1. This chapter explores hitherto unacknowledged influences, including McLuhan and Ong, on Dusklands. New light is shed on the novels manuscript origins and its relation to satire.

Chapter 8 treats Ivan Turgenev’s influential portrait of a nihilist in his character Bazarov from the novel Fathers and Sons. Turgenev portrays the rise of nihilism as a conflict between the older and the younger generation in Russia that took place after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. With his character sketch of Bazarov, Turgenev made the Russian nihilist movement famous throughout Europe. The story tells of the homecoming of the young Arkady Kirsanov who brings with him his friend from the university, Bazarov. The novel depicts the conflicts that arise when the two young men stay at the rural estate of Arkady’s father. Bazarov claims that nihilism is about negation, and his goal is to destroy everything and start again. When asked what his positive program is for afterwards, he surprisingly says that he does not have one. While Turgenev generally gives a sympathetic sketch of Bazarov, he cannot subscribe to his ideas. Like Jean Paul and Møller, he believes it is impossible to accept the idea that death is annihilation. His model is rather Bazarov’s simple grieving parents, who believe in something higher than death.

Caryl Emerson distinguishes Chekhov from the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky through his specific evocation of embarrassment, an emotion so ubiquitous in Chekhov’s writing as to become fused with his poetics and his worldview. While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy built their plots on more assertive acts and emotions, Chekhov, as Emerson shows, runs his path to redemption and discovery through the moral capacity to cringe at one’s own words and behavior.

Robin Feuer Miller closes the volume with a meditation on Chekhov’s career-long search for new ways to end stories and plays, distinguishing his intervention into literary endings from the work of other major Russian writers and showing how he took great pains to craft the overtone of an “eidetic” ending, the kind that retains the sharpness of its image long after one looks away from the text.

The literary context of Tolstoy matters because his works not only emerged in concrete literary and historical circumstances, but expressed in their own ways shared concerns, ideas, fears, and aspirations, characteristic of the respective periods and, in particular, of the generation affected by the humiliating outcome of the Crimean War, the collapse of the decades-long isolationist conservative “scenario of power” of Nicholas I, and a series of forthcoming profound social and political reforms that changed the emotional and ideological outlook of Russian culture. The chapter primarily focuses on Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace within its actual literary and ideological contexts, including fierce contemporary debates on the most pressing issues of the 1860s, unleashed in powerful, tendentious “thick” journals. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s final sentence of the novel, the epistemological value of seeing Tolstoy in conversation with his contemporaries (Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Grigoriev, Dmitry Pisarev, Surikov, Musorgsky, etc.) lies both in the renunciation of vision of his “unreal immobility in space” (generally taken for granted) and concurrently in the recognition of his dependence on other writers and literary contexts “of which we are unaware.” Gulliver is determined by his bonds.

This chapter addresses five authors who respond to Romantic hopes in indefinite futures: John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Mill’s late writing on religion, hope in eternal life constitutes a link to Romantic poetry, a motive for taking life seriously, and a wan empirical possibility. In Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil, blind hope, or our uncertainty about other people and any future we might share with them, may be necessary for love and engagement in this life – or it may be a grievous, fatal error. Along with Dickinson, Eliot supplies a bridge to the Modernists’ largely ironic representation of hope, more or less stripped of its possible virtue. The art of Dostoevsky is also oriented toward emerging Modernism, even as he exposes the ills of modernity, ultimately affirming something akin to Christian hope. Nietzsche sketches a new hope that might rise on the grave of Christianity. Despite his well-known adage on Pandora’s jar – the hope it contains is “the worst of evils” – Nietzsche more often prophesies, in his later writings, the “highest hope” of becoming who one is.

Chapter 8 treats the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and provides a close reading of his work Notes from Underground. While Dostoevsky was never one of Hegel’s students in Berlin, he was influenced by Hegel’s thought and fits well with the general trajectory of European thinking in the nineteenth century that the present work traces. The underground man is portrayed as suffering from the disease of reflection, which is characteristic of the modern age. He offers a criticism of the modern scientific worldview, specifically rationalism and materialism. The influence of Hegel can be seen in the fact that the underground man’s relations to others can be characterized as based on the need for recognition. The underground man plays the role of the slave with some and the master with others. The theme of self-alienation is also very much present. The underground man knows full well that he is a coward and a morally depraved person, and in his moments of transparency he admits this. He can be seen as a symbol of modern alienation.

While Manichaeism and Existentialism would seem to be two very different topics, they are intricately connected in Mailer’s work. Though as a young man Mailer maintained atheistic beliefs, his ideas shifted in the mid-1950s, and his evolving theory of existentialism became intricately tied to his developing spiritual ideology, which by the 1960s was shaping most of his writing. While he borrowed ideas from famed existential theorists like Kierkegaard and Sartre, Mailer formulated his own unique brand of existentialism, one that included the possibility of a God. The crux of existentialism in Mailer’s mind, as this chapter explains, was the ability to face down the unknown with courage, which in turn meant confronting the Manichaean idea that an imperfect God was constantly at war with the Devil.

This chapter deals with arguments against the existence of God, at least a God as is supposed by Christianity – Creator, omnipotent and omniscient, all-loving especially toward his special creation, humankind. Ruse thinks that the arguments are effective. Above all, he cannot reconcile the Christian God with the problem of evil. He sees that human free will, including the power to do great evil, can in some sensed be reconciled with the Creator. He sees also that natural evil can likewise be reconciled with the Creator. He just cannot see that the Creator, knowing it was going to happen, let it happen. The suffering of small children cannot ever be reconciled with the end, no matter how good. Davies, taking a position much influenced by the great theologians, especially Aquinas, thinks that people like Ruse have an altogether mistaken understanding of God and his nature. The Bible is far from portraying God as the friendly chap in the sky, as supposed by Ruse. And theology backs up this realization by showing that, properly understood, we can speak of God as all-powerful and all-loving.

Imperial Russia’s most popular historical novel was not War and Peace but a story of folkloric origins that celebrated freedom and poked fun at authority. The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great from Death appeared in multiple versions from 1843 onward and drew upon mythologies of the Fool – in sacred accounts, the Holy Fool (Iurodivyi); in secular tales, little Ivan the Fool (Ivanushka-Durachok). The hero of Russia’s first commercialized folktale, Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf, tricks a tsar as the protagonist of the contemporaneous children’s classic, The Little Humpbacked Horse. The freedom of fools was attractive enough in traditional society; amidst multi-dimensional change after the Emancipation, the idea of release from traditional constraint was electrifying. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others created a dialogue between the familiar and the new by peopling their works with recognizable characters, foremost among which was the Fool. In so doing they illuminated ideas of self-fulfillment free from oppressive and unjust authority. But the era’s authors and readers also knew that when authority seemed most in shadow, it could return in force. The tension between freedom and order reflected ambivalence toward each that endured in Russian traditions and new works.

The mirror image of the Fool who succeeds despite himself is the rebel doomed to fail. Centuries of institutionalized servitude had begotten both actual and dreamed-of rebellion, with songs, poems, and legends that immortalized the rebels and their acts. Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol all had explored themes of freedom and rebellion, and post-Emancipation writers took these themes into the nascent medium of popular commercial fiction in the form of the adventure novel. The novels delivered excitement while reinforcing the wisdom of generations; to wit, that Russia’s secular and religious order could not be violated with impunity. Tolstoy in Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov innovated within a traditional mythology of rebels that had long served at once to question and accentuate the oppressive authority of tsarist rulers. At the time they were writing, the conventions that had led larger-than-life heroes and heroines to fulfillment or destruction were already changing in the shared Russian imagination. The cult of doomed rebellion associated with rebels had begun to give way to a new and growing emphasis on the agency and power of ordinary people.