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1.5 - The Natural School and Realism

from History 1 - Movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Alexey Vdovin
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter outlines the history of Russian Realism against a European backdrop. In the Russian Empire, as in Europe, there were no influential aesthetic manifestos predating the rise of Realist literature. Although the first seeds of the movement can be seen in the work of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii, this chapter considers the dominant period of Russian Realism to be the period from 1845 to the 1880s. The Natural School foregrounded the genre of the physiological sketch and produced the first Realist novels by Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Herzen, and Ivan Goncharov. The ‘High’ Realism of the 1850s−80s featured a proliferation of the novel as a genre and thematic preoccupations with the role of gentry, the peasant question, political radicalism, the ‘woman question’, and bureaucracy.

Keywords

Russian Realismreality effectNatural Schoolphysiological sketchsocial typesRussian novelsocial satire
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 89 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bogdanova, Olga A., ‘Filosovskie i esteticheskie osnovy “natural'noi shkoly”’ [The philosophical and aesthetic foundations of the ‘natural school’], in ‘Natural'naia shkola’ i ee rol' v stanovlenii russkogo realizma [The ‘natural school’ and its role in the development of Russian realism] (Moscow: Nasledie, 1997), pp. 9–36.Google Scholar
Bowers, Katherine, and Kokobobo, Ani (eds.), Russian Writers at the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginzburg, Lidia, On Psychological Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kliger, Ilya, ‘Genre and actuality in Belinskii, Herzen, and Goncharov: Toward a genealogy of the tragic pattern in Russian Realism’, Slavic Review 70.1 (2011), 45–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knapp, Liza, ‘Realism’, in Martinsen, Deborah A. and Maiorova, Olga (eds.), Dostoevsky in Context, Literature in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 229–35.Google Scholar
Lounsbery, Anne, ‘Russian families, accidental and other’, in Göttsche, Dirk, Mucignat, Rosa, and Weninger, Robert (eds.), Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives, vol. I, Mapping Realism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021), pp. 503–14.Google Scholar
Smirnov, Igor P., ‘Realizm: Dikharonicheskii podkhod’ [Realism: A diachronic approach], in Megaistoriia. K istoricheskoi tipologii kul'tury [Megahistory. Towards a historical typology of culture] (Moscow: Agraf, 2000), pp. 21–77.Google Scholar
Vaisman, Margarita, Vdovin, Alexey, Kliger, Ilya, and Ospovat, Kirill (eds.), Russkii realizm XIX veka: Obshchestvo, znanie, povestvovanie [Russian realism of the nineteenth century: Society, knowledge, narrative] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2020).Google Scholar

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