The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

several well-televised home visits, the President sought the writer’s counsel. Generously subsidized by a state- owned bank, the first Russian-language Complete Works of Solzhenitsyn (thirty volumes by 2010, the first three published in 2006) are under way in Moscow. In June 2007, Solzhenitsyn was awarded a state prize for outstanding achievement in the humanities. Putin emphasized that “several steps being taken today are in keeping with what Solzhenitsyn wrote.”10 This renaissance of Russia’s most celebrated living dissident on the “state side” of the reigning ideology has provoked caustic debate. When the authorized Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings appeared in 2006, edited by two distinguished American professors teaching at Christian colleges, both the Reader (and its subject) were criticized as duplicitous.11

Solzhenitsyn despised Stalinism while depending on its unrelieved awfulness to organize his heroes andplots. But the power and uncompromising moraltex-ture of his mid-career novels transcend political witnessing. Tolstoyan worlds lie just below the surface of all his writings, played out in intricate variations. Consider only one detail in Cancer Ward. The Tolstoyan provocation is from War and Peace: Vera Rostova and her philistine husband Berg, decorating their apartment while Napoleon’s troops loot Moscow in 1812. Solzhenitsyn’s variation on the type is the vulgar, grasping materialist of the communist New Class, Pavel Rusanov, who believes that “after forty years a man and his just deserts can be judged by his apartment . . . Live well, and you think correctly. As Gorky said, a healthy spirit in a healthy body.”12 That’s the cartoon. But again like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn diversifies his positive heroes against the stereotype. He doles out cancer to communists who are not repellant – who are attractive, idealistic, unafraid to die – and to young girls who are utterly non-political. All of them are slated to lose the organ (vocal cords, stomach, breast) they value the most, the bodily part they had thought they lived by. And even this sacrifice will not necessarily save them. Solzhenitsyn is dry-eyed and epic enough to show us good people who strive and fail. What he will never tolerate is a life devoid of quests for moral self-improvement. In him, the Tolstoyan vein of

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the Russian prose tradition reaches its natural apex: the monologic pravednik confronting a monologic evil.

Beginning in the 1970s and then at galloping pace since 1991, it became clear to emerging generations of Russian writers that both truth and evil were fragmented far beyond the point where a single psychology or single sinful target could organize them. Focus turned to modes of protest more subtly transgres-sive and imitative, more in the spirit of Pushkin’s ripped-off button at Nicholas I’s imperial court. The Gulag story of the paper-factory director, arrested after being the first to stop clapping for Stalin, was supplemented by other applause scenarios more likely to result in survival. (The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko relates in his memoirs, for example, how Dmitry Shostakovich, obliged to be present at Khrushchev’s pep talks to the “creative intelligentsia” in the early 1960s, grabbed his notebook and assiduously scribbled in it every time the hall burst into applause, creating the impression that he was “writing down all these great thoughts . . . Thank God [the composer confided to the poet], everyone can see that my hands are busy.”13) In communism’s waning years, pretensions to know the shape of history – or even the shape of a single story or a single intent – were impatiently dismissed. Bombastic gestures became ludicrous. There was a thrilling attention to the peripheral dialect, the wandering detail, the eccentric gesture. Where the true-believing center had been, or had pretended to be, there was a void.

In this new climate, the Tolstoyan pole of post-Stalinist writing met its rival in a revived, more dialogic and ironical Dostoevskian pole. What seemed to appeal most was Dostoevsky’s apocalyptically dark side, a cynicism that endorsed neither the spiritual generosity of the positive characters (Sonya, Alyosha, the Elder Zosima) nor Bakhtin’s celebrated polyphony, which detected in Dostoevsky the optimistic unfinalizability of all utterances. The new Dostoevsky was a dead-ended Muse. Solzhenitsyn, in the terms laid down in his 1993 National Arts Club speech, would recognize in this newly fashionable desperate literature the “pessimistic relativism” inseparable, in his view, from postmodernism. These dark intonations pervade the work of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.

The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)

Women in Russian literature, and Russian women as writers of literature, have not been a focus of the present book. A brief sketch of the legacy might therefore be useful. The Swiss author Madame de Stae?l (1766– 1817) and French novelist and feminist George Sand (1804–76) were both avidly read in

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nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere on the continent. But Russian authors and readers alike were soon captivated by two domestically produced ideal types: woman as Muse (Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina) and woman as religiously inflected “savior” of a sinning man (Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmeladova). To some extent both became restrictive models, a fate hinted at by the title of one pioneering book that confronts this tradition head on, Terrible Perfection: Women in Russian Literature.14 Tolstoy broke with both models in his Anna Karenina (1879), arguably the first great Russian heroine in a title role who existed and suffered for her own sake, not as an index to lessons being learned by a man.

In the 1920s, the era of Gladkov’s Cement, a new paradigm emerges. Without a doubt Dasha Chumalova fails as the parent of an immediately present and needy child. But we should not ignore the fact that she succeeds, and was designed to succeed, as the mouthpiece for a radically new, more self-respecting sort of male–female love. Our horror at Nyurka’s starvation in the Children’s Home, while her mother attends political meetings and studies Marxism-Leninism, overshadows the final word that Dasha utters in the novel. She has just gathered her pillow and bundle and informed Gleb that the pretense of living together as husband and wife is over. Gleb is still raging, as he had been in the opening chapters: first at her withdrawal, now at her betrayal of him with Comrade Badin. He calls Badin a “worthless scoundrel” who has “gobbled up” both his wife and comrade Polya (p. 308) – and fingers his pistol. On this score, his “consciousness” has made no gains against “spontaneity.” But with sex as with everything else merely personal (except, temporarily, her daughter’s death), Dasha remains calm. “Love will always be love, Gleb, but it requires a new form,” she tells her husband. “I shall come to you, go on, my darling . . . We shall find each other again. But bound by other ties, Gleb?”

By the mid-1930s, the conservative Stalinist revolution firmly placed “family values” front and center. Although women had been liberated full-time into the urban workforce ever since the 1920s, in their socialist realist dimension they were increasingly depicted nursing babies in the sunlight or harvesting grain with scythes or tractors. World War II exacerbated the tensions inherent in those dual roles as robust, relaxed mother and economic producer. When so many men did not come home, women stayed on as engineers, doctors, factory workers, sharpshooters and machine-gunners. They became the “positive heroines” in literary plots that still tended to feature feeble, drunken, inconstant, and superfluous men. The Russian super-heroine does everything. She is both surgeon and street-sweeper. Heavy physical labor has long been part of her lot, and female sobriety and longevity an economic necessity. As one impatient female voice put it in the 1980s, “national disgrace” comes not when

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women are idle trophy wives at home but when they are out shoveling icy snowdrifts and pouring asphalt “that is then pressed by a steamroller driven by a

man.”15

By the 1970s, women’s voices were louder and ranged more widely. One of the most astute belongs to Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938), playwright, poet, and prose writer, whose own devastated childhood in children’s homes, on the edges of war and surrounded by the Terror, shapes her dark vision and style.16 Hers is a Dostoevskian “underground” voice, lodged inside a first-person perspective that thoroughly distrusts the natural world as well as other human beings. One of Petrushevskaya’s best stories, “Our Crowd” [“Svoi krug,” lit. “One’s own circle”] (written 1979, publ. 1988) opens on the words of the Underground Man, slightly modified but in the