of causality and plausibility. It can manipulate categories of time and is capable of producing surprise, that is, the unpredictably new. The major difference between a work of creative literature and organic life is that literature, although meticulously individualized as an organism, does not die. Its life is sustained by its chronotope.
Bakhtin was a Kantian. He assumed that before any world could be repre-sentedor structured, the structuring mind makes assumptions about the workings of time and space. That matrix then determines, or conditions, the kinds of
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events or evaluations that can happen within its borders, as well as the personalities that “come alive” in response to these events. Authors must decide how much liberty they will allow their narrators to exercise in the process of “coming to know” (penetrating, consoling, violating) the fictive consciousness that quickens insidethis time-space. Forunlike the Kantian practice,Bakhtin’s time-space is never transcendental or abstract. Seeing and speaking – Bakhtin’s minimum for experience – require a concrete body. A valid chronotope thus always delimits, individualizes, and evaluates the point of view from which any story is experienced and then told. It puts edges and eyes into the literary word. Bakhtin argued that the difference between literary genres is not to be found in formal features such as length, theme, rhyme scheme, acoustical patterns or the prose/poetry boundary. The sense of a genre is determined by its chronotope, whose primary task is to provide a breeding ground and viable environment for the growth of consciousness.
The Structuralist-semiotic perspective in this book is represented by Yury Lotman (1922–93) and his Tartu School of Cultural Semiotics. They contribute one big concept to the present study: the binary opposition. Binary structures – often resolved into a triad awaiting new bifurcation – were comfortable for Russian intellectuals, who had been enthusiastic about the Hegelian dialectic ever since the 1830s and who were battered by the obligatory “Marxist-Leninist dialectic” for most of the twentieth century. Opposing polarities is a controversial method, however. It feeds in to the proverbial (and oversimplified) image of Russian culture as a place solely of black-and- white extremes and maximalist ideals. Possibly for Aesopian reasons, in their writings from the 1970s Lotman and his colleagues limited their binary interpretations to the more formulaic texts and behaviors of the Russian medieval world (twelfth to seventeenth century), which could indeed be explicated effectively in terms of sacred versus demonic, high versus low, East versus West, old versus new. Applied to later eras or more complex texts, the binary can be distorting. Lot-man himself, in the final years of his life (which were also the final years of the Soviet regime), began to question the wisdom of a binary worldview for Russia, comparing it to a stool on two legs – exciting because always on the brink but unstable and chronically vulnerable, liable to collapse after a single shockwave. Perestroika, he implied, was that “explosion or rupture necessary for the transition in Russian culture from a binary to a ternary cultural formation.”6
That being said, natives as well as outsiders have long organized Russian literary space according to polar oppositions. Among the most durable of these poles have been: court poets versus prose satirists in the eighteenth century; Slavophiles versus Westernizers in the 1840–50s; utilitarians versus aesthetes in
the 1860s (and again in the 1890s); proletarians versus the relics of “bourgeois” art in the 1920s; and official party-minded art versus underground dissidents in the Soviet period. Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque,” the biggest bestseller ever to come out of Russian cultural theory and justly celebrated for its tolerance, openness, and malleability, paradoxically rests on one huge unbridgeable binary: the “official serious classical body” versus the “unofficial laughing grotesque.” In such polarized models, each extreme sustains and defines the other – while reducing the other, unavoidably, to caricature. Only in the last three decades has this for-or-against infrastructure definitively broken down, replaced by a rich assortment of asymmetrical, legally coexisting postmodernist alternatives. Relief as well as confusion has been immense.
My use of the binary model in the present book is intended to bemoresugges-tive than analytically rigorous. Each chapter identifies two major authors, text types, or worldviews that represent fundamentally different forms of literary expression during that period. These anchor the two poles and delimit the field. Sometimes the two poles are mediated and pushed out into a triad. Key episodes in a work (or a small cluster of works) are then discussed chronotopically – that is, with an eye to how time, space, interpersonal relations (author-narrator-hero-reader), and consequently human values are structured within it. Where the story line of a literary text promises to be obscure to non-Russian readers, plot summary is provided (for an Orthodox saint’s life, warrior epic, medieval Faust tale, prose comedy from the eighteenth century, Stalin-era production novel or fairy-tale play). For the “first-bench canon” (name recognition at the level of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky), episodes must suffice.
These literary works or episodes are then linked to one another through parody, taken in the appreciative sense discussed above: a respectful homage and a reworking. Each of the six chronological chapters has its theme. For the eighteenth century (Chapter 4), it is satire and hybridization: how French-style neoclassical prose comedy and the picaresque novel were transposed to “barbaric” Russia, and how one synthesis of Russia and the West took powerful root at the end of the century. The Romantic period (Chapter 5) is organized around two distinctly different poles. The “Pushkin side” is the world of public codes, game-playing, and the duel of honor; the “Gogol side” is governed by the opposite dynamic, a private world of evasion and concealment, abundant in texts of embarrassment and exposure. During the Realist era (Chapter 6), these themes of honor and embarrassment inflate, change shape, and take on a more strident intonation. In Tolstoy, the duel broadens out into the battlefield, where honor is eclipsed by courage and the playful narrator is replaced by stern no-nonsense moral authority. In Dostoevsky, concern for privacy can reach insane, pathological, conspiratorial proportions, cunningly masked by self-defensive
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narrative shields and comic narrators. For the Symbolist and Modernist period (Chapter 7), our theme is the city and its devils – which yields up the greatest Petersburg novel, the greatest Moscow novel, and a dystopian city-state that distils the myths of both these great Russian capital cities. For the Stalinist era (Chapter 8), we consider the doctrine of socialist realism and how it impressed itself upon three genres: the construction novel, the dramatized fairy tale, and the “suspended” lyric materialism of Andrei Platonov. Beginning with the first post- Stalinist Thaw (Chapter 9), the ideology of the canon relaxes somewhat. Literatureis officially allowed to acknowledge prisonsand laborcamps. Authors rechannel familiar high-canon scenarios through gratingly domestic contexts – our examples include the Dostoevskian underground from a harassed female perspective. Newheroesappear:Asianbusinessmen who arealsomystics, lyrical alcoholics, starched-collar detectives, serial killers, the tsarist secret police as role model, storage sheds that commit suicide. Certain constants survive from chapter to chapter: honor and humiliation as paths to a viable identity, the death of children.
For some periods, the benchmark writers anchoring the edges of literary space are so different from each other that each begins his own literary tradition. This is the case with the Romantic era, where the “Pushkin” and “Gogol” lines are antipathetic. But in other periods, agreatwriter will combine elements of both poles in a conscious quest for new and healthier hybrids. Under such conditions, one can speak almost of a “dialectical” development of characters and themes. The task of the mediating author is to challenge the oversimplification that is endemic to binary thinking and thus to re-complicate the field. To take only one example, the most timeworn binary in all of Russian literature: Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky. Like Pushkin and Gogol from an earlier period, these two were seen as incompatible geniuses. But writers appeared – one thinks of Anton Chekhov – whose gift it was to bridge, test, break down, and transform the most canonical hero types and legacies. Just as Pushkin reworked the cliche?s of European Romanticism in his short stories of the 1830s, so did Chekhov provide explicitly modest, non- melodramatic reworkings of bigger-than-life, tragic Tolstoyan plots in the 1880s and 1890s. Chekhov’s characters (like every other literate person alive in Russia) have read
