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Nineteenth Century Russian Novels

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recommended reading from the classics

Russia has a rich literary tradition which stretches from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Its great writers have done particularly well with the novel, allowing themselves to be influenced by other strong traditions, such as the British and French.

Russian novels - Eugene OneginEugene Onegin (1831) Alexander Pushkin is generally considered to be the father of modern Russian literature – a witty, sophisticated writer. He was principally a poet, but his masterwork is in fact a novel – which is written in verse. It’s the story of a clever but bored aristocrat who charms a young woman Tatiana so much that she writes a letter declaring her love to him. He rejects her and continues with his bachelor existence. But years later, on meeting her again, he realises what he has missed. He asks for a second chance, but his time, despite the fact that she still loves him, it is she who rejects him. The novel exists in many translations, including the monumentally scholarly production by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s a wonderfully light and entertaining story, but with lots of hidden depths. Many critics argue that Tatiana represents the soul of Russia, simple and truthful, and Onegin the more sophisticated but ultimately inappropriate spirit of Europe.
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Russian novels - A Hero of Our TimeA Hero of Our Time (1839) Mikhail Lermontov is another one-novel writer who concentrated his attention, like Pushkin, on the theme of the ‘Superfluous Man’. This is the talented and educated young Russian who has no outlets for his skills and no place to employ his intelligence, because of the closed, feudal, and autocratic nature of Russian society. Lermontov was a contemporary of Pushkin’s, and like him he produced just this one substantial piece of fiction which seemed to sum up the epoch in which they lived. A Hero of Our Time turns on the events of a duel (which had killed Pushkin only ten years earlier). A young and disaffected soldier contemplates existential questions of will and identity, plus the perennial question of ‘how to live’. In the end he kidnaps a woman and shoots a man in a duel to test out the limits of his freedom.
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Russian novels - Dead SoulsDead Souls (1842) Nikolai Gogol is probably at his best in shorter fictions such as The Nose and The Overcoat. These are both seminal works in the history of Russian literature. He writes in an inventive and peculiar style, rich in playful and sometimes absurd imagery. He also has a habit of butting in to his own narratives to pass comments which sometimes have nothing to do with the story. Dead Souls is his one big novel. It’s a crazy satire on the corruption and inertia of nineteenth century provincial Russian life. The plot centres on someone who trades in the identities of peasants who have died but remain on the census records. Comic, absurd, and bitingly satirical, Gogol completed a sequel, but destroyed it in a fit of religious fanaticism whilst he was starving himself to death. This particular translation comes highly recommended. Vladimir Nabokov consigned all others to the rubbish bin.
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Russian novels - Notes from UndergroundNotes from Underground (1864) Fyodor Dostoyevski represents the dark, tortured, and often violent side of Russian life. In his novels he explores all sorts of existential issues such as reason and free will, personal identity, guilt, religious belief, and the power of unconscious motivation. His treatment of these issues, the suspense in his plots, and his studies of tortured neurotic behaviour make him seem quite modern, and he is often included in studies of twentieth-century existentialism. Be prepared for complex plots, long meditations on philosophic issues, melodrama, and contradictions. The rewards are thrilling suspense and deep psychological studies of characters struggling with personal demons at the end of their behavioural tether. Notes from Underground is one of Dostoyevski’s classic existential meditations. A first person narrator informs us “I am a sick man…I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver” There is no plot: the character simply wrestles with his existence and debates whether to live according to reason or irrationality. You have the sense of something written in the middle of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth – and many modern writers make reference to this as a seminal work.
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The GamblerThe Gambler (1867) This famous novel was written under extreme pressure. Unless Dostoyevski delivered the manuscript within six weeks, all future royalties on anything he wrote would go to his unscrupulous publisher. So Dostoyevski hired a stenographer – the star pupil from Russia’s first school of shorthand dictation. He dictated the novel in four weeks – then married her. It’s a tight-knit, complex tale of compulsive gambling set in a German spa town. A young man Alexei vows that he will quit gambling as soon as he breaks even at the roulette wheel. He has also fallen in love with a beautiful young woman who does nothing but humiliate him. The novel sees the disintegration and paradoxically increased euphoria of Alexei’s character, until he is at the end so depraved that one wonders what keeps him from going mad.
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Russian novels - From the House of the DeadFrom the House of the Dead (1862) This isn’t a novel, but a documentary reportage. It gives an account of the ten years Dostoyevski spent in Siberian labour camps – as punishment for having planned to publish revolutionary pamphlets. The horrors of internment – including prisoners being flogged to death – are recounted in stomach-churning detail. But what emerges from the book as a whole is the amazing endurance of the human will and its desire to survive no matter how merciless the circumstances. If you have a taste for this topic, the book can profitably be read alongside similar classics such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
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Russian novels - Crime and PunishmentCrime and Punishment (1866) This is one of Dostoyevski’s great masterpieces. Raskolnikov, a penniless student, decides to murder a greedy moneylender on principle in order to set himself outside and (as he sees it) above society. After he has done so, he is tormented by guilt and remorse. He is also pursued by a detective who seems to be able to read his mind, and to whom Raskolnikov repeatedly comes very close to confessing. In order to resolve his doubts about his own motivation and rationality, Raskolnikov in typical Dostoyevskian fashion decides to commit a second murder. This understandably makes matters worse. There is a great deal of conventional suspense – will he be found out, or not? – the outcome of which it would be unfair to reveal, but which is surprising nevertheless.
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Russian novels - The Brothers KaramazovThe Brothers Karamazov (1880) This is another existential study which turns on the issue of a brutal murder. Old father Karamazov is killed by one of his three sons – but we don’t know which one. The eldest, Dmitri, is passionate, violent, and desperate for money; Ivan is an intellectual and an atheist; and Alyosha, the youngest, has love, faith, and compassion for everyone. (You don’t need a brass plaque on your door to see that these are aspects of Dostoyevski’s own personality.) Pay attention to the smallest details right from page one. This is a combination of a murder mystery, an exploration of the mind under extreme pressure, a study of the destructive nature of romantic love, and an argument for and against the existence of God. Many people regard this as Dostoyevski’s masterpiece.
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Russian novels - Anna KareninaAnna Karennina (1875) Count Leo Tolstoy was a great novelist, but as a man he was full of contradictions. He was a pious Christian who did plenty of sinning; a rich land-owning aristocrat who was a passionate believer in the simple life; a compulsive gambler who believed in self-discipline; and an ascetic puritan who believed in sexual abstinence but who was a compulsive philanderer. As a social reformer, he might have been the man for whom the expression ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ was coined. Anna Karenina is the most approachable of his big novels. It’s the story of a beautiful woman torn between the man she loves and her duty to her husband and son. This story is counterpointed with that of Levin, a rich landowner who is seeking for the right way to live. He tries agriculture and politics, but ends up turning to God (not very convincingly). As the cultural philosopher Isaiah Berlin said of Tolstoy, his solutions are usually wrong; but what’s important is that he asks the right questions. However, it is the story of Anna’s love affair with Vronsky which dominates the novel and makes this an enduring masterpiece. This is the Russian equivalent of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and a highlight of the nineteenth-century novel.
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Russian novels - War and PeaceWar and Peace (1863-9) As everyone knows, this is the archetypal nineteenth-century blockbuster. It is an epic study of birth, marriage, life and death set against the background of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the sacking of Moscow, and his tragic retreat in 1812. Tolstoy does a very good job of depicting war as a shambolic mess, and he is successful in undermining the idea that historical events are shaped by Great Men. It is a long novel. Be prepared for extended episodes featuring lectures on the philosophy of history. But the writing is crystal clear and the characters unforgettable.
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Russian novels - Fathers and SonsFathers and Sons (1862) Ivan Turgenev was the first Russian writer to find success in Europe, and he spent most of his adult life there. He was a supporter of the Western solution to Russia’s problems. His work might seem rather lightweight compared to Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, but he touches on important Russian themes, and his novels are well composed and easy to read. Fathers and Sons looks at the conflict between generations. The older landowners wish to preserve traditional systems, whilst the younger generation are yearning for some form of revolution to free them from the dead hand of conservatism. Neither party wins out in the end, but it is to Turgenev’s credit that the novel presciently flags up political issues which were to erupt forty years later in Russian history. This new translation, specially commissioned for the World’s Classics, is the first to draw on Turgenev’s working manuscript, which only came to light in 1988.
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© Roy Johnson 2009

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Twentieth Century Russian Novels

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Russian novels - St Petersburgrecommended classic reading

St Petersburg (1916) Andrei Biely (pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) is a much-neglected figure from the period of modernist experimentation. He was a novelist, a poet, a theorist, and literary critic. His major work is a novel with a ticking bomb (concealed in a sardine can) at its centre – a sort of meditation on violence. It’s the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a never-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father. Nikolai is pursued through the impenetrable Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. It is not unlike James Joyce’s Ulysses in its literary experimentation, and in being concerned with the events one day in one city. But the experimentation is of a different kind. Biely was a symbolist and a mystic. He uses his poetic style in this novel to bring the city to life as if it were a living, breathing being.
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Russian novels - We - ZamyatinWe (1921) Yevgeny Zamyatin is also an unjustly neglected master of the school of experimental modernism which flourished in Russia until the early 1920s. His one novel is a very original science-fiction dystopia, and a satirical critique of the Russian revolution (which he had supported) as he saw it being betrayed by the forces of totalitarianism. It is a novel which deserves to be much better known. In a totally regulated society where people are known by numbers, two lovers embody irrational urges towards which the state is hostile. The novel was tragically prophetic of the Stalinism which was to come. It is written in a dazzlingly poetic and experimental style, and it was quite clearly the model for both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Both of these writers had read the novel: this, the original, is far superior. Do yourself a favour: add this to your reading list.
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Russian novels - Nabokov - MaryMary (1923) Vladimir Nabokov is a great Russian writer, even though he left the country in flight from the revolution in his youth, and spent the rest of his life in exile, living in Germany, America, and Switzerland. In fact he wrote half of his huge output in English. He represents the playful, experimental side of modernism which the Stalinists did their best to stamp out. His writing is amazingly stylish – rich in imagery, erudite, stuffed full of verbal tricks and special effects.

Of course he is best known for Lolita, which he wrote in English whilst living in America. But he wrote novels in Russian during the 1920s and 1930s whilst living in Germany. He can be very lyrical as he is in his early novels Mary and Glory (1932) where he evokes the raptures of youthful pleasures, and the discovery of passion and loss. His lyrical prose records a young Russian exile’s recollections of his first love affair. But the woman in question clearly symbolises his relationship with Russia. He is also good at a creating a marvellous sense of awe in contemplating the quiet aesthetic pleasures in everyday events and special moments of being.

Russian novels - King,Queen,KnaveOther novels such as King, Queen, Knave show a much darker side to his nature, with its focus on adultery, deception, and cruelty. These traits are taken to an uncomfortable extreme in Laughter in the Dark (1932) which plots the downfall of a man who runs off with a young girl who, when he is rendered blind in a car accident, secretly moves her lover in to live under the same roof. The sleazy pair of them torment the protagonist in a particularly gruesome fashion. This theme of the older man driven to self-destruction by desire for a younger woman was something Nabokov explored again in The Enchanter which he wrote in Paris in 1939, and twenty years later in Lolita which he wrote in English whilst teaching in an American college.
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Russian novels - The Gift - NabokovThe Gift (1936) is generally held to be the greatest of Nabokov’s Russian novels. It deals with the ironies and agonies of exile. It’s also the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It’s also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative, and it also has at its centre a critique of Chernyshevsky. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write – a book very much like The Gift. The novel plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with conventional notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. It also includes a deeply felt fictionalisation of the murder of Nabokov’s own father in 1922 whilst he was attempting to stop a political assassination.
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Russian novels - The Master and MargaritaThe Master and Margarita (1940) Mikhail Bulgakov was originally a doctor. His early works The Diary of a Country Doctor and The White Guard are written in a lucid, plain style not unlike Chekhov (who was of course also a doctor). In the 1920s and 1930s Bulgakov turned to the theatre, and despite conflicts with the Stalinists at the height of their purges, he managed to survive just long enough to complete his masterpiece. The Master and Margarita is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, causing all sort of mischief and disruption. This is interspersed with chapters re-telling the story of Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended with spellbinding imaginative force.
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Russian novels - Doctor ZhivagoDr Zhivago (1957) Boris Pasternak is principally a poet so far as Russian literature is concerned, but it is his novel by which he is best known to the general reading public in the West. He was awarded the Nobel prize for it, but forced to turn it down by the Soviet authorities. This is a sprawling epic of the Russian revolution, a passionate love story, and a memorable portrait of a doctor-poet caught up in the wheels of history. Zhivago seeks to do good and live with simple dignity, but his efforts are thwarted by war, revolution, and his love affair with Lara, who is married to a Bolshevik general. Critical opinion has been somewhat divided over this work, with some readers seeing it as no more than a nineteenth century novel in disguise. With the general reading public however, it has never lost its appeal.
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Russian novels - One Day in the Life of Ivan DenisovichOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) This is the short novel that made Alexander Solzhenitsyn famous overnight. It recounts a typical day’s work, deprivation, and suffering of a prisoner in one of Stalin’s labour camps. Publication was ‘allowed’ as part of Krushchev’s post 1956 attack on Stalin and his legacy. The facts of the story were deliberately understated to meet the censor’s requirements at the time. It catapulted Solzhenitsyn to fame, and yet within a couple of years his work was banned again.

Solzhenitsyn writes in a simple, restrained style in which ornamentation is stripped away in favour of moral purpose. The results celebrate a stoical, almost puritan heroism in the face of all that the Russian people have had to endure – government-constructed poverty, war, political corruption, censorship, and totalitarian repression.

Russian novels - The First CircleThe First Circle (1968) This novel is set in a special research-cum-detention centre reserved for mathematicians and scientists who are nevertheless political prisoners. This is what might be called a novel of ideas, as the characters discuss the political and historical forces which have brought them to their present unjust imprisonment. Of the main characters, one is eventually released, another is sent off to a much harsher regime, and the third remains where he is. It is based very closely on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences of his first period of imprisonment by the Stalinist regime.
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Russian novels - August 1914August 1914 (1984) This is the first part of a multi-volume epic, a historical novel on a grand scale about the origins of the Soviet Union and how communism came to take root there. Solzhenitsyn sees the Battle of Tannenberg at the start of the First World War as the first major turning point in this process. Using a range of modernist-cum-experimental techniques, he sets in motion a huge cast of characters against the backdrop of this decisive battle. The whole enterprise was called The Red Wheel. There were further volumes in the cycle published, but towards the end of his life Solzhenitsyn transferred most of his energy into books arguing for social and political reform – rather in the same manner as Tolstoy.
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Russian novels - Lenin in ZurichLenin in Zurich (1976) This is a short novel composed of some separate chapters from The Red Wheel. It focuses largely on Lenin in exile, immediately prior to his triumphant return in a sealed train to St Petersburg’s Finland Station. It’s a very interesting study, because Solzhenitsyn is clearly critical of Lenin as one of the central architects of communism – yet he narrates the story largely from Lenin’s point of view. Steeped in history, this is a major attempt at a political and psychological portrait of a historical figure.
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© Roy Johnson 2009

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