The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

to a “glossary” of representative types in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 was then given over to the traditional narrative forms – often undated or anonymous – that dominated cultural life up to the modernizing reign of Peter the Great (d. 1725). The remaining chapters then unfold chronologically.

Several factors ledtothis compromise decision. First, Russianliterary“types” do not cluster especially well in the abstract. They are historically conditioned and best grasped within those conditions. What is more, the practice of

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clustering heroes is usually unfair to the fictive personalities involved. As proof it is sufficient to consider the innocent, by now pedestrian label “superfluous man,” routinely applied to a certain style of Russian nineteenth- century male protagonist.The epithet wouldhave beenincomprehensible to themostfamous heroeswho bore it (Pushkin’s EugeneOnegin, Lermontov’sGrigoryPechorin) – unhappy men, perhaps, but surely not willing to be classified as unnecessary or redundant to the only life they knew. The phrase was devised decades later and applied to them only retroactively, by writers and critics who decided that a more socially responsible, productive (that is, “positive”) hero was morally preferable for Russia’s social development. Thinking by type is always crude, but historical context can help us avoid the worst abuses. One good illustration of the necessity to read Russian types historically might be the myth of a “salvation-bearing peasantry.”

Early Russian images of the rural underclass were raw and satirical. In the 1790s, in imitation of the European vogue for pastoral idylls, Russia’s first pre-Romantic writers began to sentimentalize the peasant. This myth took on weight in the 1830s–40s after the appearance in Moscow of a Slavophile movement glorifying the archaic Russian past, and thereafter was kept alive by a conscience-stricken, serfowning “repentant gentry” up to and beyond 1861, the year Tsar Alexander II emancipated the peasantry from personal bondage. One writer’s long life could encompass several stages of this evolving image. Leo Tolstoy, for example, portrays a shrewd, ethnographically diverse, ethically neutral peasantry in War and Peace (1860s), an idealized peasant in his didactic fiction of the 1880s (such as “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man”), and brutally naturalistic village life in his peasant plays, especially in The Power of Darkness (1887), written in folk dialect. Dostoevsky, whose imagination was overall an urban one, idealized the common people for reasons related largely to his own prison term in Siberia (1850–54), spent among murderers and thievesof peasantorigin.The high-bornandwealthy Turgenevwashaunted throughout his life by his tyrannical mother’s violent, capricious treatment of the family’s serfs, and his sympathetic portraits of peasants in A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) reflect this agony and painful memory. It fell to Anton Chekhov, grandson of a serf, to demythologize Russia’s commoners thoroughly, both urban and rural – before the working class was re-mythologized in the Marxist-Leninist state.

For most writers of the Soviet period, the factory worker and front-line soldier were the commoners of choice. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, when official ideology began to fray, did “Village Prose” writers offer an alternative to those two ideologically sanctioned groups in a stoic, heroic peasant who had survived modernization, collectivization, and total war to become the moral

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 13

standard of thenation. The1976 novel Farewell to Matyora byValentin Rasputin (b. 1937), tells the story of a 300-year-old peasant village on a remote island on theAngaraRiverinsouthernSiberia, doomedtodisappearwhena hydroelectric project floods the area. The final seasons of the Island are related from the dual perspective of an old woman grieving over the fate of the ancestral dead in the village cemetery, and of the Master, the Island’s guardian folk spirit. The peasant had been reinvented as an archaic hero, although no longer prettified or pastoral.

Another sensitive cultural marker is the battlefield. Types of heroes and heroism have been closely tied to Russia’s major (and minor) wars – aggressive and defensive, nation-threatening as well as the routine border conflict. Distinct lit-eraturesdevelopedaroundtheyears1812(Napoleon’sinvasion, calledthe “First Fatherland War”), 1854–55 (Crimean War), 1878 (Russo-Turkish War), 1904– 05 (Russo-Japanese War), 1914–18 (The Great War), 1918–21 (Civil War), 1941–45 (World War II or “Second Fatherland War”), and, from the nineteenth to the twenty- first century, the interminable bloodletting in Chechnya. The close integration of the military class (officers and soldiers) with civilian society throughout the imperial period (1725–1917) not only permeated literature with the martial values of sacrifice, courage, obedience, duty, and patriotic death, but also fostered a tradition of literary plots built around crises in the public domain. In the Russian context, a great writer like Marcel Proust would find no readymade place.

The Russian literary canon developed as a dialogue in time. Here I use that overworked word “dialogue” literally, not in its more metaphorical meaning that would apply, say, to the dispersed English or Italian literary traditions, each with a leisurely thousand years of distantly spaced texts. Russian literature since 1820 was a real person-to-person dialogue taking place almost entirely in two cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, the cultural capitals of a vast but highly centralized empire. All the main publishing houses were there, the reading public was there, and the rest of the country was still imperfectly mapped and largely mute. Writers knew, responded to, revered and parodied each other within their own lifetimes and the living memory of their readers. Succession rites were often overt. As an old man in 1815, the eighteenth-century court poet Gavril Derzhavin formally consecrated the teenager Pushkin to poetry. Mikhail Lermontov stepped out to fame in 1837, in the aftermath of an outraged poem he composed on the occasion of Pushkin’s death in a duel that same year. Dostoevsky in the 1840s fashioned his first literary heroes out of prototypes created by Nikolai Gogol a decade earlier – and to underscore the debt, he obliged his own heroes to read, react to, and measure themselves against fictive characters created by Gogol and Pushkin. Maksim Gorky (real

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name Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, 1868–1936), who knew both Tolstoy and Chekhov personally and revered them both, lived to become Lenin’s comrade, Stalin’s uneasy cultural commissar, and the Party’s official sponsor of socialist realism in 1934. We can speak here of a tradition so concise, responsive, and linear that chronology is its natural framework.

Literary critics and their public goods

Russia’s stunningly rapid literary rise and its importance to her sense of identity made literary activity highly self-conscious. Almost before there was a literature, Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48), Russia’s founding literary critic, was promoting indigenous talent and debating, at times ferociously, the nature of a writer’s duties. The Romantic- era notion authorizing literary critics to supervise artistic creativity and instruct the nation’s readership enjoyed a long life on Russian soil. “All our artists would wander off along various paths, because it is only the critic- journalists who show them the way,” wrote the radical critic Nikolai Shelgunov in 1870. “Novelists merely collect the firewood and stoke the engine of life, but the critic-journalist is the driver.”2 Poetry was celebrated and novels serialized in literary periodicals, the so-called “thick journals.” For most of the nineteenth century, the circulation of each of these omnibus literary almanachs rarely exceeded 700 subscribers – and this tiny readership “conversed” with itself around emerging fictional masterpieces. Successive chapters of War and Peace and Crime and Punishment appeared in the same thick journal, The Russian Herald, during the mid-1860s; traces of Tolstoy’s 1805 war turn up in the mouth of the police investigator Porfiry Petrovich while he is interrogating Raskolnikov.3 These were the dialogues that endured. When dialogue was desired with the transitory (non-fictive) world, readers became skilled in a pre- emptive interpretive strategy known as “Aesopian language.” It assumes that Russian authors, unfree to state in print what they really mean, don the sly mask of the fabulist Aesop and encode each utterance with latent content, intended for those with ears to hear it. A curious relationship then developed between literary authors and Russia’s