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The Golden Age of Russian literature in the nineteenth-century continues to entrance Western readers. To study what created the greatest works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, and

Pushkin (along with a swathe of others) is to enter a world of cultural awakening. Russian literature became such a driving force precisely because of the restrictions that the state

imposed. Political dissidents were executed or sent on one of the infamous long marches to hard labour in Siberia. After 1825, when rebels tried to overthrow the Czardom in a protest against

autocracy, the government in St Petersburg tightened its grip on the intellectual freedom of its writers, but it also had to acknowledge their influence. Pushkin, who died in a duel in

1837, was revered by many, despite his links to the Decembrists. Gogol, who reached fame with his short stories and novel _Dead Souls _(1842), was considered safe for praise for the

authorities. In 1847, Gogol published _Selected Passages in Correspondence with his Friends_. In it, he defended the practice of serfdom, the complete rule of the Czar, and the Orthodox

religion. It provoked one of the most famous and bitter rebukes from the radical liberals in Russia at the time. Vissarion Belinsky was the most controversial and well-known critic and every

word of his was treated by eager, radical students as gospel. Belinsky used his platform to write an open letter to Gogol, chastising him for betraying the fight against tyranny. _“One

cannot keep silent when lies and immortality are preached as truth and virtue under the guise of religion and the protection of the knout.”_ Belinsky’s denunciation of Gogol’s “turgid and

squalid bombast” became the bible for young liberals, but was censored by the government. Reading and printings of the book were banned, but that didn’t stop the essay becoming the most

popular and widespread attack on the authorities seen in decades. In 1847, Dostoevsky had published his first two major novels _Poor Folk _and _The Double_. The first was praised heartily by

Belinsky, and was the author’s first literary breakthrough. The second, was excoriated by Belinsky, and readers turned against him. Dostoevsky had become a member of the radical

Petrashevsky Circle of dissident intellectuals, which had regular meetings in the house of Mikhail Petrashevksy, who had a library full of censored books. At one of these meetings,

Dostoevsky read out Belinsky’s letter, at this time supportive of its promotion of Westernisation, although the two had begun to fall out, partly over Dostoevsky’s religious faith, which

would only continue to deepen throughout his life. After the violent revolutions across Europe in 1848, the Russian authorities were afraid that such radicalism would spread to St Petersburg

and Moscow as well. The government began to crack down heavily on any perceived dissent, and the Petrashevsky Circle was infiltrated. All of its members were arrested and sentenced to

execution by firing squad. The justification reason for Dostoevsky’s fate was his reading of Belinsky’s letter. Taken out to a wide public space, the whole group were spared at the last

moment. Dostoevsky was condemned to four years in Omsk, Siberia, experiences he later used for _Notes from the House of the Dead _(1860-2). His experiences of radical politics and its bitter

consequences had let him to a spiritual conversion in Siberia that had showed signs of materialising throughout the early stages of his life. Permitted only one book during his

incarceration in brutal conditions, the New Testament, Dostoevsky read it voraciously. Its message of reconciliation, brotherhood, and equality before a divine creator deeply influenced him,

and spoke directly to him of what he saw in ordinary Russian peasants that had not been yet liberated. When he returned to European Russia, Dostoevsky was shocked by what he saw in the

growing movement of nihilists. Figures such as Nikolay Chernyshevksy, Nikolay Dubrolyubov and Dmitry Pisarev were dismissing the liberalism of Dostoevsky’s generation (“men of the 1840s”)

and instead calling for a new social order and the complete subjugation of all authority into the hands of an elite, the only people fit to govern. Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel _What Is To Be

Done _became the new gospel for radicals, and Lenin later wrote a pamphlet with the same title. Once again, the literary review or novel was being used as the main form of political

communication, and the great battle of ideas that had begun to ferment in Russia decades before was coming to the fore. Dostoevsky’s first major rebuke of Chernyshevsky’s ideals was _Notes

from Underground _in 1864, in which the narrator, the Underground Man, depicts his ostracisation from society and its norms, as his revels in the dark slums of St Petersburg. The Underground

Man is a vituperative portrait of the effects of nihilism both upon the soul and society as a whole. Dostoevsky produced the fullest onslaught against nihilism and its consequences in

_Crime and Punishment _(1866). Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student, resolves to kill a morose pawnbroker who is hated by all who come across her, and employs her sister under slavish

conditions. In doing so, he tells himself, he will be performing an act worthy of a moral Napoleon or a Byronic hero, trampling over the old social boundaries of traditional values. He also

needs her money for himself, angered by the obsequious letters he receives from his family in the country. Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker, but also murders her sister when she comes

across the crime, and in his delirium he steals barely anything. He is eventually sent to Siberia for hard labour, where he undergoes a kind of spiritual awakening like Dostoevsky, and is

accompanied by Sonya, a former prostitute to whom he first confesses his crime. It was with _Demons _(1872) that Dostoevsky penned his fiercest most shocking critique of the revolutionary

desires of radicals. A cell of agitators, led by Nikolay Vsevolodovich, or Stavrogin, and Pyor Stepanovich Verkhovensky, aims to take over their own town through social upheaval, caught in

the delusion that they are but one of many groups all across Russia. Fearing infiltration, they turn to violence, and murder. In creating the characters in _Demons_, Dostoevsky took

inspiration from the main figures of the day. The odious Verkhovensky, who proposes an Orwellian new social order where one-tenth of the population rules the other nine-tenths who are united

in complete equality of poverty. The character of Verkhovensky is based heavily on Sergei Nechaev, the notorious revolutionary who wrote the _Catechism of a Revolutionary _(1869) and was

imprisoned for his murder of a fellow activist who abandoned his circle. Of all Dostoevsky’s work,_ Demons _is perhaps the novel that most looked to the future. The activities of Stavrogin

and Verkhovensky would be emulated by the Bolsheviks in both their split from the Mensheviks in 1908 and the brutal suppression, achieved through violence, of the new Soviets after 1917.

Dostoevsky’s ongoing fascination with ideas and their impact on his characters was expressed in all of his last major novels, culminating in _The Brothers Karamazov_, his masterpiece and the

fullest expression of his ideas and the perils of those who opposed him. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel _We _was an influence on Orwell in creating _Nineteen-Eighty-Four _and _Animal

Farm_, and Zamyatin owes much to Dostoevsky in his portrayals of the perils of utopia. In predicting the mass movement of the Russian Revolution in part, Dostoevsky most definitely saw the

consequences of such a change, and the possibility of its slide into brutal tyranny. Dostoevsky saw this because of his experience of poverty from an early age, his time with the radical

Petrashevkyists and his imprisonment in Siberia. The social realist novel that caught both the Russian and later the European imagination only came into being through the desire for

intellectual freedom. Dostoevsky’s extreme faith in Christian teaching goes against this yearning. Yet his warning of the dangers that the nihilists and absolutists still resonate today.