Romancing the Soviet Rogue in Tragic and Comic Variations

The literary rogue provides a focal point for society's discontents; he is a protean figure who shifts his shape to reflect the immediate concerns of his day. As a result, the shape of the literary work he inhabits also changes from one age to the next and often manifests generic hybridity. This article examines two Soviet-era literary protagonists, Pavel Korchagin (How the Steel Was Tempered) and Ivan Chonkin (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin), and suggests that each is a compound of romance and picaresque features and that each is, accordingly, more similar to the other than has hitherto been suspected. Additionally, the article posits that one of the reasons why scholars have not considered similarities between the two characters is that How the Steel Was Tempered is modally inflected by tragedy, while Chonkin is comic.