Caryl Emerson distinguishes Chekhov from the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky through his specific evocation of embarrassment, an emotion so ubiquitous in Chekhov’s writing as to become fused with his poetics and his worldview. While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy built their plots on more assertive acts and emotions, Chekhov, as Emerson shows, runs his path to redemption and discovery through the moral capacity to cringe at one’s own words and behavior.

Tolstoy’s relationship with staged art was anxious and passionate. He was not a man of the theater – of the performing arts, music was his passion – and he was highly critical of many playwrights, such as Shakespeare and Chekhov, whom he felt abused the medium. And yet he authored several powerfully effective dramas (comedies and tragedies) as well as numerous experimental dramatized folktales and parables, and even a quasi-fictive version of his own diaries in dramatic form titled A Light Shines in the Darkness. Tolstoy composed theatrical works in two distinct periods, early and late, on either side of his spiritual turning point. This essay discusses the major plays and one exemplary didactic folk miniature (The First Distiller, 1886) in the context of nineteenth-century Russian theatrical resources, official censorship, and Tolstoy’s own evolving sense of theater’s “infectiousness” as an instrument of communication and moral growth, moving from the unsuccessful farce The Infected Family (1863) through The Power of Darkness (1886), The Fruits of Enlightenment (1889), and The Living Corpse (1900). On the stage as in his prose, Tolstoy emerges as a “realist” only in the most superficial sense. In both venues he is a rebel.

Two problems confront the biographer of Tolstoy. First, his life lacks the catastrophic coercive outer events and bodily illness that drive the more persecuted biographical plots of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. The most celebrated events in the life of the healthy, wealthy, highborn Tolstoy were not imposed on him from outside but resulted from his own freely offered verbal acts, which increasingly became condemnations of the practices and values of his social class. Second, Tolstoy wrote more words about himself than any outside person could ever hope to do. These autobiographical statements condemn more often than they confirm. How does the biographer choose among these self-lacerating, self-cancelling words? This chapter survey two types of biography: the long comprehensive account and the brief glimpse (Short Life). Discussed as exemplary within the first type are Aylmer Maude (the Boswell model who lives alongside his subject), Henri Troyat (the biographer as novelist), and Rosamund Bartlett (the synoptic view of Tolstoy as world phenomenon). This is followed by two examples of the “brief glimpse” genre: Liza Knapp’s Leo Tolstoy: A Very Short Introduction (2019), and Anthony Briggs’s controversial – even scandalous – biography in the series Brief Lives (2010). Finally, tribute is paid Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, the writer’s wife and closest, least naïve chronicler.

There is a curious shape to twentieth-century Russian writing on literary creativity. It swings between a bold revolutionary modernism – materialistic, mechanistic, impersonal, poised to dissolve the bourgeois subject together with the socioeconomic class that nourished it – and a naive idealism relying on archaic categories of spiritual epiphany and unconditional emotional commitment. From 1934 until well into the 1960s, the spiritual extreme dominated the USSR’s official theory of art: although deeply conservative and faith-based, the doctrine of Socialist Realism played a radical role in the pragmatic modernization of the Stalinist–Soviet state. As that state decayed and finally collapsed in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union at last ‘caught up with and surpassed’ the West – at least on the artistic front. With some justification, although also with that hint of cultural supremacy so congenial to Russian critical thought, the émigré theorist Mikhail Epstein claimed that postmodernism itself was born in Russia during the Brezhnev Stagnation. Not in French academies but in shabby post-Stalinist space, strewn with the (literal) ruins of the Socialist Realist fantasy, did all truth claims become preposterous, all mega-narratives lead nowhere, all speaking subjects (and all objects spoken of) become mere simulacra, and all explanatory systems begin to feel faked. If symbolism in search of a mystical totality accommodated itself to revolutionary modernism in the 1920s, then the closing years of the century in Russia were positively postmodern in their cynical sophistication at manipulating the clich´e and fragment.

If Russian philosophy is at heart a human story, one more resembling a quest for “integral world views” than an abstract system or set of logical propositions, can the great Russian novelists be said to practice a type of homeland philosophy? The idea has long intrigued readers. In 2002, James Scanlan published his controversial Dostoevsky the Thinker, which presented its subject as an anthropocentric theist probing the “mystery of man” (and the existence of God) by routes more compatible with Kant than with Russian Orthodox mysticism. Lev Tolstoi, during his final decades, experimented with a vast array of fictional, memoiristic, and journalistic genres to communicate with his readership persuasively, intimately, in utmost sincerity – and his contribution to secular and religious philosophy has been a node of dispute and inspiration ever since. But this close overlap, almost a palimpsest, between literary creativity and philosophy proper is of a special sort. It is not only that Russian novelists also wrote polemical treatises, the way Vladimir Solov′ëv “also wrote poems” and Sergei Bulgakov also produced insightful literary criticism. Rather, the very stuff of Russian fiction, its created heroes and worlds, has been recruited wholesale and reclassified as philosophy without changing a word, by later readers and even by the authors themselves.

Examples are legion. Part One of Dostoevskii's “Notes from Underground” routinely turns up in textbooks on the foundations of Existentialism.

Tolstoy's relations with music – the least mediated of the temporal arts, and thus for him the most potent – were reverent, wary, and on occasion punitive. He was fascinated by the force of music, just as he was by the force of sexuality, beauty, and war. By “force” Tolstoy did not mean violence or disruption, but the power to organize, suddenly and irresistibly, all our scattered actions and feelings into a coherent meaningful whole. Thus focused in its energies, the human organism would fear nothing, not even its own mortality. But since this heightened condition lent itself equally well to sublime insight and to irrational acts, it had to be carefully watched. Furthermore, music, being neither an instinct nor a force of nature but the product of creative human striving, obligated its practitioners to positive deeds as our more animal sides did not. The intensely receptive and aesthetically arousable Tolstoy worked hard at the piano as a young man, and he continued to revere music long after he had abjured war, sex, and beauty. Everything he wanted to accomplish through words happened faster and more purely through music.

These fundamentally Romantic priorities manifested themselves early. In a diary entry from November 1851, the 23-year-old Tolstoy charted the fine arts according to their ability to act on the imagination. The realm of visual art or painting is space, where we realize an image of nature. The realm of music is harmony and time, where we realize feelings.

In the preceding chapter we introduced Bakhtin's chronotope. It might be helpful in this chapter, before discussing some favored Russian character types, to review the services it can provide.

Bakhtin devised the chronotope as an aid for “walking into” and coexperiencing the time-space of a fictional world. Prose fiction is a field. Usually it is populated by more than one consciousness and designed to be experienced over time. In all but the most disorienting fictional environments – the absolute absurd, for example, or literature of terror and trauma devised to frustrate all attempts at communication – readers will seek to talk, interact, or empathize with characters inhabiting this field. The character can be a talking frog if we're inside a beast fable, personified Vice or Virtue if inside a medieval mystery play, an alien from outer space if inside a science fiction, or a recognizably human being: the physical wrappings of consciousness are incidental. Both the type of creature and the rules for relating to it depend upon the conventions of the literary genre. What feels strange in one environment can be wholly unmarked in another. In all cases, however, time and space in the chronotope are fused. Some sorts of time – say, in old-fashioned comic strips and soap-opera serials – never add up. Hours, days, years pass, but people do not age; characters might not even remember from one episode to the next. Accordingly, the space that accompanies such time is abstract and non-historical.

“Apart from reading,” Dostoevsky's Underground Man complains, “there was no place to go.” The metaphor is striking. So central was proper reading to the cultured Russian's self-image and sense of reality that poetry, fictional literature, memoirs, diaries, even personal letters from and among great writers almost constituted a place. The authority of these fictive or quasi-fictive residences was compelling and truth-bearing. What is the best point of entry into these alternative worlds?

Several models were considered for this book. The first was the most conventional: selected writers and their works juxtaposed to one another in chronological sequence. A second model suggested itself around distinctive Russian genres: saint's life, fairy tale, war epic, “notes” or casual jottings [zapiski], prison memoir, dysfunctional utopia, industrial production novel. Yet another structure emerged when the focus shifted to recurrent Russian heroes (or anti-heroes): righteous persons, fools, rogues, wanderers, frontiersmen, Europeanized fops, nihilists, superfluous men, salvational women, the merciful or tyrannical tsar. Special note was made of those types that did not take root in Russian soil or appeared only late on her literary horizon: the beautiful sinner, the chivalric knight, the virtuous merchant, the benign or productive bureaucrat. Each of these three formats raised interesting questions. How are we to explain the enduring popularity of the unconsummated love story or the epic that ends in defeat or dissolution of the goal? What about “heroless epic narrative” – the attempt to paint humanity on a vast historical scale and dispense with personal agency?