N. V. Gogol (1809-52) was one of the few Russian writers in the 19th century to have kept intact More’s basic elements: satire, temporal displacement, a fantastic setting, and the nonsensical narrator (not so much in his name, but in the manner of his narration). Of course, at first glance, Gogol’s fiction is not anything like More’s, and if More intended by his choice of the word utopia a possible pun on another Greek compound eutopos (or “good place”) then the crux of Gogol’s writings is rather the portrayal of the obverse, or dystopia (a term introduced in the 1950s). Moreover, as opposed to More, Gogol in his mature fiction (The Nose, The Overcoat or Dead Souls) often fused the two worlds, the “real” and the fantastic,” in such a manner that the two became indivisible in his reader’s mind, with the resultant effect of a colossal farce hardly suggesting the possibility of attainment of any utopia. Yet neither the content nor the quality of Gogol’s fiction is at issue here (as it will be commented upon later); rather it is the interpretation it received from the then-rising “civic school” of literary criticism, headed by V. G. Belinsky (1811-48). Gogol’s literary practice was understood by Belinsky as a perfect “cleansing medicine” for Russia to embark on a path toward a society rather resembling the utopia of More (although More was not mentioned in his critical essays of the forties).
It should not come then as a surprise that it was a pupil of Belinsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89), who succeeded in molding, while in prison, an extremely important work of utopian character for the second half of the 19th century, the novel What Can Be Done (1862). Chernyshevsky’s novel, however, represents a new brand of utopian literature, one with a definite future in mind, a future predicated by the newly discovered “laws” of historical process as posited by Marx (who derived his theory from Hegel’s philosophical system). Most 20th-century definitions of utopia are far more indebted to Marx than to More and imagine a social order set in the future, and coming about as a result of “predictable” advances in science and technology. Chernyshevsky’s novel fulfills this definition. With the major theme centered on the emancipation of women and the rational division of labor, it is ultimately the woman protagonist’s “dream” that provides a vision of future discoveries in science and technology. As is shown in our anthology, among the images employed is that of the Crystal Palace which the new, classless society inhabits. Chernyshevsky obviously modeled this image on the real Crystal Palace, an architectural wonder of glass and steel erected at Sydenham for the Great London Exposition of 1852 (the year of Gogol’s death).
Chernyshevsky’s novel is hardly a work with primarily literary concerns, but rather a work of agitational and sociophilosophical character. At best, it is a second-rate work of fiction. Chernyshevsky did not set out to create a work in which sociopolitical concerns replaced literary ones; on the contrary, Chernyshevsky’s novel was written to advance a priori political ideas camouflaged in a literary form. The fact that one of the most important political pamphlets of V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) bears the title of Chernyshevsky’s work is not an accident of history, but a historical indication that the study of Chernyshevsky’s “novel” belongs more to the history of political ideas than to literary inquiry. On the other hand—despite Marx’s protestations to the contrary, and his reliance on the so-called scientific method of social history—much of Marxist idealism belongs to the realm of fictional future “reality,” where the word fictional denotes precisely the primitive mechanism of literary fantasy as opposed to the scientific method. Since the popular mind is not particularly bothered by the conceptual opposition of good science vs. good literature, this bridging of disciplines was highly successful in its time, and the work proved to be one of the most important political documents leading to the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in twentieth-century Russia and to the division of the world on the eve of the Sputnik era.
Setting aside for the moment such oppositions as free market vs. directed forms of economy, democratic vs. controlled forms of elections and other major differences which divided humanity in the twentieth century, both socialist and capitalist societies were in complete agreement on one thing, namely that man is a rational entity capable of choosing what is naturally advantageous to his well-being. Both schools of thought defined well-being primarily in terms of the acquisition of material wealth, e.g. how many cars, televisions, computers, or metric tons of agricultural products were made per capita in their respective societies, and the desirability of living in one or the other was often measured simply in terms of an algebraic addition of such wealth. Both furthermore held that human ability to reason was best exemplified by science and that human progress was best measured by man’s advances in science. Both, therefore, put great store in supporting science and its attendant technology and, at least in the pure sciences, their constructive dialogue continued relatively unabated and shared.
The fundamental conceptual similarity uniting socialism and capitalism—popularly perceived as antithetical ideologies—was perhaps most cogently expressed by existentialism, one of the twentieth-century’s most influential philosophical and literary movements. Existentialist thought posed an effective and troubling challenge to the basic assumptions that underlay both philosophical camps. Though international in scope, it is important to note that the movement found productive roots in the writings of at least one major Russian writer, F. M. Dostoevsky (1821-81), whose works were for decades proscribed by the Soviet regime. The eminent critic Irving Howe—writing a few years after Sputnik was put into orbit and on the eve of the date when the new world it had created was close to being annihilated by the Cuban missile crisis—had the following to say of Dostoevsky’s connection to existentialism:
The assumption that man is rational, and the assumption that his character is definable—so important to western literature—are both threatened when the underground man appears on the historical scene. <…> As rebel against the previously secure Enlightenment, he rejects the claims of science, the ordered world-view of the rationalists, the optimism of the radicals. He is tempted neither by knowledge, like Faust, nor glory, like Julien Sorel; he is beyond temptation of any sort. The idea of ambition he regards as a derangement of ego, and idealism as the most absurd of vanities. He hopes neither to reform nor cure the world, only to escape from beneath its pressures.
A creature of the city, he has no fixed place among the social classes, he lives in holes and crevices, burrowing beneath the visible structure of society. Elusive and paranoid, he plays a great many parts yet continues to be recognized as a type through his unwavering rejection of official humanity: the humanity of decorum, moderation and reasonableness. Even while tormenting himself with reflections upon his own insignificance, the underground man hates still more—more than his own hated self—the world above ground.
Brilliantly anticipated in Diderot’s fiction, Rameau’s Nephew, the underground man first appears full face in Dostoevsky’s novels. Here he assumes his most exalted guise, as a whole man suffering the burdens of consciousness. In Notes from the Underground he scrutinizes his motives with a kind of phenomenological venom; and then, as if to silence the moralists of both Christianity and humanism who might urge upon him a therapeutic commitment to action, he enters a few relationships with other people, relationships that are commonplace yet utterly decisive in revealing the impossibility of escape from his poisoned self.
In the 20th Century the underground man comes into his own and, like a rise of pus, breaks through the wrinkled skin of tradition. Thus far, at least, it is his century. He appears everywhere in modern literature, though seldom with the intellectual resources and intensity of grandeur that Dostoevsky accorded him.2
Although most works present in our volume involve travel, whether real or imagined, including even interstellar flight (glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, as Shakespeare has it), we must elaborate the underground man’s musings even further, since he probably best defines the lack of movement of any kind, or an absolute stalema
te.3 It would of course be an injustice to Dostoevsky—who, incidentally, nearly deified Shakespeare—to consider his views as pre-existentialist, as some have posited, or lacking in idealism of his own. Rather, we shall regard the pathos of the underground man’s plight as an implicit companion to our volume, as its most necessary shadow.4 The underground man—imprisoned within himself—would be indeed a most unwilling companion on any quest. His diary occupies that pole which is inimical to travel, especially mathematically calculated travel, like that described in the Diaries of K. E. Tsiolkovsky who—while an occupant of a different kind of prison—was first in the twentieth century to provide a technological solution to the concept of flight in interplanetary space, and who was fondly remembered during the Sputnik era. As if to underscore the underground man’s lack of élan for any idealism—either for a future made fantastic by advances in technology, or one simply predicated on human love—Dostoevsky leaves his protagonist standing at a cross-roads, at the end of a novel which had forever changed the world’s understanding of Man.
Let us note that the underground man spends a great deal of time defending his need to create an irrational world, in which 2x2 could equal 5. It would seem, therefore, that he should be the first to defend that capacity in man which makes other worlds of fantasy possible—the irrational and energetically anti-empirical—or those worlds in which, as Alice learns from the Queen, “it takes all the running one can in order to stand in one place.” Yet he would not enter the Queen’s world either, because he is forever caught in his self-styled definition of the paradox of being, revolving around the following syllogism: Man, he posits, is both a “rational animal” and an “irrational human,” e.g. man may recognize by reason what is to his advantage, but, at the same he may—by free will—deliberately choose to contravene what reason dictates. Man’s free will, he argues, therefore consists not in his ability to exercise judgement or make reasoned choices (a view posited by the Enlightenment and alive today), but rather in his ability to exercise caprice, hence to be irrational. Of course, contravening self-interest (or any Crystal Palace society) leads to suffering, and for that reason “suffering is the sole cause of consciousness,” he tells his readers. If “suffering is the sole cause of consciousness,” and if to be conscious is to be one’s self, then to be one’s self is indeed to be a man. In short, to be a man, rather than “an ant, a piano key, or an organ stop” (in his terms) is to be trapped on a continuous treadmill of logic which brings the aforementioned series to a complete circle—to the paradox of man as both a “rational animal” and an “irrational human,” caught in his subterranean and sub-social existence. It is then due to his fixation on a man’s need to savor “his own toothache” so as to prove his individuality, as he puts it, that the underground man rejects even those other, non-empirical worlds of fancy, which are nearly always founded on a heroic quest for the betterment of one’s own or the human condition. Battling giants or dragons, facing the unknown and mystical obstacles, overcoming the minions of dark armies, or leaping through black holes—all these are quests in which pain or any kind of suffering is to be overcome by the promise of a greater good to be achieved.
The underground man’s argument might have been different had he been born a creature of the steppe, the typical setting of Old Russian literary quests. Perhaps he might have defended his precious sense of freedom—after all, his principal goal—in an open combat as a legendary hero. As Howe importantly observes, however, the underground man is “a creature of the city,” and in a Russian context, a creature of St. Petersburg. In Dostoevsky’s eyes the semi-utopian city founded by Peter the Great had degenerated into an unnatural and terrifying setting for human habitation, in which such miracles of nature as the purity of powder-white snow—normally falling as manna from the skies—turns “wet, yellow and dingy.” Perhaps when Dostoevsky himself looked up into the skies, he hoped that the suffering he considered so necessary for the development of the human self would also prove redemptive. Through it, perhaps, man would be led to another city, akin to St. Augustine’s City of God, or—following the path of some medieval saints—to a monastery. Such are at least the indications from his other writings, but this hope is certainly not offered to the underground man. In a world with no God and no Heaven to reproach for his condition, he vents his spite against those well-wishers of mankind who posit utopian city-society settings which would eliminate suffering—his last vestige of freedom—and lay the foundations for dehumanizing mankind. In their ideal world, composed of even more accurate geometrical spaces than his Petersburg offered, 2x2 would always equal 4, it would never snow and the skies would always be clear. In fact it is in just such a sanitized cityscape that Evgeny Zamiatin was to set his seminal dystopian novel, We.
Whatever Dostoevsky’s philosophical views ultimately became—and for Russia at least he predicted an escape from the dead-end of absolute rationalism in the form of a return to its Christian roots—as an artist he never accepted a stalemate. Enduring one of the most trying periods of his life, beginning in 1864 when he completed Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky was nevertheless able to churn out novels at the approximate rate of one per year, each work lengthier and more complex than the one before. It should perhaps not come as a surprise that the writer who laid the foundations of Russian psychological realism theorized toward the end of his life that the ultimate work of realism would be one which expressed the most unimaginable and fantastic states of being. He might have been guided in this regard by Cervantes and the fantastic journeys of Don Quixote. Or he might have wished simply to establish a quasi-paradoxical link between realism and fantasy, but chose to express the thought indirectly, because Russian 19th-century fiction—despite tremendous achievements in the representation of the fantastic—did not enshrine fantasy as a genre. The equivalent Russian term fantasia normally connoted only that which is meant in English by the slightly archaic term “fancy.” He was certainly aware of a centuries-old western tradition (from Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to the modern day), which accords distinct generic status to works of fantasy. Such texts usually posit a universe in which the author has made a conscious break with ordinary experienced reality, and engaged with the Other. But Dostoevsky also knew that Russian culture, enriched by a millennium of spiritual growth interweaving the pagan and the Christian worlds, never quite shared the west’s certainty as to the exact locus of boundaries separating empirical experience from that other realm. In any case, his infrequently cited claim as to the ultimate goal of realism is well represented by the texts included in this volume. Presenting some of the best examples of Russian literature in the fantastic mode, the collection supplies a matrix of texts rooted in the familiar topoi of fairylands, utopias, and dreamscapes—all feeding the notion that fantasy-making might be the very essence of art.
The Russian reading public of Dostoevsky’s day knew western literary traditions well, but much of Russian literature was largely unknown to the western reader before it burst upon the European scene with stunning impact in the prose of I. S. Turgenev (1818-83), Dostoevsky, and L. N. Tolstoy (1828-1910). Each was a “realist” with prodigious gifts, and each was decidedly unlike the others in matters of style. Yet all three—to a greater or lesser degree—allowed the fantastic to intersect with the real, often with no conscious break from reality. The Double (1846), one of Dostoevsky’s earliest published works, is just one example. Their realism, as opposed to its western counterpart, was far more profoundly weighted toward depicting events best characterized as improbable or even impossible.
For any further discussion of the premise of the fantastic it is important to note that Shakespeare designates the poet as the namer of uncharted places. Neither Dostoevsky nor his two great realist compatriots, were principally poets (though Turgenev wrote some poetry). Yet the genius of these masters of prose was born and nurtured at a time when poetry was indeed the principal and choice form of literary expression—a period which Russians universally feel was t
heir literature’s Golden Age. In retrospect, the period is dominated by the figure of A. S. Pushkin (1799-1837), whom Russians consistently view as their greatest poet, and the years of his short life frame in their minds the Golden Age as a whole. But during his own time Pushkin was regarded as one of a whole pleiade of incredibly gifted older and younger poets—all participating in poetic discourse as their principal vehicle of literary creativity. Such names as I. A. Krylov (1769-1844), V. A. Zhukovsky (1783-1852), N. I. Gnedich (1784-1833), D. V. Davydov (1784-1839), F. N. Glinka (1786-1880), K. N. Batiuskov (1787-1855), P. A. Viazemsky (1792-1878), K. F. Ryleev (1795-1826), V. K. Kiukhelbeker (1797-1846), A. A. Bestuzhev (1797-1837), A. A. Delvig (1798-1831), E. A. Baratynsky (1800-44), to list but a few, mean very little today to a western reader, but many of these contemporaries of Pushkin wielded at least as much influence as Pushkin and themselves had a profound effect on his own craft.
Some of these, such as Bestuzhev (pseud. Marlinsky), and even Pushkin himself, turned to prose at the end of their lives. It was, for instance, the ultra-romantic prose of Bestuzhev (rather than that of Pushkin) that Turgenev later acknowledged as his first love and a formative influence. But with the notable exception of N. M. Karamzin (1766-1826) who was the single most influential Russian prose writer before the 1830s, and whose stylistic innovations in both prose and poetry paved the way for the Golden Age, Russia did not have a single prose writer whose artistic impact could rival that of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy later on. This was not due to any lack of native talent, but rather to Russia’s peculiar literary history, which had no notion of literature as belle-lettres prior to the eighteenth-century. Russia’s medieval system of literary genres—rich as it was, and embodying a profound interest in the unexpected or the unexplained—gave place in the eighteenth century to the neoclassicist system, which signified Russia’s major embrace of the rational, utilitarian world-view offered by the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s understanding of the poet’s reason defying role was also on the ascendant, since in the years roughly from 1735 to 1835—the period from which we draw our initial selections—poetry was clearly elevated as the supreme form of literary endeavor.
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