Williams, Harold Whitmore (1876-1928) Russia of the Russians - London 1914
VI. Literature
...The Russian literature that has become famous throughout the world was written before the 'eighties. A great deal of it was contemporary with mid-Victorian literature, but how different it is from anything mid-Victorian! There is no cheerful sense of attainment, no exultation in achievement. Life for the great Russian writers is a spiritual adventure on a limitless plain. Nothing is fixed, stable, and final.
...It is not easy to understand precisely why this great artistic impulse ceased in the early eighties, why Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky had no immediate successors. For one thing, there was a natural exhaustion consequent on intense literary effort, and it is more than a chance coincidence that the period of literary decline was also one of political reaction. Alexander II was assassinated a little more than a month after the death of Dostoievsky. The years that followed were years of severe oppression.
...The Russian literature that has become famous throughout the world was written before the 'eighties. A great deal of it was contemporary with mid-Victorian literature, but how different it is from anything mid-Victorian! There is no cheerful sense of attainment, no exultation in achievement. Life for the great Russian writers is a spiritual adventure on a limitless plain. Nothing is fixed, stable, and final.
...It is not easy to understand precisely why this great artistic impulse ceased in the early eighties, why Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky had no immediate successors. For one thing, there was a natural exhaustion consequent on intense literary effort, and it is more than a chance coincidence that the period of literary decline was also one of political reaction. Alexander II was assassinated a little more than a month after the death of Dostoievsky. The years that followed were years of severe oppression.