arrived at the truth, he does not develop further. For this reason, Parthe? remarks, Russians of more liberal or ironic temperament have been wary of this peculiar sort of heroism (pp. 148–49).
The prototypical pravednik is a martyred saint. He may choose to cooperate with the state, rescuing it heroically in its hour of need, but he cannot be owned by any earthly power and often boycotts existing governments altogether. This “hagiographic [saint’s life] type” experienced a minor boom during the reform decade of the 1860s, when dozens of devotional publishing houses were founded.3 In any era, the pravednik tends to adhere to archaic, backward-looking truths, valuing the impulses of the heart over the pride of the intellect or the cleverness of the machine. The righteous almost always prefer the village to the city. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) fashioned himself into the twentieth century’s greatest exemplar of this type, both in his life and his art.
Unsurprisingly, after the 1917 Revolution the Bolshevik government made strenuous attempts to recruit righteous sufferers for the cause of forward-looking communism. Precedent was not difficult to find. Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is To Be Done? (1863), which Lenin called “the greatest and most talented representation of socialism before Marx,” includes in a cameo role one political activist-ascetic, Rakhmetov, who sleeps on nails to harden his resolve. Revolutionaries shared many traits with medieval saints. Among them are the ideal of bodily discipline (fasting and chastity), a transcendence of brute matter (miraculous visions, impossible work quotas), and a biographical progression that begins with a separation from society, is followed by initiation into the divine mystery, and ends with a potential for “return” and reintegration.4 One common sign of a specifically ascetic Russian hero-saint,
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modern as well as medieval, is that he does not return. He perfects himself and withdraws further, into increasingly remote geographical spaces. Others may follow him into that wilderness, but the hero does not need others to realize his truth. He is complete in himself.
We might say, then, that relations between righteous persons and their Truth remain stable and unambiguous, but relations between a pravednik and other human beings can differ widely – both inside fiction, and between fictional characters and the reader. Consider some examples from famous Russian novels. Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment is a pravednitsa; she never doubts the rightness of her views over the vacillating anguish of Raskolnikov. But she rarely preaches, either to him or to the reader. Only when directly interrogated does she share the grounds of her faith, and then reluctantly. She is aware of her truth unconsciously, in action, because she is fused with it. Her concern and love are directed at all times toward saving the tormented hero. Such self- effacement is a trademark of Dostoevsky’s righteous people, whose gestures are turned wholly outward, and who (unless ill with epilepsy and raving) tend to be short on words. The chattering, opinionated confessant in Dostoevsky is rarely worthy of trust.
Tolstoy’s variants on the truth-bearing type are different. His heroes tend to be oriented inward, constantly talking to themselves or “thinking out loud,” and they address their truth to the reader (whom they wish to persuade) more directly than to their fictive co-characters. Autobiographical heroes such as Konstantin Levin from Anna Karenina or Dmitry Nekhlyudov from the novel Resurrection (1898) are genuine seekers who come to know Truth. But the urgency of this search to their own desperate selves is such that they have no energy to attend to others as others; other people’s needs and experiences serve largely as a backboard against which to enlighten their own consciousness. (Tolstoy was of course alert to this selfish, self-inflating dynamic, and strove helplessly throughout his life to attain an unconscious humility.) It is characteristic of the gentler, more tolerant Chekhov that he created stories designed to truth-monger in reverse, showing a greater wisdom in losing one’s righteousness than in proving it. The Duel (1891) is an exemplary tale in this regard: each antagonist begins confident that he knows and can expose the fraudulence of the values that the other lives by – and manages to do so very skillfully. But at the end, both admit that “No one knows the whole truth.”
Very occasionally a failed pravednik, for all the indisputability of his failure, utterly wins the sympathy of the reader, the author, and the fictional world in which he lives. He can even be rewarded, although not with salvation. Such is the eponymous novelist-hero of The Master and Margarita (1940) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). This extraordinary novel takes place simultaneously in
38 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
three different spaces (Stalinist Moscow; Jerusalem during the crucifixion of Jesus; and some stratospheric metaphysical space undated and unmarked). The Master is tested and found wanting in fortitude – he cannot protect his novel againstthe hostileoutside world– but ultimately he is empowered,as awriter, to create the new word that alters Divine history. His mistress Margarita, who has bargained with Satan to get him back, emerges as a pravednitsa, a truth-bearer for whom loyalty and love do not merely work miracles, but are themselves the miracle.
Bulgakov’s Margarita, the unfaithful wife whose virtue is fidelity, and the saintly prostitute Sonya Marmeladova, whose “soul made flesh” hardly registers the degrading effects of her profession, are two models of the pravednitsa, or female carrier of truth. But there are others. Like Sonya, most have their source in Mary, Mother of God (in Eastern Christianity, Mary’s protective mercy is emphasized rather than her virginity). As did Rome, Russia domesticated this revered Marian image, but along somewhat different lines from the Western or Catholic Madonna, who was eroticized as early as Dante and became a cult in Europe during the Age of Chivalry. The Beautiful Lady arrived late in Russia, on the brink of the twentieth century. Even in her secularized guise, the Marian pravednitsa transcended sexuality as often as she incorporated it. Two of her most popular manifestations were as maiden or bride, and as mother.
As “bride” – even if this status exists only in the fantasies of the girl – the Russian heroine blended with the enlightened female protagonist created by the French feminist novelist George Sand (1804–76). This hybrid inspired a decade of stern, earnest female heroes, perfected by Ivan Turgenev in a triad of early novels: Rudin (1856), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), and On the Eve (1860). Each features a na??vely idealistic woman who loves and resolves to serve (that is, to save) a flawed, weak, “superfluous,” and ultimately doomed man, who inevitably fails her. The Russian source for such heroines is Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina from Eugene Onegin. While pointedly not sacrificial, Tatyana’s path is, for a love story, dazzlingly renunciatory; traces of a saint’s life glint affectionately through her childhood. Unconsummated love stories – being simpler, more controllable, and in their own lofty way, more selfish – are characteristic of truth-carriers.
The pravednitsa did not have to be a maiden or a nun. Wives and mothers in Old Russia were revered and formally canonized. Maksim Gorky’s novel Mother (1907,firstpublished inthe USAinEnglish)became themost influential incarnationof theRussianmaternalsaint in its forward-looking, atheist variant. In this founding text in the “Bolshevik tradition of secular hagiography,” the sacrificial and salvational subtext is wholly restored.5 Through love for her revolutionist son, the mother Pelegeya Nilovna outgrows both the resignation
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bred into peasant life and her own possessive nuclear-family love, becoming a comrade,a pravednitsa,andaradicalactivist for the working class. The Mother’s spiritual transformation also altered the image of the Pieta` – for if Pelegeya Nilovna enacts the Madonna at the Cross, then Christ has become a social revolutionary. Gorky’s novel ends as the son is exiled and the mother is beaten to death while proclaiming the truth of socialism in a May Day demonstration.
