How Tolstoevskii Pleased Readers and Rewrote a Russian Myth

How Tolstoevskii Pleased Readers and Rewrote a Russian MythAuthor(s): Jeffrey BrooksSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 538-559Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650141 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 22:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.76 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:44:52 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650141?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


How Tolstoevskii Pleased Readers and Rewrote a Russian Myth

Jeffrey Brooks

Anna Karenina and Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and punishment) are loved and loathed by students assigned to read them as modern classics. There is no doubt that these works belong on the list. Their authors ad- dress quintessentially modern themes of individual choice and personal responsibility, freedom and restraint, sin and redemption. They are uni- versal and can be read by speakers of English with only a modest supple- ment of geography, history, and explanation of the patronymic. Yet they took shape in a uniquely Russian confluence of political, economic, philosophical, and cultural developments. Great art can stand alone, without

explication of etiology or technique. But the greatest works, from cave

drawings to more recent creations, have raised questions of where they came from and what experiences of their creators led to their particular forms. Such questions, when asked of Anna Karenina and Crime and Pun- ishment, lead not only to the point at which Russia's literature intersected that of modern Europe, though these works form that intersection, but also to folklore, popular culture, and economic and political change in

nineteenth-century Russia and before. The universality of these works de- rives in large measure from a tension between concepts of freedom and order explored in a specifically Russian context.

Among the proverbs that the nineteenth-century folklorist and lexi-

cographer Vladimir Dal' gathered are many warning of the dangers of freedom. "Freedom is its own god." "Freedom for the free, heaven for the saved." "Freedom corrupts but servitude instructs." Muscovy stood out in

early modern Europe for its countenance of slavery and a politics of self- abasement that led even high officials to describe themselves as "slaves" of the ruler.2 The formal abolition of slavery in 1723 under Peter the Great led not to more freedom but to more servitude. The social historian

I thank Karen Brooks, Georgii Cherniavskii, David L. Cooper, Caryl Emerson, Donald Fanger, Richard Flathman, Sean Greenberg, Diane Koenker, Jean Laves, Anne Eakin Moss, Ken Moss, Lary May, Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Liz Papazian, Scott Shane, Elena Smi- lianskaia, William Mills Todd III, and my anonymous reviewers for comments, and also my student Patryk Babiracki. The Kennan Institute and the Woodrow Wilson Center provided support in 1999-2000. The essay stems from the conference on "Shaping Memory, Shap- ing Identity in Russian History" honoring Terence Emmons at Stanford University in 2003. Given the scope of the topic, I can barely touch the vast secondary literatures and must ig- nore some secondary themes.

1. Vladimir Dal', Poslovitsy russkogo naroda: Sbornik V Dalia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1984), 2:277-79. The Russian word used is volia.

2. See Valerie Kivelson, "Bitter Slavery and Pious Servitude: Freedom and Its Critics in Muscovite Russia," Forschungen zur osteuropdischen Geschichte 58 (2001): 109-19 for a sur- vey of the literature. See also Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725 (Chicago, 1982); Marshall Poe, "A People Born to Slavery": Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476- 1748 (Ithaca, 2000); Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (New York, 1995).

Slavic Review 64, no. 3 (Fall 2005)



How Tolstoevskii Rewrote a Russian Myth

Jerome Blum described the rise of serfdom in Russia and eastern Europe and its disappearance in the west as "the decisive watershed in the history of freedom in the modern world." As a result, he explained, "A tradition of compulsion and servility, and acquiescence in the right of a few men to hold millions of their fellows in bondage, became the heritage of the peo- ples of Eastern Europe."3

Institutionalized servitude begot traditions of rebellion, through re- current peasant uprisings and in songs, poems, and legends immortaliz-

ing the rebels and their acts. The clash between freedom and authority, disorder and order, became a characteristic of the Russian historical ex-

perience. Stories of free but doomed rebels constitute a national mythology. I use the terms mythology and myth because, as the French scholar Luc Brisson writes, "Mythology may be defined as a system of narrative

representations playing both explanatory and normative roles with re-

spect to the gods, the world, and humankind."4 Myth is also a "form in which the essential truths of a particular society are articulated and com- municated."5 The unknown authors of Russian oral tales, ballads, and

songs about failed uprisings and defiant criminals chronicle moments of discord while imparting the wisdom of generations that the secular and

religious order could not be violated with impunity. The heroes of these accounts were anonymous robbers as well as fa-

mous ones, such as executed cossack rebels Stepan Razin (d. 1671) and Emel'ian Pugachev (d. 1775), and Ermak Timofeevich, pardoned and rewarded by Ivan the Terrible for his conquest of Siberia (1581-83). Songs of these flawed champions circulated through the empire after the eman-

cipation in hundreds of variants.6 The elements of the genre became in-

tricately cross-referenced. Names of protagonists were often interchange- able with the heroes of byliny, the Russian folk epics, as well as among themselves. Lines about cossacks appear in songs about robbers, and the names of famous rebels appear haphazardly in songs about struggles with Russia's non-Christian enemies.7 Songs celebrating Ermak's feats crossed with those about Razin even though Razin was executed and Ermak rewarded.8

In 1875, when Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina began to appear and Fedor Dostoevskii had been publishing his Dnevnik pisatelia (Diary of a writer) for two years, the folklorist N. I. Aristov produced a study of bandit songs. A year before, thousands of mostly upper-class young people left home to

spread radical propaganda among peasants. Revolution was in the air and the memory of historic rebellions was close to the surface. Alexander II

3. Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), 611.

4. L. Brisson, "Plato's Mythology and Philosophy," in Yves Bonnefoy, compiler, Mythologies, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1991), 1:352.

5. Cited in Yves Bonnefoy, "Preface to the French Edition," in Mythologies, 1: xxv. 6. A. N. Lozanova, Narodnyepesni o Stepane Razine (Nizhne-Volga, 1929), 13, 51-52; on

female robbers see N. Aristov, Ob istoricheskom znachenii russkikh razboinich'ikh pesen (Voro- nezh, 1875), 111-12.

7. Aristov, Ob istoricheskom znachenii, 19. 8. Ibid., 14, 19, 51-52.

539



540 Slavic Review

had earlier warned of the need to free the serfs from above lest they free themselves from below, and such fears survived the emancipation. Vasilii Perov's painting Sud Pugacheva (Pugachev judges) shows the rebel hold-

ing court before a burning estate.9 Educated observers of the picture were likely to recall Aleksandr Pushkin's Istoriia Pugacheva (History of Puga- chev) and his story "Kapitanskaia dochka" (The captain's daughter), in which Pugachev gallantly befriends the narrator.10

Aristov traces the lives of bandits (razboiniki) from troubled youth to death or penance. Among his folkloric bandits are angry serfs, profligate merchants' and nobles' sons, disgruntled soldiers, tired barge-haulers, dissatisfied cossacks, disenchanted priests and monks, and people simply fleeing an evil parent or spouse.ll Assertive and violent, the bandits love wild spaces of the steppe, the Don, and "God's free road," the Volga.'2 "Mother Volga gave me drink, fed me, and raised me," exclaims one.13 Aristov condemns bandits as false prophets, though they embody a popular longing forjustice and freedom. "The wishes and strivings of people of this sort are constantly reduced to nothing," he writes. "Fate moves them

quickly from one extreme to another: from riotous excess to humility, and from unconcern and delight it is but a step to grief and sadness."'4 The bandit enjoys "a merry hour of fleeting revelry," followed by dreams and "sad portents" that prefigure retribution, remorse, atonement, or a rare

pardon and redemption.'5 The singers of the songs emphasized these shifts with music that was "first grandiose and solemn, then sad and heart-

breaking, then bold and wild."16 The radical worker Semen Kanatchikov recalled how his comrades "used their slow, mournful songs to lament their bitter fate and to express their envy of the incorrigible firebrands and dashing brigands who roamed the green forests in freedom."17

The cutthroats of folklore and popular fiction are worlds apart from the heroes and heroines of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi and yet they have some common qualities. "To write a novel," Walter Benjamin observed, "means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life."18 Great novels, he suggests, remind us of our mortality. Popular fiction, like fairytales, has a simpler message. After the emancipation, Rus- sian popular commercial authors used the mythology of doomed freedom to create a modern adventure story. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii evoked the

9. A copy of the picture can be found in A. K. Dzhivelegov, S. P. Mel'gunov, and V I. Picheta, eds., Velikaia reforma: Russkoe obshchestvo i krest'ianskii vopros v proshlom i nas- toiashchem, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1911), 2:48-49. Sud Pugacheva dates from 1875. An undated sketch, also in the Tret'iakov Gallery, shows Pugachev more fully as a bandit.

10. Dzhivelegov, Mel'gunov, and Picheta, Velikaia reforma, 2, 51, 53. 11. Aristov, Ob istoricheskom znachenii, 94, 108-9. 12. Ibid., 99. 13. Ibid., 100. 14. Ibid., 127. 15. Ibid., 149-51. 16. Ibid., 94. 17. Reginald E. Zelnik, trans. and ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiog-

raphy of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986), 19. 18. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New

York, 1969), 87.




mythology, and superseded it. They knew folklore and popular fiction (lubochnaia literatura). They shared with popular writers a literary world of realistic narrative and commercial genres, including adventure and romance, crime and detection, success and the supernatural.19 High and low literature overlapped, and the conjunction was apparent even in the canonization of famous writers from Pushkin to Maksim Gor'kii, first in erudite journals and then in the popular media.20 This melange belies the cliche that Russian literary culture comprised two worlds, one of educated elites and another of the peasants and other lower classes.21

Popular writers resolved the clash between freedom and order by con-

signing their heroes to death for transgressions or granting them redemption and a pardon for state service. V. Ia. Shmitanovskii's hero in Ermak ili

pokorenie sibirskogo tsarstva (Ermak, or the conquest of the Siberian kingdom, 1858) dances wildly beside the Volga after robbing a riverboat but bemoans his "future unhappiness."22 He and a comrade subsequently de- cide to conquer Siberia: "We would give it to the Russian tsar, and he would forgive our earlier villainies." The authors of these cheap booklets often invoked religion, as did their great contemporaries. Ermak's Sibe- rian adversaries in Shmitanovskii's tale shout "Allah, Allah." In the anony- mously published tale Buria v stoiachikh vodakh (Storm in still water, 1904), a Volga boatman woos a merchant's daughter, kills a servant who insults him, and goes to prison as a "bandit." He wins a pardon fighting the Turks.23

Popular authors embraced the Russian Orthodox tradition of Chris- tian kenoticism, the ideal of a passive suffering Christ, but also diverged from it. They accepted the redemption of any suffering sinner but re-

jected the ideal of a mortifying, self-denying life.24 The Orthodox tradition is infused with love for those who sought such perfection. But popular writers created bandit heroes bent on redeeming themselves as

19. On their familiarity with popular fiction, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Evanston, 2003 [1985]), 85-87, 322, 337-40.

20. Jeffrey Brooks, "Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics," in Ivo Banac, John G. Ackerman, and Roman Szporluk, eds., Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne Vucinich (Boulder, 1981), 315-34; Marcus Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989); Stephen Moeller-Sally, Gogols Afterlife: The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia (Evanston, 2002); A. I. Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: Istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kul'ture Pushkin- skoi epokhi (Moscow, 2001).

21. See for example Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 22. Like many clich6s this has an element of truth. It has also been chal- lenged. See N. M. Zorkaia's classic study of literature and film, Na rubezhe stoletii (Moscow, 1976). See also E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley, 2002); Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, 2003); N. I. Savushkina, Russkaia narodnaia drama: Khudozhestvennoe svoeobrazie (Moscow, 1988); and A. F. Nekrylova and N. I. Savushkina, Fol'klornyi teatr (Moscow, 1988).

22. V. Ia. Shmitanovskii, Ermak ili pokorenie sibirskogo tsarstva: Istoricheskaia povest' 2 vols. (Moscow, 1863), 1:12, 57-58.

23. Buria v stoiachikh vodakh: Povest' iz poslednei russko-turetskoi voiny (Kiev, 1904). 24. George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, Kievan Christianity: The 10th

to the 13th Centuries (Belmont, Mass., 1975), 99. See also 94-157.

541



Slavic Review

painlessly as possible. They do not wish to suffer. They want to live, and for that they seek forgiveness from the state and God by vanquishing Russia's enemies. For them death offers no redemption. When attacked, they vig- orously defend themselves, unlike the Orthodox saints Boris and Gleb who allowed their antagonists to kill them. The authors of these secular tales drew their readers into a world of adventure, not of asceticism.

The hero of N. I. Pastukhov's Razboinik Churkin: Narodnoe skazanie "Starago znakomago" (The bandit Churkin: a folk legend of an "old ac- quaintance"), serialized in his newspaper Moskovskii listok (Moscow broad- sheet) fromJanuary 1882 until the spring of 1885, epitomizes the narrative of rebellious freedom.25 The world of order is closed to Churkin, a hero of "the dark kingdom," an Old Believer with a fake Turkish pass- port.26 He spurns life as a factory worker, becomes an outlaw, and writes songs. His favorite refrain is "I love you, Mother Nature, free spirit, free freedom [volia-vol'naia]. For you I am ready to endure everything, I love only the carefree life [zhizn' razdol'naia]."27 Volia meant freedom in civil and criminal law but also "will" and desire, as in peasants' dreams of land and independence. In educated political and philosophical discourse, volia referred to freedom of the will, the will of the individual, and the general will-categories stretching back to Immanuel Kant andJean-Jacques Rousseau. It contrasted with svoboda, which was used for the civic freedoms of speech and of the press, as well as freedom of trade.28 Churkin is a hero of desire, who stages feasts for fellow villagers and enjoys fine clothes. He belongs to the world of consumption, but his sins overcome him. Stealing home from Siberia after his adventures, he sees the portent of God's threatening hand in the sky and is summarily killed by a falling oak branch, serving the author's convenience and the censor's wishes.

Bandits also populated great literature in which kenoticism was embraced more fully.29 Pushkin in his History of Pugachev has the upstart ex- claim before his execution, "I am guilty before God and the Empress, but I will strive to earn forgiveness for all my sins."30 The poet N. A. Nekrasov inserted a bandit song expressive of the kenotic ideal in his great poem Komu na Rusi zhit' khorosho? (Who lives well in Russia?).31 The bandit Ku-

25. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 123-25. 26. N. I. Pastukhov, Razboinik Churkin: Narodnoe skazanie "Starago znakomago" (Moscow,

1883-1885). 27. Ibid., 73. 28. F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, eds., Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' 43 vols. (St. Peters-

burg, 1890-1907; reprint Moscow, 1991), s.w. "Volia v sfere grazhdanskogo prava," "Volia v sfere ugolovnago prava," "Svoboda (lat. Libertas)," "Svoboda voli," "Svoboda mysli, slova," "Svoboda politicheskaia," "Svoboda torgovli."

29. Zelnik, A Radical Worker, 19. 30. Alexander Pushkin, The History of Pugachev, trans. Earl Sampson (Ann Arbor,

1983), 106. Pushkin's Dubrovskii fits this mold and Onegin has been compared to such heroes, as Aleksandr Etkind points out in Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow, 2001), 48-50.

31. N. A. Nekrasov, Sochineniia v trekh tomax, ed. K. I. Chukovskii (Moscow, 1953-54), 3:191-93. I thank Elena Smilianskaia for pointing this out to me. Songs of this type appeared in scholarly compilations and popular songbooks such as V Trubin, Noveishii polnyi russkii pesennik Ermak (Moscow, 1903). See also Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 174-77.

542




deiar sees his victims' ghosts after a life of "drunkenness, murder, and rob-

bery," and becomes a monk. God tells him to save his soul by cutting down an age-old oak with his murderous hand and knife. After years of labor he fells the oak and dies absolved of sin. Kudeiar belongs to the oral tradition; so high literature turns to folklore for spiritual inspiration rather than to the more secular popular fiction. Dostoevskii invoked the narrative of rebellion and submission in his Diary of a Writer in January 1877, when he described a twelve-year old boy who struck his tutor, was locked in a closet, and dreamed of a pardon. The boy dreams that "he will run

away from home and enlist in the army.... In a battle he will kill many Turks, and then fall wounded."32 A meeting with the emperor follows. Dostoevskii took the incident not from life, but from Lev Tolstoi's Otro- chestvo (Boyhood). Russia was soon to fight Turkey and the press deplored the martyrdom of Balkan Christians. The vignette reveals an extraordinary conjunction. Russia's two greatest writers, one near the end of his creative life, the other at its beginning, invoked the same mythology of a rebel's re-

demption through suffering and state service. Dostoevskii was reading Anna Karenina at the time in Russkii vestnik (The Russian herald), where he would soon publish Brat'ia Karamazovy (The brothers Karamazov).

Tolstoi and Dostoevskii each employed a narrative architecture re-

sembling the formulas found in folklore and popular fiction. Their rebellious protagonists repent, redeem themselves, or die like bandits, though they are fully modern creations. Anna Karenina is a tragic love story. Yet after her adultery with Vronskii she feels "so criminal and guilty that the

only thing left for her was to humble herself and beg forgiveness."33 Tol- stoi almost ended the novel there. She nearly dies in childbirth and asks her husband's pardon. Vronskii attempts suicide and also begs forgiveness. Each is reborn in a resolution resembling that of the bandit tales. But Tolstoi continues the novel, and only later does Anna leap to her death under the train and Vronskii set out to fight the Turks. Anna's demise satisfies the mythology of doomed freedom, and the omens she sees recall those that appear to the bandits of song and story. Vronskii's act of self- sacrifice or simply despair in leaving to defend the Balkan Christians fits the same narrative structure, whether or not Tolstoi wished to imply the

possibility of his redemption. Curiously, Tolstoi used this device even

though he damned Pan-Slavism so furiously in the final section of the novel that Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Herald, refused to publish it, perhaps with an eye to the censor.

Dostoevskii cuts Crime and Punishment from the same fabric. He sends Raskol'nikov to Siberia with a remarkable charge: his new life "had to be

dearly bought, to be paid for with a great future deed."34 And Dostoevskii hints at the feat. "In his illness," he notes, Raskol'nikov "had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet un-

32. F. M. Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer, trans. and annotated, Boris Brasol (New York, 1954), 588-92.

33. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 2000), 149.

34. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue, trans. and annotated, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 1993), 551.

543



544 Slavic Review

known and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia."35 Thus Raskol'nikov's "gradual renewal" gains coherence not only from religion but also from current events and the mythology of rebellion.36 As Dostoevskii wrote the novel in the 1860s, Russia was conquering Central Asia and Prince A. M. Gorchakov, the foreign minister, hailed Russia's mission to subdue its "barbarous" eastern neighbors. Dostoevskii, an enthusiast of empire, implies that Raskol'nikov, like Ermak, may win

grace by subduing Russia's traditional enemy. Dostoevskii also invoked the mythology of rebellion in The Brothers

Karamazov. Following Friedrich Schiller's play, The Robbers ("The Bandits" in Russian), he identified Fedor Karamazov and his rebellious sons as bandits.37 In the play, Franz, the bad son, turns his father against his brother Karl, who in despair becomes a robber. Karl defeats Franz but must pay for his crimes. "A great sinner cannot change," he cries.38 Citing Anna Karenina in his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevskii rejected Schiller's "European" criminal code and the rule that "he who violates it, pays with his freedom, his property, his life; pays literally and inhumanely."39 Instead he favored the Russian alternative by which repentant criminals could redeem themselves, as did Anna and Vronskii when they begged Karenin's forgiveness. In fact, Dostoevskii delighted in this scene that echoed his conclusion to Crime and Punishment. In TheDiary of a Writer he hailed the moment "when criminals and enemies are suddenly transformed into superior beings, into brothers, who have forgiven each other everything; beings who by mutual all-forgiveness, have removed from themselves deceit, guilt and crime, and thereby at once acquitted themselves with full cognizance of the fact that they have become entitled to acquittal."40

Dostoevskii's characters evoke the bandit tradition but with some emendations. Ivan chats with the devil and perhaps inadvertently sanc- tions his father's murder, while Dmitrii cavorts with gypsies and squanders money. Dmitrii's rebellion is confirmed by his desire to kill his father, the

guilty verdict at his trial, and his urge to suffer. Dostoevskii nevertheless leaves Dmitrii's redemption to his conscience, excluding the state and even suggesting flight to America. So powerful, however, was the old formula that the veteran Soviet filmmaker Ivan Pyr'ev, director of Stalinist classics such as Bogataia nevesta (The rich bride, 1937) and Partiinyi bilet

(Party card, 1936), ended his 1969 version with no mention of a possible escape, even though he could have included it without reference to America.41 Instead, he shows Dmitrii's beloved Grushenka piteously fol-

35. Ibid., 547. 36. Ibid., 551. 37. Robert L. Belknap, The Genesis of the Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and

Psychology of Text Making (Evanston, 1990), 65. 38. Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. Robert David Macdonald (London, 1995),

131. 39. Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer, 786. On redemption in Orthodoxy, seeJoseph Frank,

Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton, 1986), 148. Dostoevsky damned European reformers who blamed society, not the criminal.

40. Dostoevsky, Diary of A Writer, 787. 41. Ivan Pyr'ev, director, Brat'ia Karamazovy (Moscow: Mosfil'm, 1968-1969).




lowing him to Siberia in a peasant cart, a scene that must have resonated with Iosif Stalin's surviving victims. Other Soviet films also illuminate the formula. Natan Zarkhi's 1967 version of Anna Karenina ends with her death, without showing Kitty and Levin at their estate or Vronskii leaving for the Balkans. Lev Kulidzhanov's Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and punishment, 1970) follows the mythology from the first frames of Raskol'nikov in a gloomy tavern to his confession, but leaves Siberia and a possible "feat" to the viewer's imagination.42

Popular writers often situated freedom and redemption in the out- reaches of empire, pitting their heroes against Russia's enemies. This was more than a colonial literature, however. Whereas early authors clung to tsar and church as emblems of Russianness, their successors recast their

identity in terms of the diversity of land and people.43 Writers who pre- ceded Pastukhov sometimes set the empire apart as alien (chuzhoi), but those who followed made it Russian.44 Pastukhov, like his successors at dailies such as Gazeta kopeika ( The kopeck newspaper) of St. Petersburg, lauded a wild terrain of freedom.45 Churkin travels from Moscow to Nizh- nii Novgorod and then on to Perm' before returning to his village. Pas- tukhov hails his passage "over the Volga's wide and free waves to the im- mense country of Siberia, where he intended to settle in order to hide his tracks from justice." Churkin's creator was also enthusiastic about his hero's native forests and village in the district of Bogorodskii, a hub of tex- tile production in Moscow province. Yet this region, which Churkin calls "that Palestine within Russia," is denied to the unredeemed bandit, who can return only at the price of his life.46

The semiotician Iurii Lotman noted the dichotomy between freedom and order in an essay on early nineteenth-century life in which he cited the distinction among merchants between "the holiday" and "the non-

holiday," between "orderliness in everyday life" and "the 'binge' that knew no bounds."47 He found a similar split among the upper classes: "When

everyday life was the drill and the parade, leisure naturally took the form of the spree or orgy."48 He explained that "the element of freedom [vol`nost'] appeared here as a kind of everyday romanticism characterized

by the tendency to act in an absolutely impetuous manner that swept away all restrictions on behavior."49

42. Ivan Pyr'ev, director, Bogataia nevesta (Kiev: Ukrainfil'm, 1937); Ivan Pyr'ev, director, Partiinyi bilet (Moscow: Mosfil'm, 1936); Aleksandr Zarkhi, director, Anna Karenina (Moscow: Mosfil'm, 1967); Lev Kulidzhanov, director, Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Moscow: Kinostudiia imeni A. M. Gor'kogo, 1970).

43. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 214-45. 44. Vera Tolz stresses the popular view of the alien quality of the non-Russian regions

and Siberia. Vera Tolz, Russia: Inventing the Nation (London, 2001), 177-81. 45. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 228-31. 46. Pastukhov, Razboinik Churkin, 177, 878. 47. Iu. M. Lotman, "The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a Historical-

Psychological Category)," in Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, eds., The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca, 1985), 124.

48. Ibid., 125. 49. Ibid. See the use of vol'nosti in Iu. M. Lotman, Izbrannye stat'i v trekh tomakh

(Tallinn, 1992), 1:319. Others have described Russian culture in binary terms, frequently

545



546 Slavic Review

Serious Russian literature shares with popular fiction and the folklore of banditry a bifurcation of the world into spheres of freedom and order. In the popular imagination, as in Pushkin's History of Pugachev, rebellion is demonic. Pushkin contrasts "Pugachev, a schismatic, [who] never at- tended church" with the besieged city of Orenburg where "Church ser- vices were held daily." Pushkin portrays the sexual and legal transgressions in the rebel camp, explicit in its fraudulent promise of freedom: "The Berda settlement was a den of murder and debauchery. The camp was full of officers' wives and daughters, handed over to the brigands for their foul pleasures.... Bands of brigands swept in all directions, carousing in the various villages, looting public property and the property of the gentry but not touching the peasants' possessions."50

Pushkin further links freedom with Gypsies in his poem of that title. Subsequent masters of Russian literature, and not only of the nineteenth century, open a more ambiguous space beyond structured society.51 Niko- lai Gogol' and Tolstoi tie it to cossacks and the steppe: in Gogol"s phrase, "the endless, free and beautiful steppe."52 Tolstoi develops the theme in Kazaki (Cossacks) and Khadzhi-Murat, enlarging on Pushkin's encounters with the Caucasus in Puteshestvie v Arzrum (Journey to Arzrum) and Mikhail Lermontov's in Geroi nashego vremeni (A hero of our time). Ivan Turgenev makes the country estate almost an equivalent free terrain, as does Tolstoi for Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina. Vronskii and Anna gain short-lived freedom from society in western Europe, which like the free space of Gypsies, cossacks, and bandits proves uninhabitable over the longer period.

In Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevskii's characters descend into an underworld of transgression, criminality, and excess, but their lives outside the legal order are no more sustainable than those of mythologized bandits. They also must return to the legal realm to face punishment and death or win redemption. Following Gogol', Dosto- evskii portrayed St. Petersburg as a region of chaotic freedom, anticipat- ing and influencing popular writers who would later explore the linkage of freedom, order, geography, and national identity. Siberia served Dostoevskii, as it did Pastukhov, as a site of possible salvation. This explains Dmitrii Karamazov's and Raskol'nikov's optimism as they head east- ward in chains. For all these intellectual renegades, "the other shore" is a place to take stock of oneself and think freely.

citing this dichotomy. See Vladimir Papernyi, Kul'tura dva (Moscow, 1996); Sergei Medve- dev, "A General Theory of Russian Space: A Gay Science and A Rigorous Science," in Je- remy Smith, ed., Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture (Helsinki, 1999), 15-47; see also Iu. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, "Rol' dual'nykh modelei v dinamike russkoi srednevekovoi kul'tury," Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo Universiteta 414 (1977): 3-36; and Lotman, Kul'tura i vzryv (Moscow, 1992).

50. Pushkin, History of Pugachev, 37. 51. M. M. Bakhtin describes several idyllic chronotypes of time and place in The Dia-

logic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 154-55, 224-36.

52. N. V. Gogol', Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, vol. 2, Mirgorod (Moscow, 1966), 54.




It is not too much to suggest that Dostoevskii and Tolstoi sometimes

imagined their own lives in similar terms. The critic Boris Eikhenbaum observed of Tolstoi: "Alongside his complicated life, entangled in his own

passions and contradictions, there appeared in his imagination an oppo- site life: simple, free of authority [vlast'], of guile, hypocrisy and repen- tance. It was then that that historical inclination toward 'behaving like a

holy fool' ["yurodstvo"] that overcame Tolstoi at the end of the seventies [1870s] made itself felt."53 In the end, Tolstoi chose the potentially re-

demptive life of a wanderer and holy fool over that of a writer, fleeing from home and eventually dying at a local railroad station. When asked where he was headed, he indicated the Caucasus or perhaps Bulgaria.54

Dostoevskii also experienced and imagined a bifurcated world; one was the prison camp at Omsk where he spent four years, and the other the

literary society to which he sought to return. Citing "the regeneration of his convictions" in Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Notes from the house of the dead) he sounds like a repentant bandit seeking a pardon.55 His Ameri- can biographer, Joseph Frank, suggests that he had a "conversion experience."56 In the conclusion of his novel, Dostoevskii describes his future in a manner as appropriate to popular fiction as to religion: "I wanted to put myself to the test once again in a new battle."57 Military feats were beyond him, but he could strive to please the authorities. As the Crimean War ended, he sent three jingoistic odes to St. Petersburg, hoping to regain permission to publish. Disparaging Russia's enemies and praising her divine mission, Dostoevskii entered the semantic universe of pulp bandits. One ode reads:

Dishonor to you, apostates of the Cross, Extinguishers of the Divine Light! But God is with us! Hurrah! Our task is holy, And for Christ, who is not glad to lay down his life! 58

In the second of these poems, a panegyric presented to the minister of war on the birthday of the empress Alexandra Fedorovna, widow of Dostoevskii's nemesis Nicholas I, the author blessed the fate that had pro- voked his change of heart and made him again "a Russian, and again a human being!"59 Dostoevskii perhaps unwittingly set the stage for stereotyp- ical exclamations of pardoned bandits in future popular stories. A half

century later, the anonymous author of a popular serial in The Kopeck Newspaper hailed his hero's reprieve after a military feat: "There was a

53. Boris Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Seventies, trans. Albert Kaspin (Ann Arbor, 1982), 27.

54. A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (New York, 1988), 511-12. 55. Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan

(Princeton, 1967), 150; see also, Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 (Princeton, 1983), 167.

56. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 5. 57. Quoted in ibid., 151. 58. Translated in Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, 165. 59. Ibid., 165-66.

547



Slavic Review

singing in his soul, and for the first time in many long years he looked on life as a participant and not as a persecuted outcast."60

Dostoevskii and Tolstoi superimposed the genre of the crime story on the mythology of doomed transgression that had served Russians well in their helplessness before authority. With the title Crime and Pun- ishment, Dostoevskii promised readers a misdeed and a punished criminal. Raskol'nikov is a criminal even before his crime, and punishment is in- escapable. The same is true in The Brothers Karamazov. The reader learns of Fedor Karamazov's "dark and tragic death," and of consequences to come.61 Of the brothers only Alesha escapes the family's fate, and he does so in part by suppressing his own personal life and desire. With respect to Anna Karenina, critics have rightly puzzled over Tolstoi's biblical epigraph: 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay," but ordinary readers probably recog- nized the genre and perhaps even the association with failed rebellion. Seeing "vengeance" and "I shall repay," they might initially expect punishment to follow sin.62 After all, Anna cites her adultery as a "crime" at the outset.

The bandit tale was becoming anachronistic, however, even in its rein- carnation as a crime story. The emancipation ushered in an age of em- powerment, but cultural constructs changed only gradually. Millions of people found new opportunities through reforms in education, local government, courts, the press, and the military. The era succored the rise of the liberal professions, as well as new forms of work linked to industrial- ization, commercial farming, and an expanding public sphere. It also saw the growth of voluntary associations, including the Literary Fund (The Society for Aid to Needy Writers and Scholars), of which Dostoevskii was an active member.63 The fund was active in helping exiled or arrested literati, and Dostoevskii served as secretary of its administrative commit- tee between 1863 and 1865.64

Russian literature gradually outgrew its limited aristocratic public. "In the 1860s there was a miracle in the sudden creation of a completely new, unheard of reader with public feelings, thoughts, interests, and the desire to think about public issues, learning what he wished to know," observed the critic N. V. Shelgunov.65 The postemancipation gentry, amongst whom Tolstoi and Dostoevskii found their readers, sought the independence to

60. Raskatov, Na avanpostakh, (Petrograd, n.d. [after 1910]), 85. 61. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue,

trans. and annotated, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco, 1990), 7. 62. Amy Mandelker notes the ambiguity of the epigraph. Amy Mandelker, Framing

Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question and the Victorian Novel (Columbus, 1993), 44-45.

63. On voluntary associations see Joseph Bradley, "Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia" American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (Octo- ber 2002): 1094-1123.

64. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 10-11. 65. Quoted in I. I. Frolova, ed., Kniga v Rossii, 1861-1881 (Moscow, 1991), 76; on this

transformation see also William M. Todd III, "II contrappunto russo," in Franco Moretti, ed., II romanzo, vol. 3, Storia e geografia (Torino, 2002), 399-418.

548




pursue personal plans and objectives without governmental interference, as Terence Emmons has pointed out.66 Between 1860 and 1880 the read-

ing public broadened. In 1860 there were only 18,000 male secondary pupils. By 1880, there were well over a hundred thousand. The number of

university students doubled from 1865 to 1885 from four to eight thousand. By 1880, fewer than half of the secondary and university students

belonged to the nobility.67 There is no reason to suppose that children of other classes, the first in their families to acquire secondary or higher education, sought independence any less than the gentry. Education was a

step toward a kind of freedom. The writer E. O. Dubrovina (1845-1913) recalled of the postemancipation era: "The woman of that time could tol- erate material deprivation and adversity if her spiritual world were full and she could nourish brain and spirit. Freeing herself from prejudice and

superstition, she met life bravely and raised the banner of her women's

rights, trying with all strength and means to attain her human rights."68 Acquiring personal independence was a liberal project consistent

with the ideals of John Stuart Mill, who "was very popular among us in the 1860s," according to the nineteenth-century critic D. N. Ovsianiko- Kulikovskii.69 In the third chapter of On Liberty (1859), Mill wrote, "He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties."70 The quality that Mill prized and the gentry sought corresponds to what Isaiah Berlin has called "negative liberty;" that is, "the 'negative goal' of warding off interference."71 And Mill's concern for women's rights did not pass unno- ticed in Russia. Sovremennik (The contemporary) published a translation of his essay "On the Emancipation of Women" in 1860, and his Subjection of Women appeared nine years later.72

Tolstoi can hardly be said to have shared his contemporaries' enthu- siasm for women's emancipation, but his views did not preclude other

readings of the novel. Women who read it in its time may have been struck

by Anna's punishment for reaching for the expanding opportunities around her. When the novel appeared, many were questioning the moral foundations of the patriarchal family. Russian women were among the most restricted in Europe. In imperial civil law, husbands had almost un-

66. Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge, Eng., 1968), 317.

67. V R. Leikina-Svirskaia describes the new public in Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1971), 60.

68. E. O. Dubrovina, "Pamiati M. M. Mikhailova," in N. V. Shelgunov, L. P. Shelgu- nova, and M. L. Mikhailov, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1967), 2:471-72.

69. D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, "Literatura 70-kh," in A. Granat and I. Granat, eds., Istoriia Rossii v XIX veke, 9 vols. (Moscow, n.d.), 7:33.

70. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Edward Alexander (Orchard Park, N.Y, 1999), 104.

71. Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (New York, 1998), 199.

72. Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton, 1978), 44, 73.

549



550 Slavic Review

limited power over wives and daughters. Opinion shifted in the era of reform, however, and even tsarist jurists supported change.73 Radical and liberal critics debated "the woman question" and savaged the old- fashioned family. Women sought new opportunities in philanthropy and

popular education, science and radical politics, and other new spheres. Gender relations became fluid at every social level among a geographi- cally and socially mobile population.

Tolstoi created an appealing protagonist with qualities limiting her

ability to realize her hopes and dreams. Although he first imagined Anna as brash and unfeeling, she became a sympathetic character who came to a surprisingly grim end. The anarchist Petr Kropotkin recalled the novel's

popularity and the "unpleasant impression" it made on progressive soci-

ety.74 Why would the educated public, which was distancing itself from the old regime in myriad ways, embrace a work in which an independent heroine is defeated and punished? A suggestive answer may be found at the lower literary registers, in the way less-skilled readers followed serialized adventure tales. The authors of Russia's first potboilers were well aware that tradition and expectations mandated that a hero or heroine would rebel against the legitimate order. Such protagonists, however, were unlikely to be well received by the censors, who associated crime and disorder with populist terrorism.75 Authors therefore learned to navigate between demands of readers and censors to ply their growing trade.

Pastukhov's solution in The Bandit Churkin recalls Dostoevskii's and Tolstoi's treatment of freedom and authority a few years earlier. Pastukhov

sought to please readers without offending the authorities, but he was more vulnerable than the literary masters since he lacked their prestige. He reacted by making his novel into something of a sandwich, the outer- most layers of which satisfied officials while the inner pleased a wider circle of readers. At the outset he stressed Churkin's guilt and future punishment. But the novel was serialized over several years, so he could set aside these commitments as he unrolled the story. The authorities were satisfied and readers could forget the first installments, even if they had

perused them (and many had not, since the newspaper commonly was read aloud in bars and teahouses to transients and regular patrons). Nor was his public likely to anticipate the ending, since that was years away. Pastukhov bowed to officialdom, but catered to readers with different tastes as he wrote his novel in parts. He offered the censors an acceptable outer layer, while his readers feasted on the interior.

The Bandit Churkin differs from shorter tales that could be read in a few sittings. In such cases, as Mikhail Bakhtin noted of another story, the adventure sequence was "utterly subordinated to the other sequence

73. William G. Wagner, "The Trojan Mare: Women's Rights and Civil Rights in Late Imperial Russia," in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989), 65-84.

74. P. Kropotkin, Idealy i deistvitel'nost' v russkoi literature, trans. (from English) V. Batu- rinskii (Buenos Aires, 1955), 122-23.

75. With reference to revolution, this is a theme in the second and third volumes of censor A. V. Nikitenko's diary. A. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1955).




that encompasses and interprets it: guilt-punishment-redemption- blessedness."76 By the 1880s, however, a new reading public was emerging for whom the mythology of doomed freedom was likely to have lost some of its normative and explanatory power, and Pastukhov inscribed sympa- thy for rebellion into his novel. He used the medium of the serial to

eclipse the beginning and the foreshadowed ending. The gap between order and disorder shrank as the hero strode from adventure to adventure.77 Ignoring the prologue and postponing the ending, Pastukhov made Churkin into a hero who killed ruffians and even performed a few

good deeds. The novel was a phenomenon. "It was not so long ago that our light-hearted children filled their heads with Mayne Reid and [James Fenimore] Cooper," wrote Anton Chekhov. "Now in Moscow they fill their heads with Pastukhov's Bandit Churkin and play at bandits."78 Workers at the time described Churkin as "a good bandit" and "a daring fellow."79 Later popular writers followed Pastukhov's lead in giving bandit heroes more power or embracing the private detective, a character who defends

society as an exemplary citizen while freely violating its rules.80 In Anna Karenina, intentionally or not, Tolstoi also told a story in

which the adventure sequence could supplant the frame, for those who chose that reading. Such readers would discount the portents of Anna's demise as well as her actual suicide. The novel appeared from Janu- ary 1875 to April 1877 in The Russian Herald, which arrived monthly depending on the mail. Issues were bound individually if at all, and pre- sumably few could lay hands on the first installment while reading the re- mainder, since copies were inevitably mislaid or borrowed.81 If the novel is read as a serial, disregarding the omens and the tragic ending, it con- cerns a daring, self-assertive woman who escapes a detested husband and an oppressive society only to lose heart at the end.82 After the introduction and before her demise, Anna appears as a virtuous adulteress, much as Churkin becomes a good bandit and Raskol'nikov a sympathetic axe murderer.

Anna Karenina can be read as two love stories, but Tolstoi gives his readers an alternative clue as to the genre with the epigraph and the word "crime." Russia had no tradition of popular romance. The only popular love stories of the era on the level of the bandit tales were success stories

76. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 118, citing Apuleius' Golden Ass. 77. This corresponds to Bakhtin's notion of adventure time. 78. A. P. Chekhov, Sochineniia, 18 vols. (Moscow, 1974-82), 16:143. See also 16:52,

135, 143. 79. S. Reshetov, K novoi zhizni (Moscow, 1926), 8. 80. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 200-13. 81. Before the October revolution Anna Karenina was separately published twice in

1878, and then in the eight editions of Tolstoi's ten-volume set of collected works (1880- 1910). I thank William Mills Todd III for pointing this out to me.

82. William Mills Todd III translated the response of Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn to the different parts of the novel. Golitsyn, who detested Anna's depravity, pre- ferred the first and last installments, that is, the ball and Anna's death. William Mills Todd III, "Reading Anna in Parts," Tolstoi Studies Journal 8 (1995-1996), 125-28. See also Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina, 49-51, on Anna's "heroinism."

551



552 Slavic Review

in which poor suitors marry their beloveds.83 If Anna Karenina is read as a crime novel, readers can still savor the lovers' passion, sympathize with them, and anticipate their future happiness, despite the threat of punishment. Indeed, Tolstoi adds a second ending focused on Levin and Kitty's happiness, as if to tell his readers not to dwell on Anna's death or Vron- skii's departure, but to recall their lives as they unfolded. In this way he in- vited even readers who encountered the novel as a single volume to for-

get the frame.84 Great European love stories from Arthurian romances to Theodor Fontana's Effie Briest and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary end

sadly, but a tragic resolution does not bar the reader from enjoying the fulfillment of desire. In that respect, tragic narratives resemble those that end happily, such as Pride and Prejudice andJane Eyre.85 Love's consumma- tion is the crescendo, and, afterwards, writers cannot take the reader to new heights of anticipation.

The frame of the novel was also undercut by literary convention, since Anna's life and death could be read as typical of the "transgressing heroine" of nineteenth-century European fiction. Critics have considered suicide in such novels as "an obligatory sop thrown to conventional morality that gives the author the latitude to portray his or her heroine sympa- thetically," as Amy Mandelker has observed.86 Yet Anna Karenina is not a conventional novel. Not only did Tolstoi engage creatively with European realism, but he created a powerful character. Effie Briest and Emma Bo-

vary resemble Anna, but neither is a self-directed independent woman. Effie succumbs to life's undertow "as if she were under a spell."87 Emma

Bovary is as helpless as a sailor in distress, "seeking some white sail in the far-off of the horizon."88 Tolstoi's heroine does not wait passively for life to come to her. She consciously seizes her chance. When Vronskii warns of possible unhappiness, she replies with full knowledge, "I don't want to drive you away."89

Tolstoi granted Anna fulfillment as well as a brutal demise. He would later describe living as its own reward, and he may have prefigured this sentiment in his development of Anna. In 1894, he met the young Ivan Bunin, who would later win the Nobel Prize. When Bunin wrote to thank him for the meeting, he replied: "The most important and serious moment in life is the one you are living. It alone is genuine and under your control."90 Anna lives for the moment, and serialization allowed Tolstoi's

83. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 269-94; see also A. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Balmontu (Moscow, 1991).

84. Gary Saul Morson also makes this point in "Anna Karenina's Omens" in Elizabeth Allen and Gary Saul Morson, eds., Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson (New Haven, 1994), 71-81.

85. Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (London, 1994), 38-41. 86. Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina, 44. 87. Theodor Fontane, Effie Briest, trans. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers (Lon-

don, 1995), 122. 88. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Mildred Marmur (New York, 1997), 62. 89. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 139-40. 90. Thomas Gaiton Marullo and Vladimir Khmelkov, "Editor's Introduction," in Ivan

Bunin, The Liberation of Tolstoi, ed. and trans. Thomas Gaiton Marullo and Vladimir Khmelkov (Evanston, 2001), xiv.




readers to share her life as it unfolded. In this respect, Tolstoi may have valued the process of the novel over the plotted trajectories of the characters. Through his treatment of Anna and Vronskii he melded the bandit-like freedom of wanton desire with the liberal freedom to realize oneself in an orderly world. He did much the same through Levin and Kitty, but with an open-ended finale. Levin ignores local government and re- treats to private life on his estate with Kitty, utilizing the personal inde-

pendence liberal gentry of the 1860s had so fervently sought. Dostoevskii, like Pastukhov and Tolstoi, offered censors and officials

reassuring beginnings and endings while allowing readers a different ex-

perience. His strategy in Crime and Punishment resembles Pastukhov's. Churkin is a good worker who succumbs to temptation, suffers moral de- cline, but paradoxically becomes a hero at the same time. Before his crime, Raskol'nikov meets Marmeladov in a tavern, hears of his problems, helps him home, hands his family a few coppers, and then regrets his kindness. Later he protects a girl from a lecher, but again repudiates his action and even tries to forestall help when it appears. Until his crime Raskol'nikov vacillates, debilitated by doubt. After it, he enters the adventure sequence of the novel and gains stature. He renews his friendship with Razumikhin, assists Marmeladov's family, befriends Sonia, protects his sister from an unworthy suitor, and even helps her find her future husband, Razumikhin. The narrative turns not only on his duel with the in-

spector but also on his use of his precious freedom, which, like the bandit's, is doomed. Almost to the last, Dostoevskii explains, Raskol'nikov remains "an energetic and spirited advocate of Sonya," of the Marmeladov

family, and of his sister.91 Thus the axe murderer emerges as a disturbing hero of civil society for a public inclined to utilize new rights and opportunities. Contemporary critics read Crime and Punishment as a tract about liberal and radical ideas of crime.92 Ordinary readers may have read it as a criminal adventure and sympathized with Raskol'nikov, since the frame

largely vanished with serialization. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevskii likewise provides a filling of ad-

venture between a beginning and end sufficiently orthodox to satisfy censors and traditional readers.93 Yet the public had become more diverse since he published Crime and Punishment in 1866, thirteen years earlier.

Perhaps in response to the changing world around him, he stretched the formula further. Ivan's romp with the devil suggests a bandit's adventures, but Dostoevskii discards him as a hero. Dmitrii is closer to popular fiction. Like Raskol'nikov, he performs a good deed, saving Grushenka from her seducer. Dostoevskii dwells on Dmitrii's clumsy effort to satisfy his longing for love but adopts a narrative strategy similar to Tolstoi's when he dis- tracts the reader from his punishment and possible flight to America. Ale- sha acts the part of Levin and Kitty in obscuring what might be thought a

91. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 405. 92. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1972-84;

hereafter PSS), 7:340-48. 93. On the serialization of The Brothers Karamazov see William Mills Todd III, "The

Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Serialization," Dostoevsky Studies:Journal of the Inter- nationalDostoevsky Society 7 (1986): 87-97.

553



Slavic Review

false ending. He triumphs over life as a Karamazov and becomes the hero of a freedom more resilient and durable than that of the bandit. For once, as in the ending of Anna Karenina, freedom and the legitimate social order coexist.

In his Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevskii invoked the mythology of the bandit: "Life in the forests, a life that is powerful and terrifying, but free and full of adventures, has its seductiveness, and some kind of secret fascination for those who have experienced it."94 Yet he cited another freedom when he described his own release from exile: "Yes, with God! Freedom, a new life, resurrection from the dead, what a glorious moment!"95 In the first passage he used volia for a life "free and full of adventure"; in the second, he employed svoboda for the freedom to live out a resurrected life within the tsarist order.96 Volia connoted will, but svoboda belonged to the universe of civil liberties.97

Dostoevskii continued to identify freedom with license, desire, and brute power over others, however. A decade earlier he had mocked bour- geois freedoms in his Zimnie zametki na letnikh vpechatleniiakh (Winter notes on summer impressions, 1863). Raskol'nikov remarks in an early version of Crime and Punishment, "I want my human rights now."98 In the "poem" of "the Grand Inquisitor," however, Dostoevskii identified Christ with freedom and the demonic Inquisitor with order. For the Inquisitor, freedom means riots and rebels (buntovshchiki), and he rebukes Christ for trying to make people free. Yet God's freedom is the orderly freedom Dos- toevskii cited in Notes from the House of the Dead. The Inquisitor damns freedom of choice, conscience, love, and reason, in short, all the liberal freedoms. He asks Christ, "Do you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil?"99 When Ivan Karamazov claims that without God "everything is permitted," he rejects the freedom of bandits and rioters that both Christ and the In- quisitor also scorn. He argues that "everything is permitted" because a godless world is one of unchecked desire, but he still cannot accept Christ's world with its injustice and suffering. Tolstoi's Levin, who finds faith and reconciles to the world as Ivan does not, exclaims that if he "did not know that one should live for God and not for one's needs," he would "rob, lie, kill." 100

By requiring their characters to choose between good and evil, Dos- toevskii and Tolstoi erased the formulaic dichotomy between freedom and order. The bandits of popular fiction act irresponsibly on whims and desires, rather than deep aspirations, until their last moments of moral reflection. Dostoevskii's and Tolstoi's protagonists choose between good and evil, thinking of themselves and others. "The only freedom which de-

94. Dostoevskii, PSS, 4:174. 95. Ibid., 232. 96. Ibid., 174, 232. 97. See note 31. 98. Dostoevskii, PSS, 7:309. 99. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 254. 100. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 797.

554




serves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it," Mill wrote in On Liberty.'?' The distinction between one's own good and that of others is similar to that made by Dostoevskii's Christ, when in the Inquisitor's words he defends the freedom to choose between good and evil. Freedom mediated by moral reflection also corresponds to the linkage between individualism and social solidarity proposed by the leading populist thinkers of the time, P. L. Iavrov and N. K. Mikhailovskii.l02

By creating heroes and heroines who agonize over choices, exercise free will in their own interest and that of others, and then are punished for doing so, the greatest of Russian writers presented readers with a liberal subject, though they themselves may have rejected their protagonists' behavior. The autocracy and its defenders aligned themselves with Dosto- evskii's Grand Inquisitor in identifying liberal freedoms with violent rebellion. K. P. Pobedonostsev, the Ober Prokurator of the Holy Synod, wrote Dostoevskii of his impressions of The Brothers Karamazov and warned of the bloodshed and chaos that lurked behind liberal freedoms.103 Dos- toevskii, the Pan-Slav and anti-Semitic defender of the old regime, although personally agreeing with much of what Pobedonostsev stood for, fundamentally undermined the moral foundations of the old order. And he did it not once but twice in the novel. His hero Alesha rejects human savagery, particularly that of his family, and performs a feat (podvig) of service to people, instead of the autocracy.'04 The novel ends not with hosan- nas to the state or the Orthodox Church but with a secular chorus of hur- rahs for Alesha who has acted as a good citizen. Even if we see Alesha as a pastor with a new flock, he has little in common with the priests of the old order, whose first loyalty since the time of Peter the Great was to the state. Founding a new church was a liberal project, and here perhaps as elsewhere, the censors were misled by Dostoevskii's apparent embrace of the autocracy in his polemical writings.

Dostoevskii's development of Alesha, though in apparent conflict with his polemical stance, is echoed elsewhere in the novel. He broke with Schiller's Robbers but also amended the bandit formula that prescribed punishment or redemption by the state or church. Enjoying his role as artist and citizen, simultaneously writing The Brothers Karamazov and his column The Diary of a Writer, addressing the assembled educated public in his speech at the Moscow Pushkin festival in 1880, Dostoevskii put society in the forefront. He had recently observed an example of civic action, the movement to aid the Balkan Slavs. Katkov's Russian Herald had kept the issue before readers. Slavic Benevolent Committees were formed in 1868, and funds were raised for the Balkan Christians. These activities peaked

101. Mill, On Liberty, 55. 102. Alexander Vucinich, Social Thought in Tsarist Russia: The Quest for a General Sci-

ence of Society, 1861-1917 (Chicago, 1976), 33-35. 103. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton, 2002),

457, 549-551. 104. Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:414.

555



Slavic Review

during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. From the time of the emancipation, liberal-minded Russian gentry had sought the freedoms of pub- licity, representation, and the rule of law.'05 Critics of varying opinions shared these views. Katkov, Dostoevskii's and Tolstoi's editor at The Russian Herald, was more than a publicist of nationalist and Pan-Slav opinions. Until the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, he was a powerful advocate of public opinion per se.'06

The freedom to act on the basis of a choice between good and evil in order to fulfill oneself belonged to a liberal public sphere in which different opinions could compete.107 Dostoevskii gave his readers a glimpse of this public sphere by means of what Bakhtin has called the "polyphonic novel" in which a "plurality of consciousnesses" contributes to the novel's development.l08 Tolstoi did much the same in Anna Karenina by oppos- ing his active self-reflective heroine to the formulaic structure of the novel and to expectations inherent in the genre. As Gary Saul Morson has noted, "Although the author of Anna Karenina was no liberal, he provides a strong defense of this key prerequisite of liberal polity-namely the sense that different opinions are not just something to be tolerated but also a real asset to society."109 Dostoevskii organized a similar ideological forum in his own bizarre fashion, submerging his characters in contradic- tory systems of thought and freeing them from the constraints of genre by means of a formulaic sandwich. Listening in on these intimate conversa- tions, following the personal dilemmas of the heroes and heroines, readers shared with these great authors a public literary space akin to that of more pluralistic societies of western Europe.10 The serialization of the works and their public discussion in bars, restaurants, and drawing rooms expanded the arena and created liberal chat rooms long predating those of cyberspace.

Nineteenth-century liberalism was more than an arbitrary set of political practices and values.l" Its attributes were core beliefs of modern western societies. In the foreground was the notion of agency, that is, of "the individual persona as actor, initiator, producer, creator," in the words of the political philosopher Richard E. Flathman.l2 Mill and other liber-

105. Emmons, Russian Landed Gentry, 204. 106. Marc Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Boulder, 1994),

22-41. 107. On this link see Bruce Baum, "Freedom, Power and Public Opinion:J. S. Mill on

the Public Sphere," History of Political Thought 22, no. 3 (Autumn, 2001): 501-24. 108. M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1963); S. Lominadze criti-

cizes Bakhtin's thesis in "Rereading Dostoevsky and Bakhtin," Russian Studies in Literature 38, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 39-57.

109. Gary Saul Morson, "Foreword: Why Read Chicherin?" in B. N. Chicherin, Liberty, Equality, and the Market: Essays by B. N. Chicherin, ed. and trans. G. M. Hamburg (New Haven, 1998), xv-xvi.

110. On this and the "literary public sphere" as defined by Jurgen Habermas see Keith Michael Baker, "Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 183 - 84.

111. Richard E. Flathman makes this point in The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom (Chicago, 1987), 318-20.

112. Richard E. Flathman, Reflections of A Would-Be Anarchist: Ideals and Institutions of Liberalism (Minneapolis, 1998), 3-4.

556




als believed in the ability of individuals to form their desires, develop personal capacities, follow their own course and attain their objectives.'13 Mills's model of society depended upon this ability, and his notion of

agency and individualism was grounded in the dignity of the person. In On Liberty, he accepted Wilhelm von Humboldt's statement that the end of man "is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole."114

Individual freedom meant self-fulfillment. Desire drives many liter-

ary narratives, but the characters in these great novels aspire to self- fulfillment rather than immediate gratification. The philosopher Alan Gewirth develops the importance of this concept in western culture and concludes, "In fulfilling oneself one creates oneself."115 Anna creates herself through her love of Vronskii. Kitty and Levin do so through their mutual love. Dostoevskii's heroes also aspire to fulfill themselves. Raskol'nikov wants the pawnbroker's horde in order to gain power but also to live a

worthy life. Dmitrii yearns for money to win love, honor, and respect, rather than simply to live comfortably.16 Grushenka becomes everything for him, and she too is self-fashioning. So is Alesha in his quest for a spiritual life. Even the lowly Smerdiakov sees his ill-gotten gains in terms of

self-development, and tries to learn French. Only Ivan, horrified and en- ervated by injustice, lacks this objective. Alesha, Kitty, and Levin emerge as independent agents who achieve conventionally positive outcomes. Raskol'nikov, Dmitrii, and Anna, equally independent, ultimately bow to the superior force of authority, society, or, in Anna's case, social mores, and pay a high personal cost for their decisions. Yet all these characters succeed in fulfilling themselves by achieving something earlier heroes and heroines of Russian fiction did not. Dmitrii finds love and honor and himself, albeit in suffering, as do Raskol'nikov and Anna.

Russian writers from Pushkin to Turgenev gave their readers heroes and heroines characterized by frustration and thwarted efforts. Critics dubbed these defeated heroes "superfluous men," in Turgenev's phrase, condemned to inaction by autocratic society, serfdom, and the lack of a civic space in which to act.117 In Turgenev's Nakanune (On the eve), Elena's heroic decision to marry the Bulgarian revolutionary ends with his senseless death and her premature widowhood. In Ottsy i deti (Fathers and children), Bazarov's dreams come to naught, and he is no more able to create himself as a person than is Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin. Anna Karen- ina, Alesha, Dmitrii, and even Raskol'nikov belong to another world.

Unlike their predecessors and despite their pronouncements to the

contrary, Tolstoi and Dostoevskii demonstrated the efficacy of the liberal

113. Fred R. Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy ofJohn Stuart Mill (Berkeley, 1984), 238.

114. Mill, On Liberty, 203. 115. Alan Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment (Princeton, 1998), 7, 3. 116. David Herman, Poverty of the Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

about the Poor (Evanston, 2001), 200. 117. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900 (Evanston,

Ill., 1999), 196; Victor Ripp, "Turgenev as a Social Novelist: The Problem of the Part and the Whole," in William Mills Todd III, ed., Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800- 1914 (Stanford, 1978), 237-58.

557



558 Slavic Review

freedoms celebrated in western Europe and America. Through their protagonists, structural allusion to the traditional bandit tale and popular crime fiction, and exploration of the implications of free will, they ad- dressed the key intellectual issue of Russia's cultural development after the emancipation: freedom and order. Each had his conservative views on the subject, but each of their works is an implicit dialogue with readers across the political spectrum. The power with which they present the issue transcends their own views and explains how during this period Russian literature became synonymous with Russian identity among the educated elites and soon thereafter among many semieducated citizens. Educated Russians celebrated Russia's literary masters as the nation's teachers and

symbols of national identity, and their social inferiors learned to do likewise from new "thin"journals that reached an expanded readership.118 So

fully were these two identified with high culture in the last years of the tsarist regime that, despite the Bolsheviks' particular distaste for Dostoev- skii, Soviet satirists Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov were able to use the pen name F. Tolstoevskii during the late 1920s and early 1930s to mock but also to certify the elevated and exclusive role of these two authors.119

Over time some of Russia's most creative minds have expressed out-

rage at how Dostoevskii and Tolstoi framed their novels with an ideological message. Vladimir Nabokov, who idealized Tolstoi as a writer, took issue with Dostoevskii in his lectures on Russian literature. Citing Vissarion Belinskii's 1847 letter to Gogol' in which the critic urged "an awakening among her [Russia's] common folk of a sense of human dignity" amidst the "horrible spectacle of a land where men traffic in men," he complained that Dostoevskii urged Russia in another direction with his sentimental- ism and anti-western "brotherhood-Christ-Russia."120 Anna Akhmatova chided Tolstoi in much the same manner. Lidiia Chukovskaia recorded her conversation with Akhmatova on 12 June 1940, in which the latter voiced her particular dislike for Anna Karenina: "Tolstoi wanted to prove that a woman who leaves her lawful husband inevitably becomes a prosti- tute. And his attitude towards her is vile." 21 At the height of Stalin's rule, Akhmatova found Tolstoi's constraints on Anna's freedom galling. "Had Anna written the novel herself," the Russian poet and critic Aleksandr Kushner recently argued with reference to Akhmatova, "she would not have thrown her under a train, she would have set up a divorce, she would have brought back her son Seryozha and general respect, and she would have seen to it that Anna was happy with Vronskii."122

118. Brooks, "Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature," 315-34; and Jeffrey Brooks, "Popular Philistinism and the Course of Russian Modernism," in Gary Saul Mor- son, ed., Literature and History (Stanford, 1986), 90-110, 308-10. See also Geoffrey Hosk- ing, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (Cambridge. Mass., 1997), 286-314.

119. I. F. Masanov, Slovar' psevdonimov russkikh pisatelei, uchenykh i obshchestvennykh deiatelei, 4vols. (Moscow, 1956-60), 3:170.

120. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York, 1981), 97.

121. Lydia Chukovskaya, The AkhmatovaJournals, vol. 1, 1938-1941 (London, 1989), 112.

122. Aleksandr Kushner, "Anna Andreevna and Anna Arkadyevna," Russian Studies in Literature 37, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 14.



How Tolstoevskii Rewrote a Russian Myth 559

That Akhmatova, from the depths of Soviet repression, could be cross with Tolstoi, and Nabokov, from the vantage point of the American acad- emy, could disparage Dostoevskii, shows the impact and longevity of the conversation about freedom these writers initiated, or perhaps took up midstream. Literature can reinforce structures of thought coextensive with an oppressive society, but it can also undermine them. Tolstoi in Anna Karenina and Dostoevskii in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov evoked a mythology that had long served to reinforce the oppressive authority of tsarist rulers. By drawing upon it and surpassing it, they provided another way to structure human experience in its Russian manifestation.



Documents

How Tolstoevskii Pleased Readers and Rewrote a Russian Myth