The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

fledgling civic and professional discourses – the quasi-public speech of salons, theatre foyers, student circles, meetings of medical societies, scholarly gatherings, jubilee anniversaries for famous artists or scientists, lawyers at public jury trials.4 This growing professional class adored literature and relied on its heroes and themes to authenticate their public statements. The respect was often not returned: literary authors, in their fiction, continued to portray “group” and public speech either satirically – or criminally. It would appear that many creative writers

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 15

considered civic speech, mediated by institutions and a rising corporate consciousness, an unwelcome rival.

Although intellectual freedom in the public sphere constricted at times to the choking point, Russian thought about literature broadened and became more systematic in the twentieth century. Russian theories burst upon the world, with ambitions of being applied to the world. Russian Formalists in the 1920s made claims about the nature of all narrative; the structuralist Roman Jakobson about all language; cultural semioticians in the 1960s–70s (Yury Lotman and his Tartu School in Soviet Estonia) about all sign systems; and the ideas on dialogue, carnival, and literary time-space of an obscure provincial professor, Mikhail Bakhtin, came to be embraced by a vast global community a decade after his death. In deference to this rich critical tradition, whenever the need arose for some organizational framework I have sought to use categories or paradigms developed by Russian thinkers. In the post-communist period, this includes theworkofsome bicultural e?migre?s–Mikhail Epstein, Boris Gasparov, Mark Lipovetsky, Vitaly Chernetsky – who continue to work as “culturologists” on material from their native land. Such an application of Russian categories to Russian creativity is intended to anchor these chapters without falling into that least wholesome of all theoretical habits: imposing, on defenseless primary texts, alien instruments devised in some context distant or indifferent to them.

Three major approaches to literary expression achieved currency beyond Russia’s borders in the twentieth century: the Formalist, the Dialogic, and the Structuralist-semiotic. From each of these schools I have chosen one concept to help focus our literary juxtapositions and link them up into a more coherent national narrative.

From the Formalists, in particular Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) and Yury Tynyanov (1894–1943), comes the idea of “respectful” parody. The idea grows out of the Aesopian defense discussed above. Many authors and critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century believed that a protest literature, one that exposed social ills and assigned blame, was the only morally justified position for a writer. But by the century’s turn a reaction had set in against this civic-minded – and usually stridently materialist – mandate, first among Symbolist poets and critics seeking a more mystical reality, then among a group of Petrograd literary scholars, known as the Formalists, who sought to defend the autonomy of art against all such ragged, ill-formed obligations to “real life.” Formalists did not preach “art for art’s sake.” They acknowledged that art and life were interdependent. Shklovsky stressed this symbiosis in his twin ideas of “estrangement” and “automatization,” by which he meant the duty of art to “make everyday objects strange” so that our habitual perceptions would be

16 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

jolted out of their drowsy rut and we would wake up to life anew. As he put it in 1916: after viewing nature – or people, or ideas – through the lens of art, “the sun seems sunnier and the stone stonier”; without art, our automatized life would “eat away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, at our fear of war.”5 This is definitely art in the service of life. Overall, however, it was not the “wake-up” function that the Formalists advocated for verbal art as much as a higher degree of autonomy.

Literature, they insisted, was a profession and a craft. It could even become a “science” (in Russian, the word for science, nauka, refers not only to empirical hard science but to all scholarship, and to systematic or methodologically consistent thinking in general). Literary creativity – or as the Formalists preferred to call it, “literariness” – had an arsenal of techniques and devices for achieving its effects. Writers cared about life’s problems, of course, but mostly they cared about learning how to write. For this to happen, they needed to master the tools of their trade. Some Formalist critics, like Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) in his study The Young Tolstoi (1922), went so far as to claim that Tolstoy’s obsessive “self- improvement lists” and periodic condemnations of his own behavior in his diaries, as well as his elaborately public, exaggerated confessions later in life, were tasks more intrinsic to “literariness” than to conscience. Diaries of the sort Tolstoy produced were designed to experiment with various literary forms of punitive self-exposure, not really to combat, or repent of, the actual sins being recorded – which often continued unabated. This skeptical verdict on Tolstoy’s spiritual quest was an extreme Formalist position, and Eikhenbaum himself later backed off from it. Mostly the group sought to understand the role of formal strategies or “devices” in a literary tradition. Apprentice writers studied devices for portraying character, plot, imagery, and emotional tone that had been developed by their predecessors. In their own creative writing they worked subtle changes on these earlier formulas, expecting their readers to recognize when an old, worn-out, automatized device was being brought to the surface and replaced by something else. To “lay bare” an old device was one of the tasks of parody.

In a 1921 essay on Dostoevsky and Gogol, “Toward a Theory of Parody,” Tynyanov insisted that parody is not the same as satire, travesty, farce or burlesque. All those forms involve a struggle against outdated behaviors and forms, to be sure. At some level all strive to make us laugh. But parody need not imply any mean-spirited disrespect. Within the tightly laced spiral of the Russian tradition, the old was understood as essential to appreciating the new. The early Dostoevsky “parodied” Gogol but worshipped him and could not have existed without him. The novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891– 1940), writing a century later, perceived himself as a direct heir (indeed,

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 17

almostacontemporary)ofboth Gogol and Dostoevsky. The best Decadent and Symbolist-era novels, such as Fyodor Sologub’s Petty Demon (1904) or Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916/1922), are saturated with the nineteenth-century classics, in dense networks of allusion recombined and often distorted so that tragic motifs become comic and comic motifs tragic. Pushkin House (1971) by Andrei Bitov (b. 1937) portrays the Russian intelligentsia, betrayers of culture who are themselves betrayed by communism, through the affectionately garbled lens of masterworks by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky: the real and enduring Russia of the literary imagination. One trademark device of the postmodernist poet and performance artist Dmitry Prigov (1940–2007), author of over 35,000 poems, is to swallow up and re-accent other poets’ words: his spectacular recitation of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin as a Buddhist mantra always brought down the house. For such indefatigable inventiveness with cultural artifacts of the past, Prigov won a Pushkin prize in 1993. Such parody does not discredit or overthrow its predecessors, but addresses and confirms them. The point of this address is not to displace the writers who came before, a futile and impoverishing exercise, but to become worthy of joining them.

The Dialogic school is represented by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Bakhtin was a profound student of parody, in which he heard a rich “double-voicedness” and thus the potential for achieving that most difficult human virtue: responsible, or answerable, freedom. His readings of Dostoevsky from this perspective are highly provocative. Respectful parody also permeates the Bakhtinian idea of carnival as open-ended, two-way or reciprocal laughter. More central than freedom or carnival to our discussions, however, will be Bakhtin’s less flashy, more workmanlike notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin adapted this neologism (“time-space”) from Einstein’s insights in physics and then applied it to the life sciences – where, in Bakhtin’s capacious view, literature should probably be classified. Verbal narrative resembles a living organism of a highly advanced type. It regulates itself internally on the basis of responsive feedback (from its author, its readers, and the fictive characters within itself). It respects laws