Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
27
Impressions
I climb a ladder called progress, civilization, culture. I keep climbing, not knowing pre-
cisely where I'm going, but in fact the wonderful ladder alone makes life worth living.
—Anton Chekhov,
My Life,
in a treatise that served as Chekhov's rebuttal to
Tolstoy's rejection of intellectual activity for a simpler life
reflected the more hopeful, ironically play-
ful side of Russian life,
Fyodor Dos-
toyevsky
's work revealed its darker, more
troubled side.
Crime and Punishment
traces the inner turmoil of a poor student
who murders a pawnbroker. No character
is really likable, but each is disturbingly
believable.
Notes From Underground
's
account of a man expressing his free will
by sinking into desperation leaves the
reader ready to jump off a bridge.
Nikolai Gogol
chose satire over solem-
nity, portraying the complacency and
petty concerns of the rural gentry and
urban clerical classes in short stories such
as
The Nose
and
The Overcoat
and in his
novel
The Inspector-General.
Mikhail Ler-
montov
carved a name for himself with
A
Hero of Our Time
and other tales about the
Caucasus Mountains and Russia's efforts
to subdue warrior clans there.
Nineteenth-century writers also took
on Russian politics, often incurring the
wrath of czarist governments: Pushkin was
exiled from St. Petersburg, and Dos-
toyevsky was jailed for taking part in a
radical intellectual discussion group.
The next crucial figure in the Russian
literary pantheon was
Leo Tolstoy.
His
writing career spanned 6 decades, starting
with
Sevastopol Sketches
about his time
serving in the Crimean Wars. He won
fame for
War and Peace,
his careful and
complex account of the Napoleonic Wars,
and for
Anna Karenina,
about the fall of a
married woman suffocated by her bour-
geois world. Tolstoy later abandoned the
aristocratic, intellectual realm for a form
of Christian anarchism and asceticism at
his farm at Yasnaya Polyana outside Mos-
cow.
Anton Chekhov
countered Tolstoy's
rejection of modern life with an unflag-
ging faith in progress. Originally a doctor,
Chekhov began writing short stories
before discovering widespread success as a
playwright. His preference for progress
underpinned plays such as
The Seagull,
The Three Sisters,
and
The Cherry Orchard,
in which stagnation and the emptiness of
rural life are recurrent themes.
The political turmoil of the early 20th
century fueled literary expression before
Soviet ideology crippled it or sent it fleeing
abroad. Some writers managed to produce
masterpieces amid this repression and fear.
Anna Akhmatova
thrived in the heady
years before the revolution, then spent
decades producing subtle yet wrenching
commentary on the transformation of her
beloved hometown into Soviet Leningrad.
The Communist leadership was notori-
ously fickle in its loyalties.
Vladimir May-
akovsky
was hailed as the voice of the
revolution but by the late 1920s was ostra-
cized.
Mikhail Bulgakov
staged several
plays in the 1920s; his
Dog's Heart,
in
which a bourgeois surgeon puts a dog's
heart in a decidedly proletariat patient,
became a much-loved film. However,
most of his works were banned or cen-
sored, including his masterpiece
Master
and Margarita,
a complex novel that
invokes Pontius Pilate and has the devil
stalking one of Moscow's most prestigious
neighborhoods.
Vladimir Nabokov
fled
Russia after the revolution but continued
publishing in Russian and translating his
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