Russia is unique among European states for having had two capitals during much of its modern life: St. Petersburg and Moscow. The first was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, and became the administrative, political, and cultural capital. In these respects, it displaced Moscow, whose history went back at least four hundred years. But Russians continued to regard the older city as the spiritual center of the country; even the tsars, who presided in Petersburg, went to Moscow to be crowned; and the Bolsheviks reconfirmed its traditional importance by moving the government back there in 1924. Each city has come to represent very different and often conflicting values, as we shall see, and each has functioned as a pole around which the vexed question of Russia's character and destiny has revolved.

Since the early nineteenth century, St. Petersburg and Moscow have figured prominently in the Russian novel. But many of the issues that attach to them are far older. In Kievan Rus, the first East Slavic state, cities were not only centers of culture, but enclosures against domestic and foreign enemies. It is instructive, and perhaps psychologically significant, that in Slavic languages, the word for “city,” as in Russian gorod and Church Slavonic grad, has no etymological connection with the Latin civis and its derivations in English and the Romance languages, but instead goes back to the Indo-European root designating an enclosed place.

It is by now a commonplace that the classic Russian novelists - Dostoevskii, Turgenev, Tolstoi - are distinguished by an unparalleled ability to portray the complex inner mental states of their characters. As early as 1856, the Russian critic Chernyshevskii praised Tolstoi for his superlative rendering of the “dialectics of the soul,” by which he meant Tolstoi's painstaking dissection of the inner life of his heroes. And in the Englishspeaking world, Virginia Woolf summed up a review of Tolstoi's The Cossacks by remarking: “They do not rival us in the comedy of manners, but after reading Tolstoi we always feel that we could sacrifice our skill in that direction for something of the profound psychology and superb sincerity of the Russian writers.”

I have no wish to dispute the near unanimous critical opinion that the Russian novel is particularly attuned to psychological analysis. Instead, in the essay that follows, I would like to ask why Russian novelists have been so concerned with psychology, and, as a corollary question, when this concern has been most in evidence. My central points will be two. First, that Russian novelists, with few exceptions, are concerned with individual psychology because it provides a window onto what might be called social psychology; that is, the individual is crucial not primarily for him or herself, but because he or she is seen to be representative of a larger group.

The power of the Russian nineteenth-century novel depends in part on earlier techniques of novel-writing which most Western novelists had abandoned. This study will concentrate on the particularly Russian relation between plotting and narration, though it must also reckon with the interplay between Russian and the Western novelistic practices in the nineteenth century. In the first Western book on the Russian novel (1881), Melchoir de Vogüé, the eloquent French diplomat, journalist, and gossip, says that for Turgenev the study “of our masters and the friendship and the advice of Mérimée offered precious help; to these literary associations he may have owed the intellectual discipline, the clarity, the precision, virtues which are so rare among the prose writers of his country.” This denial that Turgenev is a fully Russian novelist shows that Vogüé recognized something special about Turgenev, but it also led Western Europeans from the 1880s on to recognize that there was something special about most Russian novels.

In his preface to The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879-80 and surely the grand finale of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, Dostoevskii as author introduces Alesha as his hero, a hero for the present. The author thereby follows a line of European Romanticism that sees the hero as conveying his time and place, not just literally but also symbolically for others. As Dostoevskii goes further, into the future, he argues that such a hero, though strange, “carries within him sometimes the core of the universal” which his other contemporaries have been torn away from. One could not imagine a woman writer speaking to the universal or prophesying in this unambiguously assertive manner (except in sorrow), much less inventing a heroine to incarnate such prophecy. The heroine of her time in Russia, perhaps because she would have had to be similarly exceptional without any irony on the part of her author, remains unwritten. Women lived within a tradition of total truth, which included their own reality as defined by male writers in the Russian novelistic canon from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn.

Russian, like Western Realism, is best understood as a reaction against Romanticism, as an attempt, then, to reach out to topical mundane reality (Balzac's actualité), renouncing romantic fantasy or escape into an imaginary past and Sentimentalism's abstract discourses on virtue. Realism meant a concern with concrete Russian life, while Romanticism often pursued the exotic and Sentimentalism dealt with humanity in the abstract. In contrast to Romanticism's preoccupation with the extraordinary individual, Realism meant an interest in the concerns of ordinary men and women, in social problems and in the life of the lower classes. Also, Realism meant a faith in literature's calling to be involved in the affairs of real life.

The Russian realist novel, like the realist novel in the West, grew out of existing genres, while often using them as a foil. Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) is formally a picaresque novel. Dostoevskii's Poor Folk (1846) uses the sentimentalist form of the epistolary novel. His The Double (1846) is a “realized” version of a Gothic novel. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Tolstoi's Cossacks (1863) “realize” the exotic novel made popular by Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii in the 1830s.

When one considers the impact of Russian literature on world literature, one thinks first of all of the novel. Russia excelled in the novel to the extent that the Greeks and the English excelled in tragedy. To the extent - but not in the same way, because Greek and English tragedies offer the defining examples of the form, whereas the Russian masterpieces, while surely the greatest novels, defy, rather than define, their genre.

From the time Russian novels began to be widely read abroad, two features struck Western readers: their inclusion of long philosophical arguments and their violation of the formal expectations of the genre. It was also clear that these features are intimately connected, because it is in part the philosophical passages that turn these novels into “loose, baggy monsters.” The essays in War and Peace, Levin's internal dialogues on the meaning of life at the end of Anna Karenina, Kirillov's mad meditations in The Devils, and Ivan Karamazov's “Grand Inquisitor” legend - all these striking sections, which seemed to have few counterparts in Western masterpieces, define the spirit of the Russian novel.

In the nineteenth century, after decades of imitations, translations, and a tradition of bawdy native prose, Russia began to challenge the West as the home of the greatest novels ever written. Are Russian “theories of the novel” comparably rich? The current fame of Mikhail Bakhtin might suggest that this is indeed the case. But Bakhtin was a pioneer: he began work on the novel during the 1920s, with what he considered to be only scattered and unsatisfying critical precedent at his disposal. He repeatedly declared that the protean nature of this genre, its unsystematicity and generosity of form, had made the very question of an adequate theory of the novel awkward for any literary tradition. Since the novel outgrows every definition imposed upon it and can incorporate its own parody without ceasing to be itself, its formal study does not reward that drawing of boundaries upon which respectable theory rests.

For this reason, many discussions claiming to provide a “theory” or “morphology” of the novel in effect provide a history of novels. The literary historian devises a chronology of select novel-types (picaresque, sentimental, utopian, psychological), attaches it to larger literary periods, and then appends to this structure valuable information about authors, origins, plot invariants, or the literary market. But such chronologies fall short of a unified concept of the genre, as the great comparativist Aleksandr Veselovskii acknowledged in his 1886 essay “History or Theory of the Novel?” Veselovskii viewed the novel as the endpoint of a lengthy process of narrative individualization.

All novels are Romantic in the sense that they defy generic categories, combining poetry and philosophy, reportage and fantasy. “Der Roman ist ein romantisches Buch” (“The novel is a Romantic book”), according to Friedrich Schlegel, one of the greatest of Romantic theoreticians. But to speak more strictly, there is such a thing as a Romantic novel, as distinct from other types of novels (realist, science-fiction, etc.). The Romantic novel, mainly cultivated by the German Romantics (Schlegel, Novalis, Eichendorff and, to some extent, Goethe), is a free, lyrical form, often incorporating lyric poetry, concerned less with linear plot than with the exploration of inner spiritual states, of love, the mystical and the supernatural. Another type of novel that may be termed “Romantic” is the tale of exotic adventure in the manner of Chateaubriand and Scott. Both these types of Romantic novel are represented in Russian literature of the early nineteenth century, but only among the works of second-rank writers like Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Aleksandr Odoevskii, and Nikolai Polevoi. The first two great Russian novels, Aleksandr Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (1823-31, published in full 1831) and Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840), are already engaged in a struggle with Romanticism that in its intensity and explicitness goes well beyond the selfconscious play known as “Romantic irony.”

INTRODUCTION

Mill would have found it entirely appropriate that, in a collection on his philosophy, attention should be paid to his political writings and to their reception, which itself had a strong political dimension. Mill saw his political ideas as an integral part of his philosophy, and his philosophical battles as also political battles whose outcome had great practical importance. He stated this explicitly in his Autobiography in the survey of his aims in writing his principal philosophical books, A System of Logic and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. He thought it crucial to set out in the Logic the true philosophy, deriving all knowledge from experience, because it was “hardly possible to exaggerate” the practical mischiefs done in morals, politics, and religion by the false philosophy that “truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience”. The latter was “the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions” because it allowed “every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered... to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason....” “There never was”, Mill concludes, “such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep seated prejudices.”

John Stuart Mill's views about arithmetic and geometry have probably attracted more ridicule and disdain than the positions of any other thinker in the history of the philosophy of mathematics. I believe that the unfavorable assessment of Mill is quite unwarranted, resting in part on misunderstandings of his position born of hasty misreading (sometimes, one suspects, of reading only the scornful remarks of his influential critics), in part on commitments to a view of philosophy quite different from that which moved Mill. In this chapter I shall try to set the record straight.

Because it is essential to any clear appreciation of Mill's ideas about mathematics to recognize the problems he attempted to address, we should begin by contrasting two large conceptions of philosophy in general and of the philosophy of mathematics in particular. One of these conceptions, which I shall call “transcendentalism”, believes that a central task of philosophy is to identify fundamental conditions on human thought, representation, or experience, and that this enterprise is to be carried out by special philosophical methods that yield knowledge quite independently of experience or of the deliverances of the natural sciences. Prime examples of transcendentalist philosophy can be found in Kant, in Frege, and, in recent philosophy, in the writings of Michael Dummett.

Mill's essay On Liberty had both the good and the ill fortune to become a “classic” on first publication. The immediate success of the book, dedicated as it was to preserving the memory of Harriet Taylor, could only gratify its author. Yet its friends and foes alike fell upon it with such enthusiasm that the essay itself has ever since been hard to see for the smoke of battle. That it is a liberal manifesto is clear beyond doubt; what the liberalism is that it defends and how it defends it remain matters of controversy. Given the lucidity of Mill's prose and the seeming simplicity and transparency of his arguments, this is astonishing; ought we not to know by now whether the essay's main target is the hold of Christianity on the Victorian mind or rather the hold of a monolithic public opinion of whatever kind; whether its intellectual basis lies in utility as Mill claimed or in a covert appeal to natural right; whether the ideal of individual moral and intellectual autonomy is supposed to animate everyone, or only an elite; and so indefinitely on?