Robin Feuer Miller closes the volume with a meditation on Chekhov’s career-long search for new ways to end stories and plays, distinguishing his intervention into literary endings from the work of other major Russian writers and showing how he took great pains to craft the overtone of an “eidetic” ending, the kind that retains the sharpness of its image long after one looks away from the text.

The literary context of Tolstoy matters because his works not only emerged in concrete literary and historical circumstances, but expressed in their own ways shared concerns, ideas, fears, and aspirations, characteristic of the respective periods and, in particular, of the generation affected by the humiliating outcome of the Crimean War, the collapse of the decades-long isolationist conservative “scenario of power” of Nicholas I, and a series of forthcoming profound social and political reforms that changed the emotional and ideological outlook of Russian culture. The chapter primarily focuses on Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace within its actual literary and ideological contexts, including fierce contemporary debates on the most pressing issues of the 1860s, unleashed in powerful, tendentious “thick” journals. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s final sentence of the novel, the epistemological value of seeing Tolstoy in conversation with his contemporaries (Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Grigoriev, Dmitry Pisarev, Surikov, Musorgsky, etc.) lies both in the renunciation of vision of his “unreal immobility in space” (generally taken for granted) and concurrently in the recognition of his dependence on other writers and literary contexts “of which we are unaware.” Gulliver is determined by his bonds.

With literacy rising but still low, it was through the visual arts that millions of nineteenth-century Russians encountered new thinking about personhood, social relations, and national identity. Artists had been locked into an official hierarchy determined by training and awards, and they enthusiastically joined the emerging free professions. The market heated up as incomes rose and advances in printing made images affordable. Visual culture responded at every level of society. A group of artists who became known as the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) (because they traveled to exhibit their work) deviated from tradition and took as subjects Russia’s peasants. Illustrated magazines achieved great influence from the 1860s on and also departed from officially promoted traditions, although in ways that differed from those of the Wanderers. Cheap lubok prints brought contemporary themes to the villages and to the urban working poor. Social change irrevocably altered perceptions of the Self and the Other – the faces people saw in their mirrors and their neighbors, relatives, and random passers-by on the street - and innovations in visual culture validated those changing perceptions. The inclusion of the visual arts in the gathering cultural energy propelled further innovation and creative genius in the years ahead.