often mournful high canon would lead us to believe.7 When, for example, adventure, crime, and detective fiction began to attract a mass Russian market in the 1890s and again in the 1920s, the cultural intelligentsia took fright: escape and thrills were not compatible with the mission of the Great Tradition. For all that this turf war raged over
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keenly valued goods, Russian “high” and “low” cultures were not isolated from each other. Plots, fads, and literary devices moved in both directions. Among the services rendered by recent scholarship is to remind us that most people, including great writers who live in authoritarian or “closed” regimes, have everyday lives and non- heroic appetites. The pull of pleasurable distraction interrupts the grimmest political threats as well as the temptations of tragedy and high significance. Pushkin, lofty persecuted poet, loved comic opera and formulaic verse comedy throughout his life. Sergei Prokofiev, repatriated to the USSR on the brink of the Great Terror, had long courted commissions (from Hollywood and elsewhere) for the frothiest film music. It was this rigid aspect of Russian reverence for its canonical writers and writings that began to loosen up in the 1980s, most frequently through affectionate irony, occasionally through abuse, but always with the sense (thrilling to some, terrible to others) that the stability of a massive and precious edifice was at stake.
Such, then, have been the major anxieties informing this project: the status of the “high” canon; the indispensability of the Russian language to it; and the self-mythologization of Russia’s literary tradition. For each anxiety, compromises were eventually found. Some parts of poetry survive admirably in translation, because form has many ways of making itself felt. It was my working assumption that the major literary works of a cultural tradition do submit to a technical treatment more rigorous and interesting than a paraphrase of plots, feelings, and ideas. Tools of analysis can be devised. Alongside the evolution of poetically analyzable structures – the ode, ballad, elegy, blank-verse lyric, revolutionary “stepladder verse” [
movement (socialist realism) was deliberately designed to debunk, relativize, and humiliate European literary models.
Let me return in closing to the anxiety about “rudderless freedom” raised in the opening pages. Does Russia’s partially “normalized” post-communist literary life, which has greatly diminished the role and status of the creative writer, threaten the integrity of the tradition? Perturbations have been severe, but apocalypse is nowhere in sight. In-print verbal art continues to have splendid survival advantages, regardless of sinister twists in Kremlin politics and even in competition with today’s image-saturated, instantly accessible cybernetic world. To its immense good fortune, literature does not need the big budgets, collective efforts, or approved public spaces required to realize symphonic music, visual art exhibits, cinematic productions or large-scale architectural projects. Its more compact forms can be carried in the pocket, composed (and also carried) in the head. Heroic legends abound concerning this latter mode of survival under the most recent Old Regime. Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the great poet, committed her husband’s entire poetic corpus to memory “for safekeeping” during the Stalinist years, until it was no longer dangerous to write it down. Since literary texts are so very dispersed and so inefficiently, individually, privately processed, inertia tends to be huge. One can blow up an offensive monument but cannot gather up and burn all copies of a published novel. A state bureaucracy can ban a film or mutilate an opera, but it cannot prevent us from memorizing and mentally re-experiencing a poem in all its fullness.
And finally: unlike the progressive, falsifiable sciences or (at the other extreme) the capriciously marketed world of fashion, great literature does not date. It accumulates contexts rather than outgrows them, for literature is designed to speak to the current needs of the person who activates it. Who are these “activators”? Although today’s Russian school curriculum might no longer require
With that fact in mind it is worth asking, in Milan Kundera’s spirit, whether a literature need belong to its own nation at all. Russian lovers of the word are of two minds on this issue, professing two ideals. In the first, that peculiar chauvinism exemplified by Dostoevsky, Russian literature is a common denominator for the world, yet only Russians are privileged to understand it. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some leading Russian sociologists still see in the Russian national character a “negative identity” driven by self-deprecating exceptionalism, ennui, sentimentality, constant expectation of
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catastrophe, and an alarming xenophobia.8 It is indeed true that these character traits read like a home page for the darker sides of Dostoevsky’s novels. But it is also true – and this is the second ideal – that Russian literature long ago slipped out from under the tutelage of the nation that produced it. Russian artists – in literature, theatre, dance, music, film – have inspired more disciples and “schools” around the world than any other single national culture. Since the early 1990s, a bit of that openness has been coming home.
Critical models, committed readers, and three Russian Ideas
“Apart from reading,” Dostoevsky’s Underground Man complains, “there was no place to go.”1 The metaphor is striking. So central was proper reading to the cultured Russian’s self-image and sense of realitythat poetry, fictional literature, memoirs, diaries, even personal letters from and among great writers almost constituted a
Several models were considered for this book. The first was the most conventional: selected writers and their works juxtaposed to one another in chronological sequence. A second model suggested itself around distinctive Russian genres: saint’s life, fairy tale, war epic, “notes” or casual jottings [
