The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

dandy with a smattering of foreign education courts a silly self-important governor’s wife in full view of her browbeaten spouse (a situation straight out of Fonvizin). Had she been alive to watch these

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stock-in-trade episodes on stage, the Empress Catherine II would have laughed heartily. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, however, fops and fakes are not only foolish. They are also lethal. Virtue no longertriumphs at the end. Manners are not corrected by mockery. Bouts of madness are not due to some magic potion slipped into an unsuspecting body from the outside. The madman has become shrewd, sly, multidimensional, manipulative, and this complicates our sympathy. Comic scenes in Gogol and Dostoevsky easily became demonic without the reassuring envelope of the Enlightenment.

Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”

Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), prosewriter, literary reformer, essayist, and Russia’s first major historian, almost single-handedly moved Russian literature across the century’s divide. His prose fiction has not stood the test of time. But Pushkin and his generation could not have begun to write without him, and the plots, characters, and scenarios made famous by Karamzin surface uninterruptedly in all forms (poetry, short story, drama, opera) throughout the nineteenth century. Several factors contribute to his pivotal role.

Karamzin experimented with a wide number of genres. Uncommonly for the time, he favored English and German literature over the ubiquitous French, thus broadening the traditions on which Russian writers could draw (and also lessening the merciless heat focused on Gallomania). Among these pioneering works were his Letters of a Russian Traveler, based on his tour of Europe in 1789–90, his historical romances, sentimentalist love stories, Gothic horror tales, and hortative (but not treatise-like) critical essays. Each was a popular success, and for each he created a smooth, literary-colloquial intonation that came to be known as the “novyi slog,” the “new style” – “new” in its elegance, emotionality, and politeness. Drawing creatively on French constructions, studiously avoiding both the piously inflected high style as well as the jarringly colloquial low style, Karamzin’s prose strove to reflect “how people actually talked.” Or more correctly, he created a model for the way Russian speech in the 1790s should sound among high-born, cultivated men and women in the upper-class salon – if they could be dissuaded from conversing in French.

Why was this task so timely? Fonvizin, we recall, wrote neoclassical comedies in the 1760s and 1770s remarkable for their racy dialogue and rudeness. These dramas were an enormous step forward from the stilted tragedies penned by his colleagues at Catherine’s court. But Fonvizin’s language-masks, for all their responsiveness, were brittle. The spectator’s pleasure increased to the extent that the characters on stage did not understand one another, or made fools of themselves, or were indecorously exposed in public. Such negative types, which

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constitute the major delight of this sort of comedy, move without mediation from comic buffoon to violent bully to abject vanquished villain. Decency did not have its own voice. Karamzin sought to fill in the missing “decent” layers with a style that was appropriate for empathetic communication. Only then, he believed, could Russian prose become polite, witty, nuanced, playful, and thus a part of belles-lettres.

Some men-of-letters resisted these reforms. The so-called “archaists,” or Russian-language patriots, preferred to develop the potentials of this eighteenth-century rawness rather than bleach it out. They feared, not without cause, that such prettified Gallicized Russian would become a linguistic “blandscape,” even though the “old style” was an unspeakable amalgam of bookishness (at the upper end) and crudeness (at the lower). But even to these conservatives, Karamzin was indispensable. To him Russia owes the very concept of a “reading public.”12 Karamzin advocated universal literacy, for women and children as well as for “minors.” He encouraged reading – any reading on any topic – as a dignified and honorable pastime. Unlike preceding playwrights or writers of odes, whose diction was public (either performative or rhetorical), Karamzin cultivated an intimate voice, one that sought out its readers privately and face to face. In their time, these priorities were considered quite provocative, even revolutionary. We consider only one example of the “Karamzinian revolution”: his famous 1792 Sentimentalist short story “Poor Liza.”

A peasant girl, Liza, living with her widowed mother on the outskirts of Moscow, is seduced by Erast, a young nobleman from the city. The seduction is roundabout. What first attracts the hero is Liza’s virginal innocence, so unlike his carnal relations with women in town. But after some time spent on chaste kisses under the ancient oak, the two consummate their love (during the obligatory thunderstorm). Erast begins to lose interest once his ideal shepherdess becomes merely his mistress. Eventually he leaves her on pretext of going to war, gambles away his wealth, and arranges to marry a rich noblewoman. When Liza comes across his carriage on a Moscow street, Erast cannot avoid explaining matters – and then shows her the door with a hundred rubles and a farewell kiss. In despair, Liza drowns herself in the pond near the ancient oak. Her mother dies immediately of grief. Erast, the inconstant lover, cannot be consoled. The narrator hears this story from the miserable man a year before his death.

Such seduce-and-abandon plots are found in every culture. In the West today they survive robustly in serial soap operas, teenage romances, comic strips. When they were new, however, as they were for the Russian 1790s, they shocked and mesmerized the upper classes. Russian heroines might have behaved like this, but they had not been revered for it. A cult developed around the pond where Liza met her end. Still, “Sentimentalism” is inadequate to Karamzin’s achievement. A better word would be “Sensibility,” as in Jane

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Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility (1811)- because the lachrymose suicide at the end is quite incidental. The story exists not in its events but in the tone given to those events by the narrator, a man of “sentiment.” Like Rousseau, this narrator insists on the basic goodness of human nature (Erast, we read, has “a decent mind and good heart, only he is weak and frivolous”); in this sort of world, there are no truly evil villains. The “writer of sentiment” believes in the virtuousness of spontaneous feelings, which connect us to one another more readily and influence us more profoundly than can words, ideas, or our sense of duty. The successful Sentimentalist text, whatever its central event, must unite the author, narrator, hero, and reader in a mesh of co- sympathy, co-experiencing, and co-remembering of that event.

In Western Europe, Sentimentalism, or Sensibility, had a somewhat different profile.13 Western novels - from Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Sir Charles Grandison (1754) to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelleHelo??se (1761) and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) - were by and large moralizing sagas set among the bourgeois class, or on the border between bourgeois and upper-class values, replete with concrete realistic detail. In Russia, there was not much middle class. The “realistic,” bourgeois, Sentimentalist novel of England and the continent was thus an unusable model for the pioneering Russian Sensibility. But the Russian peasant - largely unknown and thus available for idealization -represented a possible candidate for carrier of pure feelings. In this idyll, all individualizing traits disappear from bodies and words. Everyone speaks in the same emotionally heightened voice, peasant and nobleman alike. The time-space of idylls is severely constrained. Events unfold in a permanent present of emotional arousal or deflation. Liza, who makes a living by selling lilies-of-the-valley on Moscow street corners, is no recognizably Russian peasant and certainly no serf. Her family follows the biological conventions of folkloric and Romantic time, which deletes a generation: Liza is seventeen, but her mother is “in her sixties” - as if Russian women bore their first surviving children only in their late forties.

In the 1830s, Pushkin several times rewrote the Poor Liza plot, with varying degrees of affectionate irony. Dostoevsky, who knew his Karamzin thoroughly and loved all of it, gives us an urban “Poor Liza” as na??ve prostitute in his Notes from Underground, a saintly Lizaveta as the pawnbroker’s timid, hardworking half-sister (and co-murder victim) in Crime and Punishment, and an upper- class, sexually willing and sacrificial Liza in Demons. The plot was parodied and then