A Confession: Reflections from Reading Russian Realism
After the first two weeks of attending what would become my favorite literature course of all time in college, I remember catching up with with one of my friends. She gave me her course schedule line-up for the quarter, and I did the same—but when I finally listed off “English 459: Transatlantic World Literature, Subtopic: Russian Realism”— my friend cut off my monologue.
“Wait, you’re taking what class?” she asked, laughing lightly. “Russian Realism? What on earth are you even learning in there?”
Slowly, I said, “Well—”; and my voice trailed off. How could I properly explain the weighty, but extraordinarily liberating texts that I had just started studying a few days ago?
“From what I understand so far,” I continued, “Russian realism depicts life in such a realistic manner that no one can tell that it was written before our time. It’s timeless, and I can’t help feeling like it’s true. Like the name— it feels scarily real, even in our lives today.”
Over the next eight weeks, my seminar class and I read, discussed and carved away at an 800 page novel, a realist novella, seven short stories, two plays and a full-bodied religious confession. The sheer mass of the texts—let alone their dense content— had my eyes swimming and my mind buzzing. Before the class ended, I felt as if I had a responsibility to tell my friend the truth of what I had learned through my experience in the class. The next time we caught up, I told her that I couldn’t look at other people and the world in the same manner after living through this kind of literature. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov had shown me the vibrancy of life.
After each class lecture and subsequent seminar, when I stepped outside of Cal Poly’s business building, the world felt richer somehow. After 4pm each Monday and Wednesday, I entered into the winter quarter sun’s melting, golden, evening scene, and the light caught my elongated, spindly shadow as it tumbled across the pavement. My head floated in the midst of the dreamlike landscape in Tolstoy’s war stories and childhood reflections. The architecture buildings to my left jutted aggressively into the clear sky and a fleeting gust of wind pushed my hair into my eyes. Heading home in a “realist” trance each day, I recounted the echoing words of the Russian authors that my professor had painted and framed for our class. I must have looked ridiculous — but of course, no one watched. I grinned and felt satisfied with the honesty of my commute.
Perhaps it was that mesmerizing time of day, or the combination of five straight hours of lectures that I worked through each of those afternoons that sent my head spinning. Perhaps I was looking too hard to find some “Alyoshian” epiphany that would validate my ability to take something from my course reading into the “real world”. But after 4pm each Monday and Wednesday, without fail, I watched people’s faces and subtle movements speak louder and shine brighter in that orange light. These small, sublime strokes on this new world’s canvas hinted at a new beginning, and a fresher outlook on the life I live.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov each share the truth of life through experience, differing in structure but not in substance. They all work with the height and depth of the Russian soul, but toy with their own interpretations and personal philosophy. Offering their realist readers a complex assortment of life’s pathways, these Russian realists create the necessary space for one to evaluate the authenticity of one’s life and restructure its trajectory so one can climb towards the light.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov each share the truth of life through experience, differing in structure but not in substance.
Dostoevsky first gave me the words to start evaluating my current perspective, and he challenged me to restructure my practice of empathy. His philosophy of the Underground, defined in The Underground Man, is a psychological anthropology that I have grown to see most everywhere. Designating man as the “ungrateful biped” in Part I, Dostoevsky asserts that the Underground is man’s natural asylum (Notes 20). He writes that even if this man is given everything, “every earthly blessing” and “economic prosperity,” he will still choose his will over every happiness — and do so simply out of spite (Notes 21). I started hearing and recognizing my own Underground thoughts and actions while in class, while driving, and while working; I felt like I couldn’t ever avoid them. (For more on the Underground, check out my related article: “Man is Not a Piano Key: Dostoevsky’s Underground in The Brothers Karamazov.” )
Dostoevsky structured some possible responses to these Underground tendencies through the characters (or “experimental selves”) of The Brothers Karamazov. He creates individuals that think like us. In Father Zosima’s cell, Fyodor, the sensualist father of the abandoned brothers, shares that sees other people and their opinions as “lower than [him]!’” (Brothers 43). Fyodor’s misplaced sense of self and gross overconfidence are just as (if not more) common today as they were in the late 1800s. One only needs to open Twitter or read a few comments on other social platforms to experience a ripe variety of Underground natures. Dostoevsky carves Fyodor and his other characters like chess pieces—each with their own mechanisms and individual purpose— and places them on a lifesize chess board to act and be acted upon by others in The Brothers Karamazov. He invites and encourages us to watch and learn from their example as we progress through the novel alongside the Karamazovs.
Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, poses and answers grand philosophical questions that frame his works; he does so in his early personal reflections like “The Raid,” “Ivan Iliych” and “Childhood.” Mystifying his readers with its dreamlike narrative, “The Raid” ultimately questions what courage is, and what it appears like. In this work, Tolstoy re-fashions the war-story genre by offering his readers a tragic-comic portrait of the human experience. Unlike a typical war-story, Tolstoy doesn’t offer his audience a clear hero — as a realist, he is morally obligated to be honest the way he shares his experience. In the last scene of the novella, one youthful officer, a would-be hero objects to his captain’s orders to retreat. He claims that their forces could “beat [the enemy] back”, eager to demonstrate his “courage” on the battlefield. Out of his learned experience, the youth’s captain disagrees with the youth, and again orders that they must retreat. The officer refuses the captain’s command and charges alone, and he quickly falls to the enemy— and the captain watches on. The soldiers who listened to the captain’s order fight for their individual lives as they retreat, without looking for help or direction from the captain. The captain is not the idealized hero of the story, and neither is the youth. There’s nothing to be gained or learned from either of their examples; the youth was irrational, and the captain was pragmatic. Neither the captain or the youth truly embodied the idea of courage. Their story just is; it exists to exist.
In his later life, Tolstoy shows through his own example that the philosophical inquiries of his youth (in stories like “The Raid”), fall short of answering life’s greatest question: the question of existence. He came to the conclusion that only a life of faith offers a proper-enough response to this question. A Confession illustrates Tolstoy’s fall from and eventual return to an invigorated Christian faith at the end of his life.
Growing up practicing Christianity, Tolstoy writes that “religious doctrine, accepted on trust and supported by external pressure, thaw[ed] away gradually under the influence of knowledge and experience of life” (A Confession, Chapter 1). The harsh realities of fear and wrong-doing in the world that he observed made it difficult for him to see any truth or benefit of having faith. At the end of his life, however, Tolstoy concludes that living out a life of faith is life’s epic task; the question of Life is a question best answered with a life of faith. He writes, “I look more and more into the infinite above me and feel that I am becoming calm” (A Confession, 1879). The infinite, the absurd, and the unknown is not a dreary or dreadful void for Tolstoy at the end of his life— it is a gateway and an answer to the question of existence that he was searching for his entire life.
The third realist I grappled with in this class was Anton Chekov: a doctor, a playwright, and a short-story mastermind. While Anton Chekhov’s writings contain Underground characters very similar to those in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s works, Chekov’s writings primarily investigate and showcase the absurdity of life. If Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are Socrates in the way that they carry out a ‘Socratic’ literary conversation in their works, Chekov is the blunt, pragmatic student within the Socratic seminar who introduces out-of-pocket, inside-out questions into the discussion—ones that disrupt all common understanding of topics that once seemed familiar. Chekov believed that “It is not the artist’s job to answer life’s questions, merely to pose them correctly.” His works timelessly portray the world as we know it, but suddenly, at a sharp and incredibly distinct moment in every one of his short stories that we read — he inserts the most absurd moment or phrase into the work that turns what you’ve read and understood so far inside out. After the absurd is injected into a story’s center, a Chekovian work becomes a completely different product. The absurd truth within Chekov’s works taught me that I— who am a mere 19 years of age— truly know nothing of life, and nor can I expect to, given the absurd beauty of the life we’re given to live.
Reading Chekhov’s work is refreshing, because in this world of programmatic and form-fit literary answers, he refuses to give us an answer that we’ve already heard. He takes his audience somewhere that they’ve never been before. In his short story “Gooseberries,” he first expresses upon the dangers of living for false ideas. But with his last lines, he changes the meaning of the story: transforming it into a tale that expresses the difficulty of confessing the desires and aches of one’s soul to a deaf audience. Chekov’s stories end ambiguously. Like Tolstoy’s early works, Chekov’s stories are amoral, and don’t tell you what you should think, do or feel after you finish the work. Chekov’s works hold up the mirror to the absurdity of reality. “The main idea in a text is not on the page,” writes Chekov. “It’s something in your head that you need to construct.”
After dreaming through the works in this course, the only thing that I know for sure is that I know nothing. When I started writing this article, I thought I was on the verge of an epiphany. I thought that by working through and composing these ideas in a rich body of text, I would find a greater understanding of my position in this life — and if I didn’t, well, I’d have to falsify some form of self-improvement so I could make a impress those who read my writing. What a shame! What a shame it was to find that I hadn’t learned from the fate of Ivan Ilyich!
Russian Realism has provided me with more questions than I have answers for at this moment in my life. Yes, after ten weeks of discussing these authors’ philosophical inquiries and coming face-to-face with the realism of their works, I have found a type of understanding— but it’s the kind of understanding that I did not expect to find. I have found I am wont for experiences of has real substance, like Dostoevsky had in the labor camps, like Tolstoy’s peasants had in their day-to-day life, and like Chekhov had as a doctor. Originally, when I first started reading their realist works, I thought that I’d find order within the patterns of life they described. When I found truth in Dostoevsky’s Underground and the dream-like nature of Tolstoy’s stories of War and Childhood, I arrogantly started to believe that that I was on my way to a better understanding of human nature. It wasn’t until I started looking at life’s unveiled face through the absurdity of the endings of Chekov’s short stories that I found that I did not recognize the world I thought I knew.
I unwittingly approached life’s unfamiliar face, as Chekhov reveals it, in the most unexpected place. I was meeting one of my newer friends for a coffee amidst the angst caused by our upcoming midterm exams. Holding our mugs, we laughed, swapped jokes and had a lively conversation at our high-top table. But amidst the fun we were having together, I could tell something was off. She seemed slightly down, that day—something I hadn’t noticed from her before. After some time, I asked her: “If you don’t mind me asking, how are you really?” She paused, set her hands in her lap and tossed her hair to the left before answering. She opened up to me then, sharing the current family tension she was experiencing, her current anxieties, and some of her personal suffering in the past that made her present life extremely painful. The more she spoke, I became embarrassingly aware of my naivety. I realized that I did not have the proper words to say to her, nor did I have a similar personal experience to assure her that she was not alone. My chest hurt as I longed to stitch the troubles she shared with me into a cohesive whole, but I did not know how.
While trying to come up with a proper response, I sat there, both woefully sympathetic and frustrated that my ignorant assumptions had stunted my ability to connect with my friend. This was not the scene at the bar shared by Ivan and Alyosha; I had no perfect action to offer her as an answer to her pain. I felt like I had skimmed the CliffsNotes summary of her life, and when called on to ask questions about the primary text of her experience in a classroom lecture, I could only deliver a lackluster response that was not only tone-deaf but also horribly off-topic. My friend’s testimony was a Chekhovian ending line: I didn’t know what to do with it, or how to approach it. At this point, I wondered if it was even my place to do anything at all. I wanted to be the supportive figure in my friend’s life — her own Alyosha — but my inexperience kept me a great emotional distance from her. I rested my hands on hers.
After she left, I stared down at my scuffed sneakers and scowled, wondering if I was any wiser than I was before. A familiar melancholy gathered on my brow. “But I felt the warm glow of the winter evening after class,” I thought. I saw the fall of the careerist Ivan Ilyich and recognized the philosophy of the Underground in action — but why I didn’t have the words to empathize with my friend? I dug my elbows into the table and covered my face. What to do now?
“The more you see the less you know, The less you find out as you go… I knew much more then than I do now,” goes one of my favorite songs. With these lines, that I’ve been singing since I was a child, composes the same realist truth that took me a whole quarter to stomach. I’ve carried these words with me for years, but their realist truth did not strike me when I first heard them as a child, balancing on the shoulders of my father staring up at the night sky. The more you see, the less you know: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy said this too, and Chekhov showed me the truth of this statement.
These three Russian realist writers diagnosed my nearsighted outlook on the world and gave me lenses to temporarily correct my stunted vision. But, they did not promise to fix the underlying cause of my blurred vision: my limited (and, at times, incorrect) perspective, and limited experience. But that ten-week Russian Realism class showed me my twisted Underground thinking, and pushed me to start regulating my Underground will through active love and faith.
I owe my sincerest gratitude to my professor and to these Russian realists. I extend the greatest ‘thank you’ to them for hinting at the task ahead — and sending me on my way to complete it. Tolstoy wrote this task as: “I must find what is true and what is false, and must disentangle the one from the other” (Confession). Dostoevsky’s Alyosha describes it when he speaks of Ivan’s internal strain: “either rise into the light of truth, or… perish in hatred” (Brothers 655). And Chekhov, wary of cliche, includes a muted version of the same task in Sonia’s final monologue: “What can we do? We must live our lives” (Uncle Vanya).
I know that I know nothing of life — but I’m strangely at peace. Although I have more questions now than I did before, I am choosing to keep my eyes up, like Tolstoy. I’m beginning to see how living out a life of faith is my new epic task. In the words of Tolstoy, I strive to be “saved from [my] fear by looking upwards” (A Confession, 1879).
Works Cited
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, and Yarmolinsky. The Portable Chekhov. Penguin Books, 1978.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
— -. Notes From the Underground. Dover, 1992.
Tolstoy, Leo. The Works of Leo Tolstoy. Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford for the Tolstóy Society, 1933.
