Is there such a thing as a revolutionary novel? Can one write its history? It would be hard to answer such questions in the context of English literature. In the context of Russian literature the questions can be posed and answered for perfectly good historical reasons. Although the special case of Russian literature is this book's chief concern, the roots of the modern realistic novel as a literary form have their beginnings in English literature, and a reference back to such beginnings, though cursory, may explain the relationship between the novel as realistic literature and its principal purpose as an informative, improving and even revolutionary genre.

Henry Fielding, the most celebrated English claimant to the title of first realistic novelist, attached great importance to the novelist's knowledge of the world. In Tom Jones he insisted that a novelist should lawfully have learning – ‘a competent knowledge of history and the belles lettres’, on the one hand, and ‘another sort of knowledge, beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had by conversation’, by witnessing the acted word, by being conversant with people, the high and low life of society, by being, in short, a historian. This is the term Fielding constantly used to describe his principal function as a novelist. Such criteria were of course in need of an important qualification.