The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

traditionally not endowed with a sympathetic face. These are the middle spaces: commercial classes such as merchants, bankers, and Jews; professional classes such as lawyers and professors; and bureaucratic classes of every sort. The compromised heroes here range from the local thieving mayor and his cronies in Gogol’s play The Government Inspector to Anna’s unhappy spouse Aleksei Karenin, government minister made ridiculous by his desire, cruelly satirized by Tolstoy, to improve the plight of human beings through an official commission. If the bureaucrat is modest and oppressed, like the clerk Akaky Akakievich in Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” then we might see (after a fashion) a human face. If a learned person is of low enough rank, like a provincial tutor or schoolteacher, then some virtues might be mixed in with the weakness and vice. But let any of these middlemen flourish, and

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 33

they lose all possible positive qualities. One challenge for twentieth-century Russian literature was to devise an acceptable sort of success for the pragmatic and disciplined wage-earner, state servitor, or career bureaucrat in modern civic culture, without losing the enormous energy contained in the sacrificial, spiritually rich hero.

If this was a difficult task for the Soviet century, it will be even more daunting for the more fragmentary and less cohesive twenty-first. But full stops, failed apocalypse, and looking out the window at empty space going nowhere are completely familiar to this cultural tradition and easily accommodated by it. This Introduction opened on the assertion that the Russian literary canon is “always about to forget that it is merely made up out of words.” Assuming that is true, surely Russia’s literature will talk itself out of this trap too.

Chapter 2

Heroes and their plots

In the preceding chapter we introduced Bakhtin’s chronotope. It might be helpful in this chapter, before discussing some favored Russian character types, to review the services it can provide.

Bakhtin devised the chronotope as an aid for “walking into” and co-experiencing the time-space of a fictional world. Prose fiction is a field. Usually it is populated by more than one consciousness and designed to be experienced over time. In all but the most disorienting fictional environments – the absolute absurd, for example, or literature of terror and trauma devised to frustrate all attempts at communication – readers will seek to talk, interact, or empathize with characters inhabiting this field. The character can be a talking frog if we’re inside a beast fable, personified Vice or Virtue if inside a medieval mystery play, an alien from outer space if inside a science fiction, or a recognizably human being: the physical wrappings of consciousness are incidental. Both the type of creature and the rules for relating to it depend upon the conventions of the literary genre. What feels strange in one environment can be wholly unmarked in another. In all cases, however, time and space in the chronotope are fused. Some sorts of time – say, in old-fashioned comic strips and soap-opera serials – never add up. Hours, days, years pass, but people do not age; characters might not even remember from one episode to the next. Accordingly, the space that accompanies such time is abstract and non-historical.

Somesorts of time permit the hero tochange, but only atmiraculous, isolated moments (say, tales of metamorphosis or religious conversion). The qualities of the surrounding space may or may not change to accord with the abruptly altered hero. In other chronotopes, the outside world changes in a variety of ways, but the people residing in that time-space are “ready-made” from the start. Their potential is predetermined. They may be tested by events, but they do not learn or mature as a result of such testing; they merely unfold as a pre-formed bud unfolds into a given leaf. Fully novelistic heroes (Bakhtin’s favorites, such as he sees in Goethe, Dickens, and Dostoevsky) both change themselves and presume that they live in a changing environment, which will present them with unexpected challenges to which they must respond.

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Heroes and their plots 35

In Bakhtin’s view, the vigorously functioning, free personality (fictive or real) needs open-ended time more than open-ended space. It is no surprise, however, that the most durable parameter in many Russian chronotopic situations is space, with the temporal dimension a secondary, often dysfunctional afterthought. “Growing up” properly can appear difficult or dead-ended. Developmental time simply stops: through early sacrificial death, in capped or arrested adolescence, or on the far side of threshold moments that commit the hero to an unchanging revealed truth. Conversely, space-based trajectories or metaphors remain fertile and attractive options in a variety of secular as well as sacred genres: “setting out in search of something,” being exiled or displaced, waking up after thirty years of immobility and “going on the road” to slay Russia’s enemies (the plot of Ilya Muromets, Russia’s favorite epic hero). Start with the spatial imperative, and time will tag along. Even when the journey is parodiedbeyond repair,asinthe tragicomic alcoholic fantasyMoscowto the End of the Line (1970) by Venedikt Erofeyev (1938–90), the illusion of movement is the indispensable starting point. Leo Tolstoy, Russia’s great demystifier and debunker of all the bad habits we live by, spent decades writing narratives that showed how people are doomed if they try to escape their truth or their fate by running away – from The Cossacks (1863) through Anna Karenina (1873–78) to his late stories “Master and Man” (1895) and “Father Sergius” (1898). And then a week before his death, he himself boarded a train to get out.

In addition to a general preference for changing one’s fate by moving through space, the very concept of evil was scattered and diversified. In traditional Russian folk culture, the devil [chort] was small: omnipresent, petty, devious, often a changeling, miserably ugly and unheroic. Traditional Russian culture had a bigger devil [dyavol] – an abstractly ominous black body – but no humanized, grand Miltonic Satan; native Russian demons were “not tragic or avuncular or nobly doomed free spirits.”1 Such anthropomorphized images of evil, largely Romantic in origin, arrived from the West only in the early nineteenth century. Instead, a myriad of tiny folk devils hovered around your body, eager to crawl down your throat when you yawned, up your birth canal while you were delivering your infant, into your ears during an unguarded moment. Against this onslaught of small exhaustions and seductions one could apply numerous folk charms and incantations. But the best defense against demonic temptation was “righteousness.”

Righteous persons [pravednik (m.) / pravednitsa (f.)]

To be a “righteous person” is more an attitude than a deed. Christian faith often informs this righteousness, but the type was frequently secularized and

36 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

re-sacralized. A righteous person usually requires an enemy to fight against – the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler, capitalists as a class, the Antichrist – but a big, showy Foe is by no means necessary. The enemy as well as the task can be very small. Dostoevsky’s radiant pravedniki (pl.) in The Brothers Karamazov (the Elder Zosima and the youngest brother Alyosha) are of this sturdy everyday sort, fending off doubts with a spiritually healthy mind. Success in the deed is not essential, but steadfastness is.

In her discussion of righteousness in Russia’s Dangerous Texts, Kathleen Parthe? remarks of this sort of hero that the righteousness is “inflexible but unselfish.”2 A righteous person can stay home and instruct by example, but often, “unable to bear the injustice of the world,” he or she becomes a wanderer [strannik/strannitsa]. Central to the type is always a willingness to suffer – but regardless of torment self-inflicted or imposed, a pravednik does not change his mind or his soul. He cannot, for he is inseparable from his truth. He can become a righteous person after a sinful youth (as does the elder Zosima), but like Saint Augustine, once he has seen or