prison camps, Russia’s most vibrant boundary in terms of
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aesthetic texts had been the southern tier. The Caucasus mountain range, Russia’s domestic Alps, was the birthplace of her native tradition of the Sublime. The discovery of awe-inspiring natural beauty on home territory raised Russian literature in its own eyes vis-a`-vis the West, which helped to compensate for other perceived backwardness.
“Frontier heroes” lend themselves to exemplary binaries, of which probably the most robust are the categories of free versus unfree. On the free side we find the monastic frontier communities, homesteaders, pilgrims, adventurers, commercial travelers, heroes of Romantic Wanderlust, and – after the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1725 – scientific expeditions. The classic Russian homesteading text, Sergei Aksakov’s Family Chronicle (1846), describes the travails of a patriarchal household that emigrated eastward into the Ufa region in the Urals, bordering the Bashkir steppe. To this same “free” line belong all Soviet-era narratives of virgin-soil settlers, Trans-Siberian railway workers, and founders of new industrial centers in the Ural mountains. On the unfree side belong the exiles and prisoners.
Two astonishing early autobiographies by pravedniki (one religious, the other political) anchor the punitive Russian frontier narrative. The first, “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself” (1670s), was composed in a vigorous vernacular Russian appropriate to its message of hunger, pain, mud, resignation, compassion, and spiritual courage. Avvakum’s “Life” is the self-accounting of a charismatic religious conservative or “Old Believer” who was persecuted, together with his family, by the official church. His travail through Siberia and then the Far North ended in martyrdom in 1682, when he was burned at the stake. The second autobiography is the 1767 memoir of Princess Natalya Dolgorukaya, who was exiled by order of Empress Anna in 1730 four days after marrying into a disgraced family. It details their 2000-mile deportation to a central Siberian settlement north of Tobolsk on the Ob River. In 1739, after her husband was broken on the wheel and beheaded for treason, Dolgorukaya’s discipline and courage held together the wrecked lives of their large clan. In such punitive narratives as Avvakum’s and Dolgorukaya’s, the scaffolding of evil events is imposed exclusively from without. Under such conditions, to sustain oneself and survive without doing harm to others is the maximum that can be asked of the victim by way of a moral goal. A hero or heroine need take no other initiative. Solzhenitsyn’s prison- camp laborer Shukhov, hero of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), speaks for the optimal plot expectations of this type of hero on the book’s final pages: because so many potentially awful things did not happen to him in his Siberian work gang during that stretch of hours, it was an “unclouded day, almost a happy one.”
46 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
This paradox of happiness achieved through unfreedom in wide open space, of salvation through imprisonment on Russia’s vast frontier, has proved spiritually very fertile for Russian literature. Raskolnikov confesses his murder in Petersburg – but only repents of it in Siberia, in prison, gazing out over the empty steppe. A story with similar geographical shape was so dear to Tolstoy that he wrote it twice, once as the peasant Platon Karatayev relates it to Pierre Bezukhov, prisoner of the French, in War and Peace (1863– 68), and then later, in 1872, in the free-standing parable “God Sees the Truth, But Waits.” A man unjustly accused of murder serves twenty-six years as a convict in Siberia, meets the real murderer there, refuses to betray him when the latter tries to escape, and both men die spiritually content. In such narratives, the unfree Siberian exile is Everyman, by birthright a sinner, for whom release into true freedom is release from life itself.
Other organizing binaries for the frontier might include civilian versus military, or the scientific explorer (cartographer, naturalist, cosmonaut at the edge of the known mapped world) versus the supernaturally assisted traveler “beyond seven seas” in the magical folk tale. Let us consider only one final contrast:settlers versus wanderers.Heretherelevant distinctionisbetweenthose who set out with the goal of arriving somewhere, of putting down roots in a new home, and those for whom space itself is their destined and undifferentiated home, their ultimate residence.
Wanderers can be secular or religious. The secular wanderers in Russian literature were largely borrowed from European Romanticism: restless, alienated Byronic heroes, who kept “travel notes” and died beyond the boundaries of the story line. The religious variant of wanderer, the strannik, was a figure of some spiritual stature. In Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), the foolish buffoon-father Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, having sired a demonically destructive son, decides, after decades of posing and sponging, to take to the open road with backpack and staff. He ends his life as a strannik in the company of a Bible-vendor, which casts a faint but authentic aura of wisdom over his otherwise parodied and indulgent person. And at the spiritual center of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Princess Marya reveres the wandering God’s folk who visit the Bolkonsky estate at Bald Hills. Her brother Andrei and her stern industrious father must ridicule these visitors, but Tolstoy’s central hero and seeker, Pierre Bezukhov, is sympathetic and curious about Marya’s guests. Seekers are drawn to wanderers.
Wanderers are not obliged to arrive anywhere, but their natural end is a monastery. In a strange mock epic written in 1873 titled The Enchanted Wanderer, Nikolai Leskov tells the story of a vigorous young man, born a serf, who carelessly commits several murders, suffers remorse, and in a vision is
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commanded to wander through Russia, the Tatar lands, and the Caucasus, constantly exposing his life to danger before being deemed worthy to become a monk. Maksim Gorky (1868–1936) tapped into the same tradition, when he launched his career as a writer in the 1890s with bestselling stories of itinerant dockworkers and charismatic tramps.
The wanderer or displaced person during war constitutes a terrible and vital subset of Russian heroes, one that remained vigorous in literature and film up through the end of the Soviet era. Its human parameters stretched from helpless children to cold-blooded killing machines (Bolshevik as well as enemy). A rich Soviet literature of the (literally) embattled frontier emerged out of the savagery of the Civil War (1918–21), which was fought simultaneously on dozens of fronts: on the Western frontier among Poles, Cossacks, and Jews, portrayed in the violent miniatures of Isaak Babel (1894–1941) in Red Cavalry (1924–26); throughout Siberia, Mongolia, and along the Chinese border in the brutal war stories (most notably Armored Train 14–69) of Vsevolod Ivanov (1895–1963), himself of mixed Polish, Mongolian, and Russian ancestry. Total war allowed these writers to bring into focus Russia’s huge ethnographic expanse through fierce personal close-ups that were at once lyrical, shockingly naturalistic, and unsentimental. When, in the 1930s, experimental war prose gave way to more conservative and expansive models – exemplary are the Quiet Don epics by MikhailSholokhov(1905–84)–theprototypeagainrevertedtoTolstoy’sclassic, Russocentric War and Peace. But all Russian war literature has tended to be read as a parable on Russia herself, a land in which experience could never be made short, painless, or small.
Rogues and villains
Our previous three hero types – righteous people, fools, frontiersmen of the ever-expanding and never- pacified edge – have noticeably Russian chrono-topes. To an important degree, each is space-and-time-specific to the Russian culture and continent. With the rogues and villains we move into more pan-European territory. The Russian rogue [plut, pronounced ploot] shares much with the Spanish picaro [rascal], his genetic cousin. But the Russian rogue exhibits some unmistakably national traits, which come into focus at those points where a rogue becomes a villain. In the Russian context, certain acts came to be considered villainous that would not be so quickly condemned elsewhere.
Rogues are not virtuous, of course, but neither are they evil. What gets in the way of evil is their buoyancy,
