1931 Boris Pasternak's Safe Conduct
The Golden Calf by I. Ilf and E. Petrov
1932-60 M. A. Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned 1932-34 N. A. Ostrovskii's How the Steel was Tempered
1932 V. P. Kataev's Time Forward!
1934 Promulgation by A. A. Zhdanov of the doctrine of Socialist
Realism at First All-Union Writers' Congress in August Death of Andrei Belyi (1880-1934)
1936-38 The Great Purges
1936 Death of Maksim Gorkii (1868-1936) 1936-37 M. A. Bulgakov's Black Snow
1937 Probable year of death of Boris Pilniak (1894-1937?) Death of E. I. Zamiatin (1884-1937)
1938 V. V. Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading
1940 Death of M. A. Bulgakov (1891-1940) 1941-45 Russia participates in the Second World War 1941-44 Siege of Leningrad
1941 Germany invades the USSR Death of Isaac Babel ( 1894-1941 )
1945 A. A. Fadeev's The Young Guard (inflated Stalin-inspired
version 1951 ) Death of A. N. Tolstoi (1883-1945)
1947-54 "Cold War" between the Soviet bloc and the West
1949 Death of A. S. Serafimovich (1863-1949)
1953 Death of I. V. Stalin
Krushchev elected First Secretary Death of I. A. Bunin (1870-1953) L. M. Leonov's Russian Forest
1956 I. G. Erenburg's The Thaw Death of A. A. Fadeev (1901-56)
1957 Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago Death of A. M. Remizov (1877-1957) Launching of Sputnik I
1958 Death of F. V. Gladkov (1883-1958)
i960 Death of lu. K. Olesha (1899-1960)
Death of Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
1961 Iurii Gagarin is the first to travel in space
196Z Cuban missile crisis
A. I. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1963 M. M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevskii's Poetics (revised edition of 1929 book on Dostoevskii)
A. I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrena's Home"
1964 Fall of Khrushchev; he is succeeded by Brezhnev and Kosygin
1966-67 M. A. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita
1966 F. A. Iskander's The Goatibex Constellation
1967 Death of I. G. Erenburg (1891-1967)
1968 A. I. Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward A. I. Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle
1973_75 A. I. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago
1973 F. A. Iskander's Sandro from Chegem V. Erofeev's Moscow Circles
M. A. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (full, Moscow edition)
1974 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the USSR
1975 Death of M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975)
V. N. Voinovich's The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (published in the USSR in 1988-89)
1976 V. G. Rasputin's Farewell to Matera
A. Zinoviev's Yawning Heights (published in USSR in 1990) lu. V. Trifonov's House on the Embankment
1977 Death of K. A. Fedin ( 1892-1977) Death of V. V. Nabokov (1899-1977)
1978 A. G. Bitov's (1937- ) Pushkin House
1979 V. N. Voinovich's Pretender to the Throne (published in the USSR in 1990)
1982 F. A. Iskander's Rabbits and Boa-Constrictors (published in
the USSR in 1987)
Death of Brezhnev; Iurii Andropov elected as General Secretary
1984 Death of Andropov; Konstantin Chernenko elected as General Secretary
Death of M. A. Sholokhov (1905-84) \ Death of Chernenko; Gorbachev elected General Secretary
1985 Gorbachev and Reagan meet at Geneva
1986 Death of V. P. Kataev (1897-1986)
V. N. Voinovich's Moscow 2042 (published in the USSR in
1990)
Explosion at Chernobyl nuclear reactor
Academician Sakharov released from detention in Gorkii
Policy of glasnost' and perestroika announced at XXVII
Party Congress
1988 Celebration of millennium of Russian Orthodox Church
1990 Yeltsin resigns from Communist Party
1991 Yeltsin elected President of Russia August coup against Gorbachev Abolition of USSR (December)
I
MALCOLM V. JONES
Introduction
What does give the classic Russian novel its power over the imagination? There have been many attempts to define its unique features and to account for its rise to pre-eminence in such unpromising soil. Underlying most analyses is the perception that Russian literature achieved its stature in a dialectic (or dialogue) with Western European literary traditions. Bakhtin has provided a theoretical model for this process in a shift from regarding the Western tradition as "authoritative discourse" to regarding it as "inwardly persuasive discourse"; in other words from a mental attitude which saw Western traditions as providing unsurpassable achievements which could only be imitated or rejected, to one which assimilated them to native Russian experience as part of a process of growth-in-dialogue: a complex dance in which the partners now lightly touch, now embrace and now draw apart, at times melting into a common movement and at times loudly asserting their difference.
The double helix comes unbidden to the modern mind as a model of this process. And that is no doubt one of the major reasons for the extraordinary fascination which the Russian novel has exercised over the Western reader. It is not simply that Russian writers have always had the Western tradition at the back of their minds, and woven it into their own tradition, trying to overcome what Harold Bloom has famously called the anxiety of influence. It is that for the first time Russian literature is reflecting back to Western readers a profounder, broader, more complex and, it often seems, more authentic, view of themselves, a view which puts in question not only Western achievements, but also the Western literary heritage as embedded in the novel itself. To put it more simply, Russian novels force us to ask questions about ourselves, about novels, and more broadly about human discourse, as well as about the physical world they purport to convey.
A key role in this process - characterized by a profound inferiority complex and a countervailing impulse to discover and assert an authentic
national voice - was played in the last century by the Russian intelligentsia, for whom the novel was the primary medium of debate. The intelligentsia was both a channel for the assimilation of Western culture and a vehicle for the affirmation of Russia's own unique experience and values and (potential or presumed) contribution to world civilization. Educated Russians of all social classes were heirs both to Western cultural traditions, which they shared with their European and North American counterparts, and their own cultural and historical roots, which were uniquely theirs and which retained a strong sense of otherness. The novel appeared and achieved respectability in Western Europe just at the right moment to act as a vehicle for this ambitious programme. By the 1830s it had come of age in Russia too. Moreover, a more capacious and appropriate vehicle could hardly have been designed for the purpose. The novel was capable, as Bakhtin has famously argued, of absorbing all other genres. As Russians discovered, no field of contemporary human discourse - except perhaps the strictly technical or scientific - was debarred. Imaginative fiction could be manipulated in all sorts of ways unavailable to more direct forms of discourse and, above all, it was capable of relating, as no other medium could, broad social, political, philosophical and religious questions to the existential experience of the individual through the medium of narrative, thus facilitating entry to these questions at a variety of different levels. Through the evolution of its narrative techniques, the novel had proved capable of engaging the interest of the reader simultaneously at the level of story and, as modern theory has it, at the level of "ideal author".