“Mne nenadobno puteshestvovať. la puteshestvuiu v svoem voobrazhenii,” said Aleksandr Pushkin, not quite ingenuously, toward the end of his life. Pushkin’s chronic desire for travel had so often been frustrated or deflected that his loudly lamented exile in the early 1820s to the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabia, and Odessa later came to represent, faute de mieux, the peripatetic freedom of his youth. When in 1829 Pushkin and Petr A. Viazemskii were refused permission to travel to Paris, Pushkin embarked instead on the illicit trip south that would become the basis for his literary “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” six years later. In 1836, with a rueful backward glance at the orientalist fashion that he himself had helped to launch in Russian poetry, Pushkin wrote, “Vinovat: ia by otdal vse, chto bylo pisano u nas v podrazhanie l.(ordu) Bai(ronu), za sleduiushchie nezadumchivye i ne-vostorzhennye stikhi, v kotorykh poet zastavliaet geroia svoego vosklitsať druz’iam: Druz’ia! Sestritsy! ia v Parizhe! Ia nachal zhit’, a nedyshať!” (12:93). Perhaps the exuberant first words of an unfinished drama, “Cherez nedeliu budy v Parizhe nepremenno” represent a vestige of that never-to-be-realized desire (7:251-253). In short, if the south served as an escape valve for dreams of uninhibited motion and adventure, it was also a surrogate, marking the boundaries rather than the fulfillment of that freedom. Not surprisingly, then, the theme of the seductive border crossing is central to the “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” (8:1, 463):

The nationalities policy in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and specifically during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was more complex than has been indicated by many American interpretations. In the Soviet press of that period, many newspapers and periodicals carried articles that dealt with nationality issues. I will consider here the possibility that publication of these articles was part of a propaganda program originated by state policy.

Henry David Thoreau, in "Walden," wrote about people leading "lives of quiet desperation." Russian literature is filled with examples of people who cannot break out of the paralysis of selfimprisonment and who are deadened to life by their addiction to habit. In "Zhizn' v vetrenuiu pogodu" ["Life in Windy Weather"] Andrei Bitov explores the process, in life and literature, of escape from those ossified forms of existence and art. He plots the path toward creative living and creative writing. For him, one cannot divide the creative process in life from the creative process in literature.

The structure of Doktor Zhivago is in many respects unique. Its concluding chapter is a collection of poems ostensibly composed by the novel’s central figure. The preceding sixteen prose chapters are themselves further divided into numerous individual scenes, focused on a predominant image, that may be likened to separate cinematic shots. In this respect, the novel lends itself to discussion of the relations between narrative and cinematic technique. It also seeks a certain reconciliation between specific incidents documented in prose and then later reformulated as poetry, affording a sense of “dialogue” between the two classic modes of expression. The purpose of this essay, however, will be to consider dialogue primarily in its concrete sense, rather than range across an entire figurative spectrum, to which the term or its derivatives seem, in recent usage, naturally to gravitate. Metaphoric interpretation, nevertheless, will also find its place here in response to the poetic qualities of the work itself. In broad outline, the intent of this study will be to concentrate upon a specific complex aspect of the novel, its dialogic structures, and attempt to demonstrate that, within this singular work, they are worthy of attention as principal features accounting for its singularity.

Although his career as a Russian prose writer spanned more than twenty years, Boris Pil'niak is now remembered primarily for a single early novel and for two later short stories that gained him political notoriety with an increasingly hostile public. Much of the rest of Pil'niak's work, discounted even during his lifetime, has still not received the wide readership it deserves, a fact that is puzzling in light of his innovative talent and considerable influence on younger writers. Despite a number of scholarly studies devoted to rehabilitating Pil'niak's reputation, the notion persists that this neglect is justified by a body of work that is repetitive, fragmentary, and derivative. His formal innovations notwithstanding, Pil'niak is still frequently viewed as outside of the modernist aesthetic, which would otherwise provide a meaningful and useful context for his work.

In 1974, soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, the literary scholar Andrei Siniavskii once again deferred to his created alter ego, the writer Abram Terts, to pass provocative judgment on the Soviet literary scene. The essay ascribed to Terts, “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii,” reviews unofficial Soviet literature to highlight its artistic (rather than moral) appeal. As Terts reads it, the punitive context of this literature—established by Stalin and enforced to a less rigorous extent through the Leonid Brezhnev era—inadvertently guaranteed art and the fate of the artist richness and power:

The question of humanity’s moral makeup has high priority in current sociopolitical and cultural discussions in the Soviet Union. At issue is whether a person is a “clean sheet” whose moral makeup represents nothing but the experience of and reactions to the surrounding environment, or, conversely, a “living soul” endowed with such mysterious and irrational faculties as love, mercy, and compassion. Concern about a lack of morality and spirituality in Soviet society increased significantly in the arts and media after the period of relative liberalization, the thaw, was over and another period, officially referred to now as “the period of stagnation,” began. This change took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Soviet literature of the time, pragmatism stood out as a primary cause for concern in the works of the derevenshchiki, the village writers. Their approach to this problem, however, was limited by their attempts to resolve it within the context of old and not necessarily adequate stereotyped oppositions: village versus city, nature versus technology, Russian versus western.