Beginnings and Endings

Abstract

This chapter presents the resulting narrative structure of the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition. The reader’s unconscious reconstruction of the narrative of a literary tradition is a complex process, integrating data from a variety of sources, nonfictional and fictional. Once this integration has been achieved and the reader has established the network of canonic moments that link tradition members, there remains a final step—to resolve the contradictory stories of progress and decline that are manifested in these links. The end point of the Tradition narrative is marked by a collective outpouring of talent—such as Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy—rather than the emergence of a solitary titan comparable to Aleksandr Pushkin. While Pushkin is the key figure in the narrative’s inception, he is not the only writer whose role is that of a pioneer. Nikolai Gogol, in particular, may be given a share of the title of progenitor. The chapter then considers the reconciliation of the decline and progress narratives.