History

During the first two decades of the 19th century in Russia, fable writing became a fad. By all accounts the most widely read fabulist was Ivan Krylov whose stories borrowed heavily from Aesop, La Fontaine, and various Germanic sources. If Krylov’s tales made short prose popular in Russia, the stories of the revered poet Aleksandr Pushkin gained serious attention for the form. Somewhat like Mérimée in France (who was one of the first to translate Pushkin into French), Pushkin cultivated a detached, rather classical style for his stories of emotional conflicts (“The Queen of Spades,” 1834). Also very popular and respected was Mikhail Lermontov’s “novel,” A Hero of Our Time (1840), which actually consists of five stories that are more or less related.

But it is Nikolay Gogol who stands at the headwaters of the Russian short story; Fyodor Dostoyevsky noted that all Russian short story writers “emerged from Gogol’s overcoat,” a punning allusion to the master’s best known story. In a manner all his own, Gogol was developing impressionist techniques in Russia simultaneously with Poe in America. Gogol published his Arabesques (1835) five years before Poe collected some of his tales under a similar title. Like those of Poe, Gogol’s tales of hallucination, confusing reality and dream, are among his best stories (“Nevsky Prospect” and “Diary of a Madman,” both 1835). The single most influential story in the first half of the 19th century in Russia was undoubtedly Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (1842). Blending elements of realism (natural details from the characters’ daily lives) with elements of fantasy (the central character returns as a ghost), Gogol’s story seems to anticipate both the impressionism of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) and the realism of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886).

Ivan Turgenev appears, at first glance, antithetical to Gogol. In A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) Turgenev’s simple use of language, his calm pace, and his restraint clearly differentiate him from Gogol. But like Gogol, Turgenev was more interested in capturing qualities of people and places than in building elaborate plots. A remaining difference between the two Russians, however, tends to make Turgenev more acceptable to present-day readers: Turgenev studiously avoided anything artificial. Though he may have brought into his realistic scenes a tale of a ghost (“Bezhin Meadow,” 1852), he did not attempt to bring in a ghost (as Gogol had done in “The Overcoat”). In effect, Turgenev’s allegiance was wholly to detached observation.

Developing some of the interests of Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky experimented with the impressionist story. The early story “White Nights” (1848), for example, is a “Tale of Love from the Reminiscence of a Dreamer” as the subtitle states; the title of one of his last stories, “The Dream of the Ridiculous Man” (1877), also echoes Poe and Gogol. Though sharing Dostoyevsky’s interest in human motives, Leo Tolstoy used vastly different techniques. He usually sought psychological veracity through a more detached and, presumably, objective narrator (The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 1886; “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 1891). Perhaps somewhat perplexed by Tolstoy’s nonimpressionist means of capturing and delineating psychological impressions, Henry James pronounced Tolstoy the masterhand of the disconnection of method from matter.

The Russian master of the objective story was Anton Chekhov. No other storywriter so consistently as Chekhov turned out first-rate works. Though often compared to Maupassant, Chekhov is much less interested in constructing a well-plotted story; nothing much actually happens in Chekhov’s stories, though much is revealed about his characters and the quality of their lives. While Maupassant focuses on event, Chekhov keeps his eye on character. Stories like “The Grasshopper” (1892), “The Darling” (1898), and “In the Ravine” (1900)—to name only three—all reveal Chekhov’s perception, his compassion, and his subtle humour and irony. One critic says of Chekhov that he is no moralist—he simply says “you live badly, ladies and gentlemen,” but his smile has the indulgence of a very wise man.