Russian literature. A short introduction

many of whose plays, so far from being brilliant but theatrically problematic experiments, were competent formulaic comedies lifted above the rut by the author’s extraordinary ear for vulgar speech, vivid sense of the ridiculous, and infectious misanthropy. The Storm, on the other hand, was a full-blooded melodrama of merchant life that was quite out of kilter with Pushkin’s emotional delicacy. Which is not to belittle Ostrovsky’s achievements as a dramatist: his plays have a firm place on the international stage (The Storm inspired Janac?ek’s opera Katerina Kabanova, for instance), as well as the national one. And in early twentieth-century Russia, their familiarity bred not contempt but daring on the part of directors, including Meyerhold and Stanislavsky, as well as Eisenstein.

Modernist as Nabokov, who held much Russian Realist prose to be as bogus in intention as it was garrulous in expression, and who detested psychological literalism, commented of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin that he is ‘fluid and flaccid as soon as he starts to feel, as soon as he departs from the existence he has acquired from his maker in terms of colorful parody and as a catchall for many irrelevant and immortal matters’. It was above all as a triumph of surface-painting that he admired the novel. To be sure, Evgeny Onegin is stylistically diverse and has a narrator who plays many parts (a friend of the characters, a mouthpiece for

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them, an ironic commentator upon folly, a sympathizer in time of grief). Yet even Tatiana remains a symbol rather than a counterfeit of lived reality, a creature of idealism rather than representation. She is as much a manifestation of the creative sensibility as a portrait of a provincial young lady. If her letter to Evgeny, written when awake, is a tissue of quotations from books she has read, her dream of Evgeny surrounded by strange creatures is narrated in the language of Pushkin’s own lyric ballads.

None of this has resonance in, say, the writing of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Chekhov. Pushkin’s characters usually do not have their own voices: they are pegs upon which the fabric of authorial brilliance is hung (the same is true of Gogol’s characters, with the exception of the Mayor in the Government Inspector, who, in his final outburst of rage against the trick that has been played on him, achieves a truly personal eloquence unlike anything else in the play). Pushkin’s acidly detached portrayal of Hermann and Liza allows little space to speech from within the characters: Hermann in particular remains enigmatic because he is always seen from outside. The furthest possible point from this was reached in Dostoevsky’s extraordinary, and by both national and international standards revolutionary, story Notes from Underground, in which we have no point of orientation but the voice of the central character himself, tormenting us with his capricious and contradictory statements from the very first sentence of the novel:

I am a sick man. A bitter and spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver has something wrong with it. But actually I don’t give a stuff about being ill and I’m not even sure what’s wrong with me. I’m not going for treatment and I never have gone for treatment, even though I do respect doctors and medicines. And on top of that, I’m superstitious; superstitious enough, even, to respect medicine. (I’m educated enough not to be superstitious, but I still am superstitious.) No, sir, the reason I don’t go for treatment is out of spite. You probably won’t want to

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understand that. Well, I understand you there. But of course I won’t manage to explain to you precisely whose nose I aim to put out of joint with my spite . . .

No English translation can imitate the grammar of the original, which employs the flexibility of Russian syntax in order to place the adjective in a different position in each of the first sentences, so that the cadence rises to a pitch of hysterical triumph on ‘unattractive’. But the nature of the rhetorical stategies comes across. As a statement is presented, it is immediately contradicted; just as contradictory is the Underground Man’s combination of insistent solitariness and inability to do without his listener, the antagonist who ‘probably won’t want to understand’. The Underground Man’s confession is presented without any of the devices customarily used to establish a memoir as ‘real’. There is no diary discovered after his death, his listener remains anonymous, and there is no motivating occasion (in contrast, the murderer in Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata makes his confession in a train carriage, a propos a discussion of marriage). Notes from Underground breached the literary etiquette of Pushkin’s prose as energetically as its monstrously paranoid, intolerant, and rude narrator poured contempt on the behaviour conventions of polite society.

To be sure, aspects of Pushkin’s prose were to be treated as exemplary by some later writers. For Chekhov, it was Pushkin’s sparing use of figurative language, his preference for metonyms over metaphors, that was particularly attractive. For Tolstoy, it was above all the directness and immediacy of Pushkin’s opening paragraphs that had weight. The second sentence of Anna Karenina – ‘Everything had got mixed up in the Oblonsky household’ – has the deliberate flatness of the first line of The Queen of Spades, ‘A game of cards was going on one day in the residence of Narumov, an officer in the horse guards.’

Yet Tolstoy, the most ‘Pushkinian’ of writers in terms of his way of beginning a narrative, was decidedly anti-Pushkinian in other respects.

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The caricatured Napoleon in War and Peace is at the far end of the representational spectrum from Pushkin’s ambivalent, but fervent, tributes to the leader’s Romantic grandeur. ‘Napoleon’ (1822) opens with lines that employ the cosmic imagery of the eighteenth-century formal ode to evoke the French emperor’s transcendent greatness:

The fateful destiny is played out: The great man has flickered into darkness. In gloomy unfreedom has rolled to an end The thunderous age of Napoleon.

For Tolstoy in War and Peace, ‘providence’ replaced ‘destiny’, and characters achieved greatness in the sight of their God and of their literary creator because of their lack of aspiration to the ‘greatness’ represented here. In Pushkin’s writings, for instance The Bronze Horseman, the word ‘idol’ occupied a vital place, capturing an ambiguous configuration of greatness and moral transgression. In Tolstoy’s mind, all idols, by definition, could only deceive, and in attempting to escape their common humanity were certain to reveal their tawdry and hollow true selves. The fact that Tolstoy’s father, a member of Pushkin’s own generation, had made him learn ‘Napoleon’ by heart in the nursery did everything other than ensure piety towards Pushkin and his hero.

Compared with Pushkin’s sense that prose should be ‘modest’ and ‘lucid’, too, the expansiveness of Tolstoy’s vast ‘baggy monsters’ was provocative to the point of impertinence. The epilogue of The Queen of Spades ties up the ends with exaggerated neatness, underlining the fact that this is a piece of fiction. Tolstoy’s endings, on the other hand, are made fuzzy by their epilogues and afterwords. There is the sense of the writer returning again and again to subjects he could not bear to abandon. And the intimations of fate that play an ambiguous role in The Queen of Spades were, for Tolstoy, always escapable. If there is some sense that Hermann may really have been taken to the Countess’s house