Russian literature. A short introduction

What is the use of it to us?

And in The Queen of Spades (1834), any moralizing ambitions that might have been expected in a tale of compulsive gambling are undercut because story-telling and writing are shown within the story itself as frivolous, unreliable, deceptive, no more than ‘chatter to spin out a mazurka’.

But moral commentary is not avoided altogether. When Hermann appears in Liza’s room to undeceive her about the reasons behind his long-distance courtship (he has in fact been writing her passionate letters so he can inveigle himself inside the house to confront her guardian, the Countess), the narrator observes: ‘She wept bitterly, seized by belated and painful repentance.’ Had Pushkin opted for moral neutrality, he could have used a different phrase (for example, ‘seized by sudden, painful understanding’). But the narrator is made to espouse Christian moral vocabulary (‘repentance’), and the adjective ‘belated’ passes explicit judgement (Liza’s feelings are appropriate, but she has

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ignored the voice of conscience too long). Equally, there is no doubt that the duel between Evgeny Onegin and Lensky is to be understood as a form of homicide licensed by civilization, though this point is conveyed indirectly, through a comically embittered disquisition upon the joys of revenge:

It is pleasant to enrage an obtuse enemy

With an impudent epigram [ . . . ]

Pleasanter if he, my friends,

Bawls out in stupid rage: ‘That’s me!’

Still pleasanter to prepare in silence

An honourable grave for him,

And to shoot silently at his pale forehead

From a well-bred distance;

But sending him to the land of his fathers

Is unlikely to be a pleasant experience.

It would be absurd to interpret the final proposition here as a stylistic mannerism, introduced merely in order to puncture the overblown rhetoric of revenge with plain speaking. But wry humour pushes just out of reach an obvious truth – that killing even one’s enemies is not nice.

Delicate irony of this kind, though, rests on a fragile pyramid of assumptions about the way that readers are likely to react. As Yury Lotman has pointed out, in Pushkin’s generation the duel was well on its way to being regarded as ‘ritual murder’ (and less melodramatically, as a form of posturing that was fatuous in adult males, an interpretation that hovers at the fringes of Pechorin’s duel with his charlatan-double Grushnitsky in Lermontov’s The Hero of Our Time (1841), and came fully into its own in Chekhov’s representations of duelling half a century later). In a society where the duel was universally accepted as the central means of settling affairs of honour, an assault upon the practice of duelling as immoral would have needed to be expressed more

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explicitly. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian writers had a strong sense that readers of serious literature (as opposed to fortune-telling books or church calendars) belonged to a unified group, even if some had a less sophisticated understanding of literature than others, and needed to be reminded of certain elementary critical truths – that literature was not the same thing as life, and that a narrator should not necessarily be identified with the author. This sense of integration resulted, in the main, from the fact that the educated population was so small.

In the 1830s and 1840s, as intellectual life expanded to include a much broader range of social groups, in particular ambitious male provincials from the middle ranks of Russian society, the notion of educated consensus began to break down. The first symptom was factionalism within the literary world, particularly squabbling between patrician writers such as Pushkin, and literary journalists, most notorious among whom was the arch-conservative, police spy, editor of The Northern Bee, and popular novelist Faddey Bulgarin. Once the sense that all educated people belonged to the same circle had disintegrated, so too did the expectation that moral values were shared and could be taken for granted. This created a pressure for the expression of consensus within a text by means of overt commentary and explication; for the frank didacticism that had been the source of irony in literary texts since the end of the eighteenth century.

Hence, of many possible Pushkins that Pushkin himself had created, it was the writer as ‘master of minds’, and teacher to his nation, that carried most weight among his contemporaries and immediate successors. In 1834, Belinsky sought to prescribe to Pushkin the ways in which he should work, complaining that the writer had moved from Poltava and Boris Godunov (shorthand for ‘works of unassailable seriousness and national importance’) to ‘empty, lifeless fairy-tales’ (it is a shock to realize that Belinsky had in mind Pushkin’s brilliant condensation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Angelo). And the

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transition from a view of the writer as metatextual ironist to an emphasis upon responsibility to society can clearly be seen in the case of Nikolay Gogol. Gogol’s story The Nose (1836) had poked fun at the idea of morally improving literature: the tale ended not with a moral, but with the narrator sputtering into silence as he tried to explain what meaning there could possibly be in an anecdote about Major Kovalyov’s lost nose reincarnated as a senior civil servant. But a decade later, Gogol had developed a very different notion of the writer’s vocation. In his notorious treatise, Selected Passages From Correspondence with Friends (1847), he claimed that Pushkin had been the only reader of Dead Souls to understand the high moral purpose of the novel, and asserted: ‘A writer’s duty is not only to provide pleasant amusement for the mind and the taste; he will pay dearly if his works do not disseminate something of use to the soul and if they convey no moral instruction to their readers.’ While a great many of Gogol’s opinions in Selected Passages were attacked by both radicals and conservatives (not many people were impressed by Gogol’s suggestion that the landowner should burn banknotes in front of his peasants in order to teach them indifference to money), his emphasis on the writer’s duty to convey ‘moral instruction’ was not challenged. Rather, the central point in criticism of Selected Passages, as voiced, for example, in a famous open letter written by Belinsky to Gogol in 1847, was that Gogol had betrayed the writer’s duty to be a moral instructor by imparting the wrong sort of message. Radicals and conservatives alike now valued literature on the grounds of its ideinost’, or confrontation of important topical issues.

To be sure, ideinost’ did not reign unchallenged after 1840. The conviction among politically committed critics that realist fiction, or indeed journalistic reportage, were superior to lyric poetry provoked the authors of verse into questioning utilitarian theories of literature. (A notable case in point was Apollon Grigoriev, a Moscow critic, author of ‘gypsy romances’, and vehement enemy of Belinsky, Nekrasov, and Dobrolyubov, as well as one of many Russian writers to have been a drinker on an epic scale.) In the late nineteenth century, the Russian

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Decadents followed their French counterparts in insisting upon the autonomy of art, and in maintaining a cult