The late start

Russia had almost no secular literature before the 1700s. Written culture meant Orthodox texts in Church Slavonic — a liturgical language related to Russian about the way Latin is related to Italian — and the country sat outside the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Peter the Great changed this by force, starting in the 1690s. He had traveled in Western Europe in disguise as a young man, worked in a Dutch shipyard for four months, visited English dockyards and the Royal Society, and came home convinced Russia was a backwater that had to be dragged into the present. He did the dragging himself. He made the boyars cut off their beards and wear European clothes, and taxed those who refused. He replaced the old calendar with the Julian one and moved New Year’s Day from September to January. He stripped the Orthodox Church of its patriarch and put it under a government department. He simplified the Russian alphabet by personally crossing out letters he thought useless. He created a table of ranks that let commoners rise through state service, founded the navy from nothing, conscripted serfs by the hundred thousand to fight the Swedes, and won — taking the Baltic coast and ending Sweden as a great power.

The largest project was the city. In 1703 he founded St. Petersburg on a Baltic swamp, named it after his patron saint, and built it as a deliberate window on Europe: stone instead of wood, straight avenues, Italian architects, a court that spoke French. Tens of thousands of conscripted workers died in the construction. He moved the capital there in 1712. He died in 1725, by some accounts from a chill caught while wading into icy water to help rescue drowning sailors.

The cost was that within two generations the aristocracy read French more easily than Russian and had no Russian literature to read. Mikhail Lomonosov wrote a Russian grammar in 1755, and Karamzin a generation later gave the language a usable prose, but there were still no great Russian books.

Pushkin

The first writer who produced any was Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). His great-grandfather Abram Gannibal had been taken as a child from somewhere in present-day Cameroon or Eritrea — the sources differ — sold through the slave market in Constantinople, and acquired by a Russian envoy who presented him to Peter the Great. Peter stood as the boy’s godfather at his baptism, had him educated in France as a military engineer, and Gannibal eventually rose to the rank of general under Peter’s daughter Elizabeth. Pushkin grew up with a Russian nanny who told him folk tales and a French tutor who taught him Voltaire.

Pushkin did almost everything in Russian literature first. The short lyric poems — hundreds of them, written across his short life — established the metrical and emotional vocabulary that every Russian poet after him would either adopt or react against. The Bronze Horseman (1833), a narrative poem of barely five hundred lines, set the terms of the central Russian argument about Peter the Great: a young clerk named Evgeny loses his fiancée in the flood of 1824, goes mad with grief, and one night shakes his fist at the equestrian statue of Peter in Senate Square. The statue climbs down off its pedestal and chases him through the streets. The poem admires Peter as a builder and mourns the human cost of his city in the same breath, and refuses to resolve the contradiction. The Queen of Spades (1834) is a short story about a German officer who pries from an old countess the secret of three winning cards, then loses everything when the third card turns up wrong; it became the template for a strain of supernatural Petersburg story that runs through Gogol and Dostoevsky into the twentieth century. The Captain’s Daughter (1836) gave Russian prose its first historical novel.

Eugene Onegin (1825–1832) is a novel in verse, written in a stanza Pushkin invented for it. The plot is simple. A bored Petersburg aristocrat, Onegin, goes to the country, where a young woman named Tatiana writes him a love letter. He turns her down politely and tells her she should be more careful with her feelings. Then, out of pure boredom and irritation, he flirts with his best friend’s fiancée at a party, the friend challenges him to a duel, and Onegin kills him. Years later, in Petersburg, Onegin meets Tatiana again. She is now married to a general. He falls in love with her and writes her a letter. She tells him she still loves him but will stay with her husband.

Onegin is the first version of a character type Russian critics later named the superfluous man: an educated, privileged young man who has no use for his education or his privileges and ruins the lives around him because he cannot find anything to do with himself. This type recurs in Russian novels for the next hundred years. Pushkin himself died in a duel in 1837, at thirty-seven, defending his wife’s honor against a French officer who had been pursuing her.

Lermontov

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) wrote the next major version. A Hero of Our Time (1840) is one short novel made of five stories about an army officer named Pechorin who is stationed in the Caucasus. The stories are arranged out of chronological order, and they are told by three different narrators — first by an older officer who knew Pechorin, then by an unnamed traveler who hears the older officer’s account, and finally, in the longest section, by Pechorin himself, in a journal the traveler has come into possession of after Pechorin’s death.

The point of the structure is that the reader meets Pechorin from the outside first, as a charming and impressive man whose actions seem inexplicable, and only later gets inside his head, where it turns out he is fully aware of what he is doing and bored by it. In the central story he meets a Circassian princess named Bela, has her brother kidnap her for him, makes her fall in love with him, and loses interest within weeks; she is killed shortly afterward. In the longest story he sets up a romantic intrigue with a young woman in a spa town purely to humiliate a rival officer, then kills the rival in a duel. He records all of this in the journal in clear analytical prose, including the parts where he understands he is destroying people. He cannot stop.

Lermontov was the most gifted Russian poet of his generation and would probably have become the major Russian writer of the century if he had lived. He was killed in a duel in 1841, at twenty-six, by a fellow officer he had been mocking.

Gogol

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) wrote a kind of realism that suddenly stops being realistic. The Overcoat (1842) is about a poor copying clerk in Petersburg named Akaky Akakievich whose old coat has worn out. He saves for years, eats less, walks carefully so as not to wear out his shoes, and finally has a new coat made. On his first night wearing it, two men stop him in an empty square and take it. He tries to report the theft, is shouted at by an important official, walks home in the cold without a coat, catches a fever, and dies. So far the story is a piece of social realism about poverty and bureaucratic indifference. Then, in the last two pages, Akaky’s ghost begins appearing in Petersburg at night and tearing the coats off the shoulders of well-dressed men, including, eventually, the important official who shouted at him. The story does not say this is a dream, or a rumor, or a metaphor. It just happens. The reader has to decide what to do with it.

Dead Souls (1842) is a comic novel about a confidence man named Chichikov who travels around the Russian countryside buying legal title to dead serfs. The trick depends on a specific feature of the system: serfs were counted for tax purposes only every few years, so a serf who had died after the last census still legally existed on paper. Chichikov offers landowners small sums to transfer these paper serfs to him, planning to mortgage them as if they were real estate, and then to disappear with the loan. Most of the book is the visits — Chichikov going from one landowner to the next, each one a different variety of provincial Russian, the negotiations played for comedy. Underneath the comedy is the observation that the whole Russian economy was organized around treating human beings as units of property listed in a book.

Gogol meant to write a second part in which Chichikov reformed, modeled loosely on Dante’s progression from Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso. He could not make it work. He fell under the influence of a fanatical priest who told him his writing was sinful, burned the manuscript of part two, stopped eating, and died at forty-two.

The critics who made the novels public events

Russian novels did not reach their readers as private entertainments. They reached them through the so-called “thick journals” — The Contemporary, Notes of the Fatherland, The Russian Messenger — which serialized fiction alongside long critical essays that told readers what the fiction meant politically. The most important of these critics was Vissarion Belinsky, who in the 1840s essentially invented the role of the Russian literary critic as moral conscience of the nation. His annual surveys of Russian literature were read as state-of-the-nation reports, and his open letter denouncing Gogol’s late religious turn was passed around in handwritten copies for years; reading it aloud was one of the charges that got Dostoevsky sent to the firing squad.

The pattern Belinsky established held for the rest of the century. A novel appeared in a journal; a radical critic — Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev — wrote an essay explaining what social position the novel forced on its reader; a conservative critic answered; the public read the novel as a move in that argument.

Turgenev, Goncharov, and the others

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) spent much of his adult life in Western Europe, mostly in Baden-Baden and Paris, in long pursuit of the Spanish singer Pauline Viardot, and watched Russia from a distance. Fathers and Sons (1862) is his best-known novel. A young medical student named Bazarov comes home from university for the summer with his friend Arkady. Bazarov calls himself a nihilist — the word entered general use through this novel — by which he means that nothing established deserves respect: not art, not love, not the gentry’s polite manners, not religion, not even his own parents’ affection for him. He says all of this aloud, repeatedly, to anyone who will listen.

Turgenev does not argue against Bazarov’s positions. He simply puts him through the year. Bazarov falls in love with a wealthy young widow, which his theory should not have permitted; she declines him. He goes home to his parents, whom he has been telling himself he finds tedious, and finds he is glad to see them. He helps his father, the local doctor, with an autopsy on a peasant who has died of typhus, cuts himself, contracts the disease, and dies. The last scene is his parents weeping at his grave. The novel was attacked when it came out by radicals, who said Bazarov was a slander on their generation, and by conservatives, who said he was glamorized. This is generally what happens when a writer draws a generation accurately.

Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859) is the definitive superfluous-man novel. The first hundred and fifty pages are about a landowner in his thirties trying to get out of bed. He owns a country estate; he has friends who want to help him; he is loved by an intelligent woman who is willing to marry him. He cannot do any of it. The novel follows him slowly losing all of these things to inertia and ending up married to his landlady, eating well, doing nothing, and dying young. Oblomovism entered the Russian language as a common noun for the condition.

Two writers who do not fit neatly into the realist line but belong in any honest account of the century are Nikolai Leskov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Leskov (1831–1895) wrote stories rooted in provincial speech and folk idiom — Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), about a bored merchant’s wife who murders her way toward an affair, is the one Shostakovich later turned into the opera that got him in trouble with Stalin — and is the Russian writer most other Russian writers, from Chekhov to Solzhenitsyn, name as a model of how Russian prose should actually sound. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889) wrote political satire that got past the censors by being grotesque enough to deny. The History of a Town (1870) is a chronicle of an imaginary provincial town governed by a series of increasingly insane officials, one of whom has a music box for a head. The Golovlyov Family (1880) is a non-comic novel about a provincial gentry family destroying itself through greed and piety; it contains, in the figure of the unctuous middle son Iudushka (“Little Judas”), one of the few villains in Russian literature who is genuinely difficult to read about for stretches.

Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was arrested at twenty-seven for belonging to a discussion circle that read banned socialist pamphlets and circulated Belinsky’s banned letter to Gogol. He was sentenced to death, marched to the execution ground in front of a firing squad, told he had three minutes to live, and pardoned at the last possible moment. The Tsar had staged the mock execution as a lesson. Four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp followed. Dostoevsky came out a Christian and a monarchist, and he spent the rest of his life writing novels in which a character holds an idea, acts on it, and discovers in the process of acting that the idea cannot survive contact with what he is actually like inside.

Crime and Punishment (1866) is the clearest example. Raskolnikov, a poor student in Petersburg, has written an article arguing that exceptional men — Napoleon is his example — have the right to kill ordinary people if doing so serves a great purpose. He decides to test his theory on himself. He murders an old pawnbroker with an axe, takes some of her money, and discovers when her sister walks in unexpectedly that he has to kill her too. He then spends four hundred pages slowly falling apart. He cannot eat. He faints in a police station when the murder is mentioned. He goes back to the pawnbroker’s apartment for no reason and pulls the doorbell so he can hear the sound it made that night. He has a dream in which a peasant beats a horse to death while a crowd of drunks laughs. He has, in conscious argument, an answer for everything — he keeps telling himself the killing was justified — but his body keeps acting as though it knows the argument is wrong.

What Dostoevsky shows over and over is that this gap between what the character believes and what the character’s body, dreams, and involuntary reactions reveal is the moral life. A person is not what he says he believes. A person is what happens to him when he tries to live by it.

Notes from Underground (1864) is the same method in short form, and it has a specific target. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a radical critic, had published What Is to Be Done? the year before — a didactic novel arguing that if people are educated in their rational self-interest, they will cooperate to build a just society, and laying out, in some detail, the socialist communes such people would live in. Chernyshevsky’s book became a political bible for a generation of young Russian radicals; Lenin later named a pamphlet after it. Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky’s answer. A bitter retired civil servant, the underground man, attacks the idea that human beings will ever choose their rational self-interest, on the grounds that human beings will choose ruin, illness, and humiliation as readily as happiness if doing so lets them feel they have chosen for themselves. The attack is not made in clean arguments. The narrator contradicts himself from one sentence to the next, picks fights with imaginary objectors, takes back what he said two paragraphs ago, and accuses the reader of accusations the reader has not made. The form of the writing is itself the argument: a human being looks like this on the inside, not like a calculator working out his interests.

The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is Dostoevsky’s longest book and the one in which his method is applied at full scale. Three brothers — Dmitri the sensualist, Ivan the cold intellectual, Alyosha the young monk — circle the murder of their disgusting father. The intellectual case against God in the novel is given to Ivan, and Dostoevsky gives it more force than the believers’ answers. The famous Grand Inquisitor chapter is a story Ivan tells Alyosha. In it, Jesus returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. A cardinal has him arrested and explains, in a long speech, that the Church has had to take back the freedom Jesus offered humanity because humanity cannot bear it: people would rather have bread and authority than the burden of choosing for themselves. Jesus does not answer. He kisses the old cardinal on the lips and leaves.

What happens next in the novel is the answer Dostoevsky gives to Ivan’s argument, and it works at the level of plot rather than counter-speech. Ivan has a half-brother named Smerdyakov, an illegitimate son of the father, a servant in the house. Smerdyakov has been listening to Ivan’s table talk. He has absorbed Ivan’s repeated line that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. He takes Ivan at his word, kills the father, and tells Ivan afterward that he did it because Ivan, the smartest person he knows, had said it was allowed. Ivan loses his mind. He had believed the argument as theory; he had not understood, until Smerdyakov said it out loud, that someone might actually hear it and do something. The novel does not say Ivan’s argument is wrong. It shows what it costs to mean it.

Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a count, fought as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, ran a school for peasant children on his estate, and wrote two of the longest and best novels in any language.

His central skill, in both of them, is to make a single small physical detail do the work of a paragraph of explanation. In War and Peace (1869), at the battle of Austerlitz, Prince Andrei is wounded and falls on his back on the field, and the first thing the reader gets is what he sees: the sky. Just the sky, very high and gray, with clouds moving slowly across it. He has been a young man with large ambitions — to be a Napoleon, to do something famous — and lying there looking at the sky, he registers, without working it out in an argument, that none of that matters. The realization is the seeing of the sky. Tolstoy does not summarize it for him. The scene is short. The reader does the rest.

This is how Tolstoy writes the whole book. At the battle of Borodino, Pierre Bezukhov, an idealistic civilian, has gone to watch the battle from a position behind the Russian lines. Tolstoy keeps him there for many pages and keeps reporting what Pierre actually notices: that he is hungry, that the field smells of trampled grass, that the soldiers around him are afraid in specific small ways — one is laughing too loud, one keeps adjusting his pack. The argument War and Peace is making, both in the war scenes and in the long essay-like passages between them, is that nobody in a great event actually experiences it as a great event. Napoleon does not control the battle. Kutuzov, the Russian general, does not control the battle. The battle is the sum of many small things that none of them sees, and the official histories written afterward make it look orderly because that is what histories do.

Anna Karenina (1877) uses the same skill on private life. Anna is a married Petersburg noblewoman who falls in love with a young officer, Vronsky, leaves her husband and her son for him, and is destroyed by it — not by society’s disapproval, though that is part of it, but by her own slow change inside the affair. Tolstoy shows the change one scene at a time. Early in the book, Anna is at a horse race watching Vronsky ride. He falls badly, his horse breaks its back, and Anna cries out — too loud, in a way that her husband, sitting next to her, hears and understands. The detail is just the cry. Tolstoy does not say, and from this moment her husband knew. He lets the reader see the cry happen and lets the reader notice the husband next to her. Later in the novel, Anna decides her young son no longer needs her. She thinks this for one paragraph, and then in the next paragraph she knows that she has just told herself a lie, and Tolstoy lets that registration happen in her without commentary. Each of these moments is a small piece of physical or mental specificity that the reader is left to weigh. Across eight hundred pages, the weight of them adds up to her death.

Tolstoy also wrote excellent short fiction throughout his life, and his late novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is probably the best thing he ever did at short length. A high-court judge in his forties bangs his side against a window frame while hanging curtains in a new apartment, develops a pain that will not go away, and dies of it over the course of a few months. The novella follows him through the illness and watches him realize, very slowly, that the conventional respectable life he has been living — the right marriage, the right friends, the right career — was not actually a life. The realization arrives only days before his death. The story is fifty pages long and contains as much as most novels.

In his fifties Tolstoy had a religious crisis, repudiated the novels he had already written, renounced his copyrights, attacked the Orthodox Church (which excommunicated him), and spent the rest of his life writing tracts on Christian nonviolence and trying to live as a peasant. Gandhi corresponded with him and took part of his doctrine of nonviolent resistance from these later writings.

Chekhov

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was a working doctor — the grandson of a serf who had bought his own freedom — who started writing comic sketches to support his family while he was in medical school, and changed the short story by taking the climax out of it.

Most stories before Chekhov were built around a turn. Something happens that reveals the meaning of the events leading up to it: a marriage, a death, a confession, a recognition. Chekhov’s stories often have no such moment, or they have one so quiet that you can miss it, and what he is after is for the reader to realize, after finishing the story, that the meaning was somewhere in the middle and the story just kept going past it.

The Lady with the Dog (1899) is the standard example. Gurov, a middle-aged Moscow banker, is on holiday at the Black Sea resort of Yalta and meets a young married woman walking a small dog. They begin an affair, both of them treating it as the kind of casual resort affair Gurov has had before. The holiday ends. They go home to their separate cities. Gurov tries to forget her and finds, over the following months, that he cannot. He travels secretly to her town to see her. They begin meeting in Moscow in a hotel. Then, one evening, walking home from his club with a colleague, Gurov mentions that he wants to tell him something. He starts to say something about her. The colleague does not register what Gurov is trying to say and replies, after a pause, that the sturgeon at dinner had been a little off.

The story ends shortly after. Nothing more happens. The point of the moment with the sturgeon is that Gurov realizes, sitting on the street outside his club, that he is surrounded by people for whom the most important thing in his life is not even audible — that his entire social world cannot hear what he is actually feeling. The realization is the story. It is given through one offhand reply about fish.

Chekhov wrote dozens of stories that work this way. He also wrote four plays — The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard — in which the same technique is applied to the stage. In The Cherry Orchard (1904), an aristocratic family is about to lose their estate at auction. A merchant — the son of one of their former serfs — has told them they can save it by cutting down the famous cherry orchard and renting the land out as summer-cottage plots. They spend four acts not addressing this. They talk about their childhoods, about old loves, about philosophy. They throw a party on the night of the auction. They learn the estate has been sold to the merchant. As the family leaves at the end, the audience hears, offstage, the sound of axes beginning on the trees.

Chekhov died of tuberculosis later that year, at forty-four, in a German spa town.

The Silver Age

Between roughly 1890 and the Revolution in 1917, Russian poetry caught up with Russian prose and in some ways went past it. This period — called the Silver Age, in contrast to the Pushkin-era Golden Age — was organized around three successive movements, each defining itself against the one before it.

The Symbolists came first, in the 1890s, taking their starting point from French poets like Baudelaire and Mallarmé and grafting onto it a peculiarly Russian religious mysticism. The world of ordinary objects, on their account, was a thin curtain in front of a higher spiritual reality, and the poet’s job was to indicate that reality through symbol, music, and suggestion rather than describe it directly. The major Symbolists were Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Valery Bryusov. Blok’s last great poem, The Twelve (1918), shows what the movement could do at full strength: twelve Red Guards march through a blizzard in Petrograd, robbing, cursing, shooting a former lover in the snow, and at the head of their column — incongruously, controversially, in a vision that horrified almost everyone who first read the poem — walks Christ in a white wreath of roses. Bely’s novel Petersburg (1913) is the Symbolist masterpiece in prose: a young revolutionary is told to assassinate his own father, a high tsarist official, by means of a sardine tin containing a time bomb, and the bomb ticks in a desk drawer through three hundred pages of hallucinatory cityscape.

The Acmeists organized themselves around 1912 as an explicit reaction. They wanted poems about actual things, in clear syntax, with classical proportion — what Mandelstam called “a longing for world culture.” The three who lasted were Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Nikolai Gumilyov (Akhmatova’s first husband, shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 on fabricated charges of conspiracy). Akhmatova wrote short poems built around a single concrete domestic detail, often something a woman doing housework would notice: a glove pulled onto the wrong hand, salt spilled on a table, the smell of an apple. The detail in her poems carries the weight of a love affair or a betrayal that the poem barely otherwise describes. Mandelstam wrote poems compressed to the point that a single line could refer simultaneously to Homer, Dante, and a Petersburg streetcar; reading him is partly the work of unpacking the references he is invoking in three words.

The Futurists came at the same moment as the Acmeists, from the opposite direction. They wanted to throw Pushkin off the steamship of modernity (the phrase is from their 1912 manifesto), invent new words, break syntax, write poems that looked like industrial machinery and sounded like street noise. The major Futurist was Vladimir Mayakovsky, a huge young man who shouted his poems in public squares and put together long, jagged, exclamatory love poems and political poems in lines that fall down the page in stair-step fragments. He welcomed the Revolution and spent the 1920s writing propaganda posters, advertising jingles for state cooperatives, and increasingly disillusioned love poems, and shot himself in 1930 at thirty-six.

Marina Tsvetaeva belonged to none of these movements and is in some ways the strongest poet of the generation. She wrote with broken syntax — dashes everywhere, lines stopped mid-phrase, words torn out of their normal grammar — which gives her work an emotional pressure that almost no translation has managed to keep.

The Soviet state destroyed most of these poets. Mandelstam read a sixteen-line poem at a small private gathering in 1933 in which he compared Stalin’s mustache to a cockroach and Stalin’s fingers to fat worms. He was arrested, exiled, re-arrested in 1938, and died in a transit camp on the way to Kolyma that winter. Tsvetaeva had emigrated after the Revolution and lived in poverty in Prague and Paris; she returned to the Soviet Union in 1939, where her husband was shot, her daughter was sent to the camps, and she was evacuated during the war to a small town where she could not find work and hanged herself in 1941. Akhmatova’s first husband was shot, as noted; her son Lev was arrested twice and spent more than a decade in the camps. She spent seventeen months over the late 1930s standing in the line outside Leningrad’s main prison waiting for news of him. During those months she composed a poem cycle called Requiem in her head, line by line. She could not write it down: a manuscript discovered in the apartment during a search would have been used as evidence against her. So she taught it line by line to a small number of trusted friends, who memorized it. The poem survived in their memories for more than twenty years before it was safe to write down and longer than that before it could be published in Russia.

The last great Russian poet of the Soviet century, Joseph Brodsky, inherited this tradition directly. Akhmatova, in her old age in Leningrad in the early 1960s, took in a circle of young poets, of whom Brodsky was the most gifted. He was arrested in 1964, charged with “social parasitism” (the state did not recognize poetry as work), and at his trial, when the judge asked who had granted him the right to call himself a poet, he answered that he supposed it came from God. He was sentenced to five years of hard labor in the Arctic, released after eighteen months under international pressure, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, and won the Nobel Prize in 1987.

Underground prose

The Revolution did not at first kill Russian prose. The 1920s were, for a few years, a period of strange experiment. Isaac Babel published Red Cavalry in 1926 — a cycle of very short stories about a Jewish intellectual riding with a Cossack regiment in the Soviet-Polish War, each story a page or two of compressed violence and surreal landscape, written in prose that other Russian writers immediately recognized as a new instrument. Babel learned exactly the lesson the period taught: he was arrested in 1939, tortured, shot in 1940, and his unpublished manuscripts were destroyed.

Andrei Platonov wrote in the same years and is perhaps the strangest writer in Russian. His novels Chevengur (1928) and The Foundation Pit (1930) take Soviet utopian language — the slogans, the bureaucratic prose, the philosophical jargon of the new state — and let his characters, mostly half-educated peasants and workers, try to speak in it. They produce sentences that are grammatically Soviet and emotionally devastating: a man digging a foundation pit for a future workers’ palace mourns that he is digging through topsoil that should be growing wheat; an orphan girl dies of consumption, and the men around her, lacking any other vocabulary, try to console her in the language of dialectical materialism. The books could not be published in his lifetime. Stalin read one of them, wrote “bastard” in the margin, and Platonov spent the rest of his life unable to publish, working as a yard-sweeper at the Writers’ Union building, and died in 1951.

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in secret over twelve years, burned one draft, and died in 1940 with the manuscript unpublished. It sat in a desk drawer for twenty-six years before a censored version reached print. The novel has two plots running in parallel. In one, the Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow with a small retinue — including a giant talking black cat who drinks vodka and shoots a pistol — and torments the Soviet literary establishment with a series of supernatural pranks: making writers go mad, sending bureaucrats to Yalta in their underwear, putting on a stage show in which money rains from the ceiling and then turns to paper in people’s hands. In the other plot, which is the novel the Master, an imprisoned writer, has written, Pontius Pilate questions Jesus before the crucifixion and decides, against his own better instinct, to allow the execution. The two plots converge on a single moral claim, which Pilate has to live with for two thousand years afterward: the worst of sins is cowardice.

Vasily Grossman wrote Life and Fate in the 1950s as a deliberate echo of War and Peace, set during the Battle of Stalingrad. The novel placed Nazism and Stalinism on the same moral footing — showed them as two versions of the same totalitarian impulse — and in 1961 the KGB confiscated not only the manuscript but the drafts, the notebooks, and the carbon-paper ribbons from Grossman’s typewriter. He was told the book could not be published for two hundred years. He died a few years later believing this. A microfilm of a hidden copy survived. The novel was smuggled abroad in the late 1970s and published outside Russia in 1980, and inside Russia only in 1988.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served eight years in the camps for criticizing Stalin in a private letter to a friend during the Second World War. In 1962, during a brief political thaw under Khrushchev, he published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — exactly that, a single day in a prisoner’s life, from the cold morning when he is woken to the moment he goes to sleep grateful that nothing especially bad happened, told in the prisoner’s own plain practical voice. It was the first officially published account of the camps inside the Soviet Union, and it caused a sensation. Solzhenitsyn went on to interview more than two hundred other camp survivors and assemble The Gulag Archipelago, a three-volume history of the Soviet camp system, which was smuggled out and published in Paris in 1973. More than any other single book, it destroyed what was left of the Soviet system’s moral standing in the West.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, in exile in Berlin and Paris, before switching to English in the 1940s and writing Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire. He belongs to two literatures. The Russian one usually loses the claim because he ended up in America and is read in English, but his Russian novels — The Gift in particular — sit naturally inside the tradition described in this essay.

What holds it together

Two things, finally, run through all of this work.

The first is that Russian novels are long because they are doing other people’s work as well as their own. Russia in the nineteenth century had no free press, no independent universities, no parliament, no public sphere where political and religious and philosophical questions could be argued openly. Those arguments had to happen somewhere. They happened inside novels — and inside the long critical essays in the thick journals that explained the novels — disguised as plot and as literary criticism. A Russian novel of the 1860s is doing simultaneously the work that a political essay, a philosophical treatise, a sermon, and a piece of social journalism were doing in other countries at the same time, and it has to disguise itself well enough to get past a state censor.

The second is that for the whole nineteenth century, educated Russians were split — unevenly, with people on both sides changing their minds and disagreeing with their own camp — over a question about what Russia was. The Westernizers held that Russia was a backward European country that needed to finish what Peter the Great had started: become a modern liberal society with parliaments and rule of law and individual rights. The Slavophiles held that Russia was not a European country at all but had its own Orthodox and communal soul, rooted in the village and the church, which the Westernization project had been actively damaging since Peter, and that Russia’s task was to recover that soul, not to imitate France and England. Neither camp was monolithic, and the brightest figures on both sides spent as much time arguing with their own allies as with the other camp. But the question itself — what is Russia and what should it become — ran through every major writer.

Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman is divided about Peter — admires him as a builder, mourns the human cost of his city — and refuses, in the end, to side with either the statue or the clerk it crushes. Turgenev was broadly a Westernizer who lived in France, but Fathers and Sons gives Bazarov, the cold scientific Westernizer, a death scene of remarkable tenderness with the religious peasant parents he had been dismissing all novel. Dostoevsky was broadly a Slavophile who put the argument inside The Brothers Karamazov: Ivan, who has read all of European philosophy and quotes it in Petersburg restaurants, against Father Zosima, the dying monk who teaches that salvation comes through humility and love for the person in front of you. Dostoevsky gives Ivan the better arguments and lets Zosima win anyway. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from American exile in 1994 and began giving speeches that horrified the Westernizing intelligentsia who had idolized him while he was in the camps; the speeches were Slavophile speeches.