The Age of Realism In 19th
century`s Russian Society and Dostoevsky`s Crime And Punishment
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| Image Courtesy: Russia Beyond |
The
age of realism in Russian literature coincided with the reign of Emperor Alexander
II and a period of far reaching reforms. Ascending the throne at the height of
the Crimean war, Alexander himself took steps in the immediate postwar period
to introduce the most important of these reforms, the emancipation of the
serfs. It was generally conceded that serfdom had been a principal reason for Russia's
backwardness and a contributory factor in the military defeat of the Crimean
war and it was recognized that serfdom impeded the growth of modern
socio-economic relations. On the other hand, the spectacle of capitalist Europe
engaged in the internecine strife of the Franco-Prussian war seemed to confirm
the Russian intelligentsia in its growing conviction that Russia should seek a
non-capitalist path of development. (Moser, Charles. The Cambridge History of Russian Literature. Cambridge University
Press. P- 333-350)
In literal and cultural terms the
age of realism was an age that dominated by several realistic thoughts and ideas.
These thoughts and ideas were not only accepted, enthused over and endlessly
discussed, but they were lived. It
was in the living enactment of ideas that the Russian intelligentsia discovered
its purpose and achieved its greatest influence. In this process of literature
had a high and noble role, for it served to reflect the ideas that illuminate
them and transmit them while also transforming them to the extent. Irish poet Oscar
Wilde argued that:
"Literature always anticipates
life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century,
as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac."
The years from 1855 to 1880 were
the time when the Russian realists flourished. A mere listing of names is
sufficient to make the point: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov,
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Pisemsky, Ostrovsky, the literary careers of all these
writers and realistic thinkers are reached their peak during these centuries. The reign of Alexander II in Russia, is
largely an invention of the major novelists like Turgenev, Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky. It was also a stimulating period for literary criticism. The
realist period was also the time of the greatest influence of the "Thick Journals,"
as various political and literary camps argued and gave their theories for
control of the best of them. The polemical theory about the nature and purpose
of literature and its realism began with the publication of Nicholas
Chernyshevsky's essay The Esthetic Relations of Art to Reality in 1855.
While the world was still reading
popular romantic writings, Russia was leading a realistic movement in
literature. Feodor Dostoevsky was one of the forerunners of this age, along
with Gustave Courbet in France. The
novel Crime and Punishment (1866) by Feodor Dostoevsky, tells the
story of a university dropout student Raskolnikov, who murders a pawnbroker and
is eventually convinced by a young prostitute, Sonya, to confess his crime. In
the end of the novel he does so and is sentenced to Siberian exile. The work is
romantic, even melodramatic also. But Dostoevsky's great novel is supremely a
realistic work in the best nineteenth-century tradition and contains many
elements now commonly termed "Dostoevskian Novel." The term was
coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his milestone critical study Problems of
Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929). In his text he argued that “Dostoevsky's art
as a novelist is distinguished from all others by its polyphonic character,
that is, by its propensity for suggesting that the authorial voice is never
omniscient but in some sense equal to the voices of the fictional characters.
That there is no obvious feel of an author or omniscient narrator in Crime
and Punishment is one significant feature of its realism”. Researchers and
editors have measured the number of feet between Raskolnikov's tiny room and
the old pawnbroker's apartment and have discovered that Raskolnikov had made an
accurate account of the distance that is, he walked 730 paces in order to reach
the old pawnbroker's apartment to commit the murder. Dostoevsky is very careful
to ground his novels in these actual places. In this novel, he is very exact in
identifying the names of the streets like S. place, the K. Bridge where
Raskolnikov sees a woman attempting suicide. Realism imposes limitation on the
novel therefore Dostoevsky wanted to move away from such limitations imposed by
classical points of view of realism. In a letter by Dostoevsky, he explains
that he has his own ideas that are shown throughout his works, he argue that “I
have my own idea about art and it is this: what most people regard as fantastic
and lacking in university, hold to be the inmost essence of truth”. (Marlene Chamber, “Some Notes on The Aesthetics of
Dostoevsky”, Comeparative literature, 13.2, p-114.)
This novel is replete with lengthy monologues
letting its readers into the minds of the characters. This marks an overlap
between the psychological world and real world. Not only is the detailed
description a signature characteristic of a realist novel but this detailing of
the internal posits the novel into the domain of the psychological. (An Overview of the Realism in Crime and
Punishment by Dostoevsky. https://www.kibin.com/essay-examples/an-overview-of-the-realism-in-crime-and-punishment-by-dostoevsky-n5jAhN04)
Work Citation:
1. 1. Moser,
Charles. The Cambridge History Of Russian
Literature. Cambridge University Press.
2. 2. Marlene
Chamber, “Some Notes on The Aesthetics of
Dostoevsky” Duke University Press.
3. 3. An Overview of the Realism in Crime
and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
https://www.kibin.com/essay-examples/an-overview-of-the-realism-in-crime-and-punishment-by-dostoevsky-n5jAhN04
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