Russian literature. A short introduction

cough first . . .

As this example indicates, the language of narration was now as important as the material cited. The vitality of much early twentieth-century Russian prose was derived directly from popular speech (prostorech’e). The favoured genre was a first-person narrative that eschewed the norms of educated speech (this type of narrative was to be retrospectively named skaz by Russian Formalist critics: see for instance Boris Eikhenbaum’s 1918 essay ‘The Illusion of skaz’). Before the Revolution, the most outstanding exponent of skaz was Aleksey Remizov, whose more successful imitators included Evgeny Zamyatin and Olga Forsh. After the Revolution, though, the Remizovian school, whose procedures might be described as ‘dialect ornamentalism’, went into something of a decline, the causes of which lay not only in Remizov’s emigration (he left for Berlin in 1921 and later settled in Paris), but also in the determinedly pro-urban standpoint of the early Soviet regime. However, skaz persisted in transmuted form. The working-class

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narrators of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories, such as ‘The Bathhouse’, spoke in a patchwork of mangled cliches taken from political discourse of the day (‘This isn’t the Tsarist regime, you know!’) and popular language of quite a different kind (grekh odin, literally ‘nothing but sin’, but approximately equivalent to ‘no peace for the wicked’). And their structure drew on traditional folk narrative patterns, such as triple repetition (the narrator of ‘The Bathhouse’ tries three times to get hold of a wash-tub for himself) and the use of a rhetorical formula to begin and end the narrative and mark it off from surrounding speech (‘The Bathhouse’ starts with the wonderfully surreal sentence, ‘They say, lads, that in America the bathhouses are ever so excellent’). At the same time, Zoshchenko’s characters were more than sociological studies: they were also masks for the writer himself. As the literary critic Alexander Zholkovsky has argued, the constant social and sexual failures of the writer’s fictional protagonists played on obsessive motifs in Zoshchenko’s psychoanalytically inspired autobiography, Before Sunrise; rather than laughing at the inarticulacy and inadequacy of those he had invented, Zoshchenko was using their helplessness to render decent the exploration of his own self. One could add that his stories were quintessentially Modernist not only because they ‘made the world strange’ (to adopt the term used by the Formalist literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky), but also because they expressed a profound philosophical pessimism about the communicative function of language. The fact that Zoshchenko’s main characters are so often not understood, so frequently baffled (in all senses) by the responses of others, reflects not only the petty tyrannies of early Soviet life, but the urban isolation that gripped those living in the world of Daniil Kharms, or indeed Samuel Beckett.

Just so in poetry, the sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical functions of skaz intertwined: folklore was no longer kept at one remove but used in order to assault old concepts of appropriate behaviour and expression. Tsvetaeva’s verse tale The Tsar-Maiden, for instance, was a transexual narrative representing the love of an aggressive, manly

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princess for a mild-mannered young princely aesthete; The Swain showed the union of a peasant girl and vampire-lover as a sublime erotic experience. For Tsvetaeva, as for several other Symbolist and post-Symbolist women poets, appropriation of folklore was a means of breaking away from the constraints of ‘women’s poetry’ in a traditional sense – poetry of unhappy love, elegant narcissism, and self-effacing creativity. Her poem ‘The Muse’ represented a woman at the borders even of rural society, a vagrant, perhaps even a drab and an outlaw:

No birth, no marriage certificates,

No forefathers, no ‘bright falcon’ [i.e. young man].

She goes tearing along,

Such a distance away!

Under the dusky eyelids [Glows] gold-winged fire. With a wind-beaten hand She snatched – and forgot.

Her hem trails in the dirt, Her shoes gape apart. Not wicked, not kind, But far-off: her own woman.

Without ‘certificates’ (of birth, of marriage), without a man to ensure her respectability, and with her hem trailing in the dirt (a proverbial image of sluttishness in the sexual sense too), Tsvetaeva’s Muse could not have been more different from the decorous muses, with impeccable literary credentials, that figured in Akhmatova’s poetry. What is more, here, as in Tsvetaeva’s work as a whole, the polarization between ‘acceptable’ rural folklore and ‘vulgar’ urban folklore that ran through much work by other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers broke down. (Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s imitations of the ‘vulgar’ genre of street ballad in her poetry of the early 1920s were considerably

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more refined than her poems drawing on rural folklore.) However, the poem is marked by the stylistic features that characterized Modernist pieces in the folkloric style: fixed epithets (‘gold-winged fire’); negative constructions (‘not wicked, not kind’); and the use of parallelism (see particularly the ‘hem’ and ‘shoes’ of lines 9– 10). At the same time, the poem was a self-portrait, a statement of the poet’s right to defy convention, to exist beyond the official scripts of ‘birth and marriage certificates’.

The fact that Modernists’ work in the folk style was much closer to authentic rural popular culture than the writings of the Russian Romantics was one reason why the early twentieth century also saw poetry by actual members of the Russian lower classes enter the literary mainstream for the first time. Where nineteenth-century ‘peasant poets’, such as Aleksey Koltsov, had been incidental curiosities, their twentieth-century successors, above all Nikolay Klyuev, were formidable aesthetic and intellectual presences. Klyuev fused the dialect and natural phenomena of the far North, his birthplace, with esoteric Eastern philosophy, the theology of sects such as the Flagellants and the Self-Castrators, and citations of epic from Finland to North America. His was an extraordinary and individual artistic vision, where death was ‘a squall/rumbling on foam-filled wagons/to life’s outer shore’, where the classical muse was replaced by a skylark, or a whale breasting the Arctic swell, and where Lenin, a ‘cedar frost in Spring’, was evoked as emotionally as ‘the crystal voice of whooper swans’. For his part, Klyuev’s contemporary and sometime comrade-inarms Esenin, though a less considerable poet, was, forty years after his death, to become the most popular poet in Russia, with a poem that lamented the loss of youth vanishing ‘like white smoke from the apple trees’ sung to the guitar in millions of hostels and private flats.

By and large, though, it was intellectual writers looking for alternative material, including a significant group of upper-middle-class women (Zinaida Gippius, Adelaida Gertsyk, Marina Tsvetaeva) who immersed

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themselves in folk lexis and in popular tradition. The proletarian poets of pre-revolutionary worker journals and post-revolutionary Proletcult groups inclined to a stylistically conventional late Romanticism of foundry sparks and burning furnaces. And Socialist Realism made incumbent on writers the use of a style that would be ‘accessible to the mass reader’ rather than based on the putative language of that reader in his or her pre-educated state: this curtailed experiments in skaz in prose and poetry alike. By the time that literary adventurousness resurfaced again, in the 1960s, the majority of the Russian population was living in towns, and