Lecture 13. Realism and critical realism

Turgenev (1818-1883)
Born in south-central Russia, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev attended universities in St. Petersburg and Berlin. He had wanted to be a philosopher but he found he could only devote his life to literature. He and Dostoevsky were once among the young writers gathered around the critic Belinsky. In 1843 he fell in unrequited love with Madame Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a singer and the wife of a French writer. His fame
as a writer was established by A Sportsman’ s Sketches, a series of short stories published in 1847-1851, in which he showed his sympathy for the peasants. He was often beset by critics and other writers. The publication of his major novel, Fathers and Sons, outraged not only conservatives but also radicals, and he was induced to leave Russia, only to return for short visits to his native land during the last 20 years
of his life. He died in France with Pauline at his bedside. Fathers and Sons or Fathers and Children (Ottzy i deti, 1862) is about the conflicts and differences existing between two generations in Russia during the
1860’ s: the older aristocratic generation and the new democratic generation. The central character is a nihilist and clever biologist called Bazarov. He believes in political anarchy and regards science as the savior of mankind. He and his friend Arkady are at first seemingly rivals for the hand of a young widow, Madame Odintzov, though Arkady proves to be actually in love with her sister Katya. Both friends find
adversaries in their fathers, but the strongest adversary of Bazarov is Arkady’ s uncle, Pavel Kirsanov, who finds Bazarov kissing Fenichka (mistress of Arkady’ s father) and challenges him to a duel. Finally, Bazarov dies accidentally from being infected by a patient’ s typhus, ironically as a victim of science.

Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Born the son of a physician in Moscow, Fyodor Dostoevsky attended the Military Engineering School in St. Petersburg, where he found his interest in literature and decided not to pursue the career of a military engineer. His first novel, Poor Folk, was highly praised by Belinsky, but several successors to it were failures in Belinsky’ s estimation. He had long suffered from adverse criticism and his literary feud with Turgenev was a lifetime preoccupation. Equally lifelong was his suffering from epileptic attacks, which were supposed to begin in 1839, when his father was murdered by serfs. In 1849, he was arrested for joining the socialist activity of the Petrashevsky Circle. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to death. Standing before the firing squad, however, he was spared at the very last moment. His death sentence was commuted to exile and imprisonment in Siberia. He was then sent to stay four years in a Siberian labor camp. After that, he was obliged to serve a four-year term in the army. In 1857 he married a widow, and in 1859 he left
the army and returned to European Russia. He made some trips abroad, once accompanied by Polina, who was for him the model of “the infernal woman.” He became addicted to gambling in Germany. When editing Epoch in 1864, he contributed Notes from Underground, his first mature work. Afterwards, grief
occupied him, for both his wife and his brother Mikhail died. In 1866 he published his masterpiece Crime and Punishment along with a short novel, The Gambler. In 1867 he married Anna, his one-time stenographer. They then traveled for some years in western Europe before they returned to Russia in1871. Dostoevsky’ s last ten years were relatively his prosperous years, during which he published The Brothers Karamazov and delivered an honored speech at the Pushkin celebration in Moscow. He died in St. Petersburg in 1881 and since then his reputation has grown steadily. Today, he is recognized as one of the world’ s supreme masters of the realistic novel particularly for his acute, psychological perceptions in characterization
(along with his philosophical profundity linked to religiosity), which in many scholars’ (including Freud’ s) view derive from his own real-life experience.Dostoevsky’ s major novels are five. In Notes from Underground (Zapiski izodpol’ya, 1864), the underground man, i.e., the narrator, explicates,
laughs at, and defends his philosophical ideas concerning man’ s perverted nature in a monologue, and then recounts his adventures (which lead to his affair with a call girl, Liza) to illustrate his ideas already propounded in the monologue. In The Idiot (, 1868), the epileptic Prince Myshkin is nicknamed “the idiot,” but he is actually a childlike and saintly gentleman. His magnanimity leads him to a tragic ending. In
The Possessed (1871-1872), Stavrogin interacts with “the possessed ones,”who are the affected nihilist revolutionaries. In Crime and Punishment (Prestupleniye i nakazaniye, 1866), the poor student Raskolnikov murders for money an old woman pawnbroker and her sister and believes himself justified because practically he needs the money to raise himself and help his family and perhaps to do good to mankind, and because heoretically he thinks he can become an “extraordinary superman” like Napoleon by
transgressing the law. This self-justification, however, fails to convince himself; his conscience tells himself that all his motives are false. As he suffers terrible remorse, he turns for sympathy to a young prostitute, Sonya, who urges him to confess his crime to the police inspector that has long suspected him and waited just for his arrest. Finally, Raskolnikov is sentenced to seven years of imprisonment in Siberia, and the
devoted Sonya follows him to his prison, helping him redeem his crime with punishment and achieve peace of mind. In Dostoevsky’ s best work, The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ya Karamazovy, 1879-1880), the main plot revolves about Fyodor Karamazov, a depraved father, and his four sons: the passionate, impulsive Dmitri; the brilliant, rationalistic Ivan; the upright, priestly Alyosha; and the imbecile, epileptic bastard Smerdyakov. A series of action leads to the death of the father. It is Smerdyakov that kills Fyodor, and he kills him perhaps because he has the impression that Ivan has transmitted the secret wish for their father ’ s death. The crime of the murder, however, falls on Dmitri, who once quarreled with his father over a local siren (Grushenka) and threatened to kill him. Unable to defend himself because even his betrothed
(Katerina) also speaks unfavorably of him, Dmitri is convicted and sent to Siberia. In the end, Ivan goes insane and Smerdyakov hangs himself. It is said that this great novel has four levels of meaning: literal, religious, social, and ethical. What works most impressively, however, is the psychological probing into the main characters, especially Ivan.