The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

spectacularly Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), became internationalcelebrities and media stars, asmuch for their lives and philosophies as for their art. The self-consciousness of this

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tradition was furthered by a steadily rising literacy rate, the emergence of a mass press, and also by recurring national trauma, censorship, and an edgy, often defensive “exceptionalism” – that is, by the insistence that Russia was so special that she could not be judged by normal (which is to say, Western European) standards of progress, health, or success. “Normalization” at some non-catastrophic level became a possibility only for post- communist Russia. But many Russians – and Russia-watchers as well – have feared that rudderless freedom and the abrupt dethroning of literature’s role as arbiter of national identity might spell the end of the Russian literary tradition.

This book is predicated on the assumption that such fears are unfounded. A literary tradition can crack, interbreed with alien elements, be subject to massive purging and parodies of itself, incessantly predict its own demise, and still remain robust. Indeed, purgings and parodies need not discredit the corpus but can become identifying traits and even load-bearing structures within the tradition. The enduring core of this tradition is called the “literary canon.” The phrase requires some explanation. The canon of a nation’s literature – its best-known texts, plots, fictional characters, plus the mythically enhanced biographies of its writers – does not have the force of a religious doctrine or a legal code. It changes constantly, but slowly, more by accretion and decay than by fiat. A given canon looks different, of course, to native speakers raised inside the culture that gave birth to it, than it does to outsiders who speak another language and depend upon translations. The literary canon of any national culture works in approximations. Ask any dozen interested readers to identify “canonic works” from a given culture, and each will come up with a different list. But chances are excellent that all lists will contain some works in common. Our goal is to stick close to that common core.

As used here, the phrases “literary tradition” and “literary canon” refer to works of creative fiction that satisfy three criteria. First, these are the created worlds (or writers’ biographies) that generations of Russians have been raised on and are expected to recognize, the way English speakers recognize the shape of one of Shakespeare’s plots (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet) and Spanish speakers the tribulations of Don Quixote. Merely mentioning the name is enough to bring up the story, for these are common denominators, a sort of cultural shorthand. Although these plots are themselves often of international (or pan-European) origin, the Russian canon is unusually rich in common denominators that peaked first in other national literatures and then were adapted, with fierce enthusiasm and particularity, as Russia’s own (the “Russian Hamlet,” the “Russian Don Quixote”).

Second, texts become canonical when they are repeatedly referenced, recycled, and woven into successive artistic worlds so that they never entirely fade

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from view. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (set between 1805 and 1819) had an impact in its own time (the 1860s), inspired an opera (by Sergei Prokofiev in the 1940s), a steamy parodic sequel titled Pierre and Natasha (in the 1990s), and along the way a mass of reverent and irreverent illustrations, films, spin-offs, caricatures, and comic strips. Natasha Rostova has now become a personality that can enter other stories (including real-life ones); she is not limited to the plots that Tolstoy created around her.

And finally: the literary canon is proof of the legitimating aesthetic judgment of readers over time. Of course politics, censorship, taste, prejudice, accidents of loss or discovery, and approved reading lists play a role in the canonizing process. But overall, canonic works survive because they are excellent. Excellence in an artwork is both formal (that is, due to its efficient aesthetic construction) and “psychological” – that is, we recognize a classic because it has rewarded multiple interpretations of itself from multiple points of view, over generations.

During the century that it has existed in adequate English translation, the Russian canon of novels and plays has acquired a reputation and a certain “tone.” It is serious (that is, tragic or absurd, but rarely lighthearted and never trivial), somewhat preacherly, often politically oppositionist, and frequently cast in a mystifying genre with abrupt or bizarre beginnings and ends. The novels especially are too long, too full of metaphysical ideas, too manifestly eager that readers not just read the story for fun or pleasure but learn a moral lesson. These books are deep into good and evil even while they parody those pretensions. If there is comedy – and Russian fiction can be screamingly funny – there is a twist near the end that turns your blood to ice. Russian literary characters don’t seek the usual money, career, success in society, sex for its own sake, trophy wife or husband, house in the suburbs, but instead crave some other unattainable thing.

How one should respect this reputation and received “tone” is a delicate issue. In the literary humanities, an Introduction is a subjective enterprise. It has a shape of its own, which means big gaps and broad leaps. It is not a history, handbook, encyclopedia, digest of fictional plots or real-life literary biographies, and even less is it a cutting-edge textbook summarizing, as science textbooks can, the “state of the art.” No in-print genre today can compete with search engines or updatable online resources for objective information of that sort. An Introduction probably works best as a tour guide, pointing out landmarks, road signs, and connecting paths. Since its purpose is to lead somewhere more complex than the point at which it began, it should introduce names, texts, and themes that an interested reader can pursue elsewhere in more detail. A non-Russian author inviting a non-Russian audience to enter this territory is thus obliged, I believe, to select as exemplary those literary texts and tools

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that are accessible “from the outside.” They must exist in decent translations, survive as genuine works of art in their target languages (here, English), and be capable of accumulating cultural weight beyond Russia’s borders.

With minor exceptions, this defines the transposable Great Russian prose canon, plus perhaps a dozen plays. It neglects the empire’s cultural minorities. This prose canon contains very few women (the Russian nineteenth century had no Jane Austen, George Eliot, or George Sand) – although groundbreaking research on Russian women’s writing over the past three decades has brought to light many formerly invisible authors and works. For reasons of space, the Russian e?migre? community is excluded from this book (together with the aristocratic and very Russian genius of Vladimir Nabokov, who has stimulated a Russo-American industry of his own).

The most significant compression in the present volume, however, occurs in the realm of Russian poetry, which can only be a secondary presence in the story. The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry has already been written, by Michael Wachtel; the present book can be seen as a companion to it. Our tasks are quite different. Wachtel notes provocatively in his opening sentence: “The achievements of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy notwithstanding, Russian literature is a tradition of poetry, not prose, and Russian readers have always recognized it as such.”1 Russian readers, yes – but not the rest of the world. Europe ignored the Slavic tongues. Highborn, educated Russians of the imperial period were raised bilingually, spoke French in polite society, and many knew English and German as well. Europeans by and large did not presume that any benefits could be gained by learning Russian. And why should they? The Russian officers who occupied Paris in 1814 spoke French as purely and elegantly as their defeated foe. Some Russian writers, like Pushkin’s friend Pyotr Chaadaev as late as the 1830s, argued that the Russian tongue was unsuited to refined philosophical thought. This imbalance in language competencies contributed to a curious, and not unjustified, superiority complex in many great Russian writers. Most insistent in this regard was Fyodor Dostoevsky in his journalism of the 1870s. We can translate you, Dostoevsky proclaimed, but you cannot translate us. We can grasp, absorb and transfigure your legacy, but ours is mysterious, potent, for us alone. When the quatralingual Ivan Turgenev, living in Paris in the 1870s, presented some poems by Pushkin in his own French translation to Gustave Flaubert, the latter shrugged: “Il est plat, votre poe`te” [He’s flat, your poet].2