The Concept of Tragedy in Russian and Soviet Literature

Abstract

W 7 HAT is tragedy? It is easier to point to it than to define it. Oedipus Rex is tragedy, King Lear is tragedy. Tragedy involves but the kind of suffering that elicits more than pity. It involves disaster, but something more than mere catastrophe. It has a sense of terrible relentlessness and of implacable, unmotivated doom which, says James Joyce, fills one with terror the presence of whatever is and constant in human suffering. Is the story of Job a tragedy, when everything turns out well in the end? Perhaps not. Perhaps, like Dante's poem it is a comedy, which was a comedy, Dante explained, because it began in Hell and ended in Heaven. Nevertheless, both the story of Job and The Divine Comedy are so intent on the most excrutiating agony of the human spirit that it is hard not to think of them as tragic. And it is in the same category that War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov belong. They too are full of tragic events that occur in an ultimately untragic context; they too are concerned with what is grave and constant in human suffering, and provoke those final questions which are the inevitable accompaniment of tragedy, questions that attempt to detect some order in a universe in which men suffer constantly and unfairly, questions, that is, about justice and freedom. A recognition of human limitations is implicit in the tragic design: on the one hand, man with