This is a scholarly article published in Rocky Mountain Review in Fall 2005 and made available on the triencyclopedic book of threes at www.threes.com the next year. In this article, the author, Lee B Croft, a Professor of Russian at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, investigates the "why" of "
things in threes" in Russian
literature and culture. He argues that the Russian culture is particularly susceptible to seeing things in threes, to
tricategorization, to
tertiariness of all kinds, and that Russian forms of narration, both spoken and written, are particularly rife with
triplicity. He exemplifies triplicity in the works of many Russian authors, including (chronologically) Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol (who uses, for example, a story about spontaneous human combustion three times in his works), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Zinaida Gippius, Alexander Blok, Boris Pasternak, and Victor Pelevin. He points out that many critical works that deal with Russian literature are themselves triplistic in structure and/or theme, embodying a meta-triplicity.