existence as a tragic subordination to corporeality, then the ultimate fear troubling this vision is that nothing but matter truly exists.8
If the material, whether of the town or the countryside, plays a notable part in Russian realism, so too does a characteristic which Marshall Berman has ascribed to "the modernism of underdevelopment," a tendency in one powerful tradition of the Russian novel, represented in both the Gogolian and the Pushkinian lines, to question the reliability of our perceptions and to stand nervously on the threshold of an abyss which opens up as soon as confidence in the solidity of the prosaic world is eroded. Beyond the abyss is a world which seems to be structured by the arbitrariness of the dream rather than the solidity of common sense and reason. It is as if "all that is solid melts into air," Berman tells us, quoting, of all people, Karl Marx. It is the ability of the Russian novel to render the sensation of life in the no man's land between the prosaic, everyday, common-sense world and the world of fantasy, dream, folklore, madness, that is one of its hallmarks. Of course the focus on minute physical detail is as much a feature of the dream life as it is of waking experience, perhaps more so. Those critics who tell us that the Jerusalem sections of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita are more realistic than the Moscow chapters sometimes forget that. This sensation is enhanced for Western readers by the fact that, aside from the deployment of narrative techniques, the subject matter itself hovers on the brink of the familiar and the unfamiliar, "one's own world" and "an alien world."
The Modernism of underdevelopment is closely allied to the tendency in Russian literature which is often called - somewhat misleadingly perhaps -"Fantastic Realism." Ranging from the grotesquerie of Gogol's "The Nose," through the frankly supernatural of a small number of Turgenev's and Chekhov's tales and the diablerie of Bulgakov's novel, but also including Dostoevskii's masterpieces, Fantastic Realism in the Russian tradition places a huge question mark against the reliability of common sense, the healthy, the self-evident, the reasonable, and the rational in human experience, and the ability of logic and science to contain it and plumb its depths. It also raises profound questions about our ability ever to discern the boundaries between a world apparently governed by these principles and the realms of dream, fantasy, the supernatural, poetry, the spirit. It is of course in these respects heir to the Romantic and precursor of the modern and post-modern, of Freud, Kafka and the Existentialists. But it is positivistic realism - all that is solid - that it explicitly takes as its point of departure, and our confidence in it which it seeks subtly, by one means or another, to subvert. There is a degree of play in this. There is also an intense seriousness. How could it be otherwise in a country which was
required for seventy-five years to subscribe to systematic, state-sponsored fantasy; in which science itself was put at the service of ideology, where statistics almost always meant lies, and where the outcome, far from being playful and escapist, was the kind of experience expressed by Solzhenitsyn in his First Circle or Zinoviev in Yawning Heights? Solzhenitsyn's works internalize the principle of institutionalized fantasy and it becomes the structural principle which dominates and distorts the everyday experience of millions of people in his world. The twentieth century, no less than earlier epochs, can furnish many horrific examples of societies being fashioned to accord with systematic fantasies. Perhaps the Russians roresaw this and sensed the danger more clearly than most. If so, it did not prevent them from experiencing it as cruelly as any.
Fantastic Realism, then, which both celebrates the non-rational and warns against the terrifying abyss to which it may be the gateway, turns out to be an obsessive fascination of the Russian imagination. It takes many forms, from the appeal of extreme ideological positions - an appeal experienced no less by Tolstoi than by Fedorov, Dostoevskii, Bakunin or Lenin - to fascination with the folkloric, the demonic and the grotesque -Gogol or Bulgakov - an awareness of being part of powerful, impersonal, irresistible historical processes - Tolstoi again, Sholokhov, Bulgakov - or a sense that the patterns of history and personal experience find their meaning in religious categories, for instance, the motifs of death and resurrection (the Easter myth), of crisis, judgment and vindication (the myth of the Apocalypse).
It is perhaps significant that it was a Russian, Mikhail Bakhtin, who introduced into literary theory the term "chronotope," a term which constantly reminds us of the fourth (temporal) dimension of what traditional criticism was wont to call "setting." In theory, all narrative has its own chronotope, just as it has its own setting. But in practice Bakhtin is particularly interested in a relatively small number of particularly striking or recurrent chronotopes for which he found convenient labels, for example, the chronotopes of the carnival, the provincial town, the salon, biographical time, the road, the threshold, each with its own characteristic space-time coordinates and modes of narrative.
One chronotope which does not figure in Bakhtin, and not at all prominently in writing about him - this may incidentally be a key to the dissatisfaction many have felt with his treatment of Dostoevskii - is the apocalyptic. But given the nature of the Russian historical experience it is not surprising that the apocalyptic tradition should have exercised such a hold on the Russian imagination. David Bethea recently published a book on this subject9 in which he analyzed the way in which the apocalyptic
tradition is handled in Dostoevskii's The Idiot, Belyi's Petersburg, Plato-nov's Cbevengur, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The book is remarkable as much for the idea as for the realization, for it throws into relief a facet of the Russian novelistic tradition, the importance of which, though now obvious, had somehow eluded literary criticism, except when dealing with individual writers.10 In passing, Bethea draws attention to a number of features of this tradition which demonstrate that far from being a minor feature of the Russian imagination, it turns out to be a major organizing principle. For example, he links it with both the revolutionary and the Utopian traditions. The real-life visions of such revolutionary activists as Mikhail Bakunin were imbued with apocalyptic motifs, in which a secular Revolution replaces the Second Coming and an earthly Utopia replaces the "new heaven on earth" to come. As Tolstoi's narrator says in "The Kreutzer Sonata," "According to the doctrine of the Church the world will come to an end, and every scientific doctrine tells us the same thing" (chapter n). The Second Coming and the coming of the Revolution merge in the writings of the Symbolists, most memorably in Blok's poem, The Twelve, where the figure of Jesus appears in the snowstorm to lead the revolutionary band. They merge again in expectations of a glorious life built on completely new lines in which humanity will be free from oppression and conflict, in which the righteous (the proletariat) will be vindicated and the sinners (the bourgeoisie) eternally damned. In Pasternak's novel, all, Marxists and non-Marxists alike, experience a sort of elemental upsurge of energy, interpreted by some in a poetic, Schellingian sense, by others according to the Bolshevik creed. The sense of history moving at breakneck speed towards a final and catastrophic dénouement was foreshadowed in Gogol's image of the troika. With hindsight it is possible to see that Russian history actually was rushing towards such a catastrophe, that those Russian writers who sensed it were right in their intuitions, though in most cases wrong in the way they characterized it. The apocalyptic mode of interpreting history had a long pedigree in Russian culture, linked to the notion that Moscow was the Third Rome and that there would be no fourth, and surfacing even in the thought of such disparate thinkers as Nikolai Berdiaev and Iurii Lotman. The tendency for Russia to define itself by radical breaks and maximalist strategies is all part of the apocalyptic package. What some Western critics have seen as a lack (the failure of Russia to garner the fruits of the Graeco-Roman classical tradition) is seen in this perspective as an irresistible organizing principle of historical experience, by no means unique to Russia, but unusual in its pervasive influence on the shape of narrative fiction.