Start with the map. What we call ‘Russia’ is a geographically vast territory: one set of borders looks to an unambiguously Western world, the world of (often militant) Latin Christianity; another towards the self-contained cultural world of China. South-westwards lie the Balkans and what was once the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’, as Dimitri Obolensky called the cluster of states and peoples sharing a broadly Greek Christian heritage; south-eastwards, the tribal cultures and Turkic languages of Central Asia. Russian identity has been moulded in response to – sometimes violent reaction to – all these environments, and its complexities reflect the way in which these diverse contacts and conflicts have impressed themselves on Russia’s sense of itself and its destiny.

Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy imagined a diverse nation in different ways, but each embraced humanity in all its diversity and did so not only as artist but also as citizen and moral spokesman. In Chekhov’s The Island of Sakhalin (1895) and Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), the writers led the evolution of the artist’s role as a new civic actor on the national stage. Russian writers began to dream in the 1860s of an inclusive big tent of the arts, but just what and how the disparate elements of Russian society might share in a common culture was contested. Tolstoy and Chekhov expressed their own views on the topic in their books Resurrection and Sakhalin, which were neither backward-looking glorifications of peasant traditions nor forward-looking visions of modernization. Rather, the authors described people sharing the vast landscape of the empire in recognition of their commonality, acceptance of diversity, and rejection of parochial interests. They emphasized place rather than time. Both authors carved out a shared national space, within which they offered readers a new view of their fellow citizens. Of the two authors, it would be Chekhov rather than Tolstoy who transitioned successfully into the next wave of innovation in art.