Fact and Fiction in the Romantic Historical Novel

Abstract

T he historical novel, by definition, combines fiction and history. While the fictional chronotope is ultimately selfcontained, the historical one is open to outside verification, since it invokes phenomena belonging to real space and time. Such dichotomy has on occasion prompted doubts concerning the legitimacy of historical fiction, which has sometimes been labeled as a contradictory or even mongrel genre. Summarizing early attacks against the historical novel, Osip Senkovskii, a prominent journalist of the age of Pushkin and Gogol, points to a cognitive anxiety that afflicts the reader: reader, being constantly disturbed by uncertainty in this mixture of truth and fiction, wants at every step to believe the author's words and yet at every step is afraid to be deceived, and, upon reading the novel ... does not know what to think of his impressions.' However, it is precisely this tension between fact and fiction, the empirical and aesthetic planes, that creates the peculiar dynamics of the historical novel (and other genres of documentary literature), endowing it with a unique and important dimension.2 This article will treat the relationship between fact and fiction in the Russian historical novel of the 1 830s and 1 840s. As the subject is very broad, it seems necessary to mention some aspects that will remain outside the scope of the current study. The issue of history and fiction has received much attention in recent theoretical writings. Over the last three decades, with the publication of works by W. B. Gallie, Arthur Danto, and especially Hayden White, there emerged an influential school of thought that views historiography from the standpoint of narrative theory. Proponents of this school deem historical narratives similar in essence to fictional ones since they are informed by identical rhetorical devices and categories of emplotment. I will leave these problems aside; neither will I address heated debates about historiography during the Romantic period in Russia (for example, in connection with the histories of Karamzin and Polevoi). I will take as the point of departure the