'It's on the Russian Level'

“I’m not a great reader of fiction. I read through all of Jane Austen with pleasure. I read through George Eliot at school, but I was too young to appreciate her then. But about a year ago I read Middlemarch. Most marvellous book. Best thing in nineteenth-century English fiction, I think. It’s on the Russian level. I’m a great admirer of the Russian writers.” 

The speaker is the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in a 1969 interview, “Portrait of a Man Reading,” originally published in the Washington Post ‘Book World.’” His literary tastes are varied and interesting – Thomas Browne, Edward Gibbon, Charles Doughty – and he says in the same interview, “Books to read should have a tincture of literature and philosophy,” as opposed to “potboiler history . . . by multiple hands.”

 

What impressed me was Trevor-Roper saying Eliot worked “on the Russian level.” Some of us fell for Russian literature and “the Russian soul” early and never entirely recovered. Not that the “Russian level” is a monolith. Trevor-Roper says, “I would put Turgenev at the top of all novelists,” which seems rather unlikely given the existence of Tolstoy. It’s the pairing of Eliot (whose Daniel Deronda I would couple with Trevor-Roper’s choice of Middlemarch) with the Russians that reminded me of Gary Saul Morson’s similar understanding of what he calls “the prosaic novels.” By that he means novels that regard “a good life is one lived well moment to moment,” with plots that “typically concern the hero’s or the heroine’s growing ability to appreciate the world immediately around them.” He writes:

 

“Beginning with Jane Austen, prosaic authors include Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and some lesser twentieth-century writers, such as Barbara Pym.”

 

A seemingly odd grouping but Morson has identified a strain of “realism” – that troublesome term – that was never dominant but also never merely latent. The approach is not crudely naturalistic. I think Joyce could be included, for Dubliners and Ulysses, along with much of Proust. Such writers create worlds recognized by readers, who often return to such books many times across a lifetime. Morson adds:

 

“Some prosaic authors leave their prosaic philosophy implicit, but the three greatest—Eliot, Tolstoy, and Chekhov—propound it explicitly and profoundly. The epilogue to Middlemarch, for instance, observes that the heroine, Dorothea, did not accomplish any famous deeds. That is no cause for regret, however, because the best people, on whom we all depend. Are those we usually overlook.”

 

 Morson then quotes the well-known closing lines of Middlemarch:

      

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. . . . But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

 

[Trevor-Roper’s interview is collected in Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Historian (I.B. Tauris, 2016). Morson’s observations can be found in Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press, 2023).]