The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

To set poetry at one pole and “the rest of literature” at the other is a familiar reflex in literary studies, and it comes at a cost. It satisfies our intuitive sense that the most marvelous aspects of a poem collapse outside its original language, or must be wholly recreated by a translator-poet of equivalent gifts, whereas prose

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is somehow wide open, serving raw experience more than form. This binary view, unfair to the resources of both poetry and prose, leaves out rich stretches of artistic writing in between – ornamentalist prose, rhythmic speech, and “prose poems,” for example. But it nevertheless touches on an important truth. Prose is deficient in criteria and tools for precise measurement, whereas poetry has an agreed-on descriptive and critical vocabulary, beginning with rules of versification. In his Introduction to Russian Poetry and elsewhere, Wachtel argues that poets cite, converse, and bond with one another (that is, come together in a tradition) most intensely at the level of what is lost in translation. The reality of the work, its substance, is this complex of rhythmic patternings and specific aural cues. Only later does that technically identifiable mass come to be associated with certain themes (feelings, images, narrative experiences).3

How do prose writers bond and cite? Shared themes and images are important for both poetry and prose, but unlike the lyric poem, fused to the language and rhythms of its birth, prose and dramatic genres are presumed to be more resilient – orphaned without trauma and adopted with gratitude into new families. Novels, stories, and plays are routinely “realized” outside their original languages, garnering international fame in all manner of translations, to audiences that have no idea of the context or sound of the source. (Occasionally one even hears the comment that a translation can, and should, improve on the original. A variant on this position was voiced by the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera in 2007, when he argued that the aesthetic value of a given novel could be appreciated fully only in the “large context of world literature,” which for him meant by those “without a knowledge of the original language.”4) Confounded by the success of their product and uncertain about the specificity of their tools, professional prose analysts frequently default to plot summaries, the work’s “message,” the perspectives of its narrators, its reflection of real-life events, and how its fictive personalities do or do not cohere as people who resemble us, their readers, and their friends. These are all valid categories and inquiries. But they apply as readily to philosophy, sociology, politics, cultural anthropology, psychology, and simply getting through the day as they do to verbal art.

This profligate applicability of stories to life was one reason why the Russian Formalists, attempting to professionalize literary study in the 1920s, took up the challenge of narrative prose with such missionary fervor. They devisedtechnical categories for its analysis that were deliberately, polemically blind to personality and to ethics: objective terminology and procedures that would qualify artistic prose as aself-consciously “literary” (or “poetical”) construct.Itisofenormous significance that the most aggressive and fertile of these Russian prose theorists,

6The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

ViktorShklovsky(1893–1984), wrotebrashandinfluential essays onthe artistry of Miguel Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Laurence Sterne, all the while working solely, and apparently with full confidence, in Russian translation. Shklovsky did not know Spanish, English, or any foreign language. Did he consider his monolingualism a handicap? His practice as an analyst of prose suggests that in his view, a higher-order authenticity residing in the very structure or movement of literary narrative permits it to transcend the specific material out of which it is made. No verse theorist could take seriously the “scientific” results of such a method applied to his chosen subject matter.

In balancing these two wings of the Russian tradition, the poetic and the prosaic, Flaubert’s remark to Turgenev about that “flat poet, Pouchkine” has been a warning to the present volume. Flaubert was not wholly wrong. Pushkin taken out of Russian becomes two-dimensional with treacherous ease. Part of the reason, surely, is that his lyric gift was not especially pictorial. He tended to avoid metaphor, which is among the easiest elements of a poem to be transferred out of one language into another. Instead of image and metaphor, Pushkin manipulated for poetic purposes various grammatical categories, largely case endings and the verbal aspect peculiar to Slavic tongues – all the while delivering a lucid, pure, almost conversational speaking line.5 Other great poets of thicker, more startling texture, such as Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), built so inventively out of Russian phonemes that each verbal unit literally explodes on the ear with a mass of lexical and rhythmic associations. Such effects can hardly be registered outside their native element. But some genres of poetry (longer narrative poems, ballads, and many types of verse satire) communicate powerfully in translation, and these will be selectively stitched in to the chapters that follow. Perhaps most important, the lives (and deaths) of poets – heroic, sacrificial, prophetic – are themselves texts of the utmost centrality to the Russian literary canon.

There is a final intriguing paradox. Michael Wachtel is surely correct that Russian poets cultivate a highly formal communal identity out of aural and rhythmic reminiscence. But prose writers seem to have cultivated the opposite, a form-breaking impulse. Several high-profile Russian writers celebrated their resistance to, if not downright defiance of, all the received forms or genres out of which Western literary canons were built. To cite only the most famous, Leo Tolstoy, writing in 1868 upon the conclusion of War and Peace: “the history of Russian literature since the time of Pushkin not merely affords many examples of deviation from European forms, but does not offer a single example of the contrary . . . In the recent period of Russian literature not a single artistic prose work rising at all above mediocrity quite fits into the form of a novel, epic, or story.”6 Because Ivan Turgenev wrote trim little novellas that resembled

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French and Italian prose classics, he was viewed with suspicion as a renegade, insufficiently disobedient and exotic to be truly Russian. The same charge was later leveled against his well-trained, formally disciplined, Western-friendly compatriot in music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Russian spokespersons for the canon have long been protective of its eccentric, high-risk, rebellious profile. The greatest writers seemed always to be in trouble with their regimes, and the worst regimes in turn felt threatened by writers. But a persecuted or martyred writer could be posthumously cleansed of ideological impurities and elevated to approved, even to cultic, status in a series of state-sponsored Jubilees. This happened massively with Pushkin (d. 1837) at the end of the nineteenth century, with Tolstoy (d. 1910) beginning with the centenary of his birth in 1928, and with the great Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (d. 1930), glorified by Stalin’s decree five years after he had committed suicide. A writer privileged to be part of this pantheon could be alternately repressed and sponsored, shoved into the limelight and just as suddenly yanked back into the shadows. One can only wonder, looking back at the process from a freer time, how much of that heroic story of literature’s cen-trality to Russian culture was itself manipulated. How might Russian identity have developed without these violent enthusiasms and constraints?

Such thought experiments are sobering. For of the three major forces that disseminated literature and compensated writers – the ruling court (tsarist or communist), the aristocratic salon, and the bookseller’s market – “royal patronage,” with its hectoring censorship and selective sponsorings, has probably done the most to foster the high-minded texts that we associate with the immortal Russian classics. But did the average Russian citizen in times of distress really recite poetry like a mantra? How many readers actually desired to change their lives, as those great novels (and novelists, and literary critics) constantly urged them to do? The story of the two-hundred- year rise of Russian literature became its own bestselling novel – although, some now suggest, largely among the elite groups invested in the story.

This hazard is inherent in discussions of any canon, but of the Russian more than most. Among the virtues of Jeffrey Brooks’s path-breaking study When Russia Learned to Read (1985) is its conclusion that the majority of ordinary Russian consumers of literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century resembled our own sensation-seeking, escapist Western readerships far more closely than the morally saturated,