A.A. Bestuzhev- Marlinsky and the Critical Theory of the Novel

Abstract

Examines the literary criticism of Bestuzhev, who under the pseudonym Marlinsky became the most celebrated Russian fiction writer of the 1830s. Believes Betuzhev made a decisive but relatively unappreciated contribution to the critical theory of the novel in Russia. Argues Bestuzhev’s critical theory must be understood against the background of an emergent Romanticism; divides his critical work into three stages that track a trajectory out of Russia’s local concerns and into the mainstream of European thought. Claims these three stages touch on all the major themes that would work themselves out in the nineteenth-century Russian novel: the search for national consciousness in language and folk material, the social and political issues associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of Christianity in dialectic with its pagan double, and the complex dialectic between East and West that would evolve into the Slavophile- Westernizer controversy.