Russian literature. A short introduction

artistic landscape like beached whales. The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s novels and stories of the 1950s and early 1960s were preceded by the publication of fulminating articles about parish-pump problems in provincial newspapers, and followed by the composition of yet more polemic, lent fuel to accusations that Solzhenitsyn was a kind of latter-day Pyotr Boborykin or Aleksandr Amfiteatrov (two prolific and long-forgotten late nineteenth-century authors of topical fiction). But it was equally possible for advocates of writing’s moral purpose to refer to the cases of the early twentieth-century avant-garde writers Aleksey Kruchonykh and David Burlyuk, whose repetitive output mechanically reproduced futurist devices long after the creative power of these had become exhausted. In Andrey Sinyavsky’s 1960 story ‘Graphomaniacs’, some of the characters were passionately committed to writing in alternative genres – extremely badly; but the story’s narrator, Galkin, a ‘graphomaniac’ of the officially approved kind, and operating a sort of Socialist Realist ‘writing by numbers’, seemed at least equally ludicrious.

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The pessimism expressed in ‘Graphomaniacs’ was to become a standard theme in post-Thaw discussions of ‘the state of Russian literature’. In his ‘Catastrophes in the Air’, for example, Joseph Brodsky argued that ‘politics fills the vacuum left in people’s minds and hearts precisely by art’, but was just as scathing about avant-garde writing (which, in his view, led to isolation over the vodka bottle) as he was about political commitment. And in ‘Soviet Literature: In Memoriam’ (1990), Viktor Erofeev took up the theme again, dismissing both dissident and official Soviet writing as of merely local and topical interest.

Fortunately, post-Stalinist literature was considerably more varied and vigorous than such jeremiads proclaimed. To be sure, there were some writers – for example, the novelist and short-story writer Yury Trifonov – in whom the search for a ‘middle way’ provoked a reversion to a Chekhovian realism of authorial self-effacement plus relentless stress on cultural and moral decline. But a ‘prosaics of invisibility’ was not the only or even the most favoured interpretation of ‘the middle way’ among post-Stalinist Russian writers. On the contrary: scepticism about the standing of the writer was (as in the 1920s) matched by an emphasis upon the construction of the art work as a conscious act. This is evident, for example, in Joseph Brodsky’s poem elegy ‘The Year 1972’, which disposed of the figure of ‘the poet’ in favour of that of ‘the wordsmith’, working not ‘with the aim/of winning fame’, but ‘for the sake of my native tongue and of writing’. But it was equally clear in the work of writers as committed to the true depiction of real events as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. Though these two writers held very different views about the experience of incarceration in the prison camps (for Solzhenitsyn, the camps opened up vistas of inner freedom and moral renewal; for Shalamov, they were claustrophic ‘pits’ of moral degradation), they were strikingly similar in terms of the prominence that they gave to the act of writing. The figure of ‘walking on fresh snow’ at the beginning of Shalamov’s huge story cycle Kolyma Tale s (1978) turned out to be not simply an introduction to camp life,

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the reader following the prisoners on their journey through the wastes of the far North. It was also a metaphor for the act of writing about untouched material, about retrieving narrative from silence:

How do you stamp out a path on fresh snow?

In front walks a man, sweating and swearing, hardly able to move his

legs, sinking every minute into the brittle deep snow. [ . . . ]

Five or six men follow after, along the narrow and treacherous trail. They

walk alongside the track not in it. [ . . . ]

Every one of them, no matter how small and weak he is, must stand on a

piece of fresh snow, not in someone else’s tracks. It’s only readers, not

writers, who ride on tractors and horses.

If Shalamov drew his readers’ attention to the problems of narrative right at the outset of his text, Solzhenitsyn’s novels The First Circle (1978) and Cancer Ward, began, quite traditionally, ‘in the middle of things’ without preamble. But they too were in literary terms heterogeneous. The citation in Cancer Ward of Tolstoy’s late story ‘What People Live By’ (1881), a tale in which an angel comes to live with a poor cobbler and his wife, emphasized that the novel was not merely a representation of a hospital as metaphor for Soviet society, but also a text preoccupied with the miraculous in the mundane (an insight fundamental to understanding the novel’s extraordinary last chapter). One of the inset narratives in The First Circle, ‘Prince Igor’, was an illustration of creativity in extremity, a tale told for the joy of the telling, precisely because it did not bear direct or oblique relation to ‘real life’. And One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), with its refrain, ‘How can a well- fed man understand the hungry?’ drew attention, like Shalamov’s preface to Kolyma Tales, to the fact that representing horror was impossible. The more ‘true’ a narrative, the less likely it was to communicate with its anticipated audience. Such utterances were more than merely a rhetorical strategy aimed at shaming the ‘well-fed’ into attentive silence. They also questioned the function of literature at a time when any utterance might leave only ‘the stamp of “good-night” on lips/that

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could say it to no-one’, in the words of a poem from Joseph Brodsky’s cycle ‘A Part of Speech’.

In the post-Stalin era, then, the concept of writers as ‘masters of minds’, compromised by Socialist Realism, was the source of serious doubt among many intelligent commentators on, and practitioners of, literature. These included not only Shalamov, recognized by Viktor Erofeev as a ‘literary’ writer, but also the supposedly ‘teleological’ Solzhenitsyn. With emerging doubts that the writer’s function was or should be purely didactic went a decline in the standing of the novel, the genre most privileged under high Stalinism precisely because of its supposed capacity for weighty moral commentary. (A cartoon published in the humorous magazine Krokodil in 1952 showed two writers talking. Writer A to Writer B: ‘I’ve just thought of a great subject for a little short story!’. Writer B: ‘Well, get down and write it, then!’. Writer A: ‘No, you see the problem is I can’t think of how to turn it into a big novel!’.) (Ill. 14.)

However, the compromised standing of moral disquisitions on the one hand, and the novel on the other, was not well understood in the West during the post-Stalin years. Here, many readers looked to Russian writers for the direct and unironic discussion of ethical matters that had become unfashionable in the West after the Second World War. To many commentators in the late 1950s, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) seemed a much weightier novel than any recent publication in the English language, while Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich spoke with an authority recalling Dostoevsky’s memoir of prison-camp life House of the Dead (1861–2). If Nabokov wished that Tolstoy had exercised his concentration entirely on the free-floating curl hanging down at the back of Anna Karenina’s head, many readers, since Anna Karenina was published, have been more absorbed by the novel’s governing moral themes: whether personal happiness is legitimate at the cost of imposing suffering on others, or whether there may be such a thing as inescapable or deserved suffering. And they have expected

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14. Cartoon of two writers by Yu. Gorokhov.

that Tolstoy’s successors will provide them with ethical stimulation of just this kind. It was no accident that the first literary award to be supported by Western investors in Russia should have been the Booker Prize for the Russian novel, inspired by the quixotic notion of reviving the genre in the country that many still considered its