“Is This Really the Same Tatiana…” The Dispute About Pushkin’s Heroine in Russian Literature of the Second Half of the 19th Century (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Others)

The Russian novel is anthropocentric. The recognition of this phenomenon occurred gradually. At first, the original types and characters were perceived: Evgeny Onegin and Tatiana Larina, Pechorin and Maksim Maksimych, Makar Devushkin and Varenka Dobroselova, “Turgenev’s young ladies,” Natasha Rostova, Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov, Raskolnikov and Sonya Marmeladova, Anna Karenina, Alexey Vronsky and Konstantin Levin, and others. It was only later that the nuances of genre poetics were understood. Pushkin’s romantic poems and his novel in verse “Eugene Onegin”, in which the poet discovered new types and characters of Russian literature, became the pretext for the Russian novel. Their interconnections and relationships are diverse: Chatsky and Pechorin are similar to Onegin, Platon Karataev and Akim Akimovich resemble Maksim Maksimych, the features of Tatiana Larina are reflected in the images of “Turgenev’s young ladies” and Natasha Rostova. The question of why Tatiana did not leave with Onegin became the subject of Dostoevsky’s dispute with Belinsky and the culmination of his “Pushkin Speech” of 1880. Anna Karenina left her husband and family for Vronsky, but this only complicated her fate: everyone turned out to be unhappy. Pushkin introduced a new type of heroine in Russian literature — the “Russian woman.” Dostoevsky reinforced the apotheosis of Pushkin’s heroine: Tatiana is not just positive, she is perfect. By rejecting Onegin, she acted “the Russian way,” “in accordance with Russian folk truth,” and “the Christian way.” Her action imbued the novel genre with national significance and ethnopoetic meaning. To the traditional contents (love, family, and private life), Russian novelists added historicism (“historical era”). The concept of the Russian novel was conditioned by the discovery of realism, which developed as a historical type of mimesis and presumed a “faithful reproduction of reality” (Belinsky), socio-psychological and historical determinism, and Christian ontologism. The creative discoveries of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were accompanied by the theoretical ideas and concepts of A. Galich, V. Belinsky, B. Griftsov, M. Bakhtin.