How the Russians Read the French

Russian writers of the nineteenth century were quite consciously creating a new national literary tradition. They saw themselves through Western European eyes, at once admiring Europe and feeling inferior to it. This ambivalence was most keenly felt in relation to France, whose language and culture had shaped the world of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Catherine the Great. In their novels, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy responded to the French realists by setting the French works into dialogue with Russian and biblical texts. Answering the French novels with Pushkin's prose as well as with the Gospels, the Russian authors created moral and philosophical works of art based in the spiritual values they felt the French had lost. Meyer argues that each of these great Russian authors takes the French tradition as a thesis, proposes his own antithesis, and creates in his novel a synthesis meant to create a genuinely Russian national tradition, in dialogue with rather than imitative of Western models.