9 Coming to terms and seeking new terms: from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of
the millennium220
The intelligentsia and the camps
(Solzhenitsyn)224
The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)230
Three ways for writers to treat matter
(Sorokin, Pelevin, Akunin)238
(photobyMichael Julius)
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This is a book for the advanced beginner. It is not presumed that the reader has taken any courses in Russian literature or history, nor studied the Russian language (although I do introduce a number of Russian words for which there are no precise cultural equivalents; these words are gathered in a glossary at the end). All works discussed exist in English translation and most enjoy considerable name recognition outside Russia. But the beginner is nevertheless not entirely a blank slate. Most readers, hopefully, will have read a story or seen a play by Chekhov and know something by Tolstoy (perhaps
Because the book is for beginners, those professional colleagues who helped me by reading drafts, prodding out errors, and advising me on what to delete know a great deal more than the book’s target audience. And yet they kept their erudition in check, remembering that the purpose here is to introduce and seduce, not to resolve some scholarly debate. Of those who donated their page-by-page insights and services to this project I thank, above all, my Princeton colleagues Michael Wachtel (whose
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Many hundreds of Princeton undergraduates in my literature courses over the past twenty years have helped me to see what texts did (and did not) speak to the curious, but still “common” reader. For scrutiny and scholarly feedback from outside the Princeton community, I am indebted to three of my most astute longstanding readers, Kathleen Parthe?, Donna Tussing Orwin, and (in a class of her own as stylistic editor and critic) Josephine Woll, whose untimely death from cancer in March 2008 makes the imprint of her intelligence on these pages all the more precious..
Then there are my own teachers, in print as well as in person, whose traces are everywhere and edgeless: George Gibian, Sidney Monas, Victor Erlich, Robert Belknap, Michael Holquist, Robert Louis Jackson, Richard Taruskin, Donald Fanger, Joseph Frank.
In this as in other Cambridge University Press projects, Linda Bree has been the exemplary editor, ably assisted this time round by Maartje Scheltens, Elizabeth Davey, and Jacqueline French. At the final inch, which became a very demanding mile, Ivan Eubanks provided indispensable editorial, formatting, and research services. Jason Strudler helped me cut 23,000 words from the final draft without batting an eye.
Debtstomyfamily thistimeround are deeper thanever.Tomyever supportive and enabling husband Ivan Zaknic, my parents, and my siblings, the usual gratitude for accepting the fact that the wisdom and provocation of the Russian literary tradition has been my lodestar for as long as I can remember, obliging them to make allowance, decade after decade, for odd priorities and monumental blind spots. Special thanks are due to my father David Geppert, who is the sort of reader and interlocutor that most writers can only dream about, and to my sister Trisha Woollcott, certified nurse-midwife, who persisted in calling Nikolai Gogol “google” and whose no-nonsense diagnostic skills detected all manner of verbal obfuscation. To my grandnephew and godson Nicholas, born in 2004 and thus also a beginner, this volume is lovingly dedicated.
Russian literature is compact, intensely self-reflexive, and always about to forget that it is merely made up out of words. Imagined characters walk out of fiction into real life, while real-life writers are raised to the status of myth. Myths consolidated first around saints, then around cities (St. Petersburg and Moscow), then around biographies of writers, finally around ethical and ideological systems. When measured against the subcontinents – Europe and Asia proper – that flank Russia to the west, south, and east, this tradition is remarkable in two respects: its extreme brevity, and its lateness. Chinese literature is calibrated in millennia. Masterpieces in Arabic date from the fifth century. Dante wrote his
From that point on, the rise was unprecedentedly swift. Within two decades, from 1815 to the end of the 1820s, two paradigm-shifting events came to pass that provided prime binding material for national myth: Russia’s most perfect military victory (the expulsion of Napoleon, from 1812–15) and the maturity of her most perfect poet, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837). These achievements were not the crowning peaks of a national history but its beginning, and they shaped the public face of modern Russia and of Russian literature. It was a two-faced Janus. Pushkin came to represent a style of creativity so cosmopolitan that a Russian man (or woman) of letters was presumed to be at home, linguistically and culturally, anywhere in Europe. During those same years, however, Napoleon’s defeat and its aftermath led to a chauvinistic closing-down of Russia as a sociopolitical entity, and to a pattern of suspicious confrontation with the West that has continued, with small windows of relief, into the twenty- first century.
Such was the visible point of origin. A scant fifty years after Pushkin’s birth, Russians were producing works of prose fiction that not only were translated into every major world language, but whose authors, most
