Beginning in the 19th century, Russian writers created a national literature unparalleled in its moral and philosophical depth and intensity. Russians love good literature, and they are looking for good literature, real literature. To identify yourself as Russian is to identify yourself as a member of society that has produced some of the greatest works of literature of all time, and that’s what Russians really think. Russian writers aren’t just writers; they don’t care about the things that writers care about in the West, which is career, money, sex, and making good. Russians in fact want to make bad because then their moral example is more compelling. Russian writers changed the course of world literature. And they did so while facing political pressures unknown to most writers in the West. How did that happen? Who were these writers? And what makes them so great? Russian literature started with a bang in the early 1800s. Within a few short decades, it produced a body of work whose quality equaled literary traditions stretching back centuries. You had a tradition that was so compact. You had writers, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, that knew each other, that responded to each other, that had read each other’s works, that wrote each other’s characters into their works, that were serialized side by side in the same journals. All of this happened with enormous feverishness at incredible pace and at a time when Russia herself as a nation was first gaining visibility on the European scene. Russia, the world’s largest country, existed in proud isolation for centuries. Known as “the barbarous kingdom,” it was a mystery to Western Europe, and Europe was largely unknown to Russia. Russia has a very complicated relationship with Europe. They wanted to be part of Europe, but they wanted to be apart from Europe. They were separated by religion, by language, by alphabet, and it was very common for Europeans and Americans to think of Russians as savages. In the early 1700s, Russia’s Tsar Peter the Great set out on a crash course to modernize Russia. He took over control of the Russian Orthodox Church, and forcibly rammed Western learning and culture down his people’s throats. The secular tradition of Russian literature is really only a matter of the 19th and 20th century. When Peter The Great opened Russia to the West, Russia took in a vast number of foreign texts, and you had an extraordinarily gifted number of translators and transmitters and transmogrifiers that turned this mass of imported raw material into pure gold very quickly. They rebelled against conventions, they rebelled against what was expected of a novel. They knew these forms fluently but they decided to play with them. Alexander Pushkin led the way. He mixed the sophistication of Western literature with Russian folktales and cultural and political themes to create work that was original and distinctly Russian. Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin the first great work of Russian literature was entitled, Eugene Onegin a Novel in Verse. I mean you don’t write novels in verse, right? I mean the novel is, you know, sort of by definition the thing that's not written in verse. So you have this fluent knowledge of everything that Western literature expected and then the Russians just say but we’re not Western European. If Russian writers challenged established writing styles from abroad, they faced a homegrown challenge of their own, one with a profound effect on Russian literature: government censorship. The relationship between Russian writers and Russian authority, what is called in Russian...the poet and supreme authority. This is a very difficult axis of power for Westerners to understand. There could never be a crisis in any Western cabinet because of some book being printed. They just don't think that the printed word matters that much. Whereas in Russian governments, we're talking a whole relationship to the word, which is deep into the modern period still a sacrilized word, a word that performs sacred functions. Russia’s harsh, authoritarian government made fiction writing dangerous. But news, scientific research, and political and religious thought were even more severely censored. Fiction, because it was not considered real, became a social force in Russian life. Russian literature in the 19th and throughout much of the 20th century was asked to do many things that literature is often not asked to do. There could not be public discussion of very basic issues that we may take for granted now. However authors, fiction writers, were able to broach subjects that otherwise were off limits. Things were censored. What’s that mean? That literary writers couldn’t write what they wanted, but economists couldn’t write, political scientists couldn’t write, religious thinkers couldn’t write, philosophers couldn’t write, only the State and the church had the right to write what they wanted and to speak what they wanted. That meant that because real realms of ethical and intellectual concern were censored, literature became a free world, relatively speaking. So, the characters inside the fictional world are more real, more stable than the outside world. But writers lived in the outside world, where secret police roamed, internal exile or prison loomed, free expression was dangerous, and political reform impossible. Rather than let Russia’s first great writer, Alexander Pushkin, be censored by a mere official, Tsar Nicholas I, absolute ruler of all Russia, announced that he would be Pushkin’s personal censor. Pushkin greatly admired Nicholas I. Of course, he did not want the Tsar to censor him in a stupid way, but he did not want to be irrelevant to the Tsar. What Pushkin, the greatest poet of the Russian land, wanted for Russian literature and for Russian government was to have Tsars and poets work together. But you didn't have freedom. What you had was moral virtue. In 1837, Pushkin died in a politically motivated duel at age 37. Thousands of Russians mourned, including his friend Nikolai Gogol. Gogol became Russia’s second great writer, and its first great satirist. By exposing the petty hypocrites who filled Russia’s growing bureaucracy, he gave voice to a particularly Russian form of humor. Gogol was a man who was ahead of his time. He started laughing at everything around him. Created the model of the Russian laughter, yah. And the laughter never died in Russian literature. In the wake of Gogol and Pushkin’s popular success, Russian readers began to make demands on their writers. If literature was the only way to address social issues in an unfree society, it had a responsibility to address them, even if indirectly. Corruption, abuse of power, the role of women, oppression of serfs, peasants bound to the land, all found their way into Russian novels. One of the roles that Russian authors have had since the early 19th Century is that of moral authority, questioning and challenging the established power. There were very great works written counter to the censorship, but still, as it were, under the pressure of censorship, which were made more wonderfully inventive, more deeply and religiously profound for being written in opposition to, perhaps satirically in opposition to, the culture in which they were conceived. Writers camouflaged their social commentary within larger philosophical questions about life and death. Ivan Turgenev knew not to openly criticize Russia’s version of slave labor, serfdom. Instead, he wrote a series of short stories that presented Russian serfs as distinct individuals for the first time. His book helped convince Tsar Alexander I to free the serfs in 1861. Pushkin and Gogol had founded Russian literature. Turgenev introduced it to the outside world. But Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the two towering geniuses who followed him, lifted it to the pinnacle of literary achievement. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky lived and wrote at the same time. They read each other’s work, they both willingly accepted the mantle of prophet, and confronted censorship. But there were as many differences as similarities in these two giants of world literature. Dostoevsky, he was the son of an aristocrat but not a real aristocrat, his father was a doctor in a hospital and at the time, you know, a doctor was like a barber, I mean, you know, I mean it was not at all a glamorous or well paying position. Tolstoy on the other hand was, you know, the crème de la crème and he was the upper, upper circles of Russian society. Dostoevsky lived a life of privation. He was literally hungry as a student. Dostoevsky, when he wrote novels, he was writing for money. Tolstoy, when he wrote novels, he was writing for fame or just for pure pleasure. Tolstoy spent most of his life at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, surrounded by a large and loving family. His personal life inspired his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky’s great works -- Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov -- also reflected his life, which was filled with tragedy. It didn’t take much in 1848 to get yourself arrested. He was arrested with several dozen colleagues, he was condemned to death. He was within three minutes of being executed, he had donned a shroud, he had said goodbye to life. And then Tsar Nicholas I, who loved these theatricals, sent a galloping horse into the scaffold ground and pardoned the men thus condemned, sending them instead to Siberia. The experience Dostoevsky went through, almost at the threshold of the scaffold, never left him. He believed that unless we felt our life was to such an extent challenged, that unless we had gotten to that crisis point, we did not have any insight into either life or death. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s insights continue to challenge readers today. But by the 1880s, Dostoevsky had died and Tolstoy had stopped writing novels. Though government oppression continued, Russians were no longer accepting it. A growing middle-class publicly demanded reforms, and privately whispered about revolution. With the disappearance of big, challenging novels, Russian literature, like Russia itself, reached a crossroads. Increasingly, by the end of the century, readers are reading more and more in newspapers, and there are more and more newspapers being published. This is one of the things that leads to a renewed interest in short stories, particularly in humorous and satirical short stories. At the turn of the century, a master of short stories and plays arose: Anton Chekhov. After Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Chekhov is the writer best known outside Russia. If you look at those three writers, Dostoevsky was the most crisis ridden, the most extravagant, the most romantic. Tolstoy wanted to see people in local domestic situations. He wanted to play out tiny temptations on a daily basis. But Anton Chekhov, a great admirer of Tolstoy, he felt that Tolstoy was too heroic, that he didn’t understand that most people peter out before they get to the end of their own plot. And most of his plays and short stories are about people petering out, people who can't really understand the story they're in. That’s why the stories are short. Anton Chekhov rejected the role of writer as prophet. In the world of Russian literature, he was the great exception. Chekhov is very consciously not interested in this willingness to take a strong position. And for him, the role of the artist was correctly posing the problem but not offering a solution. Chekhov, a doctor and a deeply compassionate man, wrote investigative reports about government prison camps, but he believed the position of moral leader not only limited a writer’s artistic freedom, it would prove corrupting. Chekhov’s friend and contemporary, Maxim Gorky, failed to see the danger. He embraced the role of writer as prophet, with tragic results for Russian writers. Gorky was friends with the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. In 1917, the long festering Russian Revolution broke out. Tsarist Russia collapsed. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party seized control, and installed the world’s first communist government: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. And Gorky invented a new form of writing to go along with the new government: socialist realism. The aim of socialist realism isn’t to depict how reality really is, but how reality should be or even more, more exactly, a more real reality. Gorky was very sincere in his belief that the Soviet Union was the first step in the creation of an ideal world where there would be no want, no strife no unhappiness, where everyone would be happy and he wanted to come up with a kind of art that correctly represented the unfolding paradise that he believed the Soviet Union was. He was considered the father of the socialist realism, but he probably couldn’t even imagine that that would be the only conception. Yah? Stalin made it clear that it is the only conception for you. Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin in 1924, and announced massive social and technological changes he called "five year plans." Just as Peter the Great had forcibly modernized Tsarist Russia, Stalin would forcibly transform the USSR into a global superpower, but at a terrible cost. Mandatory collective farms led to famines. Mass arrests led to executions and a huge system of slave labor camps Censorship took on a frightening, new efficiency. I don’t know who coined this slogan. Maybe Gorky himself. But it was used by Stalin many times. Writers are the engineers of the human souls. It sounds very Bolshevik because they believe that souls are a certain mechanism, yah? That they can make a soul. Stalin said that Soviet citizens are cogs in our splendid machine. Now literature has to be the engineer of souls, literature has to help the five-year plan, literature has to get people to become less curious, less private, less selfish, more sacrificial in these large industrial, mechanical, agricultural projects. In other words, you're really less free to be yourself in the Soviet period, less free to fantasize. All that takes energy, and energy's supposed to go to the state. Tsarist time, actually, all the time censorship existed but that was censorship in traditional sense. It was looking only for what it would delete. Soviet censorship, they demanded love. All authors was supposed to express love to the communism, to our leaders. 20th century censorship was far more effective simply because of the possibilities granted by mass communication and...I mean, for a totalitarian government to succeed, you need technology. The Tsarist government just could not exercise the sort of control over its borders, over its media, over its printing presses that the Soviet Union could. We're dealing with a culture that had every typewriter licensed by the secret police until the fall of communism in 1991. Every typewriter licensed! Stalin, by both glorifying and oppressing writers, kept the role of writer as moral compass and social prophet alive. Russian poetry had blossomed in the years leading up to the Revolution. It would become a source of pride and resistance to Soviet control throughout the 20th century. Poet Osip Mandelstam said, “Poetry is respected only in this country. There’s no place where more people are killed for it." He reads a poem to a man named Brodsky, who in this poem, it’s about I think...is it about a cockroach who has a big moustache, right? It's Stalin. It makes fun of Stalin, which I mean that would be like you know making fun of God or something, and you know in a different age and in a different place, I mean, you know Stalin was irreproachable, he was superhuman. Mandelstam wrote that poem, recited that poem, and took the consequences. This was part of the enormous, the unspeakable bravery of Russian writers of the 20th century. They wished to leave a mark on their time. Mandelstam and some 1,500 other writers died in Stalin’s prisons. Writers would be persecuted throughout the Soviet era. One became an international symbol of literary resistance: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn is probably the most thorough witness to the 20th century that Russia was to know. He was also raised entirely by Soviet standards. Now, what does that mean, Soviet standards? It means that he embodied, incorporated Soviet values. Solzhenitsyn was a true believer. He then suffered a terrible disillusionment after the war when he was arrested, as he said, for nothing, for some intercepted correspondence. He went right away into prison camp and it was part of the nicety of the Stalinist regime not to tell people what they did wrong. In fact, you could easily suffer having done nothing wrong at all. Solzhenitsyn served eight years in prison in Siberia. In 1953, the year Stalin died, he was released and began to write. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Krushchev, would use Solzhenitsyn to make a political point. In 1962, Krushchev personally approved publication of Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Krushchev wanted to announce once and for all that the myth of Stalin was over. That it was a new time, this is why it’s called the thaw after 20 or 30 years of uh.. of severe oppression, things were going to change and the publication of a Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the calling card. It was the announcement to the public at large that things were going to get better, that there was reason for optimism that the world wasn’t going to end after Stalin died. It’s also a great novel. The novel, which appeared in the state sponsored magazine Novy Mir, exposed for the first time the Soviet prison camp system known as the Gulag, where 18 million people were sent, and unknown numbers died. The magazine never even made it to the news stand; all the copies were bought off the backs of trucks. I mean it was an immediate sensation that something like this, something that was actually very critical of the Soviet power that depicted the reality how these political prisoners really lived in Siberia, it was a bombshell, it was a real moment in Soviet society. But the thaw only went so far. A new crackdown began in the late 1960s, with writers subject to public trials, prison, and exile. Solzhenitsyn had distributed secret copies of his later work at home and published it abroad. After winning the Nobel Prize for literature, he was stripped of Soviet citizenship and sent into exile in 1974. There are lots of highly-publicized cases of writers being thrown out of the country or executed. The real story to Soviet literature isn’t the well-known writers who were attacked, exiled, but instead just the sort of oppressive circumstances that unless you hewed to the line, unless you were a good servant of the Communist Party, you couldn’t become a writer. It’s not as though the Tolstoys, Dostoevskys, Chekhovs, Gorkys disappeared in the 20th century. They just weren’t allowed to write. In 1991, after three-fourths of a century, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the nation of Russia re-emerged, blinking in the glare of elected governments and capitalist economies. I have a lot of hopes for the future for the Russian literature. Literature in the West now in demise in this very lamentable decline, pressed by the commercialism. Russia probably the last place where we can fight commercialism. It is not true that because the stone of communism has been rolled away the Russians are going to become just like us, you can forget that right now, they’re going to turn I think to their own traditions and return eagerly to those traditions, traditions that’s quite different from the West. What they see in their own heritage are literary figures who believe that literature is not only repository of great moral dilemmas, but also of serious thought. And that without literature carrying that role, it collapses into what the Western media has become, largely consumerism, entertainment, escapism, and sensationalism. So, all those things that constitute the American dream constitute the Russian nightmare and they think that material prosperity brings you further and further from the ethical dream. They think it’s extremely difficult to be ethical under conditions of power and prosperity. The ethical path for them always lies elsewhere. Since the time of Peter the Great, Russians have struggled to mark their special place in the world. Poor in material goods, they have often claimed for themselves a spiritual richness that other nations can’t match. In the world of literature, that claim rings true.