pragmatic, corrupt) fed their tolerance of “re-utopianization.” For if every alternative was always
fatally deficient, perhaps it made better sense to stick with the ideal. Idealist logic was the reverse of Bazarov’s scientific nihilism, which required above all that the material world be made to “work.” But it is characteristic of these utopias that the reader can never be convinced that the scenario is not simply a sly undercutting of the entire idea. Even the most famous of revolutionary utopias, Chernyshevsky’s 1862
Anti-utopias, it turns out, are as double-voiced as utopias. It is both impossible to remain as we are, and impossible to survive in a society where our current vices have been eliminated. Vladimir Mayakovsky (1894–1930) was a Bolshevik poet, committed in word and deed to the futuristic slogans of the new regime. But in the final scene of his dystopian comic drama
The heroes we might yet see, and what lies ahead
This gallery of favored Russian heroes has not been strong in certain categories widespread in Western fiction. Virtuous merchants and productive bureaucrats are few, beautiful sinners are rare. Has the twenty-first century already irreversibly changed this repertory? After the collapse of cultural controls, the
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classics ceased to be lavishly subsidized and the boundary between “high” and “low” literature began to erode. Russian literary space openly welcomed persons and themes that had always been on the brink of taboo: detective fiction featuring state security personnel or the ruling dynasty or party; crime where the state is to blame; wars that Russia has lost or is losing (like Afghanistan and Chechnya); attractively snappy capitalists. And also, to be sure, explicit pornography, violence, and misogyny. Whereas the tsarist-era and Soviet canon held women’s rights sacred (and preferred salvational women to superfluous men), that prejudice is now gone. Instead we begin to see a partial return to the bawdy mixed prose of the eighteenth century, to wide-open (not Aesopian) satire, and to the amoral ethics of the folk tale. These and other narratives of the pre-Pushkin era are the subject of our next two chapters.
Traditional narratives
Russian medieval culture was rich, but not in the printed word. Folk and religious art was visual and aural: folk tales, epic and everyday songs, round dances, charms for healing the sick, rituals for marrying and burying, laments for men lost to the army during recruiting season, saints’ lives and the liturgy. In 1563, Tsar Ivan the Terrible allowed a printing press to be set up in Moscow. The first book published in Russian on Russian soil, an elaborate edition of readings from the Apostles for use in the liturgy, appeared in 1564. In 1565, the press was destroyed by a mob incited by clerical authorities. Accused of heresy, the master printer Ivan Fyodorov “fled for unknown lands” - but printing continued under the protection of Tsar Ivan himself.1 This cautionary tale,
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in which an absolute ruler pushes through a modernizing reform against the popular will, resonates throughout Russian history. Although printing made steady gains, until the late seventeenth century, the small number of literate Russians preferred scrolls to printed books.
Traditional texts were performed in connection with specific communal rituals. This sense of the “oneness” of a literary work with its experienced environment remained an ideal for many Russian writers, long after the triumph of the privately authored, privately consumed book. In his final years, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) provocatively declared a wedding song and a well-timed anecdote or joke preferable to a symphony or a novel. At the time of his death, the visionary Symbolist composer Aleksandr Scriabin (1872–1915) was planning a vast choral work of divine revelation,
