By the novel of ideas I mean realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and the social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of their appeal and the consequences of accepting them. George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Honoré de Balzac, and others produced splendid examples of the form, and Russian writers knew European predecessors well. Père Goriot helped shape Crime and Punishment as Middlemarch influenced Anna Karenina before the predominant direction of influence reversed. Then Tolstoy and Dostoevsky achieved renown as the supreme masters of the form and set the standard for Western writers. Turgenev, Chekhov, Grossman, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn also produced significant fiction of ideas. The power of these works derives in part from the profundity of their insights and in part from the inventiveness of the literary means employed to express them.
–Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions And Why Their Answers Matter, 12
