Who reads nineteenth-century Russian writers in translation? Which ones? And why? At a moment shaped by Russia’s flagrant military aggressions (on the one hand) and a US- wide decline in language study (on the other), these questions matter urgently for our field. “The Russian novel” remains a powerful calling card, both within the academy and outside it, and a gateway for first-time readers. At the same time, its existence as a cultural category reflects the odd reification of national literatures abroad. Although the idea of “the Russian novel” is always up for dismantling or re-creation, little about it has changed since 1886, when Viscount Melchior de Vogüé “sought the secret of Russia from its novelists”—Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogolʹ, Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Lev Tolstoi.Footnote ¹ Since then, the Russian empire has given way to the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation, while remaining no less rapaciously imperial. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has amplified calls to acknowledge the diversity of literatures written in Russian and to unravel the cultural mythology of “Russianness.”Footnote ² In the American academy, this impulse has merged (not always smoothly) with earlier challenges to the all-male, demi-mythical nineteenth-century Russian canon. Recent editions have made it easy to teach writers long underread in English translation, like Karolina Pavlova, Avdotya Panaeva, Sergei Aksakov, Sofya and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Nevertheless, college courses on nineteenth-century Russian literature are still most likely to feature Pushkin, Gogolʹ, Turgenev, Dostoevskii, and/or Tolstoi—with the sole addition of Anton Chekhov to de Vogüé’s 1886 canon.

Any reckoning with the legend of “the Russian novel” must thus be institutional, as much as intellectual, and it will involve a balance between competing needs for preservation and change. Even at a historical moment that molds the context of reading, many are drawn to these six writers because of their gifts for distilling what Lydia Ginzburg called “life in general” (obshchaia zhiznʹ).Footnote ³ No less than English on Shakespeare or philosophy on Plato, Slavic Studies relies on Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and the aura of “greatness” around them. With this as our starting point, how to go about the pressing and cyclical work of reframing the nineteenth-century Russian canon?

One way forward is to historicize more rigorously the concept of Russian realism. Introducing their vital 2020 collection, Russian Realism of the 19^th Century: Society, Knowledge, Narrative, the four co-editors emphasize the symbiosis that all national realisms demanded among the languages of philosophy, science, politics, economics, and visual art.Footnote ⁴ Rather than foregrounding Russian realism’s idiosyncrasies, they uncover rich potentials for cross-fertilizing scholarship. As the decade advances, numerous studies of Russian as one realism among many, and Russian realism itself as a thoroughly hybrid mode of representation, have explored the promise of this approach.Footnote ⁵ By questioning each word in the phrase “the Russian novel,” contemporary scholars are creating the building blocks for new literary histories—illuminating not only these novels’ variety and strangeness, but also the strangenesses they have always shared with novels elsewhere.

An alternative possibility is to come at the problem head on, whether by defending the Russian realist canon’s merits or by deconstructing the idea of canonicity itself. The three timely books under review in this essay—Rolf Hellebust’s How Russian Literature Became Great, Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty, and Angela Brintlinger’s Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature—collectively map these lines of approach. These synthetic studies were conceived long before February 2022. Nevertheless, their publication marks a moment of evolution in how an elastic and nebulous “we”—roughly, the readers of Russian literature in English—envision a remarkably stable “they”: the classic nineteenth-century Russian writers.

In his tour-de-force monograph, Hellebust treats nineteenth-century Russia as a case study in the construction of a literary tradition. His book begins from a set of crisply posed problems: “What is the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition—considered as a cultural construct rather than merely the sum of the contributions of individual writers … ? Where (in what texts, metatexts, or configurations of collective consciousness) does it exist? And how does it communicate its values and manifest its central unity?” (6). Hellebust is among the first to train systematic focus on the ubiquitous cliché of Russian literature’s “greatness,” and the results are both essential and thrilling. Claims for literature’s defining national significance and transformational power have long been the hallmarks of Russian culture. Anyone who now finds themselves grappling with these claims should read Hellebust’s book.

His first clarifying move is to treat the greatness of Russian literature as a quasi-religious article of faith, “a trinitarian mystery of exceptional unity, exceptional aesthetic value, and exceptional social function” (3). To trace the development of this “secular icon” (1), Hellebust adapts the tools of Prague structuralism, particularly Felix Vodička’s account of literary tradition itself as an object of aesthetic reception or “concretization” (37). Rather than treating tradition as the static or conventional background to individual works’ innovations, Vodička understood it as a product of readers’ collective imagination, understanding, and aesthetic values. Hellebust extends Vodička’s account to argue that “a literary history is a story” (42) or fabula, but one whose siuzhet has to be discerned without recourse to a written text. It emerges, instead, from perceived patterns and episodes that coalesce to make a narrative and set of evaluative standards or norms. “Great writers” are the agents of this narrative, whose relationship to historical reality is (for the most part) beside the point.

Hellebust’s theory is a valuable tool for thinking through the nebulous concept of “tradition,” which has languished (he argues) because of kneejerk distrust on one end of the political spectrum and uncritical reverence on the other. However, the real payoff comes when he applies this framework to the Russian context and the puzzle of literature’s near-religious significance in the nineteenth-century “Golden Age.” In one of the “revolutions from above” that (as Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii famously wrote) have characterized the shape of Russian cultural history, the post-Petrine secular writer took over the medieval hagiographer’s mantle as “bearer of a ‘higher truth’” (64). The massively influential critic Vissarion Belinskii brought this native legacy together with the tenets of Herderian romanticism, where poetry became a privileged space for the making of national identity. Belinsky thus applied the trope of the writer’s prophetic mission to a coterie of anointed national geniuses: Pushkin, followed by his designated heirs Mikhail Lermontov and Gogolʹ. Hellebust tells a familiar story about why the European romantic adulation of literature was so much heightened in the Russian empire, where there were few other outlets for political action and expression. But he also shows how this lack of shared political institutions fed the myth of literature’s messianic significance. For writers like Belinskii, Gogolʹ, and the Slavophile philosopher Ivan Kireevskii, Russia’s true history lay ahead and “great” Russian literature was the path toward it. This was not because literature allowed for more open political expression, but rather because its beauty reflects the divine ideal or kernel of reality, which Russia alone was destined to reveal. Hellebust quotes a chilling speculation from one of Belinskii’s 1835 reviews: “And who knows? Maybe one day history will turn itself into a work of art and will replace the novel, as the novel has replaced the epic” (73).

Hellebust’s reconstruction of the “Russian Tradition” as narrative of “greatness” is bracingly provocative. He points out the heroic triads that organize this narrative (Pushkin/Lermontov/Gogolʹ, Belinskii/Nikolai Dobroliubov/Dmitrii Pisarev, Turgenev/Dostoevskii/Tolstoi) and the recurring pattern of initiation, discipleship, and crowning ordeal that links them. He places special weight on Pushkin’s role as the Tradition’s alpha and omega, a seed containing its entire future development, which is framed sometimes as progress, sometimes as decline. The Tradition’s structural neatness suggests that this unfolding plotline has long been a force not only in the telling of Russian literary history, but in how nineteenth-century writers and critics conceived and arranged their working lives. At the same time, Hellebust is skeptical about the practical impact of literary texts themselves, and the numerous types of “positive real-world transformation” attributed to Russian literature in Belinskii’s wake (79). It is easy to question the “soteriological imperative” (99) that moved writers as disparate as Gogolʹ, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, and Tolstoi to write fiction: the idea that literary works and characters could remake readers for the better in specific ways or offer a set of instructions for living. More controversial is the doubt Hellebust casts on claims that even now remain integral to the writing and teaching of Russian literary history, such as the concrete political changes spurred by Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter and Fathers and Children or Chernyshevskii’s What Is To Be Done? Hellebust does not fully explain his skepticism or deal with the evidence that characters like Bazarov and Rakhmetov did indeed become direct patterns for radical readers’ behavior.Footnote ⁶ Nevertheless, his larger point is valuable: the very “mythogenic” tendency that made nineteenth-century readers so ready to imitate literary characters may also have infected the way we write and tell the story of Russian realism today. The mechanism by which public response to any piece of writing leads to concrete historical change is hazy, and in the final analysis, “no matter how prominently the names and works of Tradition writers appear in the record of evolving Russian public opinion, the gap between their maximalist ambitions and any provable historical consequences remains unbridgeable” (89).

How Russian Literature Became Great thus maps a new route back toward the Russian canon and its history. Both should be reread (Hellebust suggests) with an eye to the enduring myth of “greatness”—not least, to see how nineteenth-century Russian novelists and critics wrote the script for their own canonization. What happens when we turn this lens on recent works of scholarly and popular Russian literary history? Morson and Brintlinger offer two brilliant examples for consideration.

Wonder Confronts Certainty brings together Morson’s previous studies of literary “prosaics” and extends this idea to an array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian writers and thinkers. In earlier work, Morson defined “prosaics” as “a view of the world” that “recognizes the importance of the ordinary, everyday, and undramatic, which we overlook precisely because of its familiarity.” It highlights the concrete details that “resist reduction to some overarching law.” The privileged literary expression of prosaics is the realist novel, because it “focuses on the tiny alterations of daily life” and does not try to subsume them under a predetermined aesthetic structure.Footnote ⁷ For Mikhail Bakhtin, whom Morson cites as an inspiration for the concept, the novelist’s “prosaic vision [prozaicheskoe videnie]” begins as a special perspective on language. Novelists see linguistic and narrative conventions as conditional and relative, a matter for representation in their own right—and the novel is the genre in which these disparate socially-conditioned languages clash and mingle.Footnote ⁸ For Morson, prosaics is something broader, a philosophical and aesthetic credo. It underwrites a sense of time as open and undetermined, not subject to patterns or absolute laws, and human life as shaped by ordinary moment-to-moment decisions. It is (in the terms of this latest book) the mode of “wonder” rather than “certainty,” of concrete individual particularity rather than abstract generalizable principles.

In the story that Morson tells about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literary and political history, prosaic wonder marks the faultline between prose writers who evoke life as it is and radical intelligents who set out to recreate it as it should be, violently subordinating reality to theory. He makes this opposition early in the book: “The revolutionary (and terrorist) … lived in a special temporality—let us call it terrorist time—exactly opposite to the temporality of realist novels, where characters develop gradually and plot unfolds slowly. In this sense, the realist novel ran counter to the very pace of Russian radical thought” (22). In a book that argues passionately against maximalism, intellectual orthodoxies, and “the division of humanity into the evil and the good” (278), this absolute split between revolutionaries and novelists can feel incongruous. Here wonder is always confronting certainty, never tempted by it; indeed, the very narrative texture of realism protects novelists and their readers from the siren song of radical thinking. Gogolʹ’s fanatical sense of historical mission, Tolstoi’s uncompromising Christian doctrine, Dostoevskii’s deeply-rooted messianic nationalism, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s unmitigated Russian chauvinism have little place in the book’s landscape—although these incompletely prosaic tendencies may explain why Morson ends by identifying Chekhov as his book’s most plausible hero (394).

The wonder/certainty split becomes the impetus for a vigorous and gripping tour through 150 years of Russian literature, criticism, and sociopolitical thought. It encompasses both universally-known and less familiar writers, and it is animated by Morson’s conviction that reading and writing carry the highest historical stakes. In this sense, Wonder Confronts Certainty is not just about Hellebust’s “Russian Tradition” but also of it. Morson introduces three recurring nineteenth-century types: the Wanderers, the Idealists, and the Revolutionists. The types are illustrated through the fictional characters of writers like Chekhov, Gleb Uspenskii, and Vsevolod Garshin, as well as the writings of Belinskii, Mikhail Bakunin, Vera Figner, Boris Savinkov, and others. What they share is a “faith in abstractions as more real, and more important, than living people” (127), and for Morson, this faith in theory feeds directly into the terrors of twentieth-century Soviet regimes. Lenin chose violence “not whenever necessary but whenever possible” (160) and rejected any scientific theory that “seemed to suggest that human knowledge had limits” (189). Stalin condemned millions to execution or starvation on the basis of ethnicity or class and insisted that Party members could surpass the laws of nature (307). Morson’s litany of Bolshevik atrocities stages a kind of rebellion (bunt) for the Soviet era, and like Ivan Karamazov, he compiles this catalog to prove a point: the total unacceptability of Theory’s world. He also invokes the argument of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor: the world is divided between “certaintists” who demand “indubitable answers” and the “vanishingly few willing to live in a world of uncertainty,” who value freedom above all else (185). For Dostoevskii, this is a parable teaching that freedom lies only in Christ. For Morson, it is an impassioned case for prosaics, the contingent worldview best modeled by the “great realists” (35) and the genre of the realist novel.

In an account of the novel that is categorically opposed to Marxist theory, Morson’s reliance on the linked concepts of “greatness” and “realism” is surprisingly reminiscent of Georg Lukács. And if Lukács (or later, Fredric Jameson) were to read Morson’s book, they might contend that few things are more ideologically conditioned than perceptions of greatness and the real. Lukács understood the concrete detail of realist narration as the result of unerring selectivity, governed by the eye of a writer who grasps the inner structure of History.Footnote ⁹ Morson explains it differently: a penetration into the actual contingency of human being, achieved through “constant practice in noticing what others miss” (53). True vision then depends on escaping any convention or abstraction that blunts the edges of individual perspective—and indeed, Morson argues that realist novels “presume the fascinating uniqueness and absolute unrepeatability of each person, who cannot be reduced to material causes” (207). The meaning that comes from one’s own unrepeatable being in the world “cannot be conveyed in words, but a novel, and only a novel, can describe how it is achieved” (382). Apropos here is Morson’s slight misquotation of Isaiah Berlin: “The fox knows many truths, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (387).Footnote ¹⁰ Morson comes down so hard on the fox’s side that pluralism seems to entail truth rather than just characterizing it. Knowing “many,” realizing and recognizing the validity of each perspective, means knowing truly, with insight that stretches across place, time, and culture while casting doubt on the wisdom of collective and intentional political action.

The “timeless questions” to which Morson brings this prosaic viewpoint are irresistible, and his book revitalizes them for scholars and first-time readers alike. At the same time, these questions tell only one of the realist novel’s stories. Berlin’s Tolstoi was tormented by the multiplicity he could not help seeing, reaching all his life toward “a universal explanatory principle” that could unify “the mutually exclusive bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world.”Footnote ¹¹ For Morson, it seems that the genre is wiser than the writer. But as Morson’s own incomparable work on Tolstoi suggests, books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina are structured precisely as a struggle with genre, as attempts to convey within novelistic narrative what “lies beyond narrative and is complete in itself” (297). At their most poignant, characters like Pierre Bezukhov and Anna Karenina are unrepeatable individuals yearning for absolute community; the same could be said of Prince Myshkin and Raskolnikov, or (for that matter) Dorothea Brooke and Daniel Deronda. If realist novels are driven not just by individuality but also by the desire to transcend it—a desire they frequently explore in both political and religious terms—then their claim on the reader goes beyond private acts of empathy or moral imagination. The genre’s animating ideal may be Bakhtin’s “unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses” (393), but this vision, too, is hard to transpose into a wholly secular key.Footnote ¹²

It may be, then, that we give up too much of realist fiction’s absorbing inner tension by offering it as a consistent source of wisdom. Paying attention, seeing what is there, rejecting formula—there is no doubt that Morson’s prosaic virtues are sorely needed. Arguably, these skills are cultivated less by any particular set of texts than by the aesthetic and critical act of reading.

There are few more economical guides to this endangered discipline than Angela Brintlinger’s Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature, a recent addition to the Bloomsbury series Russian Shorts. Built around the milestones of a nineteenth-century survey course that Brintlinger has long offered at Ohio State University, the book starts by acknowledging the many challenges to reading Russian realism:

Brintlinger avoids restrictive claims about what these rewards might be, and her book thus offers a master class in teaching diverse groups of contemporary readers. Her texts—Eugene Onegin, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, and “The Lady with a Lapdog”—are the Tradition’s mainstays, but she injects them with all the immediacy and spontaneity of live performance.

The unexpected leitmotif of Brintlinger’s book is age—the coming-of-age of fictional characters, but also the ways in which aging changes reading (and vice versa). Eugene Onegin traces the characters’ Bildung through what and how they read; it also traces Pushkin’s Bildung over the decade of its writing and publication (in part, through the chapters’ evolving epigraphs). Brintlinger emphasizes the purposeful games Pushkin played with historical time, “deliberately not allowing the narrative present to reach” the cataclysm of the Decembrist revolt (23). On the levels of both story and discourse, the novel teaches the equal importance of opening oneself up to romantic illusion and of walking away from it in good time. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoi distributes a single life’s inflection points among his broad network of characters, and his trademark repetition makes us feel their vividness and their commonality at once. Crime and Punishment dangles the adolescent temptation of blaming anything (even murder) on your mother. Brintlinger ends the book with Sasha Cohen Waters’s documentary Chekhov for Children, which traces a class of fifth-graders who read and performed Uncle Vanya with Phillip Lopate in 1979. These are all intriguingly time-bound ways of framing the canon’s “eternal questions” (87). Woven through are swift but memorable close readings: the four times Vronsky’s eyes traverse Anna’s face when she gets off the train, the improbable number of words in Pulcheria Aleksandrovna’s double-sided letter, or Chekhov’s sound-portrait of Dmitrii and Anna Sergeevna’s view of Yalta (“the verbal has become physical, and in that way the text echoes the characters’ interactions” [85]).

Like Morson, Brintlinger claims for Russian literature “a vast diversity of human experience”; unlike Morson, she associates this diversity explicitly with the fact of empire (104). Her periodic references to the current war strike the same defensive note as the book’s title, but they coexist with a stark assertion of ownership: “We—readers all over the world of national as well as translated fiction—decide what literary works are worth reading” (13). The cult-like mystique of “the Russian novel” plays a part in this decision, but so does each reader’s direct experience of aesthetic pleasure, intellectual immersion, and play. Less obviously, the same sense of pleasure permeates Morson’s book, with its abundant quotations and heady transhistorical dialogues. These are masterful works of public scholarship that promise to enlighten the readers of Russian novels and will, just as likely, seduce them.

Hellebust persuasively argues that the time is ripe to take a closer look at our field’s substantial stake in the concept of national “greatness” and the literary history that attends it. At this painfully contingent moment, it is still unclear how this slow process will unfold. But as sharply as their books differ in tone and audience, Morson and Brintlinger approach the problem in a similar spirit. Within the static frame of the Russian canon, they cultivate the wonder of attentive reading—the delight and risk of interpretations that spark not need, but love.