Russian literature. A short introduction

criticism, and technical guidance as the book took shape. Catherine Humphries and Alyson Lacewing saw the typescript through to press. Several anonymous readers made suggestions that helped me improve the first draft; more general help with lines of approach came from conversations with friends such as Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, Barbara Heldt, Stephen Lovell, David Shepherd, Gerry Smith, and Alexander Zholkovsky, as well as from the studies of Russian literature and culture listed in my suggestions for further reading. Martin McLaughlin’s gift of his Calvino translation was a great help with Chapter 1.

In an introductory book of this kind, though, it is above all one’s teachers that one thinks of. In my undergraduate days at Oxford, Anne Pennington’s wise tolerance and deep love of Russian poetry was complemented by Ronald Hingley’s fierce expression of enthusiasms and detestations, and insistence that Russian writers must be seen as part of a wider literary world. I hope this book is a worthy tribute to them, and also to the students I have taught in Oxford and at the University of London, whose sceptical questions, creative ideas, and refusal to take anything for granted are a constant delight and an unfailing inspiration.

Chapter 1

Testament

Which of us can understand Pushkin? We knew Pushkin only in translation [ . . . ] and we liked his short stories much less than Nathaniel Hawthorne’s; and obviously, we were wrong, for because of limitations of language we were debarred from seeing something that is as obvious to unsealed eyes as the difference between a mule and a Derby winner.

(Rebecca West, 1941)

In 1925, the Anglo-Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky began Modern Russian Literature, a pioneering ‘very short’ introduction published by Oxford University Press, by referring to Pushkin.

It is indeed difficult for the foreigner, perhaps impossible if he is ignorant of the language, to believe in the supreme greatness of Pushkin among Russian writers. Yet it is necessary for him to accept the belief, even if he disagrees with it. Otherwise every idea he may form of Russian literature and Russian civilization will be inadequate and out of proportion with reality.

Seven decades later, Pushkin is still acknowledged as ‘supremely great’ among Russian writers by his compatriots, and this is still likely to strike foreign readers as odd. Outside its home, Russian literature is associated first and foremost with prose, and particularly with prose that is rich in

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1. Portrait of Aleksandr Pushkin.

This 1827 portrait of Alexandr Pushkin (1799–1837) by Vasily Tropinin, done from life by an artist who was the favoured painter of Moscow’s ‘middling sort’ (successful merchants, civil servants, and respectable writers) is at first sight a workaday likeness. In contrast to a contemporary, Orest Kiprensky, who produced a full- blown Romantic portrait of Pushkin, eyes raised, arms folded, and statue of the Muse at his back, Tropinin gives the poet only one ‘writerly’ accessory, the sheaf of manuscript under his right arm. At the same time, Pushkin is handled rather differently from Tropinin’s other subjects. His fraying scarf, carelessly knotted at his badly ironed collar, and long dirty fingernails, suggest unconcern with trivialities such as grooming; his sideways gaze conveys abstraction; and his prominent astigmatism (barely noticeable in most portraits) implies internal conflict. The picture shows Pushkin at the pinnacle of his lifetime fame. A byword for youthful brilliance even in an age where precocity was taken for granted (he had begun publishing while still at the Lyceum School in Tsarskoe Selo, and his early works included the sparkling mock-epic Ruslan and Ludmilla, written in his late teens), Pushkin achieved still greater notoriety when he was exiled for political insubordination in 1820. Outside the capital until 1826, he remained at the centre of literary life: The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), the early chapters of Evgeny Onegin, and the lyric poems of 1820–5 had a huge popular and literary success and remained the benchmark of his achievement for many critics and ordinary readers. During the late 1820s and early 1830s, Pushkin’s circumstances were to become increasingly difficult, as a result of political surveillance, a troubled marriage, and a problematic relationship with his readers. Later works, such as the historical narrative poem Poltava (1828), received a relatively cool reception, and the last years of the poet’s life, culminating in his death

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in a duel in January 1837, saw mounting personal and artistic isolation. But between 1826 and 1830, he produced a run of masterpieces: many of his greatest lyric poems, his first published experiments in prose, and several outstanding narrative poems, as well as the later chapters of Evgeny Onegin.

ideas and devotes itself to the exploration of moral dilemmas. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the authors of vast novels of exactly this kind, who have been acknowledged, among Western readers, as the greatest writers of Russia. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–9), which argues that human beings can exercise control over events only if they recognize their own powerlessness, yet breathes individuality into a vast range of characters, appears regularly in lists of the ten most important books of all time. The ethical concerns set out by Dostoevsky, above all the question of whether morality is possible in a world without God, anticipated some of the most important concerns of modern philosophy, from Nietzsche to Sartre.

Pushkin wrote no large novels, and he does not even seem particularly ‘Russian’ in other ways, not even as ‘Russian’ as Turgenev. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) has a main character, Bazarov, whose obsession with social utility (he insists that the dissecting of frogs is superior to water-colour painting) seems satisfactorily strange because it is so hyperbolic. And the novel’s country estate setting is at once charming and exotic, with its serf mistress, its ribboned dogs, and its duel fought over an imagined matter of honour. It is easy to trace a line between Fathers and Sons and Chekhov’s plays, but far less easy to see how Evgeny Onegin – with its wayward digressions, its urbane and ironic tone, and its curious air of repressed emotion – might be a forerunner of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–7) or of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868). The combination of wit with the melancholy appreciation that happiness

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may be most elusive when easiest to realize makes the book seem more like a successor to Jane Austen’s Persuasion. To be sure, it has some impressive English-language descendants – they include Nabokov’s Lolita and Vikram Seth’s verse novel about San Francisco, The Golden Gate – but these arch and self-conscious texts simply enhance Western readers’ conviction that Pushkin is peculiar in terms of his own, supposedly immediate and spontaneous, culture.

Yet all the major Russian writers were avid readers of European literature; if they reacted against it, they also learned from it. Anna Karenina may be at some level a riposte to