The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

their plight can be part of their problem, even if it was part of Tolstoy’s solution. On occasion, a more recent author at the end of the chain can turn prior inherited worlds inside out or upside down. One example is Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), who, in 1930, suspended socialist realist time-space and – dreamily, as if in a trance – inverted a Stalinist-style production novel into a construction pit that eventually became

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 21

a grave. In no way are these inversions or syntheses assumed to be superior to the benchmark authors who flank them. They are simply complex in a different way, for the intelligence of a literary tradition is not linear or progressive. It constantly grows in all directions without invalidating its earlier truths. For that reason there is no single optimal place from which to view it. But some students of the Russian tradition have seen in it a darker and more severe pattern than the binaries and triads offered here.

One such skeptic is the cultural historian Steven Marks, in his 2002 book titled How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. By what criteria, he asks, does the cosmopolitan common reader sense a work as “Russian”? Not by its length, setting, characters, spirituality, moral demands – in other words, not by a stable list of traits or revealed truths. “Russianness,” Marks argues, is a special attitude toward the outside world, one that is dismissive or condemnatory. When nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian ideas caught on around the world – and catch on they did – it was not because they “worked” or were “true” in any practical (or even moral) sense, but because they were designed to startle, destabilize, and negate. This nay-saying was practiced at a very sophisticated level. From Napoleon’s defeat to the defeat of Gorbachev, in Marks’s reading, the refrain was the same: resent the bourgeois, consumer-oriented, progress-bewitched West. Out of such restlessness and resentment came Russian maximalism, irrationalism, messianism, mysticism, utopianism. On censored Russian soil, these unruly ideas were either promptly banned, or else co-opted by the state and turned to sinister purpose. But they were a source of inspiration to revolutionaries and dispossessed people everywhere else around the globe. This ecstatically nihilistic edge to so many Russian achievements in art is key to their enduring success.

Marks has been praised as well as censured for this thesis. His book has been taken as a tribute to the dynamic creativity of Russian culture, to its infectious pan-humanism, and also as a slanderous insult to it. One negotiation of his hostile binary might be offered. Contempt for what the “civilized West” considers normal, healthy, or prosperous need not be the sole (nor even the primary) motivating force of Russian artists and thinkers. Russian nay-saying might more fairly be seen as a protest against any fixed idea of normalcy, against the belief that “normalcy” is or must be the norm or the ideal, and that sufferings and exceptional passions are painful diversions from the balanced, healthy condition that everyone would choose if given the option. In Russia’s more nonconformist tradition, from the earliest Orthodox saints to the most celebrated Dostoevskian novels, pain and passion have been considered necessary to both wisdom and consciousness. But Marks has nevertheless grasped a

22 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

basic truth. What returns us to Russian literature again and again is the chance to savor risk-taking at the extreme edges of an idea. And even those writers who parody these extremes (like Chekhov) or who despair at surviving them (like Boris Pilnyak [1894–1937]) are unsympathetic to the goals, behaviors, and humdrum activity that result from a disciplined or calculated pursuit of material prosperity.

What Marks explores in his book is one flamboyant expression of the “Russian Idea.” It too is part of the story of Russian literature. This Idea, born in Moscow in the 1830s among Russian Romantic disciples of Schelling, has had a long gestation. The e?migre? philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), in a mood shaped equally by nostalgia and despair, codified the Russian Idea for Western consumption in a book of that name published in 1947, on the ruins of World War II.7 In it he emphasized Russia’s divinely inspired mission on behalf of all other peoples through her passivity, apocalypticism, collectivism, distinctly feminine softness (receptivity and forgiveness), indifference to political grandeur and private property alike, and her anarchic preference for the depths of personality over the superficialities of institutional identity. The work of great novelists and poets was recruited selectively as evidence.

Three Russian Ideas

As Russian imperial pretensions were enfeebled and discredited in the final decades of the twentieth century, these cosmic ambitions contracted. In 2004, an anthology of present-day Russian opinion on this time-honored, oft-maligned topic appeared as The Russian Idea: In Search of a New Identity, edited by a Canadian scholar of religion after seven years spent teaching at Moscow State University.8 By that time, of course, political caution was gone, Aesopian language was gone, the centralized management of culture lay in shambles, and Russians were routinely invoking Western cultural theorists to discuss their native experience. Even in this anthology, however, traditional value-categories prove resilient. No literary work can wholly escape their shadow. To complete this chapter on critical models and their readers, then, I sketch out three “Russian Ideas” (cultural invariants) that have recurrently served to distinguish this literature from any other. These are the Russian Word, Russian space, and their meeting ground on the human face.

The socially marked, quasi-sacred Word

In the Beginning was the Russian Word. This word has always been perceived as more than a means to communicate the merely transitory needs or truths of

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 23

the current day. Russia understood herself as having come to consciousness (as a mute infant comes to consciousness) through language. This Romantic-era conviction has had enormous staying power, and to some extent explains the charismatic grip of the Poet on Russian culture. Writers frequently attributed to the Russian Word “such values as self-consciousness, self-reflection, perception, intentionality” - as if the word itself and by itself were a person.9 In one’s native language, the wandering self could find its abiding home. Kathleen Parthe opens her book Russia’s Dangerous Texts (2004) with “ten common beliefs” about the relationship between literature and politics in pre-1991 Russia.10 These include the truisms that Russians read more than any other people; that in Russia all serious “politics, prophecy and identity” took place through literature; that a single literary text (licit or illicit) would galvanize the attention of all reading Russians at a given time, providing an electrical current of common language; and that the great writer, by definition, must avoid cooperating with “power” [vlast']. The flip side of a country that exiles and shoots its poets is a culture that nurtures an image of the writer as prophet, philosopher, a person with the status of (in Solzhenitsyn’s words from his novel The First Circle) a “second government.” Even when the word fails in its mission -as many post-communist writers now feel it did, and perhaps should have - that failure is predicated on immensely high expectations. In his retrospective book on writers and readerspost-1995, Remaining Relevant after Communism (2006), Andrew Wachtel opens his chapter on “The Writer as National Hero” with the reminder that “a good definition of Eastern Europe would be the part of the world where serious literature and those who produce it have traditionally been overvalued.”11 Two broad explanations have been suggested for this word-centeredness in Russian culture: one spiritual, the other secular.

At first glance the spiritual primacy of the word might seem paradoxical, for in Russian high medieval culture up through the late seventeenth century, literacy was low. The visual image and the miracle-bearing relic had far more potency than the written word. Eastern Christendom - first Byzantine, then Russian - revered icons even more intensely than did Roman Catholicism, especially after the Eastern Church decisively refuted the iconoclast movement (triggered by the charge that icon worship was akin to idolatry) in the eighth century CE. What is more, signed, authored literature was undervalued and at times even demonized. “Authorship was not one of the recognized activities of Old Russia,” D. S. Mirsky writes in his History of Russian Literature. “There were no ‘writers,’ but only bookmen [knizhniki].”12 Books were