Volume 34, Number 16 · October 22, 1987
Riding the Bronze Horse
By John Bayley
Partings
by Leonid Borodin, translated by David Floyd
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 221 pp., $15.95
Pushkin House
by Andrei Bitov, translated by Susan Brownsberger
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 350 pp., $22.50
The vitality of the thoughtful novel in Russia, and its enormous popularity with all classes, has often depended on a caroming effect. X writes a novel in protest against Y's novel, and then Z moves in and finishes the job. After Turgenev's Fathers and Sons came Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done?, a ridiculous work in praise of—among other things—'young people,' whom the degraded and Europeanized Turgenev, as the radicals saw him, had slandered. Dostoevsky then produced Notes from Underground, and went on to finish the job on Turgenev in The Devils. Genius battened on the work of inferior dogmatists, and itself became all the more dogmatic in the process—Tolstoy in War and Peace was taking up the cudgels on behalf of the Russian gentry class, routinely slandered by the intellectuals of the 1860s.
Review, 2177 words
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