Chapter 8: Conclusion

Literary Criticism 
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It was Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)--who lived and wrote for many years in Europe 
and was profoundly Western in his outlook--that first brought Russian literature to the 
attention of European readers, but at the cost of often being considered an alien in his own 
land. It was the twin giants Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky whose work exploded out of 
Russia in the 1870s to overwhelm Europeans with their imaginative and emotional power . To 
many readers it must have seemed as if this distant, obscure country had suddenly leaped to 
the forefront of contemporary letters. Both were profoundly influenced both by European 
Romanticism and Realism, but their fiction offered characters more complex and impassioned 
than those Europeans were used to. 
Tolstoy is known chiefly for his two masterpieces, 
War and Peace (1865-1869) and 
Anna Karenina (1875-1877). These works which wrestle with life's most profound questions 
earned Tolstoy the reputation of perhaps the world's greatest novelist. The first is a vast 
portrait of Russia during the period of the Napoleonic wars, and the second the story of a 
tormented adulterous woman treated far more seriously than Flaubert's Emma Bovary. Like the 
English Victorian novelists, Tolstoy sought to do more than entertain or even move his readers, 
taking the writing of fiction seriously as a moral enterprise. In the end Tolstoy became a 
Christian utopian, abandoning fiction altogether. 
Dostoyevsky is famous for his complex analyses of the human mind. Unlike Turgenev 
or Tolstoy, he pays little attention to details of setting or the personal appearance of his 
characters, instead concentrating on their thoughts and emotions (Jost, 1974: 75). His work 
and that of Tolstoy revealed to Europeans that modern fiction could serve ends far more 
sophisticated than it had in the hands of Zola or even Flaubert. 
Dostoyevsky had a sensational life which is variously reflected in his fiction. He 
believed his father to have been murdered by his own serfs, a belief which led him to be 
obsessed with murder as a subject in many of his greatest works, such as 
Crime and 
Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1881). After being arrested for his 
involvement in a radical group (the model for The Possessed) he was abruptly notified that he 
was about to be shot, but was spared at the last minute and sent to Siberia for ten years. He 
often described the traumatic effect which this mock-execution had on him in his fiction, and 
devoted another novel (
The House of the Dead) to the story of his time in prison. 
While there, he developed epilepsy, and later made epileptic seizures one of the chief 
characteristics of the Christ-figure Prince Myshkin in 
The Idiot. He also analyzed his addiction 
to gambling in 
The Gambler. The fervent Christianity and anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment 
attitudes of his later years color much of his writing, and underlie the influential long story 
Notes from Underground. 

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Literary Criticism 
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Some Western readers, notably the very restrained American novelist Henry James, 
found Dostoyevsky's fiction exaggerated. The combination of traditional Russian effusiveness 
with Dostoyevsky's truly sensational life made for sensational writing (Stam, 2004: 124). But it 
is important to note that though his characters always seem to be undergoing some sort of 
torment, he creates the extreme situations and emotions in his novels not out of mere 
sensationalism, but to plumb the depths of human experience. 
Of the other Russian writers of the 19th Century, the only other one to make much of 
an impression abroad was Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), whose short stories and plays used 
Realism in a much more understated way. His four great plays written just before and after the 
turn of the century--
The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, along 
with the Realist masterworks of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen--helped to rescue the theater 
from the dismal state into which it had plunged after the time of the German Romantics. The 
theatrical genius of the 19th century seems to have gone into opera rather than stage plays; 
few of the plays written between Schiller and Chekhov are remembered or performed today, 
but his works are seldom absent from the stage for long. 
Chekhov's works are often seen as the last echo of a fading tradition before Stalinism 
made "socialist realism" into a suffocating orthodoxy. Under Communism, Tolstoy was 
regarded a great national writer despite his mystical leanings because of his sympathies with 
the peasants and utopian idealism; but Dostoyevsky was out of favor during much of the 
Stalinist period because he was an outspoken foe of socialism and fervent Christian. Yet 
abroad, his reputation continued to grow. He was seen as a prophet of the evils which 
followed in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, as a psychologist who anticipated many of 
the most striking discoveries of Sigmund Freud, and as a welcome challenger to the pervasive 
celebration of modernity so characteristic of the period 1850-1960. Despite his anti-
modernism, Dostoyevsky still speaks directly to many readers in ways that most of his 
contemporaries do not. In post-Communist Russia he is again celebrated as a national 
treasure, just as he is revered as a classic abroad. 
THE INFLUENCE OF FRENCH TO RUSSIAN 
The first real manifestations of the influence of France in Russia date from Russia's first 
political opening toward Europe, undertaken by Peter the Great (1682–1725) and further 
advanced by Catherine II (1762–1796) (Smith, 2006: 18). In the first instance, this influence 
was cultural. The adoption of the French language as the language of conversation and 
correspondence by the nobility encouraged access to French literature. The nobility's 
preference for French governesses and tutors contributed to the spread of French culture and 

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