In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion Psychology and the Russian Novel We are entering, obviously, into a new age of Russian prose, which seeks new paths-beyond the connections with the psychological novel of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. -Boris Eikhenbaum, 1921 IT IS REASONABLE to expect that a vital literarytradition will continually outpace itself, trace new paths, and discover overlooked turns in the old. Much ofwhat I have written has been motivated by my desire to show how Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov reshape the Russian tradition of psychological prose by elevating the figure of the author to hero in their novels. The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago, and The Gift illustrate a transition in Russian literary tradition from novels that use an "analytical, explanatory psychologism" (Lydia Ginzburg's phrase) to those using a novelistic psychology ofselfhood.1 In all three novels, in other words, the psychological focus shifts from how people understand the world to how authors understand the relationship between their creativity and their identity. Just as all nineteenth-century Russian novels were not based on explanatory psychologism, so too are there a number of important early-twentiethcentury Russian novels that do not reflect any special interest in the psychology of identity. The symbolism of Bely's Petersburg, the ornamentalism of Pilnyak 's The Naked Year; the dystopian in Zamyatin's We and in Platonov's The Foundation Pit, as well as IIf and Petrov's use of the picaresque all testify to the remarkably broad boundaries of the Russian novel in the first decades of the twentieth century-and this is to say nothing of the influx of socialist realist novels that find their precursors in Gorky's Mother, Gladkov 's Cement, and Kataev's Time, Forward! Each of those novels may be about psychology in some way, but they do not as insistently interrogate names, mind/body problems, childhood memories, and so forth with the focus of Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov; nor do they suppose that novels are the proper place for considering such themes. Of those novels, We is the most psycholOgical: D-503's use of a documentary genre, the personal diary, to re-create his identity follows in the nineteenth-century tradition of 104 Psychology and the Russian Novel using introspection as a primary psychological method for uncovering the roots of personality. In Petersburg, Bely also addresses the narrative representation of psychology, but though his novel is maximally intertextual, it is not as obviously about the relation of authorship to identity. In establishing a psychological ground for The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago, and The Gift, one must take care to distinguish literary strategies that they share with other twentieth-century novels, strategies making them modernist rather than realist novels, from those strategies that discriminate one form ofpsychologism from another. Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov, like Bely, Pilnyak, and Platonov, often emphasize highly subjective perceptions ofthe world and the selfin their novels. Language for them is consequently not always perfectly suited for describing the real world and is just as likely to conjure alternate, solipsistic worlds as it is to represent reality faithfully. For these novelists, as for other early-twentieth-century novelists , the march ofhistorical time is largely at odds with the idiosyncratic time of the self, and narrative must therefore stitch together multiple disjunctive chronologies. These modernist characteristics separate Bulgakov, Pasternak , and Nabokov from conventional definitions of nineteenth-century realism , but as yet do little to define a "new" psychological novel in relation to the old.2 Central to any such consideration is the traditional novelistic relation of auto-reflexive psychological methods to autobiographical texts. In her study On Psychological Prose, Lydia Ginzburg convincingly demonstrates that the analytical impulse was shared in the nineteenth century between certain kinds of documentary and autobiographical literature-familiar letters , confessions, and diaries-and novels commonly given the epithet "psychological ." The same analytical habits of introspection one finds in the diaries ofTolstoy, for example, are aesthetically transformed by him into the psychological basis ofcharacter portrayal in his novels. As Ginzburg puts it: "The documentary character of Tolstoi's writing consists of the fact that his heroes not only address the same problems of existence that he addressed, but that they address them in the same psychological fonn and in relation to virtually the same everyday circumstances that he himself was faced with."3 Though Tolstoy was an ingenious creator ofindividual personalities, he also sought to portray that which was common to all human experience. It is hard to imagine, for example, Fyodor and any...

Share