Abstract
Paying tribute to George Sand on her death in 1876, Dostoyevsky recalled the impact of her work in Russia during the 1830s and 1840s when he was a young man. He reminded his readers that, at that time of rigid political censorship, fiction ‘was all that was permitted; all the rest, including virtually every new idea, and those coming from France in particular, was strictly suppressed’. And he remarked on the irony that, whereas the works of writers such as Thiers and Rabaut were proscribed, new ideas were introduced through fiction ‘perhaps by the standards of the day in an even more “dangerous” form, since there probably were not too many lovers of Rabaut, but there were thousands who loved George Sand’.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Dawn D. Eidelman discusses Who Is to Blame?, Polinka Saks and Underwater Stone (the title of which she renders as The Reef) in George Sand and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Love-Triangle Novels (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994).
The story of the novel’s publication and subsequent suppression until after the 1905 Revolution is told by E. Lampert in Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 128 and 364–5 (note 51). Chernyshevsky spent most of the rest of his life in prison or in exile.
For a discussion of Chernyshevsky’s formal innovations, see Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 99–104.
See Mary Evans, Reflecting on Anna Karenina (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 26–30.
‘Women and the Russian Intelligentsia: Three Perspectives’, in Women in Russia, ed. by Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977; Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1978), p. 45.
As C. J. G. Turner remarks in A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1993), p. 153, ‘This sentence has been made famous through being quoted by Lenin in his assessment of Tolstoi’s perception of Russian social history.’
Tolstoy’s Letters, trans. and ed. by R. F. Christian, 2 vols (London: Athlone Press, 1978), I, 256; Henri Troyat, Tolstoy, trans. by Nancy Amphoux (New York: Doubleday, 1967; London: W. H. Allen, 1968; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 477.
Quoted by Boris Eikhenbaum in Tolstoi in the Seventies, p. 134.
Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. by Bruce Steele (London: Grafton, 1986), pp. 25–6.
Chekhov’s response to Tolstoy is discussed by Thomas Winner in Chekhov and his prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), especially Chapter 4
and by Donald Rayfield in ‘Chekhov and the Literary Tradition’, in A Chekhov Companion, ed. by Toby W. Clyman (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 35–51 (pp. 41–3)
See p. 133 above and Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Chekhov at Large’, in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 21–31 (pp. 21–2). Eikhenbaum goes so far as to say of Pisemsky and Leskov: ‘In what is most basic and essential, Chekhov’s literary origins come from them’ (p. 22).
This sentence, which is mistranslated by Magarshack, is quoted from Constance Garnett’s translation, ‘A Misfortune’, in The Tales of Tchehov, 13 vols (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Macmillan, 1917–23), IV, The Party and Other Stories, p. 291.
Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics, ed. by Louis S. Friedland (New York: Minton, Balch, 1924; repr. Dover, 1966), p. 60.
Tolstoy’s comments on ‘A Lady with a Dog’ are in Tolstoy’s Diaries, trans. and ed. by R. F. Christian, 2 vols (London: Athlone Press, 1985), II, 475.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1996 Bill Overton
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Overton, B. (1996). What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. In: The Novel of Female Adultery. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25173-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25173-5_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-25175-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25173-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)