Nikolai Chernyshevsky's battle against tsarist tyranny was a beautiful and courageous thing to behold. His notions of literature, however, were primitive, oppressive and ultimately irrational. Literature and the other arts were for Chernyshevsky inferior substitutes for real life. Their only useful aspect was their hypnotic power to show people the desirable directions for society to take and to warn them against taking wrong paths by providing cautionary examples. Once these aims had been accomplished, art itself could be safely discarded. Chernyshevsky also postulated a peculiarly quantitative criterion for judging artistic quality: a large edition of a book by Gogol was artistically superior to Gogol's original manuscript of the same work and a full-dress production of an opera (any opera, presumably) was on an artistically higher level than a performance of a string quartet.
It was Lenin himself who best described the critical method of Cherny- shevsky's disciple Dobrolyubov. "He turned his discussion of Oblomov into a battle-cry, into a call to activism and revolutionary struggle," Lenin wrote admiringly, "and he turned his analysis of On the Eve into a genuine revolutionary manifesto, written in such a way that it remains unforgotten to this day." Of course even Lenin knew that these novels by Goncharov and Turgcnev did not contain the ideas that Dobrolyubov read into them or derived from them.
The third member of the critical trinity of the 1860s, Pisarev, Chekhov's particular bete noire, but actually the most readable and, in the long run, the most logical of the three, took the basic attitudes of his age to their ultimate conclusion and indicted all imaginative literature as frivolous and superfluous.
"Never, it would seem, was more scorn heaped upon literature generally, nor were people more eager to put literature in its place, to puncture its illusions, if not destroy it altogether," wrote Hugh McLean of this period in his masterful examination of the development of modern Russian literature. McLean summarizes the respective attitudes of the critics of the 1840s and 1860s as follows: "Belinskv had said that art should be a textbook of life; Chernyshevsky would make it a second-rate surrogate for reality; Pisarev would abolish it."
Dobrolyubov and Pisarev both died very young. The government managed to make a national martyr out of Chernyshevsky by putting him on trial on insufficient evidence, framing him with false testimony and banishing him to Siberia. But for most Russian critics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and for their readers, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky were literary figures as important as Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy. Their prestige was unassailable, their opinions and pronouncements not to be questioned, and they managed to change the literary outlook of many generations of Russians. During the more repressive decades of the seventies and the eighties, literary criticism remained in the hands of their successors and erstwhile associates. These men could not match the by then canonized radical saints of the sixties in their revolutionary fervor, but they reiterated the demand that literature express simplistic political and sociological clichcs, and above all they continued the tradition of negating and vilifying all literature that did not conform to their insistence on easv didacticism.
The available histories of Russian literature usually overlook one basic fact of late-nineteenth-century intellectual life, with which Chekhov, like all Russian writers from the 1860s on, had to contend: the existence of two separate but equally repressive systems of censorship in the country. The de jure censorship of the tsarist government still had considerable powers in the 1880s. Its job was to weed out all expression of anti-government sentiments and to watch out for anv excessive liberties in the religious and sexual areas. The government censors could temporarily bar the publication of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, and one of them managed to ban outright Chekhov's early play On the High Road because it was to his way of thinking "gloomy and filthy." But the censors' powers were visibly dwindling throughout the course of Chekhov's writing career, and if he could still worry in 1891 about the feasibility of making an ex-revolutionary the hero of a short story (Letter 63), a few years later sympathetic portrayals of active revolutionaries became quite acceptable, as the publication of Tolstoy's Resurrection in 1899 eloquently demonstrated.
Far more powerful and, in the long run, even more oppressive was the de facto unofficial censorship by the anti-government literary critics, who not only ceaselessly demanded that all writers be topical, obviously relevant and socially critical, but also prescribed rigid formal and aesthetic criteria to which all literature was supposed to conform. Because a soberly realistic depiction of Russian life had been assumed since the days of Belinsky to be the most effective way of exposing social shortcomings, the critics of the 1860s, '70s and '8os fought an unending battle against fantasy, imagination, poetry, mysticism, against excessive depth in psychological perception, against all joy and humor that was not topical or satirical, and above all against any formal or stylistic innovations in literature and literary craftsmanship in general. Their rationale was that all these things could detract from the ideological message which was the sole aim of literature. The radical utilitarians would also have liked to attack religion and the Orthodox Church, but in this one area government censorship remained adamant and rigid. In matters of sex, however, the anti-government utilitarians were even more puritanical than the official censors. Pisarev was outraged and revolted by the character of Lensky in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin because he mentions his fiancee's shoulders and bosom to a close friend, and Saltykov-Shchedrin was so shocked by the gynecological and sexual aspects of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that he ridiculed the work as a "genitourinary novel." The power of these critics to enforce their prejudices and taboos was awesome, and they used this power ruthlessly and often vindictively. There is no doubt that recognition of Dostoyevsky's true stature was delayed for decades because of Belinsky's disappointment in him after The Double and by the asininities that Dobrolyubov and Pisarev wrote about his later novels. Literary hacks like Zlatovratsky and second-raters like Gleb Uspensky enjoyed great and undeserved reputations as a result of the efforts of their utilitarian champions, while a writer of the stature of Nikolai Leskov was read out of Russian literature for the rest of the nineteenth century because of an early novel in which he had satirized a socialist commune. Afanasy Fet, one of the greatest Russian poets of the century, was treated as a criminal and a public enemy by several generations of
Russian critics because he openly declared that he was neither willing nor able to discuss social issues in his poetry. And, of course, the sad decline of Russian poetry in the 1870s and '8os is directly attributable to the savage hounding and ridicule with which the critical fraternity of the period greeted the appearance of any poet of originality or technical ability.
One of the best fictional reflections of the effect that decades of utilitarian brainwashing had on many intelligent and socially aware Russian readers is to be found in Chekhov's short novel "Three Years" (1895), which contains the following literary discussion at the home of a wealthy intellectual of merchant-class origin:
"Л work of literature cannot be significant or useful unless its basic idea contains some meaningful social task/' Konstantin was saying, looking at Yartscv angrily. "If the book protests against serfdom or if the author indicts high society and its trivial ways, then it is a significant and useful piece of writing. But as for those novels and tales where it's oh and ah and why she fell in love with him, but he fell out of love with her,—such books, I say, are meaningless and to hell with them."