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town: is this a realistic portrait or a parody? Dostoevsky- the most frightening, most hilariously comic master of all types of fool in Russian literature -built his greatest plots on the edge of blasphemy. He did not hesitate to breed a shut, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, with an abused, weak-minded orphan girl (“Stinking Lizaveta”), whom her seducer cynically calls a holy fool. The result of this union is the depraved offspring Smerdyakov, family cook and epileptic, who commits parricide.
Must Russian fools be subversive, and are they always comic? Not necessarily; the tone of a foolish narrative can be lyrical, delicate, laden with pathos. But fools must always be strange, governed by rules that others cannot grasp, or else by no rules at all. For this reason fools proliferate when cultural norms break down. In the decade following the death of Stalin (1953), there was such an explosion of eccentrics, dreamers, and wanderers - charismatically portrayed in the work of the short-story writer and film actor-director Vasily Shukshin (1929-74) - that some critics declared the chudak, the oddball or misfit, to be Russia’s new contemporary hero.11 Female fools and madwomen realize a different symbolic trajectory. In her 1998 novel Little Fool [Durochka], Svetlana Vasilenko (b. 1956) continued the tradition of “violated, pregnant holy fools” initiated by Dostoevsky12 The heroine Ganna-Nad'ka, a young mute girl with Down’s syndrome who performs miracles and is persecuted by everyone she meets in her provincial town, sings to the surrounding evil or flees it with animal-like cries. At the end, heavily pregnant, she ascends to heaven to give birth to a new sun on the brink of the Cuban missile crisis, 1962. “Nad'ka had saved us,” the narrator suddenly realizes, “there would be no nuclear strike, no missiles ... There would be no death!”13
Do holy fools always intercede for sinners, and do secular fools always stumble their way to success? That indeed has been the convention. But in the 1980s, the declining moments of the Soviet regime, a strange and colorful group of “foolish” performance artists emerged in Leningrad who targeted precisely that rosy plot - and all the plots by which our various types of Russian fool have lived. They called themselves, after their founder the Petersburg artist Dmitry Shagin, the mit'ki. They shunned work, earned next to nothing, accepted everything with a smile of good-natured irony and gentleness, and ignored all the usual standards of victory or success so as to have time for art, conversation, drink, and recitation of oral epics based on their life. In keeping with their passivity and professed “aesthetics of failure,” they dressed in grubby striped sailor shirts resembling prison garb and adopted as Russia’s defining historical event the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo- Japanese War (1904-05), when the Russian navy was defeated - that is, sunk - in several hours, a military event of unprecedented national humiliation. On principle, mit'ki neither produced
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nor condemned. They refused to consider the loss of worldly goods or reputation a bad thing. Somewhat like Charlie Chaplin (a figure much beloved by Russian audiences) but politically far more confused, the mit'ki turned personal bumbling into an art form. Unlike the lucky loafer of the fairy tale, however, in a proper mit'ki epic no one ever wins anything. Theirs was a post-heroic, post-communist ideal, equally alien to sacrificial activity, acquisition for one’s own sake or for others, masculine posturing, and meaningful protest. The mit'ki have been called “a late-Soviet inversion of Ivan the Fool.”14 Even at its most eccentric, however, theirbehavior displayed some didactic and salvational overtones. In 2001 the group gave up drinking altogether and sponsored the first free-of-charge rehabilitation center for alcoholics in post-communist Russia. A series of images of Mitya Shagin has been painted in canonical iconographic style.
The pravednik is innerly whole and single-voiced. He can be apocalyptic or merciful, an irritant to society or the savior of it. Fools, however, are double-voiced and sly. They must be ridiculed, abused, misunderstood by others. At times they present their protest as an alternative to the righteous. But holy fools are also numbered among the righteous, for they elevate moral consciousness in those who witness them. Only those pure instruments of amusement, the shut and skomorokh (jester and minstrel), are pagan enough to serve solely themselves, and for that reason so often blend with the rogue.
Frontiersmen
Between the fifteenth century and 1991, despite devastating invasions, the Russian state expanded steadily. There was always more frontier. As distances increased, however, political power was not dispersed. The highly centralized Russian Empire continued to be run from its two capitals, each of which, by the early nineteenth century, had developed a cultural mythology of its own. Pushkin’s 1833 narrative poem The Bronze Horseman and Gogol’s surreal Petersburg tales of the 1830s-40s represent the apex of the imperial Petersburg Myth, which was launched soon after the city’s founding in 1703. The myth of Moscow, although attaching to a far older city, took longer to consolidate, focusing in 1812 around the city’s occupation and burning by the French. Countering the myths of these two metropolises, the myth of the ever-widening edge became home to all those heroes who, abandoning the center or exiled from it, explored the periphery.
Three peculiarities of this expansion are worth noting.15 First, a continental empire of Russia’s vast and thinly populated sort, bordered by hostile Catholic
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or Protestant peoples to the west and hostile Islamic or pagan cultures to the south and east, gave rise to what might be called the “contiguous exotic.” But unlike the classical overseas empires of Spain, Portugal, or England, it was accessible by land, even by foot, and thus could be made familiar in routine and unspectacular ways. Colonizers could creep into it, could reside comfortably on its edges and spread out in them. Expansion involved violence, of course. But many narratives interwove peace and war. One example with an 800-year pedigree is the twelfth-century Lay [epic song] of Igor’s Campaign.
Written soon after the event, the Lay describes the ill-fated incursion by a minor prince named Igor Svyatoslavovich into hostile territory controlled by pagan Polovtsian tribes to the southeast of Kiev. In imagery of great lyrical power, the anonymous author of the Lay rebukes Prince Igor for his rash adventurism and laments his capture by the enemy. But historically, matters were not that tragic. By autumn 1187 Igor had escaped, and two years later his son Vladimir, who had also been taken hostage, married the daughter of Igor’s captor, Khan Konchak. The alliance made good military sense: quasi-Russified Polovtsians could then be deployed as warriors and spies against hos-tiletribes further east. The eastern frontier did not become culturally significant for its pragmatic military alliances, however. In the mid-1870s, the composer Aleksandr Borodin (1833–77) turned this ancient epic song into a Romantic orientalist opera, Prince Igor. In this new musical context, the “enemy to the east” became thoroughly eroticized, redefined as sensuousness and associated with savage, arousing dance. A century later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exploited another, more sinister aspect of this myth of the permeable Russian frontier. In Chapter 50 (“The Traitor Prince”) of his 1968 novel The First Circle,Russian scientists imprisoned in a research institute re- enact, as barracks entertainment, the sequence of conquest–captivity–treason–intermarriage–alliance from the Lay of Igor’s Campaign. The performance unfolds in a fictional format well known to the Stalinist era, and to these incarcerated men personally: a mock show trial. Armed with the proper sections of the Criminal Code, the inmates condemn to prison or death “Olgovich, Igor Svyatoslavich,” double-agent and spy, together with his collaborationist family, the composer Borodin, and the anonymous author of the Lay. These two famous artistic transpositions of the Igor Tale illustrate a second peculiarity of Russia’s frontier narratives: their indebtedness to Western European narrative.
Our third peculiarity concerns the compass. In the modern period, we tend to think of Russia’s frontier tensions in terms of East–West. But in fact, the North–South axis has always been equally pronounced and productive of plots. Until the twentieth century focused our attention, unhappily, on survivor narratives from Siberian
