stories have an affinity with Christian parable. Both Old-World Landowners (1835) and The Overcoat (1841) are intimately connected with an ascetic Christian critique of self- gratification and the accumulation of material possessions: in both, the ‘mistake’ made by the characters is not to ‘lay up treasure in heaven’, not to prepare for the inevitable day of divine judgement. But both texts, like Gogol’s great novel Dead Souls and his play The Government Inspector, were the product of a talent that found sinfulness easier to imagine than virtue. The main character of The Overcoat, the pathetic Akaky Akakievich, with his scatological name (kakat’ is a childish word for defecation, ‘to cack’) and his haemorrhoidal complexion, was a walking vision of fleshly disgust, someone who, like the characters in Dead Souls, was a corpse in Christian terms long before his death.
The search for an Orthodox revival in literature emerged in theory before it did in practice, then. It was expressed not only in Gogol’s treatise Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, but also in the work of writers associated with the ‘Slavophile’ movement of national conservatives that began to emerge in the late 1830s – Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksey Khomyakov, and Konstantin Aksakov. Where radical writers were rabidly secular in their tastes, the Slavophiles looked back nostalgically to Russia before the time of Peter the Great, when, so they
140 believed, religion had infused every aspect of secular life. The fact that imaginative literature was itself a Western concept (as I mentioned in Chapter 2, textual production in medieval Russia was dominated by ecclesiastical needs) did not worry the Slavophiles, since they believed it was possible to combine the best features of Western and native Russian ‘enlightenment’ (prosveshchenie). The culmination of their ideas, in a literary sense, was the work of Dostoevsky, a socialist sympathizer transformed by the experience of mock execution and incarceration in a labour camp into an Orthodox believer, a conservative, and by far the greatest ‘theological’ writer of the nineteenth century. The memoirs, novels, and stories that Dostoevsky wrote after his return from Siberian exile were not ‘religious’ merely in the sense that they focused upon themes of transgression and repentance, or topical issues such as the reform of the church courts, or because they included characters who were believers. They were also permeated by religious concepts that shaped structure and plot as well as appearing in arguments, most importantly sobornost (a term coined by Khomyakov to describe a social unity modelled upon that of the sobornaya tserkov, the phrase used for ‘Holy Catholic Church’ in the Orthodox Creed) and kenosis (‘emptying out’, a term denominating the striving to commune with others, to the point of self-loss). Both of these concepts were central to Dostoevsky’s final and most obviously Orthodox novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80). They underlay the portraits of Alyosha Karamazov and of his teacher Zosima, whose godly death was a counterbalance to the brutal parricide at the heart of the novel. They were also at the heart of the Fable of the Grand Inquisitor, where the Inquisitor himself spoke for a utilitarian, ‘Western’ view of Church power working in the world to right material injustice, while the silent Christ stood for spiritual probity of a non- interventionist, contemplative kind.
At some levels, then, there could scarcely be a more instructive contrast in styles than between Pushkin and Dostoevsky. On the one hand, there is The Brothers Karamazov, a sprawling, immensely ambitious study of
141 the nature of belief, if also of the nature of doubt (there is passionate conviction in the agnostic Ivan Karamazov’s refusal to acknowledge the goodness of a deity who tolerates suffering on the part of the innocent). On the other, there is The Queen of Spades, a brilliant miniature in which the existence even of the supernatural in a low-level sense, let alone of God, is open to question, and in which the Church figures only in the form of a worldly priest whose lip-service to the moral qualities of the dead Countess in his funeral oration is in ironic contrast to her querulous and egotistical character in life. Dostoevsky’s admiration for Pushkin (even a Pushkin made in his own image) seems at first mysterious. Yet the two tales do have much in common, and not just because Pushkin’s frivolous beau-monde is the world in which Elder Zosima has moved before his conversion. Similar, too, is the matter-of-fact, even homely, attitude to the uncanny in both texts. The dead Countess’s appearance to Hermann in The Queen of Spades (whether as hallucination or ghost is unclear) is preceded by ‘a shuffling of slippers’; the Devil who appears to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov is a disagreeably chirpy middle-aged man whose mediocre brown suit suggests a middle-ranking provincial civil servant, the Evil One as pen-pushing bureaucrat.
The other world as seen here is, in the words of Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov’s sinister double in Crime and Punishment, hell as ‘a bath-house full of spiders’. The chilling sense of a sort of parallel universe of banality and boredom recurs in Daniil Kharms’ absurdist stories of the 1930s, here acting as a counterweight to the synthetic ‘heaven’ of Socialist Realist myth. It is present once more in the figure of Quilty from Lolita, a travesty Doppelganger whom Humbert Humbert cannot throw off, any more than Ivan can his horribly bonhomous devil. In all these texts, the sense of hellish claustrophobia retains its hold, but in each it is modulated quite differently. It never hardens into stereotype, unlike the view of everyday life as a domain of inescapable banality, an impediment to intellectual activity, which gives many Russian texts, from Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done to the final part of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a strange vacancy at their heart, with
142 specific settings treated as though they were of no more consequence than the standard fittings of a station waiting room before a train is boarded to head off somewhere more interesting. The most vivid evocations of Christ in Russian literature are of failed Christs: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, whose commitment to salvation through love destroys Nastas’ya Filippovna rather than saving her, and Ieshua, the eccentric, holy-fool Jesus of Bulgakov’s debunked Jerusalem in Master and Margarita.
If the canonical Gospel texts have been reflected in Russian literature only obliquely, though, the absorption of writers in eschatology, or the ‘four last things’ of Christian theology (death, judgement, heaven, and hell), has made the Apocalypse a central book for them. This is particularly clear in texts written during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pessimism of the fin de siecle inspired interest not only in the writings of such intellectual nihilists as Nietzsche or Oswald Spengler, but also in the Orthodox tradition of looking forward to the destruction of the wicked secular world and the establishment of religious rule. Successive historical catastrophes – national defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the ‘year of revolutions’ that followed, the First World War, Revolution, and the Russian Civil War – were represented by writers using apocalyptic imagery. A particularly striking example was Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard. The book had some allegiance to the historical fiction of Tolstoy, in that the experience of one family and their connections was used to stand for the experience of historical subjects in general. But Tolstoy’s emphasis upon history as a dialectic between predestination and human will (according to the epilogue of War and Peace, the wise historical subject was one who did not place too high a value upon the import of his or her own actions) had been replaced by a stress on malign destiny. This reinforced the powerlessness of historical subjects, who were left only with the power to regret. In this, Bulgakov echoed the moralism of Russian medieval texts such as The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Baty, where defeat and destruction were visited upon God’s people ‘because of our sins’: ‘A
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