively applies a certain causal system: “How is it that four oxen can haul your loaded carriage like a lark, and six of the creatures can scarcely budge my empty one with the help of these Ossetians?” This editor’s world operates by the laws of physics or, when he predicts a fine morrow, by appearances. On the other hand, Maksim Maksimich operates in a world of hidden causes, explaining how the Ossetian greed for extra business makes them impede their own oxen, or how the steam rising from a distant mountain presages a blizzard. Though he is the central figure of the novel, in this first story Pechorin is only a minor narrator, but near the end of this story, he introduces a Byronic system of motivation into a story where other characters have motives out of a Walter Scott novel: “Listen, Maksim Maksimich…I have an unhappy character: whether my upbringing made me so, or God made me so, I don’t know; I know only that if I am the cause of unhappiness to others, I am no less unhappy.” Maksim Maksimich is as naive about such Byronism as the “editor” is about the Caucasus:
“Did the French bring boredom into fashion?”
—“No, the English.—
“Aha, that’s it…. Of course, they always were outrageous drunkards.”
(214)
Maksim Maksimich introduces not only ethnic, economic, atmospheric, and alcoholic determinism into the causal system; a dozen pages later he also uses social class to explain behavior: “What are we uneducated oldsters doing, chasing after you?…You’re young society folk, proud; as long as you’re here under the Cherkassian bullets, you’re O.K…. But if you meet us afterwards you’re ashamed to offer your hand to one of us” (228).
Maksim Maksimich’s causes relate incidents to one another in the realistic tradition, contrasting not only with the physical causality the editor espouses, but also with the romantic kinds of causes Pechorin invokes: “These eyes, it seemed, were endowed with some magnetic power” (235); “the bumps on his skull…would have astonished a phrenologist with the strange mix of conflicting drives” (248); “We’re reading one another in the heart” (249), etc.
For Dostoevsky, more important than such phrases are four especially Russian features of causation in Pechorin’s accounts: coincidence, including all of Pechorin’s accidental eavesdropping; the sovereign power of the will, as when Pechorin draws a group of listeners away from other entertaining interlocutors, or when he makes his opponent miss his shot in their duel; the gratuitous actions motivated not by anything external but by the nature of the character, such as that which makes Pechorin wonder “why I did not want to set out on that path fate had opened to me where quiet joys and heartfelt calm awaited me?…No, I should never have adapted to that destiny” (312); and finally, fate, which he discusses throughout, but most especially in the final story of the novel.
This complex of Pechorinesque causations never exists alone, because his narrative voice never exists alone. At the end of the novel, Maksim Maksimich initially responds to Pechorin’s account of an experiment in Russian roulette that appeared to confirm predestination: “Yes, sir. It’s a rather tricky matter!…Still, these Asiatic triggers often misfire, if they’re badly oiled.” The novel seems to have two fabulas, one organizing events according to the rules of practical life and another according to the more exciting rules of Pechorin’s world. Lermontov gives Pechorin the last word about fatalism, but it is a strikingly indecisive comment on the entire panoply of causal systems that this novel explores in its plot and narration: “[Maksim Maksimich] in general dislikes metaphysical debates.”
Nikolai Karamzin had carried the eighteenth-century Sentimental tradition from the West into Russian nineteenth-century prose much as Lermontov later popularized Romanticism. In Karamzin’s “My Confession” (1802), the narrator prides himself on his lack of honor, sanity, and social value, carrying Rousseau’s willful taboo-breaking and gratuitous actions to a level of insulting self-consciousness that sounds less like Rousseau’s Confessions than like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, though Dostoevsky was drawing on both. Karamzin’s most famous short story, “Poor Liza” (1792), appealed to the sentiment that expresses itself through tears, though the Sentimentalist aesthetic also valorizes the emotions that produce laughter, social action, and many other responses. Liza is a young flower-seller on the Moscow streets who is seduced and abandoned by the wealthy Erast. She dies pathetically.
In his role of follower, competitor, and successor to Karamzin as the central figure on the Russian literary scene, Pushkin seems at first to belong to the Western nineteenth-century novelistic tradition, as Ivan Turgenev did in his major novels and as did many lesser novelists in Pushkin’s generation, such as Osip Senkovsky, Nikolai Polevoy, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Faddei Bulgarin, Anton Pogorelsky, Ivan Lazhechnikov, Alexander Veltman, or Mikhail Zagoskin. Certainly Pushkin loved the fashionable and was drenched in Western literature; his Captain’s Daughter (1836) draws its setting and much of its plot from Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814). Yet the works of Pushkin that most influenced later Russian novels were not conventional novels at all. One was Eugene Onegin (1833), a novel in verse, and the other was The Belkin Tales (1830), which are usually treated as a group of separate stories, like Karamzin’s, not as a proto-novelistic experiment. The plotting in Onegin follows the standard pattern René Girard ascribes to European novels: desire is imitative and unreciprocated. Onegin rejects Tatiana’s love until he sees her loved, then she rejects him when he offers himself to her. But in both of these works, the narrator stands back and reflects upon the incidents in ways that seem sometimes naive and sometimes remarkably sophisticated. The narrator of Eugene Onegin cries out “Alas!” like a Sentimental novelist and digresses like Fielding or Sterne, although he also enters with the reader into conspiratorial judgment of his hero in the manner of Scott or later, Dickens and Thackeray. Pushkin may draw his plots from contemporary Europe, but his narrative technique in Onegin retains much of Sterne’s, Fielding’s, or Voltaire’s eighteenth-century flexibility and playfulness, with a “preface” at the end of chapter 7 and a siuzhet containing much detail about the life and opinions of the narrator that plays no part at all in the lives of the characters.
The Belkin Tales fall midway through the evolution of the most ambitious Russian prose in the 1820s and 1830s as it recapitulated the long and intricate history of the proto-novel in Europe, moving from collections of individual tales, like Karamzin’s and the Gesta Romanorum (c. 1300), to tales linked by a narrative situation like Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s Evenings on the Bivouac (1823) and Boccaccio’s Decameron (1360s), through tales linked by a single narrator like Pushkin’s Belkin and Thomas Malory’s narrator in Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), to tales linked by a single hero, like Don Quixote (1605) and Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time (1840), which is fractal, a collection of incidents worked into stories and stories incorporated into a novel. Such evolution never occurs neatly; early techniques often attract late writers more than prescient recent works of isolated geniuses, but the Russians were able to do in decades what took centuries in the West precisely because in addition to the classical sources in epic and romance from Petronius, Apuleius, and others which shaped the Western novel, the Russians had an existing novelistic tradition developed by Fyodor Emin, Mikhail Chulkov, and others in the eighteenth century and, far more important, the rich novelistic tradition of the West to draw on.
Pushkin’s Belkin breaks Henry James’s cardinal rule for a narrator. James’s narrators may be wise or foolish, even insane or fanatic, but they must be consistently whatever they are, so that “the interest created, and the expression of that interest, are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves” (The Art of the Novel, 97). Moreover, narrators who can see into a character’s mind at one moment must not learn what that character is thinking from his countenance at another moment (16). Belkin begins telling “The Blizzard” with full insight into the mind of the heroine and suddenly switches to the narration of her actions entirely from outside. Pushkin breaks James’s rules here not through ignorance or inattention, but simply because other literary needs precluded obedience to such rules. The effectiveness of the siuzhet demands that the reader share the heroine’s bookish but wholehearted love and also her surprise at the ending of the story. Consistency would have cost him one or the other of these effects, and Pushkin therefore turned to the eighteenth-century tradition of more flexible narrators.
Pushkin liked and admired Karamzin, but disdained his Sentimentalism. He mischievously took the plot of “Poor Liza” and offered an alternative ending in Belkin’s tale “The Station Agent.” The poor agent in a remote station for changing stagecoach horses dies of despondency when a rich and dashing seducer carries off his daughter to a ruin explored in an earlier generation by Richardson and many others. But to mourn him, the daughter returns grandly in a coach and four. In defiance of the Sentimental plot formula, she is the victor and has seduced her victim into the ultimate comeuppance for the promiscuous: marriage. Belkin offers no information about what goes on in the psyche of either combatant during this battle of the sexes.
The hero of Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1846), reads this story and sorrows for the old station agent, as Karamzin would have wanted. He also resembles the agent, losing the object of his affection to a rich seducer who carries her away in a coach. But Dostoevsky shows us every step in her subjection of this suitor, from her revulsion after the seducer’s earlier mistreatment of her, through her heartbroken abandonment of the poor clerk who longs to starve with her, to the moment she reduces the seducer to buying her things he cannot afford, and the true comeuppance, marriage. Dostoevsky has used the letter form to turn the plot of two of the greatest Russian short stories into that of a psychological novel that dares to compete with Pushkin and Karamzin.
The reasons Dostoevsky could draw on eighteenth-century techniques that Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and others rejected can be summed up in two words: Nikolai Gogol. Like Karamzin, as we have said, Gogol has been called the Russian Sterne. While the Western Europeans drew a new kind of novel from the tradition of Scott and the Gothic novelists because Sterne had carried so many eighteenth-century novelistic techniques to the point of absurdity, the Russians also drew heavily on the sensationalism of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Gothic novels coupled with the sharp social, moral, and psychological judgment of Scott’s novels. But they never turned away from Sterne. Gogol’s first novel, Taras Bulba (1835), owes much to Scott; yet Gogol also enabled the Russians to go on developing the techniques of the eighteenth-century Western novels they had been reading in translation and in the original for generations. A short story that appeared almost simultaneously with A Hero of Our Time gives the clearest illustration of Gogol’s departure from the Western European tradition later canonized in Henry James’s prefaces.
“The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” (1835) seems at first to be an almost plotless story of provincial pettiness, anger, and stupidity; two old friends quarrel over an insignificant request and go through their whole lives unreconciled. In the first sentences of the story, the narrator seems to be equally involved in matters of limited significance: “Ivan Ivanovich has a glorious jacket! The most excellent! And what soft fleece! Whew, go to, what wool! I’ll wager Lord knows that you can’t find anybody’s like it!” (Gogol, PSS, 2:223) These words give little information about Ivan Ivanovich but a great deal about the narrator. He is still close enough to infancy to love fuzz, to end every phrase with an exclamation point, and to bubble over with enthusiasm at matters that most of us might at most consider nice. Three pages later, this narrator remains enthusiastic and naive, but already has acquired enough control of himself and the world to enter into sociological, statistical, and perhaps biological disputation:
It has been spread around that Ivan Nikiforovich was born with a tail at his back. But this canard is so absurd and at the same time stupid and indecent that I judge it unnecessary to refute it before enlightened readers, who are aware without the slightest doubt, that only witches, and even very few of them have tails at their backs; and they, moreover, belong for the most part to the female sex rather than the male.
(2:226)
Whatever our views on the statistics of caudal preponderance, we all can recognize a much more mature voice than that of the narrator at the beginning of the story. When he appears again twenty pages later, this narrator has developed the voice of a jaded traveler with a clear and ironic sense of the Russian bureaucracy: “The trial then moved with that uncommon speed for which our judiciary is so widely renowned. They annotated papers, excerpted them, numbered them, bound them, and receipted them all on one and the same day, and placed it all in a cabinet where it lay, lay, lay a year another, a third” (2:263). And a few pages later, the narrator has even acquired literary self-consciousness: “No, I cannot!…Give me another pen! My pen is faded, deadened, with too thin a stroke for this picture!” (2:271). Finally, on the last two pages of the story, a conscientious, self-important, and tired old man displays no trace of enthusiasm: “At that time, the weather exercised a strong effect on me: I grew bored when it was boring…. I sighed still more deeply and hurried to make my adieus because I was traveling on a quite important matter, and got into my carriage…. It’s boring on this earth, gentlemen!” (2:276)
This final exclamation point has nothing in common with those at the beginning of the story. These last words almost coincide with Winston Churchill’s confession of boredom to his last private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, while dying in his tenth decade. Henry James would call this changing narrator loose and baggy, a danger to the reliability that rests on the integrity of the figure through whom the reader must apprehend everything in the text. And yet Gogol orders these changes tightly. His narrator has rather more of a career than any other character in the story. Readers see the growing decrepitude and pointlessness of the officials, the provincial town and the two Ivans, and, without noticing it, they also experience the aging of the narrator and his unsuccessful struggle against the pointlessness of his existence. By breaking the narrative rules of the West and giving his narrator a plot of his own, Gogol implicates the reader in the aging process.