Russian realism was begotten by French realism. From the 1830s through the 1880s, Russian prose writers responded to story lines, characters, motifs, and stylistics they found in French, in French journals. Pushkin, in both his poetry and prose, and Gogol in his stories, used Western European models; Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time incorporated, among many others, Georges Sand and Alfred de Vigny; Dostoevsky elaborated the work of Balzac, Eugene Sue, and Jules Janin in Crime and Punishment; and Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in dialogue with the French novel of adultery, particularly Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Russian writers, whose prose tradition was only beginning, saw themselves through Western European eyes, at once admiring French culture and feeling inferior to it. The Russians pitted these works of French (and European) realism against countertexts that refuted what they understood to be Western European values, using French subtexts dialectically to create a new cultural synthesis. The subtextual dialogue parodied, corrected, and rejected European models in order to construct a Russian moral and spiritual truth, often incorporating biblical subtexts to do so.