reconstituted in sequential transpositions throughout the century. In Pushkin’s 1833 “Queen of Spades,” for example, the old Countess’s ward [poor] Liza tries, but fails, to seduce Germann, the engineer-officer who is stalking her - for he is really only after the secret of the three cards. Thus Pushkin’s
Liza survives, gets over her infatuation, and marries someone else. When Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a composer of profound Sentimentalist vision, turned Pushkin’s tale into his opera
But the most complex commentary on all Russian seduce-and-abandon plots is surely Leo Tolstoy’s final full- length novel,
In closing, let us note one paradox shared by neoclassical comedy, Chulkov’s picaresque novel, and Karamzin’s Sentimentalism. The high-minded, virtuous heroes in all three categories become, to later audiences, dismally boring. Starodum and Pravdin, Milon and Sofya, Erast and Liza, even Martona’s lovers when they begin to behave, are one-liners with a one-dimensional afterlife. In contrast, the Brigadier, Prostakova, Skotinin, Mitrofan, Martona, Knyazhnin’s Jester are unforgettably vital - and ubiquitous. This dilemma took its toll on many writers, most tragically Nikolai Gogol. Gogol’s inability to portray a positive character was one factor contributing to his creative, and then physical, death. But Pushkin, Russia’s other Romantic-era genius, will find several ways out. His true heroes are known not by their virtue, but by the more complex concept of honor. A personal friend of Karamzin and much indebted to him, Pushkin nevertheless undertook to roughen up Karamzin’s prose, re-masculinize it, reclaim it from the salon and take it into the real outdoors. In the process, Pushkin the poet, prose writer, and dramatist became for Russia what Shakespeare is for the English-speaking world, an unsurpassed standard. To his astonishing century we now turn.
Sculpture of Aleksandr Pushkin by M. K. Anikushin, installed on Arts Square in Leningrad in 1957. Photograph by Michael Julius.
The astonishing nineteenth century: Romanticisms
In the early nineteenth century, 5 percent of Russia’s people could read. The fate of literature was in the hands of several dozen gifted, well-born, multilingual innovators, concentrated in the two capital cities and writing for one another. No literary “profession” existed, nor a “public opinion”; criticism of new poems or dramas took place in salons, theatre foyers, private correspondence. But this tiny community of cultured readers and writers, although cut off from the mass of their countrymen, never doubted that it was part of mainstream European culture. It passionately followed shifts in literary taste on the continent and, as neoclassicism gave way to cults of sentiment, furiously debated each step.
Like Romantics throughout Europe, Russian writers reacted against overly rationalisticviewsof human nature andthe universalizingclaims of theEnlight-enment. The gothic and grotesque came into fashion. E. T. A. Hoffmann popularized cults of the poet, of creative madness and the fantastic; the early Dickens opened up the urban slum as an exotic locale with an ethnography of its own. Folklore, the unique spirit of one’s native language, and national history began to compete with the neoclassical convention of borrowed plots and stock characters. Russia rapidly absorbed the major Romantic prose genres from Europe: society tale, novel-in-letters, “travel notes,” “southern” (or orientalist) tale, diary and memoir, historical romance. But for all this cosmopolitanism, the
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two Russian Romantic-era writers who are the focus of this chapter – Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) and Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) – are difficult to place on the European map. Although each endorsed the Romantic view of “poet as national prophet,” neither embraced Romantic rebellion, or even Romantic individualism, as usually defined. With his impeccable taste, implied audience of insiders, and unquestioning faith in the power (and responsibility) of the poet to elucidate rather than mystify with words, Pushkin remained in many respects a neoclassicist, an eighteenth-century writer.1 And as regards Gogol, no ready-made genre conventions apply. His Ukrainian folk and terror-tales, his humanoid caricatures and unclassifiable, out-of-control plots can pass from irrepressible laughter to unspeakable dread in the space of a phrase. Among the canonical Russian writers, the brief life of Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) probably comes closest to reflecting the pan-European Romantic spirit.
During the reign of Alexander I, literary patronage came to an end.2 Writers were obliged to seek other means of material support. Under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), the publicist Nikolai Novikov had stoutly refused to serve solely the interests of the empress – and to finance his publishing activities, he sold off inherited estates. Nineteenth-century writers were rarely so fortunate. They owned and managed (that is, mortgaged) serfs, served as military officers, worked as government bureaucrats. A commercially viable press began to function in the 1830s, but the best writing was not always the most marketable. Pushkin insisted on a decent price for his work, but he did not successfully make the transition from aristocratic to middlebrow readerships and was saddled with debts his entire life. Gogol scraped by on loans, subsidies from his mother’s estate, and publishers’ contracts. Occasionally a writer succeeded at a spectacular, high-profile imperial career. Karamzin, for example, was appointed to the salaried post of Historian Laureate in 1803, and until his death in 1826 he labored full time over his highly acclaimed
