self-confidence, sense of humor, high level
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of responsiveness, and the fact that they live off the land. If they prosper, it is because their human surroundings are corrupt, greedy, foolish, selfish – or simply amoral. Rogues are survivors; they live by symbiosis and take on the color of the terrain. There is something of Ivan the Fool in them, rooted in the immediate present, although rogues are far more energetic andentrepreneurial. Often we cannot help feeling gratified at a rogue’s success. A villain, in contrast, creates victims.
Consider the most famous Muscovite exemplar, “Frol Skobeyev the Rogue,” set in the 1680s. Frol is a poor solicitor. He wants to marry Annushka the stolnik’s daughter (a stolnik is a high-ranking court official who served the tsar at table). So he bribes Annushka’s nurse to let him attend her sleepover party dressedas a girl. He ends upin bed with Annushka, who, at first shocked, rapidly develops a liking for her seducer and their mutual sport. By means of various minor blackmails the couple manages to elope. The parents are scandalized; the tsar is alerted; Frol confesses his heinous deed to his in-laws with a shrug. The incensed parents ban their daughter and son-in-law from their house. The daughter fakes illness to win over her parents, at which point the parents send an icontoheal herbecause “apparently God himself haswilled that such arogue be our daughter’s husband”; and Frol, without effort or apology, ends up the heir to all the stolnik’s estates.16 Are we to condemn Frol Skobeyev, or secretly admire him? Both at once, perhaps. Much in our answer depends on context, tone, and the rogue’s own capacity for moral growth. These can vary widely. One study of early Russian rogue tales identifies four career trajectories: the rogue repentant, rewarded, punished, and “unresolved.”17 With their ability both to titillate and to admonish, rogue tales proved immensely popular. In the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol became godfather to the greatest rogues’ gallery on Russian soil.
Gogol’s swaggering tricksters had sprawling progeny in the twentieth century, all with fanatic cult followings. This colorful family includes the Jewish gangster-hero Benya Krik in the Odessa tales of Isaak Babel; the free, illegal, comic spirit of Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender, conman and impostor of the early Soviet years; the justice- bearing troublemakers Koroviev and Behemoth from the Devil’s entourage in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Two things must be noted about this class of rogue. First, in keeping with the traditional Russian virtues of hospitality, generosity, communality, circulation of wealth – and also their inverse, Russian intolerance for profit-making schemes and hoarding of any sort – the Gogolian rogue is overwhelmingly a mercenary one. The tests that he puts to others, and the tests that the narrative puts to him, concern proper and improper uses of money. Pavel Chichikov, the conman in Dead Souls who buys up and then tries to mortgage deceased serfs, is shallow and
Heroes and their plots 49
unappealing. But his flaws pale in comparison with Plyushkin, the miser in that novel, whose hoarded wealth turns to rot and whose person becomes paranoid and beggarly. Plyushkin is beyond rogue or villain, a black hole that sucks in every material thing and immobilizes it. He is absolutely unredeemable. Greed of this paralyzing scope is so disrespected that rogues who redistribute wealth by any means, on any pretext, can easily become noble outlaws, or cease to be outlaws at all.
This Russian discomfort with material accumulation provokes our second co mment. Acco rding to Vladimir Nabokov, Russian ro guery - at least in Gogol’s fictional gallery - boasts a special sub-type, the poshlyak (from the adjective poshlyi: vulgar, trivial, banal), designating a self-satisfied materialist, a mediocrity, the ultimate consumer mentality. This mediocrity knows neither heights nor depths; he is cautious, acquisitive, narrow-minded. To bolster his weight in the world, he would always prefer to buy than to spend. In Crime and Punishment, Pyotr Luzhin (his name derives from luzha, “mud puddle,” and also suggests the German l u?gen/Russian l'gat', to tell a lie) is one such figure, whose economic pragmatism degenerates rapidly into moral villainy. In War and Peace, Tolstoy forgives the extravagant, impulsively generous and financially bankrupt Rostov family, even when their fiscal irresponsibility causes a great deal of grief. He marries the profligate survivors, Natasha and herbrother Nikolai, to wealthy heirs and heiresses. But Tolstoy does not forgive the elder Rostov daughter Vera and her shallow, calculating husband Berg for decorating their apartment out of the spoils of war. He does not even forgive Sonya -the loyal, thrifty, morally astute ward of the Rostovs - for caring about the family’s expensive carpets when their carts are being unloaded to make room for wounded officers during the evacuation of Moscow. No capital value can accrue to a thing, only to a life.
Following Dostoevsky’s lead, twentieth-century Russian satire of Western societies tended to target one aspect especially: bourgeois prosperity. Such satirists routinely ignored (or discredited as sham) whatever civil liberties or political freedoms they saw, emphasizing only the triviality, conformity, and tedium of a comfortably provisioned life. One good example is The Islanders, a novel of British life written in 1918 by Evgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937), by profession an engineer who supervised the construction of Russian icebreakers in England during World War I and later authored the anti-utopia We. In a celebrated moment near the end of Solzhenitsyn’s great novel The Cancer Ward (1968), the camp (and cancer) survivor Gleb Kostoglotov, just released from the hospital ward, overhears in a department store a man ask for a shirt with a size fifteen collar. He is staggered. “Why return to this life?” he asks himself. “If you have to remember your collar size, you’d have to forget something
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else, something more important!” The widespread Western idea that life can be difficult, useful, and morally demanding while also being well ordered and prosperous is not easy to defend against this very Russian fear of becoming a poshlyak. Indeed, the abstract noun from poshlyi - poshlost' - is one of two Russian words that Nabokov insisted had no “Western” equivalent.18 (The other word, toska, refers to a peculiarly targetless Russian melancholy.) Part of the translation difficulty begins with the Eastern Orthodox Christian model of society, which makes no provision for a Protestant elite that justifies its accumulation of wealth (with or without the work ethic) as proof of God’s favor. Quite the opposite: an excess of possessions can lead only to smugness and spiritual inertness. Material security - a morally neutral background texture for many literary plots in post-industrial countries - has aroused far greater irritation and suspicion in Russian culture.
One category of roguishness was not well developed in the Russian context: the professional roue or sexual rogue (Don Juan or Casanova for men, femme fatale for women). This important type entered Russian high literary culture only during the Romantic period, and even then long retained the flavor of a European import. When Pushkin tried his hand at the Don Juan legend (The Stone Guest, 1830, one of his four “Little Tragedies” in verse), it was with the intent of demonstrating that Russian authors, and the Russian language, could deal confidently with the most cosmopolitan European plots. But characteristically, Pushkin awards his Don Juan lofty poetic dimensions that undercut the covetous physical aspect of his pursuit and add aesthetic luster to it. If Pushkin cleanses and poeticizes the purely sensuous, then Tolstoy darkens and coarsens it. When he touched upon the femme fatale type with his own Helen of Troy, Helene Kuragina-Bezukhova in War and Peace, she became perversion incarnate, a one-dimensional woman unworthy of psychological investigation. It can even be argued that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina - whom he most certainly did deem worthy of subtle psychological treatment - is brought to suicide not by the fact of her infidelity and not by the loss of her son, both long familiar facts of her life with Vronsky, but by jealousy nourished, to her horror, by an uncontrollably growing sexual appetite.
