The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

valued, but as artifacts to be inherited, copied, memorized, not created anew. Although Western medieval culture shared many of these values, Russia - which experienced no Renaissance or Reformation - upheld for much longer the idea of the divinely received Word as the measure of all things, as a sort of Absolute.

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Newness was suspect. For this reason, the qualities of visuality, palpability, and fixedness were compatible with a Russian cult of the word. In fact, they served it. As Kathleen Parthe? reminds us, the sacred, immutably “thing-like” qualities of the Old Russian word – the importance placed on the design of its alphabet and proper spelling; its incantational potential – imbued it with magic or miracle-working powers.13 On Old Russian soil, then, word and image tended not to compete but to collaborate in a tight moral alliance. The great nineteenth-century Realist writers inherited this tradition. Once uttered, words were not mere means to an end but already, in some sense, ends – deeds in themselves. These traditions fed richly into the revival of Russian poetry in the early twentieth century, and, ominously, into an equally rich cult of forced or fanciful political denunciations in the Stalinist 1930s.

Secular reasons for Russia’s word-centeredness echo these sacral concerns. A magically potent Word was a word worthy of being closely watched. From the mid-eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century, state censorship could reach a degree of suspiciousness and capriciousness hard for us to fathom in terms of the labor- hours required to impose it. Of course, there was always freedom by default: bureaucratic carelessness, networks of protection and politeness, regal arbitrariness, mercy, and the sheer vastness of the administrative task – but all the same, noteven a rudimentary system of safeguards for individualexpression in thepublic realm ever existed. In principle,every scrap of newsprint, every line of verse could be scrutinized, by secular and church authorities, with separate, successively more severe filters for in-print genres and theatrical performance. This quest to root out unapproved ideological content was made even more virulent by a worship of the shape and sound of the specifically Russian word. When Pushkin was exiled to the south of Russia in 1820 for penning some revolutionary verse, Russia’s sophisticated bilingual elite must have noticed that the sentiments in his offending poems did little more than repeat the abstract cliche?s of French liberationist rhetoric on which the reigning Tsar Alexander I had himself been raised two decades earlier. But when Pushkin addressed local realities and applied his glorious Russian to those banally familiar turns of phrase, they became startlingly new, authoritative, and impermissible.

Russian space: never-ending, absorptive, unfree

It is a truism that vis-a`-vis the Western nations, Russia has always lost in time and triumphed in space. Space saved Russia from Napoleon and Hitler. The broad expanse of Siberia saved Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (and Dostoevsky himself) from crimes against body and spirit committed in crowded, stifling cities. The “bird-troika” invoked by Gogol to save his trickster Chichikov at

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 25

the end of Dead Souls thrills us precisely because it rises up out of the dust so unexpectedly, terrifying all who witness it, and then soars away into the distance while, in the final phrase of the novel, “all other peoples and nations stand aside and grant it right of way.” Russian land never runs out. The need to control this potent surplus of space and tie its wandering population down to the tax rolls justified the centralized autocracy. In the opinion of Marshall Poe, writing a decade after the 1991 collapse, if the Russian state looks like a failure it is probably because we stubbornly insist on classifying her as a borderline European power, in which context she is indeed always “behind.” But in fact the Russia of the tsars and Soviets was a remarkable geopolitical enterprise, the modern world’s most successful West Eurasian empire.14

Space is forever forward, but time is an embarrassment. “Backward” for Russia has conventionally meant “not yet caught up with the progress made by France, Britain, America.” In part because of such invidious comparisons, novelists as diverse as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Olesha, and Solzhenitsyn have been united in their contempt for European “progress” – acquisitive, morally stupefying – and eager to discredit it. But the humiliationand vulnerability remained, and communism attempted to alter both. Time, too, would be forced to move to Russia’s advantage. When Valentin Kataev wrote his Modernist industrial novel Time, Forward! (1932), which chronicles the construction of a huge metallurgical plant in the Urals city of Magnitogorsk, his choice of title resonated. We learn in Chapter 2 of that novel that Kataev’s engineer hero, David Lvovich Margulies, always awakes before his alarm clock rings. There is no Chapter 1. It was, we read, “omitted for the time being.” Life is moving too fast; no time for it!

All the same, that abundant and reliable parameter, Russian space, could be deceptive. Just as a reverence for the Russian word can lead paradoxically to its obsessive monitoring and even enslavement, so triumphant Russian space has been accompanied by a sense of being trapped, tied down, crowded together in tiny communal apartments in cities with permanent housing shortages or herded into prison cells scattered over an open plain. Since so many literary narratives, from fairy tales to epic poems to postmodernist science fiction, are built on this paradox of vast but constricting Russian space, let us consider some of its dimensions.

First, size does not mean power or safety. Geophysically speaking, Russia is a wide, flat, overexposed, underdeveloped plain, with her major rivers running north–south, into foreign ports or frozen marsh. Her huge spread has been a constant source of national pride, but the lack of fixed boundaries or natural obstacles on her land borders has encouraged aggression by other peoples and a wanton imperialism pressing outward from her own core. Since

26 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

industrialization has a great deal to do with access – with extracting resources or manufacturing goods and then moving them to ports and markets – Russia’s immense physical resources, for most of her history, were not translated into efficient productivity or national security.

It was easier to exile dissidents to Siberia than to integrate them, to trash and move on rather than to recycle, negotiate, and conserve. “Because Russia had become accustomed to solving its historical problems geographically,” Mikhail Epstein writes, “it came to occupy an area so large that finding its place in time became somewhat difficult.”15 In a country this large with an overall climate so severe, transit time is enormous. Setting out, there is no assurance one will ever arrive. In a 1996 essay on Russian destiny and the Russian Idea, Mikhail Ilyin speaks of two governing images for this continental empire, the first “the rush from one valley to another through dangerous and threatening stretches of forest or steppe” and the second, a specter that has proved equally anxiety-laden, that of “roadless space,” or “the myth of the road going nowhere.”16 These two images so debase the movement and goal of any human activity that the end recedes, the reward disappears, and there remains only the texture of an exhausting, short-term present. One recalls the slogans that filled Russian street posters soon after the implosion of communism in 1991: “Seventy-two years on the way to nowhere.”

“Making therush” from one secure valley to another encouraged a distinctive spatial binary in traditional folk consciousness. Cities, those dots on a plain, were protected by their churches and Christian saints; everything outside the city fell under the sway of pagan gods. Space was divided into what was known and protected – what had its patron saint or spirit – and what was unprotected and unknown, the uncharted roaming grounds of various demons, imps, and mischievous spirits. Russian expanse was deified asMoist MotherEarth, but not after the manner of most gods. It is a remarkable fact, one of perennial concern to Russia’s great poets, that this most successful continental empire, which at its zenith covered one-sixth the land mass of the globe, never glorified a god of war and never produced a genuinely affirmative, appropriately chauvinistic war epic.

Theenormity,flatness, insecurity,and low populationdensity ofthe Eurasian continent had socioeconomic consequences that conditioned all domestic Russian narratives. Those who worked the soil did not initially stay put. To guarantee the tillable land its laborers, the army its soldiers, and the state its tax revenues, peasants were tied down to their villages in the late sixteenth century and then gradually enserfed as the personal property of the gentry and noble class. Of course the Russian serf was neither racially marked nor “imported” from another