Caryl Emerson
Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked – and then conquered – the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian narratives (saints’ lives, folk tales, epic and rogue narratives), the book moves through literary history chronologically and thematically, juxtaposing literary texts from each major period. Detailed attention is given to canonical writers including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn, as well as to some current bestsellers from the post-communist period. Fully accessible to students and readers with no knowledge of Russian, the volume includes a glossary and pronunciation guide of key Russian terms and a list of useful secondary works. The book will be of great interest to students of Russian as well as of comparative literature.
Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.
Introduction1
1Critical models, committed readers, and
three Russian Ideas11
Literary critics and their public goods14
Three Russian Ideas22
2Heroes and their plots34
Righteous persons35
Fools39
Frontiersmen43
Rogues and villains47
Society’s misfitsinthe European style53
The heroeswemight yet see57
3Traditional narratives59
Saints’ lives62
Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the
Deathless)66
Hybrids: folk epic and Faust tale71
Miracle, magic, law75
4Western eyes on Russian realities: the
eighteenth century80
Neoclassical comedy and Gallomania84
Chulkov’s Martona: life instructs art90
Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”94
ix
x
5The astonishing nineteenth century:
Romanticisms99
Pushkin and honor101
Duels108
Gogol and embarrassment114
Pretendership118
6Realisms: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov125
Biographies of events, and biographies that
are quests for the Word129
Time-spaces (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy)134
Dostoevsky and books146
Tolstoy and doing without words148
Poets and novelists (Dostoevsky and
Nekrasov)153
Anton Chekhov: lesser expectations, smaller
forms156
7Symbolist and Modernist world-building:
three cities, three novels, and the Devil166
The fin de sie`cle: Solovyov, Nietzsche,
Einstein, Pavlov’s dogs, political terrorism168
Modernist time-spaces and their modes of
disruption171
City myths: Petersburg, Moscow, OneState179
8The Stalin years: socialist realism,
anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness191
What was socialist realism?198
Gladkov)203
Shvarts)207
Andrei Platonov and suspension211
The “righttothe lyric”inanAgeofIron217
9 Coming to terms and seeking new terms: from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of
the millennium220
The intelligentsia and the camps
(Solzhenitsyn)224
The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)230
Three ways for writers to treat matter
(Sorokin, Pelevin, Akunin)238
(photobyMichael Julius)
xii
This is a book for the advanced beginner. It is not presumed that the reader has taken any courses in Russian literature or history, nor studied the Russian language (although I do introduce a number of Russian words for which there are no precise cultural equivalents; these words are gathered in a glossary at the end). All works discussed exist in English translation and most enjoy considerable name recognition outside Russia. But the beginner is nevertheless not entirely a blank slate. Most readers, hopefully, will have read a story or seen a play by Chekhov and know something by Tolstoy (perhaps
Because the book is for beginners, those professional colleagues who helped me by reading drafts, prodding out errors, and advising me on what to delete know a great deal more than the book’s target audience. And yet they kept their erudition in check, remembering that the purpose here is to introduce and seduce, not to resolve some scholarly debate. Of those who donated their page-by-page insights and services to this project I thank, above all, my Princeton colleagues Michael Wachtel (whose
xiii
xiv
Many hundreds of Princeton undergraduates in my literature courses over the past twenty years have helped me to see what texts did (and did not) speak to the curious, but still “common” reader. For scrutiny and scholarly feedback from outside the Princeton community, I am indebted to three of my most astute longstanding readers, Kathleen Parthe´, Donna Tussing Orwin, and (in a class of her own as stylistic editor and critic) Josephine Woll, whose untimely death from cancer in March 2008 makes the imprint of her intelligence on these pages all the more precious..
Then there are my own teachers, in print as well as in person, whose traces are everywhere and edgeless: George Gibian, Sidney Monas, Victor Erlich, Robert Belknap, Michael Holquist, Robert Louis Jackson, Richard Taruskin, Donald Fanger, Joseph Frank.
In this as in other Cambridge University Press projects, Linda Bree has been the exemplary editor, ably assisted this time round by Maartje Scheltens, Elizabeth Davey, and Jacqueline French. At the final inch, which became a very demanding mile, Ivan Eubanks provided indispensable editorial, formatting, and research services. Jason Strudler helped me cut 23,000 words from the final draft without batting an eye.
Debtstomyfamily thistimeround are deeper thanever.Tomyever supportive and enabling husband Ivan Zaknic, my parents, and my siblings, the usual gratitude for accepting the fact that the wisdom and provocation of the Russian literary tradition has been my lodestar for as long as I can remember, obliging them to make allowance, decade after decade, for odd priorities and monumental blind spots. Special thanks are due to my father David Geppert, who is the sort of reader and interlocutor that most writers can only dream about, and to my sister Trisha Woollcott, certified nurse-midwife, who persisted in calling Nikolai Gogol “google” and whose no-nonsense diagnostic skills detected all manner of verbal obfuscation. To my grandnephew and godson Nicholas, born in 2004 and thus also a beginner, this volume is lovingly dedicated.
Russian literature is compact, intensely self-reflexive, and always about to forget that it is merely made up out of words. Imagined characters walk out of fiction into real life, while real-life writers are raised to the status of myth. Myths consolidated first around saints, then around cities (St. Petersburg and Moscow), then around biographies of writers, finally around ethical and ideological systems. When measured against the subcontinents – Europe and Asia proper – that flank Russia to the west, south, and east, this tradition is remarkable in two respects: its extreme brevity, and its lateness. Chinese literature is calibrated in millennia. Masterpieces in Arabic date from the fifth century. Dante wrote his
From that point on, the rise was unprecedentedly swift. Within two decades, from 1815 to the end of the 1820s, two paradigm-shifting events came to pass that provided prime binding material for national myth: Russia’s most perfect military victory (the expulsion of Napoleon, from 1812–15) and the maturity of her most perfect poet, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837). These achievements were not the crowning peaks of a national history but its beginning, and they shaped the public face of modern Russia and of Russian literature. It was a two-faced Janus. Pushkin came to represent a style of creativity so cosmopolitan that a Russian man (or woman) of letters was presumed to be at home, linguistically and culturally, anywhere in Europe. During those same years, however, Napoleon’s defeat and its aftermath led to a chauvinistic closing-down of Russia as a sociopolitical entity, and to a pattern of suspicious confrontation with the West that has continued, with small windows of relief, into the twenty-first century.
Such was the visible point of origin. A scant fifty years after Pushkin’s birth, Russians were producing works of prose fiction that not only were translated into every major world language, but whose authors, most spectacularly Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), became internationalcelebrities and media stars, asmuch for their lives and philosophies as for their art. The self-consciousness of this
1
2
tradition was furthered by a steadily rising literacy rate, the emergence of a mass press, and also by recurring national trauma, censorship, and an edgy, often defensive “exceptionalism” – that is, by the insistence that Russia was so special that she could not be judged by normal (which is to say, Western European) standards of progress, health, or success. “Normalization” at some non-catastrophic level became a possibility only for post-communist Russia. But many Russians – and Russia-watchers as well – have feared that rudderless freedom and the abrupt dethroning of literature’s role as arbiter of national identity might spell the end of the Russian literary tradition.
This book is predicated on the assumption that such fears are unfounded. A literary tradition can crack, interbreed with alien elements, be subject to massive purging and parodies of itself, incessantly predict its own demise, and still remain robust. Indeed, purgings and parodies need not discredit the corpus but can become identifying traits and even load-bearing structures within the tradition. The enduring core of this tradition is called the “literary canon.” The phrase requires some explanation. The canon of a nation’s literature – its best-known texts, plots, fictional characters, plus the mythically enhanced biographies of its writers – does not have the force of a religious doctrine or a legal code. It changes constantly, but slowly, more by accretion and decay than by fiat. A given canon looks different, of course, to native speakers raised inside the culture that gave birth to it, than it does to outsiders who speak another language and depend upon translations. The literary canon of any national culture works in approximations. Ask any dozen interested readers to identify “canonic works” from a given culture, and each will come up with a different list. But chances are excellent that all lists will contain some works in common. Our goal is to stick close to that common core.
As used here, the phrases “literary tradition” and “literary canon” refer to works of creative fiction that satisfy three criteria. First, these are the created worlds (or writers’ biographies) that generations of Russians have been raised on and are expected to recognize, the way English speakers recognize the shape of one of Shakespeare’s plots (
Second, texts become canonical when they are repeatedly referenced, recycled, and woven into successive artistic worlds so that they never entirely fade
from view. Tolstoy’s
And finally: the literary canon is proof of the legitimating aesthetic judgment of readers over time. Of course politics, censorship, taste, prejudice, accidents of loss or discovery, and approved reading lists play a role in the canonizing process. But overall, canonic works survive because they are excellent. Excellence in an artwork is both formal (that is, due to its efficient aesthetic construction) and “psychological” – that is, we recognize a classic because it has rewarded multiple interpretations of itself from multiple points of view, over generations.
During the century that it has existed in adequate English translation, the Russian canon of novels and plays has acquired a reputation and a certain “tone.” It is serious (that is, tragic or absurd, but rarely lighthearted and never trivial), somewhat preacherly, often politically oppositionist, and frequently cast in a mystifying genre with abrupt or bizarre beginnings and ends. The novels especially are too long, too full of metaphysical ideas, too manifestly eager that readers not just read the story for fun or pleasure but learn a moral lesson. These books are deep into good and evil even while they parody those pretensions. If there is comedy – and Russian fiction can be screamingly funny – there is a twist near the end that turns your blood to ice. Russian literary characters don’t seek the usual money, career, success in society, sex for its own sake, trophy wife or husband, house in the suburbs, but instead crave some other unattainable thing.
How one should respect this reputation and received “tone” is a delicate issue. In the literary humanities, an Introduction is a subjective enterprise. It has a shape of its own, which means big gaps and broad leaps. It is not a history, handbook, encyclopedia, digest of fictional plots or real-life literary biographies, and even less is it a cutting-edge textbook summarizing, as science textbooks can, the “state of the art.” No in-print genre today can compete with search engines or updatable online resources for objective information of that sort. An Introduction probably works best as a tour guide, pointing out landmarks, road signs, and connecting paths. Since its purpose is to lead somewhere more complex than the point at which it began, it should introduce names, texts, and themes that an interested reader can pursue elsewhere in more detail. A non-Russian author inviting a non-Russian audience to enter this territory is thus obliged, I believe, to select as exemplary those literary texts and tools
4
that are accessible “from the outside.” They must exist in decent translations, survive as genuine works of art in their target languages (here, English), and be capable of accumulating cultural weight beyond Russia’s borders.
With minor exceptions, this defines the transposable Great Russian prose canon, plus perhaps a dozen plays. It neglects the empire’s cultural minorities. This prose canon contains very few women (the Russian nineteenth century had no Jane Austen, George Eliot, or George Sand) – although groundbreaking research on Russian women’s writing over the past three decades has brought to light many formerly invisible authors and works. For reasons of space, the Russian e´migre´ community is excluded from this book (together with the aristocratic and very Russian genius of Vladimir Nabokov, who has stimulated a Russo-American industry of his own).
The most significant compression in the present volume, however, occurs in the realm of Russian poetry, which can only be a secondary presence in the story. The
To set poetry at one pole and “the rest of literature” at the other is a familiar reflex in literary studies, and it comes at a cost. It satisfies our intuitive sense that the most marvelous aspects of a poem collapse outside its original language, or must be wholly recreated by a translator-poet of equivalent gifts, whereas prose
is somehow wide open, serving raw experience more than form. This binary view, unfair to the resources of both poetry and prose, leaves out rich stretches of artistic writing in between – ornamentalist prose, rhythmic speech, and “prose poems,” for example. But it nevertheless touches on an important truth. Prose is deficient in criteria and tools for precise measurement, whereas poetry has an agreed-on descriptive and critical vocabulary, beginning with rules of versification. In his
How do prose writers bond and cite? Shared themes and images are important for both poetry and prose, but unlike the lyric poem, fused to the language and rhythms of its birth, prose and dramatic genres are presumed to be more resilient – orphaned without trauma and adopted with gratitude into new families. Novels, stories, and plays are routinely “realized” outside their original languages, garnering international fame in all manner of translations, to audiences that have no idea of the context or sound of the source. (Occasionally one even hears the comment that a translation can, and should,
This profligate applicability of stories to life was one reason why the Russian Formalists, attempting to professionalize literary study in the 1920s, took up the challenge of narrative prose with such missionary fervor. They devisedtechnical categories for its analysis that were deliberately, polemically blind to personality and to ethics: objective terminology and procedures that would qualify artistic prose as aself-consciously “literary” (or “poetical”) construct.Itisofenormous significance that the most aggressive and fertile of these Russian prose theorists,
6
ViktorShklovsky(1893–1984), wrotebrashandinfluential essays onthe artistry of Miguel Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Laurence Sterne, all the while working solely, and apparently with full confidence, in Russian translation. Shklovsky did not know Spanish, English, or any foreign language. Did he consider his monolingualism a handicap? His practice as an analyst of prose suggests that in his view, a higher-order authenticity residing in the very structure or movement of literary narrative permits it to transcend the specific material out of which it is made. No verse theorist could take seriously the “scientific” results of such a method applied to his chosen subject matter.
In balancing these two wings of the Russian tradition, the poetic and the prosaic, Flaubert’s remark to Turgenev about that “flat poet, Pouchkine” has been a warning to the present volume. Flaubert was not wholly wrong. Pushkin taken out of Russian becomes two-dimensional with treacherous ease. Part of the reason, surely, is that his lyric gift was not especially pictorial. He tended to avoid metaphor, which is among the easiest elements of a poem to be transferred out of one language into another. Instead of image and metaphor, Pushkin manipulated for poetic purposes various grammatical categories, largely case endings and the verbal aspect peculiar to Slavic tongues – all the while delivering a lucid, pure, almost conversational speaking line.5 Other great poets of thicker, more startling texture, such as Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), built so inventively out of Russian phonemes that each verbal unit literally explodes on the ear with a mass of lexical and rhythmic associations. Such effects can hardly be registered outside their native element. But some genres of poetry (longer narrative poems, ballads, and many types of verse satire) communicate powerfully in translation, and these will be selectively stitched in to the chapters that follow. Perhaps most important, the
There is a final intriguing paradox. Michael Wachtel is surely correct that Russian poets cultivate a highly formal communal identity out of aural and rhythmic reminiscence. But prose writers seem to have cultivated the opposite, a form-
French and Italian prose classics, he was viewed with suspicion as a renegade, insufficiently disobedient and exotic to be truly Russian. The same charge was later leveled against his well-trained, formally disciplined, Western-friendly compatriot in music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Russian spokespersons for the canon have long been protective of its eccentric, high-risk, rebellious profile. The greatest writers seemed always to be in trouble with their regimes, and the worst regimes in turn felt threatened by writers. But a persecuted or martyred writer could be posthumously cleansed of ideological impurities and elevated to approved, even to cultic, status in a series of state-sponsored Jubilees. This happened massively with Pushkin (d. 1837) at the end of the nineteenth century, with Tolstoy (d. 1910) beginning with the centenary of his birth in 1928, and with the great Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (d. 1930), glorified by Stalin’s decree five years after he had committed suicide. A writer privileged to be part of this pantheon could be alternately repressed and sponsored, shoved into the limelight and just as suddenly yanked back into the shadows. One can only wonder, looking back at the process from a freer time, how much of that heroic story of literature’s cen-trality to Russian culture was itself manipulated. How might Russian identity have developed without these violent enthusiasms and constraints?
Such thought experiments are sobering. For of the three major forces that disseminated literature and compensated writers – the ruling court (tsarist or communist), the aristocratic salon, and the bookseller’s market – “royal patronage,” with its hectoring censorship and selective sponsorings, has probably done the most to foster the high-minded texts that we associate with the immortal Russian classics. But did the average Russian citizen in times of distress really recite poetry like a mantra? How many readers actually desired to change their lives, as those great novels (and novelists, and literary critics) constantly urged them to do? The story of the two-hundred-year rise of Russian literature became its own bestselling novel – although, some now suggest, largely among the elite groups invested in the story.
This hazard is inherent in discussions of any canon, but of the Russian more than most. Among the virtues of Jeffrey Brooks’s path-breaking study
8
keenly valued goods, Russian “high” and “low” cultures were not isolated from each other. Plots, fads, and literary devices moved in both directions. Among the services rendered by recent scholarship is to remind us that most people, including great writers who live in authoritarian or “closed” regimes, have everyday lives and non-heroic appetites. The pull of pleasurable distraction interrupts the grimmest political threats as well as the temptations of tragedy and high significance. Pushkin, lofty persecuted poet, loved comic opera and formulaic verse comedy throughout his life. Sergei Prokofiev, repatriated to the USSR on the brink of the Great Terror, had long courted commissions (from Hollywood and elsewhere) for the frothiest film music. It was this rigid aspect of Russian reverence for its canonical writers and writings that began to loosen up in the 1980s, most frequently through affectionate irony, occasionally through abuse, but always with the sense (thrilling to some, terrible to others) that the stability of a massive and precious edifice was at stake.
Such, then, have been the major anxieties informing this project: the status of the “high” canon; the indispensability of the Russian language to it; and the self-mythologization of Russia’s literary tradition. For each anxiety, compromises were eventually found. Some parts of poetry survive admirably in translation, because form has many ways of making itself felt. It was my working assumption that the major literary works of a cultural tradition do submit to a technical treatment more rigorous and interesting than a paraphrase of plots, feelings, and ideas. Tools of analysis can be devised. Alongside the evolution of poetically analyzable structures – the ode, ballad, elegy, blank-verse lyric, revolutionary “stepladder verse” [
movement (socialist realism) was deliberately designed to debunk, relativize, and humiliate European literary models.
Let me return in closing to the anxiety about “rudderless freedom” raised in the opening pages. Does Russia’s partially “normalized” post-communist literary life, which has greatly diminished the role and status of the creative writer, threaten the integrity of the tradition? Perturbations have been severe, but apocalypse is nowhere in sight. In-print verbal art continues to have splendid survival advantages, regardless of sinister twists in Kremlin politics and even in competition with today’s image-saturated, instantly accessible cybernetic world. To its immense good fortune, literature does not need the big budgets, collective efforts, or approved public spaces required to realize symphonic music, visual art exhibits, cinematic productions or large-scale architectural projects. Its more compact forms can be carried in the pocket, composed (and also carried) in the head. Heroic legends abound concerning this latter mode of survival under the most recent Old Regime. Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the great poet, committed her husband’s entire poetic corpus to memory “for safekeeping” during the Stalinist years, until it was no longer dangerous to write it down. Since literary texts are so very dispersed and so inefficiently, individually, privately processed, inertia tends to be huge. One can blow up an offensive monument but cannot gather up and burn all copies of a published novel. A state bureaucracy can ban a film or mutilate an opera, but it cannot prevent us from memorizing and mentally re-experiencing a poem in all its fullness.
And finally: unlike the progressive, falsifiable sciences or (at the other extreme) the capriciously marketed world of fashion, great literature does not date. It accumulates contexts rather than outgrows them, for literature is designed to speak to the current needs of the person who activates it. Who are these “activators”? Although today’s Russian school curriculum might no longer require
With that fact in mind it is worth asking, in Milan Kundera’s spirit, whether a literature need belong to its own nation at all. Russian lovers of the word are of two minds on this issue, professing two ideals. In the first, that peculiar chauvinism exemplified by Dostoevsky, Russian literature is a common denominator for the world, yet only Russians are privileged to understand it. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some leading Russian sociologists still see in the Russian national character a “negative identity” driven by self-deprecating exceptionalism, ennui, sentimentality, constant expectation of
10
catastrophe, and an alarming xenophobia.8 It is indeed true that these character traits read like a home page for the darker sides of Dostoevsky’s novels. But it is also true – and this is the second ideal – that Russian literature long ago slipped out from under the tutelage of the nation that produced it. Russian artists – in literature, theatre, dance, music, film – have inspired more disciples and “schools” around the world than any other single national culture. Since the early 1990s, a bit of that openness has been coming home.
Critical models, committed readers, and three Russian Ideas
“Apart from reading,” Dostoevsky’s Underground Man complains, “there was no place to go.”1 The metaphor is striking. So central was proper reading to the cultured Russian’s self-image and sense of realitythat poetry, fictional literature, memoirs, diaries, even personal letters from and among great writers almost constituted a
Several models were considered for this book. The first was the most conventional: selected writers and their works juxtaposed to one another in chronological sequence. A second model suggested itself around distinctive Russian genres: saint’s life, fairy tale, war epic, “notes” or casual jottings [
Several factors ledtothis compromise decision. First, Russianliterary“types” do not cluster especially well in the abstract. They are historically conditioned and best grasped within those conditions. What is more, the practice of
11
12
clustering heroes is usually unfair to the fictive personalities involved. As proof it is sufficient to consider the innocent, by now pedestrian label “superfluous man,” routinely applied to a certain style of Russian nineteenth-century male protagonist.The epithet wouldhave beenincomprehensible to themostfamous heroeswho bore it(Pushkin’s EugeneOnegin, Lermontov’sGrigoryPechorin) – unhappy men, perhaps, but surely not willing to be classified as unnecessary or redundant to the only life they knew. The phrase was devised decades later and applied to them only retroactively, by writers and critics who decided that a more socially responsible, productive (that is, “positive”) hero was morally preferable for Russia’s social development. Thinking by type is always crude, but historical context can help us avoid the worst abuses. One good illustration of the necessity to read Russian types historically might be the myth of a “salvation-bearing peasantry.”
Early Russian images of the rural underclass were raw and satirical. In the 1790s, in imitation of the European vogue for pastoral idylls, Russia’s first pre-Romantic writers began to sentimentalize the peasant. This myth took on weight in the 1830s–40s after the appearance in Moscow of a Slavophile movement glorifying the archaic Russian past, and thereafter was kept alive by a conscience-stricken, serfowning “repentant gentry” up to and beyond 1861, the year Tsar Alexander II emancipated the peasantry from personal bondage. One writer’s long life could encompass several stages of this evolving image. Leo Tolstoy, for example, portrays a shrewd, ethnographically diverse, ethically neutral peasantry in
For most writers of the Soviet period, the factory worker and front-line soldier were the commoners of choice. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, when official ideology began to fray, did “Village Prose” writers offer an alternative to those two ideologically sanctioned groups in a stoic, heroic peasant who had survived modernization, collectivization, and total war to become the moral
standard of thenation. The1976 novel
Another sensitive cultural marker is the battlefield. Types of heroes and heroism have been closely tied to Russia’s major (and minor) wars – aggressive and defensive, nation-threatening as well as the routine border conflict. Distinct lit-eraturesdevelopedaroundtheyears1812(Napoleon’sinvasion, calledthe “First Fatherland War”), 1854–55 (Crimean War), 1878 (Russo-Turkish War), 1904– 05 (Russo-Japanese War), 1914–18 (The Great War), 1918–21 (Civil War), 1941–45 (World War II or “Second Fatherland War”), and, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the interminable bloodletting in Chechnya. The close integration of the military class (officers and soldiers) with civilian society throughout the imperial period (1725–1917) not only permeated literature with the martial values of sacrifice, courage, obedience, duty, and patriotic death, but also fostered a tradition of literary plots built around crises in the public domain. In the Russian context, a great writer like Marcel Proust would find no readymade place.
The Russian literary canon developed as a dialogue in time. Here I use that overworked word “dialogue” literally, not in its more metaphorical meaning that would apply, say, to the dispersed English or Italian literary traditions, each with a leisurely thousand years of distantly spaced texts. Russian literature since 1820 was a real person-to-person dialogue taking place almost entirely in two cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, the cultural capitals of a vast but highly centralized empire. All the main publishing houses were there, the reading public was there, and the rest of the country was still imperfectly mapped and largely mute. Writers knew, responded to, revered and parodied each other within their own lifetimes and the living memory of their readers. Succession rites were often overt. As an old man in 1815, the eighteenth-century court poet Gavril Derzhavin formally consecrated the teenager Pushkin to poetry. Mikhail Lermontov stepped out to fame in 1837, in the aftermath of an outraged poem he composed on the occasion of Pushkin’s death in a duel that same year. Dostoevsky in the 1840s fashioned his first literary heroes out of prototypes created by Nikolai Gogol a decade earlier – and to underscore the debt, he obliged his own heroes to read, react to, and measure themselves against fictive characters created by Gogol and Pushkin. Maksim Gorky (real
14
name Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, 1868–1936), who knew both Tolstoy and Chekhov personally and revered them both, lived to become Lenin’s comrade, Stalin’s uneasy cultural commissar, and the Party’s official sponsor of socialist realism in 1934. We can speak here of a tradition so concise, responsive, and linear that chronology is its natural framework.
Literary critics and their public goods
Russia’s stunningly rapid literary rise and its importance to her sense of identity made literary activity highly self-conscious. Almost before there was a literature, Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48), Russia’s founding literary critic, was promoting indigenous talent and debating, at times ferociously, the nature of a writer’s duties. The Romantic-era notion authorizing literary critics to supervise artistic creativity and instruct the nation’s readership enjoyed a long life on Russian soil. “All our artists would wander off along various paths, because it is only the critic-journalists who show them the way,” wrote the radical critic Nikolai Shelgunov in 1870. “Novelists merely collect the firewood and stoke the engine of life, but the critic-journalist is the driver.”2 Poetry was celebrated and novels serialized in literary periodicals, the so-called “thick journals.” For most of the nineteenth century, the circulation of each of these omnibus literary almanachs rarely exceeded 700 subscribers – and this tiny readership “conversed” with itself around emerging fictional masterpieces. Successive chapters of
considered civic speech, mediated by institutions and a rising corporate consciousness, an unwelcome rival.
Although intellectual freedom in the public sphere constricted at times to the choking point, Russian thought about literature broadened and became more systematic in the twentieth century. Russian theories burst upon the world, with ambitions of being applied to the world. Russian Formalists in the 1920s made claims about the nature of
Three major approaches to literary expression achieved currency beyond Russia’s borders in the twentieth century: the Formalist, the Dialogic, and the Structuralist-semiotic. From each of these schools I have chosen one concept to help focus our literary juxtapositions and link them up into a more coherent national narrative.
From the Formalists, in particular Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) and Yury Tynyanov (1894–1943), comes the idea of “respectful” parody. The idea grows out of the Aesopian defense discussed above. Many authors and critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century believed that a protest literature, one that exposed social ills and assigned blame, was the only morally justified position for a writer. But by the century’s turn a reaction had set in against this civic-minded – and usually stridently materialist – mandate, first among Symbolist poets and critics seeking a more mystical reality, then among a group of Petrograd literary scholars, known as the Formalists, who sought to defend the autonomy of art against all such ragged, ill-formed obligations to “real life.” Formalists did not preach “art for art’s sake.” They acknowledged that art and life were interdependent. Shklovsky stressed this symbiosis in his twin ideas of “estrangement” and “automatization,” by which he meant the duty of art to “make everyday objects strange” so that our habitual perceptions would be
16
jolted out of their drowsy rut and we would wake up to life anew. As he put it in 1916: after viewing nature – or people, or ideas – through the lens of art, “the sun seems sunnier and the stone stonier”; without art, our automatized life would “eat away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, at our fear of war.”5 This is definitely art in the service of life. Overall, however, it was not the “wake-up” function that the Formalists advocated for verbal art as much as a higher degree of autonomy.
Literature, they insisted, was a profession and a craft. It could even become a “science” (in Russian, the word for science,
In a 1921 essay on Dostoevsky and Gogol, “Toward a Theory of Parody,” Tynyanov insisted that parody is not the same as satire, travesty, farce or burlesque. All those forms involve a struggle against outdated behaviors and forms, to be sure. At some level all strive to make us laugh. But parody need not imply any mean-spirited disrespect. Within the tightly laced spiral of the Russian tradition, the old was understood as essential to appreciating the new. The early Dostoevsky “parodied” Gogol but worshipped him and could not have existed without him. The novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891– 1940), writing a century later, perceived himself as a direct heir (indeed,
almostacontemporary)ofboth Gogol and Dostoevsky. The best Decadent and Symbolist-era novels, such as Fyodor Sologub’s
The Dialogic school is represented by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Bakhtin was a profound student of parody, in which he heard a rich “double-voicedness” and thus the potential for achieving that most difficult human virtue: responsible, or answerable, freedom. His readings of Dostoevsky from this perspective are highly provocative. Respectful parody also permeates the Bakhtinian idea of carnival as open-ended, two-way or reciprocal laughter. More central than freedom or carnival to our discussions, however, will be Bakhtin’s less flashy, more workmanlike notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin adapted this neologism (“time-space”) from Einstein’s insights in physics and then applied it to the life sciences – where, in Bakhtin’s capacious view, literature should probably be classified. Verbal narrative resembles a living organism of a highly advanced type. It regulates itself internally on the basis of responsive feedback (from its author, its readers, and the fictive characters within itself). It respects laws of causality and plausibility. It can manipulate categories of time and is capable of producing surprise, that is, the unpredictably new. The major difference between a work of creative literature and organic life is that literature, although meticulously individualized as an organism, does not die. Its life is sustained by its chronotope.
Bakhtin was a Kantian. He assumed that before any world could be repre-sentedor structured, the structuring mind makes assumptions about the workings of time and space. That matrix then determines, or conditions, the kinds of
18
events or evaluations that can happen within its borders, as well as the personalities that “come alive” in response to these events. Authors must decide how much liberty they will allow their narrators to exercise in the process of “coming to know” (penetrating, consoling, violating) the fictive consciousness that quickens insidethis time-space. Forunlike the Kantian practice,Bakhtin’s time-space is never transcendental or abstract. Seeing and speaking – Bakhtin’s minimum for experience – require a concrete body. A valid chronotope thus always delimits, individualizes, and evaluates the point of view from which any story is experienced and then told. It puts edges and eyes into the literary word. Bakhtin argued that the difference between literary genres is not to be found in formal features such as length, theme, rhyme scheme, acoustical patterns or the prose/poetry boundary. The sense of a genre is determined by its chronotope, whose primary task is to provide a breeding ground and viable environment for the growth of consciousness.
The Structuralist-semiotic perspective in this book is represented by Yury Lotman (1922–93) and his Tartu School of Cultural Semiotics. They contribute one big concept to the present study: the binary opposition. Binary structures – often resolved into a triad awaiting new bifurcation – were comfortable for Russian intellectuals, who had been enthusiastic about the Hegelian dialectic ever since the 1830s and who were battered by the obligatory “Marxist-Leninist dialectic” for most of the twentieth century. Opposing polarities is a controversial method, however. It feeds in to the proverbial (and oversimplified) image of Russian culture as a place solely of black-and-white extremes and maximalist ideals. Possibly for Aesopian reasons, in their writings from the 1970s Lotman and his colleagues limited their binary interpretations to the more formulaic texts and behaviors of the Russian medieval world (twelfth to seventeenth century), which could indeed be explicated effectively in terms of sacred versus demonic, high versus low, East versus West, old versus new. Applied to later eras or more complex texts, the binary can be distorting. Lot-man himself, in the final years of his life (which were also the final years of the Soviet regime), began to question the wisdom of a binary worldview for Russia, comparing it to a stool on two legs – exciting because always on the brink but unstable and chronically vulnerable, liable to collapse after a single shockwave. Perestroika, he implied, was that “explosion or rupture necessary for the transition in Russian culture from a binary to a ternary cultural formation.”6
That being said, natives as well as outsiders have long organized Russian literary space according to polar oppositions. Among the most durable of these poles have been: court poets versus prose satirists in the eighteenth century; Slavophiles versus Westernizers in the 1840–50s; utilitarians versus aesthetes in
the 1860s (and again in the 1890s); proletarians versus the relics of “bourgeois” art in the 1920s; and official party-minded art versus underground dissidents in the Soviet period. Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque,” the biggest bestseller ever to come out of Russian cultural theory and justly celebrated for its tolerance, openness, and malleability, paradoxically rests on one huge unbridgeable binary: the “official serious classical body” versus the “unofficial laughing grotesque.” In such polarized models, each extreme sustains and defines the other – while reducing the other, unavoidably, to caricature. Only in the last three decades has this for-or-against infrastructure definitively broken down, replaced by a rich assortment of asymmetrical, legally coexisting postmodernist alternatives. Relief as well as confusion has been immense.
My use of the binary model in the present book is intended to bemoresugges-tive than analytically rigorous. Each chapter identifies two major authors, text types, or worldviews that represent fundamentally different forms of literary expression during that period. These anchor the two poles and delimit the field. Sometimes the two poles are mediated and pushed out into a triad. Key episodes in a work (or a small cluster of works) are then discussed chronotopically – that is, with an eye to how time, space, interpersonal relations (author-narrator-hero-reader), and consequently human values are structured within it. Where the story line of a literary text promises to be obscure to non-Russian readers, plot summary is provided (for an Orthodox saint’s life, warrior epic, medieval Faust tale, prose comedy from the eighteenth century, Stalin-era production novel or fairy-tale play). For the “first-bench canon” (name recognition at the level of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky), episodes must suffice.
These literary works or episodes are then linked to one another through parody, taken in the appreciative sense discussed above: a respectful homage and a reworking. Each of the six chronological chapters has its theme. For the eighteenth century (Chapter 4), it is satire and hybridization: how French-style neoclassical prose comedy and the picaresque novel were transposed to “barbaric” Russia, and how one synthesis of Russia and the West took powerful root at the end of the century. The Romantic period (Chapter 5) is organized around two distinctly different poles. The “Pushkin side” is the world of public codes, game-playing, and the duel of honor; the “Gogol side” is governed by the opposite dynamic, a private world of evasion and concealment, abundant in texts of embarrassment and exposure. During the Realist era (Chapter 6), these themes of honor and embarrassment inflate, change shape, and take on a more strident intonation. In Tolstoy, the duel broadens out into the battlefield, where honor is eclipsed by courage and the playful narrator is replaced by stern no-nonsense moral authority. In Dostoevsky, concern for privacy can reach insane, pathological, conspiratorial proportions, cunningly masked by self-defensive
20
narrative shields and comic narrators. For the Symbolist and Modernist period (Chapter 7), our theme is the city and its devils – which yields up the greatest Petersburg novel, the greatest Moscow novel, and a dystopian city-state that distils the myths of both these great Russian capital cities. For the Stalinist era (Chapter 8), we consider the doctrine of socialist realism and how it impressed itself upon three genres: the construction novel, the dramatized fairy tale, and the “suspended” lyric materialism of Andrei Platonov. Beginning with the first post-Stalinist Thaw (Chapter 9), the ideology of the canon relaxes somewhat. Literatureis officially allowed to acknowledge prisonsand laborcamps. Authors rechannel familiar high-canon scenarios through gratingly domestic contexts – our examples include the Dostoevskian underground from a harassed female perspective. Newheroesappear:Asianbusinessmen who arealsomystics, lyrical alcoholics, starched-collar detectives, serial killers, the tsarist secret police as role model, storage sheds that commit suicide. Certain constants survive from chapter to chapter: honor and humiliation as paths to a viable identity, the death of children.
For some periods, the benchmark writers anchoring the edges of literary space are so different from each other that each begins his own literary tradition. This is the case with the Romantic era, where the “Pushkin” and “Gogol” lines are antipathetic. But in other periods, agreatwriter will combine elements of both poles in a conscious quest for new and healthier hybrids. Under such conditions, one can speak almost of a “dialectical” development of characters and themes. The task of the mediating author is to challenge the oversimplification that is endemic to binary thinking and thus to re-complicate the field. To take only one example, the most timeworn binary in all of Russian literature: Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky. Like Pushkin and Gogol from an earlier period, these two were seen as incompatible geniuses. But writers appeared – one thinks of Anton Chekhov – whose gift it was to bridge, test, break down, and transform the most canonical hero types and legacies. Just as Pushkin reworked the cliche´s of European Romanticism in his short stories of the 1830s, so did Chekhov provide explicitly modest, non-melodramatic reworkings of bigger-than-life, tragic Tolstoyan plots in the 1880s and 1890s. Chekhov’s characters (like every other literate person alive in Russia) have read
a grave. In no way are these inversions or syntheses assumed to be superior to the benchmark authors who flank them. They are simply complex in a different way, for the intelligence of a literary tradition is not linear or progressive. It constantly grows in all directions without invalidating its earlier truths. For that reason there is no single optimal place from which to view it. But some students of the Russian tradition have seen in it a darker and more severe pattern than the binaries and triads offered here.
One such skeptic is the cultural historian Steven Marks, in his 2002 book titled
Marks has been praised as well as censured for this thesis. His book has been taken as a tribute to the dynamic creativity of Russian culture, to its infectious pan-humanism, and also as a slanderous insult to it. One negotiation of his hostile binary might be offered. Contempt for what the “civilized West” considers normal, healthy, or prosperous need not be the sole (nor even the primary) motivating force of Russian artists and thinkers. Russian nay-saying might more fairly be seen as a protest against any fixed idea of normalcy, against the belief that “normalcy” is or must be the norm or the ideal, and that sufferings and exceptional passions are painful diversions from the balanced, healthy condition that everyone would choose if given the option. In Russia’s more nonconformist tradition, from the earliest Orthodox saints to the most celebrated Dostoevskian novels, pain and passion have been considered necessary to both wisdom and consciousness. But Marks has nevertheless grasped a
22
basic truth. What returns us to Russian literature again and again is the chance to savor risk-taking at the extreme edges of an idea. And even those writers who parody these extremes (like Chekhov) or who despair at surviving them (like Boris Pilnyak [1894–1937]) are unsympathetic to the goals, behaviors, and humdrum activity that result from a disciplined or calculated pursuit of material prosperity.
What Marks explores in his book is one flamboyant expression of the “Russian Idea.” It too is part of the story of Russian literature. This Idea, born in Moscow in the 1830s among Russian Romantic disciples of Schelling, has had a long gestation. The e´migre´ philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), in a mood shaped equally by nostalgia and despair, codified the Russian Idea for Western consumption in a book of that name published in 1947, on the ruins of World War II.7 In it he emphasized Russia’s divinely inspired mission on behalf of all other peoples through her passivity, apocalypticism, collectivism, distinctly feminine softness (receptivity and forgiveness), indifference to political grandeur and private property alike, and her anarchic preference for the depths of personality over the superficialities of institutional identity. The work of great novelists and poets was recruited selectively as evidence.
Three Russian Ideas
As Russian imperial pretensions were enfeebled and discredited in the final decades of the twentieth century, these cosmic ambitions contracted. In 2004, an anthology of present-day Russian opinion on this time-honored, oft-maligned topic appeared as
In the Beginning was the Russian Word. This word has always been perceived as more than a means to communicate the merely transitory needs or truths of
the current day. Russia understood herself as having come to consciousness (as a mute infant comes to consciousness) through language. This Romantic-era conviction has had enormous staying power, and to some extent explains the charismatic grip of the Poet on Russian culture. Writers frequently attributed to the Russian Word “such values as self-consciousness, self-reflection, perception, intentionality” - as if the word itself and by itself were a person.9 In one’s native language, the wandering self could find its abiding home. Kathleen Parthe opens her book
At first glance the spiritual primacy of the word might seem paradoxical, for in Russian high medieval culture up through the late seventeenth century, literacy was low. The visual image and the miracle-bearing relic had far more potency than the written word. Eastern Christendom - first Byzantine, then Russian - revered icons even more intensely than did Roman Catholicism, especially after the Eastern Church decisively refuted the iconoclast movement (triggered by the charge that icon worship was akin to idolatry) in the eighth century CE. What is more, signed, authored literature was undervalued and at times even demonized. “Authorship was not one of the recognized activities of Old Russia,” D. S. Mirsky writes in his
24
Newness was suspect. For this reason, the qualities of visuality, palpability, and fixedness were compatible with a Russian cult of the word. In fact, they served it. As Kathleen Parthe´ reminds us, the sacred, immutably “thing-like” qualities of the Old Russian word – the importance placed on the design of its alphabet and proper spelling; its incantational potential – imbued it with magic or miracle-working powers.13 On Old Russian soil, then, word and image tended not to compete but to collaborate in a tight moral alliance. The great nineteenth-century Realist writers inherited this tradition. Once uttered, words were not mere means to an end but already, in some sense, ends – deeds in themselves. These traditions fed richly into the revival of Russian poetry in the early twentieth century, and, ominously, into an equally rich cult of forced or fanciful political denunciations in the Stalinist 1930s.
Secular reasons for Russia’s word-centeredness echo these sacral concerns. A magically potent Word was a word worthy of being closely watched. From the mid-eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century, state censorship could reach a degree of suspiciousness and capriciousness hard for us to fathom in terms of the labor-hours required to impose it. Of course, there was always freedom by default: bureaucratic carelessness, networks of protection and politeness, regal arbitrariness, mercy, and the sheer vastness of the administrative task – but all the same, noteven a rudimentary system of safeguards for individualexpression in thepublic realm ever existed. In principle,every scrap of newsprint, every line of verse could be scrutinized, by secular and church authorities, with separate, successively more severe filters for in-print genres and theatrical performance. This quest to root out unapproved ideological content was made even more virulent by a worship of the shape and sound of the specifically Russian word. When Pushkin was exiled to the south of Russia in 1820 for penning some revolutionary verse, Russia’s sophisticated bilingual elite must have noticed that the sentiments in his offending poems did little more than repeat the abstract cliche´s of French liberationist rhetoric on which the reigning Tsar Alexander I had himself been raised two decades earlier. But when Pushkin addressed local realities and applied his glorious Russian to those banally familiar turns of phrase, they became startlingly new, authoritative, and impermissible.
It is a truism that vis-a`-vis the Western nations, Russia has always lost in time and triumphed in space. Space saved Russia from Napoleon and Hitler. The broad expanse of Siberia saved Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (and Dostoevsky himself) from crimes against body and spirit committed in crowded, stifling cities. The “bird-troika” invoked by Gogol to save his trickster Chichikov at
the end of
Space is forever forward, but time is an embarrassment. “Backward” for Russia has conventionally meant “not yet caught up with the progress made by France, Britain, America.” In part because of such invidious comparisons, novelists as diverse as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Olesha, and Solzhenitsyn have been united in their contempt for European “progress” – acquisitive, morally stupefying – and eager to discredit it. But the humiliationand vulnerability remained, and communism attempted to alter both. Time, too, would be forced to move to Russia’s advantage. When Valentin Kataev wrote his Modernist industrial novel
All the same, that abundant and reliable parameter, Russian space, could be deceptive. Just as a reverence for the Russian word can lead paradoxically to its obsessive monitoring and even enslavement, so triumphant Russian space has been accompanied by a sense of being trapped, tied down, crowded together in tiny communal apartments in cities with permanent housing shortages or herded into prison cells scattered over an open plain. Since so many literary narratives, from fairy tales to epic poems to postmodernist science fiction, are built on this paradox of vast but constricting Russian space, let us consider some of its dimensions.
First, size does not mean power or safety. Geophysically speaking, Russia is a wide, flat, overexposed, underdeveloped plain, with her major rivers running north–south, into foreign ports or frozen marsh. Her huge spread has been a constant source of national pride, but the lack of fixed boundaries or natural obstacles on her land borders has encouraged aggression by other peoples and a wanton imperialism pressing outward from her own core. Since
26
industrialization has a great deal to do with access – with extracting resources or manufacturing goods and then moving them to ports and markets – Russia’s immense physical resources, for most of her history, were not translated into efficient productivity or national security.
It was easier to exile dissidents to Siberia than to integrate them, to trash and move on rather than to recycle, negotiate, and conserve. “Because Russia had become accustomed to solving its historical problems geographically,” Mikhail Epstein writes, “it came to occupy an area so large that finding its place in time became somewhat difficult.”15 In a country this large with an overall climate so severe, transit time is enormous. Setting out, there is no assurance one will ever arrive. In a 1996 essay on Russian destiny and the Russian Idea, Mikhail Ilyin speaks of two governing images for this continental empire, the first “the rush from one valley to another through dangerous and threatening stretches of forest or steppe” and the second, a specter that has proved equally anxiety-laden, that of “roadless space,” or “the myth of the road going nowhere.”16 These two images so debase the movement and goal of any human activity that the end recedes, the reward disappears, and there remains only the texture of an exhausting, short-term present. One recalls the slogans that filled Russian street posters soon after the implosion of communism in 1991: “Seventy-two years on the way to nowhere.”
“Making therush” from one secure valley to another encouraged a distinctive spatial binary in traditional folk consciousness. Cities, those dots on a plain, were protected by their churches and Christian saints; everything outside the city fell under the sway of pagan gods. Space was divided into what was known and protected – what had its patron saint or spirit – and what was unprotected and unknown, the uncharted roaming grounds of various demons, imps, and mischievous spirits. Russian expanse was deified asMoist MotherEarth, but not after the manner of most gods. It is a remarkable fact, one of perennial concern to Russia’s great poets, that this most successful continental empire, which at its zenith covered one-sixth the land mass of the globe, never glorified a god of war and never produced a genuinely affirmative, appropriately chauvinistic war epic.
Theenormity,flatness, insecurity,and low populationdensity ofthe Eurasian continent had socioeconomic consequences that conditioned all domestic Russian narratives. Those who worked the soil did not initially stay put. To guarantee the tillable land its laborers, the army its soldiers, and the state its tax revenues, peasants were tied down to their villages in the late sixteenth century and then gradually enserfed as the personal property of the gentry and noble class. Of course the Russian serf was neither racially marked nor “imported” from another continent, as was the case in the northern hemisphere of the New
World. But with Peter the Great, Russia in effect became two countries in an equivalently explosive way. Peasant villages adopted a siege mentality against the cities and towns. When urban outsiders appeared at the edge of a village, it was not to trade, educate, heal, but always to bring the bad news of recruitment or taxes: always to take something away.
Eighteenth-century prose dramas mercilessly satirized country bumpkins. Of equal or greater weight to these comic scenes were the tragic or angry variants. The peasant imprisoned on the plain at the mercy of “city meddlers” became the protagonist of a wide number of narratives, from Mikhail Chulkov’s savage 1792 sketch on the bureaucratic cover-up of a mass peasant murder (“A Bitter Fate”) through the conscience-stricken outrage of Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802), the sentimentalismofNikolai Karamzin(1766–1826), Turgenev’s evocative
This abrupt distinction between city life and life everywhere else has proved tenacious. The refrain of Chekhov’s
28
mythical, without gradation. Roads were (and are) a disaster. There is little tradition of the civilized suburb. To this day, surprisingly close to the city limits of Petersburg and Moscow, “the provinces” begin – unmowed, unpaved, out of touch. To leave Moscow or Petersburg has always meant not only to go out in space but also to go back in time. This too reinforces the sense of space being primary and pockets of time negotiable, set down like the cities, as islands in a sea.
Even this excessive, untamable Russian space had its edges. In 1829, Pushkin slipped out from under police surveillance to visit the Russian army skirmishing on the Caucasus–Turkish border. As he later described this episode in his droll travel notes,
Pushkin was never allowed out. This scenario of sealed borders around an immense, unmappable world became another theme, both hair-raising and comic, that lasted right up until the end of the Soviet Union. Russia, so this thesis went, is so big, her borders so impenetrable, her censorship so pervasive, her people so gullible, and her ability to construct whole countries inside herself (with space to spare) so difficult to detect, that the authorities could simply
had.”18
If a real and inaccessible outside perhaps did not exist, then an “accessible inside” to Russia has proven itself real on several levels. I have in mind Russian spatialutopias. Mostcultures,Russia’sincluded, haveutopias in time – a Golden Age in the past, a Promised Kingdom in the future. But Russia also has a vital minor tradition of timeless, salvation-bearing utopias in space. These
utopias refuse to accept the reality of Russia’s physical defenselessness, the porousness of her borders, her inability to protect her population from chronic and devastating invasion. And thus they manipulate space – that inexhaustible Russian resource – to overcome the vulnerability of space.
Yury Lotman, who devoted a good portion of his scholarly life to spatial topographies, discusses this mythical geo-ethics as codified in Russian medieval texts.19 The model has had impressive lasting power. Dostoevsky drew on it in his great novels (reverently for his righteous persons like the Elder Zosima, symbolically for his seekers like Raskolnikov, in travestied form for his petty devils), and traces of this value system survive in Stalin-era socialist realist texts. Geo-ethics combines the high status of physical matter in the Eastern Orthodox Church with the moral implication of the compass. Lands to the east are pagan, to the west are heretic: only at the Russian center can one find holiness. Righteous persons [
Great Kitezh was built in the Yaroslavl-Volga region northeast of Moscow in the twelfth century. In 1239 it was destroyed by the Mongol Khan Batu, grandson of the great Ghengis. No contemporaneous account of the battle mentions any survivors; the city simply vanished. To counter that unacceptable fact, popular legend decrees that the city exists but at the final moment was “transposed,” not lifted to Heaven but sunk into the lake to be saved, where its bells and golden domes are still audible and visible to the righteous person. In successive Russian times of trouble, the Kitezh legend revives and Lake Svetloyar becomes again a place of pilgrimage.
ThepopulistVladimirKorolenko(1853–1921)wroteanethnographicsketch on the region in 1890. The Symbolist Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), in his 1905 novel
30
Denikin’s White forces were moving on Moscow during the darkest days of the Civil War; another was composed by Anna Akhmatova in 1940, as Nazi troops were annihilating Poland. In the opening lines of her poem, Akhmatova calls herself a
Kitezh makes itself visible to the face that gazes on it, but only if that face is seeking communion and purification. With this image, we arrive at our final Russian idea, or cultural invariant, that might be said to link the Russian Word and Russian space: the concept of
Leo Tolstoy felt these distinctions keenly, if intuitively, when creating the characters of
beauty is always
Nikolai Gogol, our final exemplar in this Russian family of human faces, adds a third variant: neither the radiant iconic
The speaking, receiving face is the only force competent to bridge great Russian distances. It does so directly, eye to eye - not through intermediaries, representatives, or impersonal “blind” laws, for the idea that “justice is blind” is incomprehensible and counterintuitive to the logic of
32
into a cult of the people’s communal heroism and then into a cult of party-mindedness, shearing off the heterogeneity at the core of the Orthodox idea. The success of such a campaign, for all its brutality, betrays its deep organic roots.
As Tolstoy correctly divined, the two master plots in Russian socio-literary history are
The same binary might besaid togovern more strictly aesthetic realms.In his 2005 book on the codes of Russian musical culture, Boris Gasparov argues that Russian nineteenth-century creativity in several fields – philosophy, literature, and music – was characterized by a single unified striving: the desire to escape the trappings and obligations of Russia’s external empire, with its spectacles, masquerades, pomp, whims of patronage, and to reconsecrate intimate, non-theatrical, sentimental space.24 Thus the whole world feels at home in the Great Russian Novel, which so often ends as a comedy – that is, as a ritual of fertility and family reconciliation. Successors to that great novel in the twentieth century were pressured to redefine this ritual out of the nuclear family into some larger, equally compelling unit that could serve communist ideology and motherland. When that model failed or proved insufficient, the family became Russian Literature itself, “Pushkin House.”
There are spaces, however, that the Empire and the Hearth do not cover, which Russian literary culture has traditionally not endowed with a sympathetic face. These are the middle spaces: commercial classes such as merchants, bankers, and Jews; professional classes such as lawyers and professors; and bureaucratic classes of every sort. The compromised heroes here range from the local thieving mayor and his cronies in Gogol’s play
they lose all possible positive qualities. One challenge for twentieth-century Russian literature was to devise an acceptable sort of success for the pragmatic and disciplined wage-earner, state servitor, or career bureaucrat in modern civic culture, without losing the enormous energy contained in the sacrificial, spiritually rich hero.
If this was a difficult task for the Soviet century, it will be even more daunting for the more fragmentary and less cohesive twenty-first. But full stops, failed apocalypse, and looking out the window at empty space going nowhere are completely familiar to this cultural tradition and easily accommodated by it. This Introduction opened on the assertion that the Russian literary canon is “always about to forget that it is merely made up out of words.” Assuming that is true, surely Russia’s literature will talk itself out of this trap too.
Heroes and their plots
In the preceding chapter we introduced Bakhtin’s chronotope. It might be helpful in this chapter, before discussing some favored Russian character types, to review the services it can provide.
Bakhtin devised the chronotope as an aid for “walking into” and co-experiencing the time-space of a fictional world. Prose fiction is a field. Usually it is populated by more than one consciousness and designed to be experienced over time. In all but the most disorienting fictional environments – the absolute absurd, for example, or literature of terror and trauma devised to frustrate all attempts at communication – readers will seek to talk, interact, or empathize with characters inhabiting this field. The character can be a talking frog if we’re inside a beast fable, personified Vice or Virtue if inside a medieval mystery play, an alien from outer space if inside a science fiction, or a recognizably human being: the physical wrappings of consciousness are incidental. Both the type of creature and the rules for relating to it depend upon the conventions of the literary genre. What feels strange in one environment can be wholly unmarked in another. In all cases, however, time and space in the chronotope are fused. Some sorts of time – say, in old-fashioned comic strips and soap-opera serials – never add up. Hours, days, years pass, but people do not age; characters might not even remember from one episode to the next. Accordingly, the space that accompanies such time is abstract and non-historical.
Somesorts of time permit the hero tochange, but only atmiraculous, isolated moments (say, tales of metamorphosis or religious conversion). The qualities of the surrounding space may or may not change to accord with the abruptly altered hero. In other chronotopes, the outside world changes in a variety of ways, but the people residing in that time-space are “ready-made” from the start. Their potential is predetermined. They may be tested by events, but they do not learn or mature as a result of such testing; they merely unfold as a pre-formed bud unfolds into a given leaf. Fully novelistic heroes (Bakhtin’s favorites, such as he sees in Goethe, Dickens, and Dostoevsky) both change themselves and presume that they live in a changing environment, which will present them with unexpected challenges to which they must respond.
34
In Bakhtin’s view, the vigorously functioning, free personality (fictive or real) needs open-ended time more than open-ended space. It is no surprise, however, that the most durable parameter in many Russian chronotopic situations is space, with the temporal dimension a secondary, often dysfunctional afterthought. “Growing up” properly can appear difficult or dead-ended. Developmental time simply stops: through early sacrificial death, in capped or arrested adolescence, or on the far side of threshold moments that commit the hero to an unchanging revealed truth. Conversely, space-based trajectories or metaphors remain fertile and attractive options in a variety of secular as well as sacred genres: “setting out in search of something,” being exiled or displaced, waking up after thirty years of immobility and “going on the road” to slay Russia’s enemies (the plot of Ilya Muromets, Russia’s favorite epic hero). Start with the spatial imperative, and time will tag along. Even when the journey is parodiedbeyond repair,asinthe tragicomic alcoholic fantasy
In addition to a general preference for changing one’s fate by moving through space, the very concept of evil was scattered and diversified. In traditional Russian folk culture, the devil [
Righteous persons [
To be a “righteous person” is more an attitude than a deed. Christian faith often informs this righteousness, but the type was frequently secularized and
36
re-sacralized. A righteous person usually requires an enemy to fight against – the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler, capitalists as a class, the Antichrist – but a big, showy Foe is by no means necessary. The enemy as well as the task can be very small. Dostoevsky’s radiant
In her discussion of righteousness in
The prototypical
Unsurprisingly, after the 1917 Revolution the Bolshevik government made strenuous attempts to recruit righteous sufferers for the cause of forward-looking communism. Precedent was not difficult to find. Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel
modern as well as medieval, is that he does not return. He perfects himself and withdraws further, into increasingly remote geographical spaces. Others may follow him into that wilderness, but the hero does not need others to realize his truth. He is complete in himself.
We might say, then, that relations between righteous persons and their Truth remain stable and unambiguous, but relations between a
Tolstoy’s variants on the truth-bearing type are different. His heroes tend to be oriented inward, constantly talking to themselves or “thinking out loud,” and they address their truth to the reader (whom they wish to persuade) more directly than to their fictive co-characters. Autobiographical heroes such as Konstantin Levin from
Very occasionally a failed
38
three different spaces (Stalinist Moscow; Jerusalem during the crucifixion of Jesus; and some stratospheric metaphysical space undated and unmarked). The Master is tested and found wanting in fortitude – he cannot protect his novel againstthe hostileoutside world– but ultimately he is empowered,as awriter, to create the new word that alters Divine history. His mistress Margarita, who has bargained with Satan to get him back, emerges as a
Bulgakov’s Margarita, the unfaithful wife whose virtue is fidelity, and the saintly prostitute Sonya Marmeladova, whose “soul made flesh” hardly registers the degrading effects of her profession, are two models of the
As “bride” – even if this status exists only in the fantasies of the girl – the Russian heroine blended with the enlightened female protagonist created by the French feminist novelist George Sand (1804–76). This hybrid inspired a decade of stern, earnest female heroes, perfected by Ivan Turgenev in a triad of early novels:
The
bred into peasant life and her own possessive nuclear-family love, becoming a comrade,a
Fools
Russian culture produced three types of fool. None coincides precisely with fools further west. In common with Western Europe, Russia has the fool of the folk tale, the
If in Europe the fool tended to be a dunce or a rogue, laughed at and held in low esteem, then Russians displayed both a reverence for folly and a tolerance for the physically grotesque and mentally deranged.6 Under Peter I (r. 1682–1725), moronic or grotesque dwarfs did enjoy a brief vogue, but far more commonly, powers of clairvoyance and prophecy were bestowed upon the eccentric or dim-witted. The tradition of the cleverly spoken fool, the fool as sidekick, confidant, or court buffoon to the king, was weakly developed in Russia, enjoying a brief stage life only in the imitative eighteenth century. For many reasons Leo Tolstoy despised Shakespeare and in particular the tragedy
Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–97), Modernist prose writer, dissident, and e´migre´ professor at the Sorbonne, drew an engaging portrait of fools and jesters in his lectures from the late 1970s, published as
40
the present, and seizing opportunity on the fly. Setting out, he doesn’t know his destination – but various miracles always come to his aid. To be called a
Sinyavsky’s own irreverent writings, for which he suffered a prison term before emigrating to France in 1973, often feature a
The jester/clown or
and irritably vain Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Significantly, the noun
Holy foolishness originated in Byzantium but was greeted with increasing reverence as it moved north. The
For this reason the fool’s utterances, even the most incoherent, were presumed to carry prophetic meaning. A
The type fascinated Dostoevsky. At one point in his confession to Sonya, Raskolnikov – wondering what sustains her in the squalid, beggarly underworld of Petersburg – calls her a
42
town: is this a realistic portrait or a parody? Dostoevsky- the most frightening, most hilariously comic master of all types of fool in Russian literature -built his greatest plots on the edge of blasphemy. He did not hesitate to breed a
Must Russian fools be subversive, and are they always comic? Not necessarily; the tone of a foolish narrative can be lyrical, delicate, laden with pathos. But fools must always be strange, governed by rules that others cannot grasp, or else by no rules at all. For this reason fools proliferate when cultural norms break down. In the decade following the death of Stalin (1953), there was such an explosion of eccentrics, dreamers, and wanderers - charismatically portrayed in the work of the short-story writer and film actor-director Vasily Shukshin (1929-74) - that some critics declared the
Do holy fools always intercede for sinners, and do secular fools always stumble their way to success? That indeed has been the convention. But in the 1980s, the declining moments of the Soviet regime, a strange and colorful group of “foolish” performance artists emerged in Leningrad who targeted precisely that rosy plot - and all the plots by which our various types of Russian fool have lived. They called themselves, after their founder the Petersburg artist Dmitry Shagin, the
nor condemned. They refused to consider the loss of worldly goods or reputation a bad thing. Somewhat like Charlie Chaplin (a figure much beloved by Russian audiences) but politically far more confused, the
The
Frontiersmen
Between the fifteenth century and 1991, despite devastating invasions, the Russian state expanded steadily. There was always more frontier. As distances increased, however, political power was not dispersed. The highly centralized Russian Empire continued to be run from its two capitals, each of which, by the early nineteenth century, had developed a cultural mythology of its own. Pushkin’s 1833 narrative poem
Three peculiarities of this expansion are worth noting.15 First, a continental empire of Russia’s vast and thinly populated sort, bordered by hostile Catholic
44
or Protestant peoples to the west and hostile Islamic or pagan cultures to the south and east, gave rise to what might be called the “contiguous exotic.” But unlike the classical overseas empires of Spain, Portugal, or England, it was accessible by land, even by foot, and thus could be made familiar in routine and unspectacular ways. Colonizers could creep into it, could reside comfortably on its edges and spread out in them. Expansion involved violence, of course. But many narratives interwove peace and war. One example with an 800-year pedigree is the twelfth-century
Written soon after the event, the
Our third peculiarity concerns the compass. In the modern period, we tend to think of Russia’s frontier tensions in terms of East–West. But in fact, the North–South axis has always been equally pronounced and productive of plots. Until the twentieth century focused our attention, unhappily, on survivor narratives from Siberian prison camps, Russia’s most vibrant boundary in terms of
aesthetic texts had been the southern tier. The Caucasus mountain range, Russia’s domestic Alps, was the birthplace of her native tradition of the Sublime. The discovery of awe-inspiring natural beauty on home territory raised Russian literature in its own eyes vis-a`-vis the West, which helped to compensate for other perceived backwardness.
“Frontier heroes” lend themselves to exemplary binaries, of which probably the most robust are the categories of
Two astonishing early autobiographies by
46
This paradox of happiness achieved through unfreedom in wide open space, of salvation through imprisonment on Russia’s vast frontier, has proved spiritually very fertile for Russian literature. Raskolnikov confesses his murder in Petersburg – but only repents of it in Siberia, in prison, gazing out over the empty steppe. A story with similar geographical shape was so dear to Tolstoy that he wrote it twice, once as the peasant Platon Karatayev relates it to Pierre Bezukhov, prisoner of the French, in
Other organizing binaries for the frontier might include civilian versus military, or the scientific explorer (cartographer, naturalist, cosmonaut at the edge of the known mapped world) versus the supernaturally assisted traveler “beyond seven seas” in the magical folk tale. Let us consider only one final contrast:
Wanderers can be secular or religious. The secular wanderers in Russian literature were largely borrowed from European Romanticism: restless, alienated Byronic heroes, who kept “travel notes” and died beyond the boundaries of the story line. The religious variant of wanderer, the
Wanderers are not obliged to arrive anywhere, but their natural end is a monastery. In a strange mock epic written in 1873 titled
commanded to wander through Russia, the Tatar lands, and the Caucasus, constantly exposing his life to danger before being deemed worthy to become a monk. Maksim Gorky (1868–1936) tapped into the same tradition, when he launched his career as a writer in the 1890s with bestselling stories of itinerant dockworkers and charismatic tramps.
The wanderer or displaced person during war constitutes a terrible and vital subset of Russian heroes, one that remained vigorous in literature and film up through the end of the Soviet era. Its human parameters stretched from helpless children to cold-blooded killing machines (Bolshevik as well as enemy). A rich Soviet literature of the (literally) embattled frontier emerged out of the savagery of the Civil War (1918–21), which was fought simultaneously on dozens of fronts: on the Western frontier among Poles, Cossacks, and Jews, portrayed in the violent miniatures of Isaak Babel (1894–1941) in
Rogues and villains
Our previous three hero types – righteous people, fools, frontiersmen of the ever-expanding and never-pacified edge – have noticeably Russian chrono-topes. To an important degree, each is space-and-time-specific to the Russian culture and continent. With the rogues and villains we move into more pan-European territory. The Russian rogue [
Rogues are not virtuous, of course, but neither are they evil. What gets in the way of evil is their buoyancy, self-confidence, sense of humor, high level
48
of responsiveness, and the fact that they live off the land. If they prosper, it is because their human surroundings are corrupt, greedy, foolish, selfish – or simply amoral. Rogues are survivors; they live by symbiosis and take on the color of the terrain. There is something of Ivan the Fool in them, rooted in the immediate present, although rogues are far more energetic andentrepreneurial. Often we cannot help feeling gratified at a rogue’s success. A villain, in contrast, creates victims.
Consider the most famous Muscovite exemplar, “Frol Skobeyev the Rogue,” set in the 1680s. Frol is a poor solicitor. He wants to marry Annushka the
Gogol’s swaggering tricksters had sprawling progeny in the twentieth century, all with fanatic cult followings. This colorful family includes the Jewish gangster-hero Benya Krik in the Odessa tales of Isaak Babel; the free, illegal, comic spirit of Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender, conman and impostor of the early Soviet years; the justice-bearing troublemakers Koroviev and Behemoth from the Devil’s entourage in Bulgakov’s
unappealing. But his flaws pale in comparison with Plyushkin, the miser in that novel, whose hoarded wealth turns to rot and whose person becomes paranoid and beggarly. Plyushkin is beyond rogue or villain, a black hole that sucks in every material thing and immobilizes it. He is absolutely unredeemable. Greed of this paralyzing scope is so disrespected that rogues who redistribute wealth by any means, on any pretext, can easily become noble outlaws, or cease to be outlaws at all.
This Russian discomfort with material accumulation provokes our second co mment. Acco rding to Vladimir Nabokov, Russian ro guery - at least in Gogol’s fictional gallery - boasts a special sub-type, the
Following Dostoevsky’s lead, twentieth-century Russian satire of Western societies tended to target one aspect especially: bourgeois prosperity. Such satirists routinely ignored (or discredited as sham) whatever civil liberties or political freedoms they saw, emphasizing only the triviality, conformity, and tedium of a comfortably provisioned life. One good example is
50
else, something more important!” The widespread Western idea that life can be difficult, useful, and morally demanding while also being well ordered and prosperous is not easy to defend against this very Russian fear of becoming a
One category of roguishness was not well developed in the Russian context: the professional roue or sexual rogue (Don Juan or Casanova for men, femme fatale for women). This important type entered Russian high literary culture only during the Romantic period, and even then long retained the flavor of a European import. When Pushkin tried his hand at the Don Juan legend
Intriguingly, it might have been Dostoevsky, that chronicler of the “accidental family,” who came closest to achieving what we might call carnal dignity. He created several unforgettable portraits of the beautiful, hungry, wounded, and predatory female (Nastasya Filippovna in
alluring skills. This should not surprise us. Key to Dostoevsky’s extraordinary popularity in hisown timewas hisgenius at devising solutionsto socialailments that were hopelessly cliche´d in Europe (concubinage, libertinage, unjust inheritance, urban crime) through the righteous and foolish heroes of the Russian tradition.
The villains of Russian literature – those heroes or anti-heroes who attack a readership’s most precious values – are to some extent continuous with the rogues, especially, as we saw, in the economic sphere. From the Baron in Pushkin’s “Little Tragedy”
The nadir of such greed and money-driven villainy is reached with the darkest nineteenth-century novel,
52
The merchant class can hardly keep from sinning. The Evil Spirit to his ways is winning . . . Shady business practices lead to Darkness Eternal, deprived of the Lord’s Light in punishment infernal.19
Evil takes more than economic form, however, and we might note two other categories. One is the “Gothic villain,” originating in the horror novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew “Monk” Lewis,20 whose sensational cruelties were imitated in early Russian Romantic fiction and later popularized in the serialized press through gruesome crime and bandit tales.21 When Realist-era literature absorbed this type – again most stunningly by Dostoevsky – it was with a crucial difference. Consider the most famous portrait, Nikolai Stavrogin from
Our final category is the political villain, the villain backed by governmental power. In a country as poorly managed as Russia, this type of villainy abounds – together with high-minded expose´s of it. Thunderous denunciations of tyrants have had a place in Russian letters ever since Ivan the Terrible’s illustrious general, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, defected to Lithuania in 1564 and sent blistering letters back across the border to his former master, condemning his villainies. This Terrible tsar [lit.
executions to a red berry squashed against his savage chest. Six months later the poet was arrested, exiled, given a reprieve, and required to produce an “Ode to Stalin.” Then in 1937 Mandelstam was re-arrested, to meet his end near Vladivostok in winter 1938. The tyrant in Russia has always been threatened by acts of straightforward outrage and feats of more private loyalty. But tyranny has also been successfully undone by more double-voiced means – through parable, satire, the fantastic, the absurd, and perhaps with greater effectiveness.
Chekhov delivers one such parable of despotism in his “Ward Number Six” (1892), a provincial hospital ward-turned-madhouse-turned-prison. Its fulcrum is the doorman Nikita, an impenetrable bully with the power to lock in or lock out as commanded by his superiors. It is Nikita who redefines a slothful, recalcitrant doctor first into a patient and then into an inmate. This story was one of a handful of tales that turned Lenin into an implacable enemy of the tsarist state. Laughter can be equally terrible, especially with its demonic undercurrent. When the evil is off to the edge of the action, behind a closed door, seen imperfectly by some na¨ıve folksy narrator, the story becomes all the more truthful and terrifying for being only partly understood by its teller. In Leskov’s 1881 yarn
Society’s misfits in the European style
Our final category of heroes is more familiar to a Western readership. These are the “European-style misfits” of the Sentimentalist and Romantic eras: the “man of nature” escaping the city, the “hero of sensibility” oppressed by society, the noble outlaw, the figures of Faust, Hamlet or Don Quixote. Many
54
of these alienated heroes were simply transplanted. During the Realist period, they evolved into distinctly Russian nihilists, utopians, and other idea-driven reformers or eccentrics. From the outset a cutting-edge of parodic reassessment characterized Russian borrowings from Europe. By mid-century, these types had coalesced under the umbrella term “superfluous man,”
The Russian Napoleon myth evolved in several stages, each with its own literary signature.23 For several years after the devastation of 1812, the fallen Emperor continued to be demonized in the popular consciousness as a destroyer, villain, and Antichrist. By the 1820s, national trauma had faded and the cult of Napoleon had begun: in the stifling civil and military bureaucracy of St. Petersburg, a self-made man and merit-based career was an exhilarating, illicit dream.
Pushkin had been only thirteen when Moscow was occupied and burned, too young (by two years) for military service or exploits against the foe; in his various poems on Napoleon, the poet already saw the Frenchman more as a liberator and democrat than as a scourge. As the myth matured in the 1830s, however, it again darkened. Insignificant clerks in Gogol’s and later Dosto-evsky’s Petersburg tales went mad with Napoleonic delusions. In
This “bourgeoisification” of the Napoleon myth began with Pushkin’s 1833 story “The Queen of Spades.” Germann, gambling hero of that tale whose dark ambitionsare compared toNapoleon’s, does not want military glory, a woman’s love, freedom from lowly birth; he wants a fortune. This mercantilereduction of the myth reached its culmination in Raskolnikov’s self-loathing reflections on the great Frenchman: Napoleon loses an army in Egypt and doesn’t look back, and here I crawl under a wretched pawnbroker’s bed, looking for trinkets! During the mid-1860s, while
The Napoleonic hero had a cyclical trajectory in Russia, one tied to the mystique of the West and to the nightmare (and the nostalgia) of foreign invasion and heroic self-defense. In contrast, and somewhat paradoxically, the nihilist hero – who doubts and negates everything – was nourished by rumors of positive internal reform. The foundational text here, Turgenev’s
56
does indeed fail in all the ways that Turgenev had laid out a decade earlier, losing the woman he loves, dying before his time, finding no useful role in society – still, Bazarov is convinced that only with his priorities and values can humanity progress. “Nature is not a temple, but a workshop,” he insists, thus placing himself outside the realm of the traditional Russian hero who prefers to rely on righteousness and miracle. Bazarov’s death at the end is a remarkable variation on the plot of Turgenev’s earlier novels, in which a weak man is tested by a strong woman and fails the test. Bazarov falls in love against his will (he doesn’t believe in love), and the woman lacks both energy and inclination to test his devotion. Turgenev was pilloried by the radicals for presenting so negative a view of Russia’s new “sons,” a charge that appalled and embittered the novelist. It is the fathers who are the brunt of my satire, Turgenev insisted in letters to his friends; and as regards Bazarov, “I don’t know whether I love him or hate him.”24
Therather lyricalliteraryimageof thenihilist inTurgenev soondegenerated – or matured – into somethingfar more dangerous and violent.The first attack on the life of the Liberator Tsar Alexander II, by a domestic terrorist organization, occurred in 1866, and it promoted the nihilist from metaphysical portrait to political threat. Political assassinations rose steadily in Russia until the outbreak of the Great War. But in literature, the apogee of the nihilist was reached in 1872 with Dostoevsky’s
Gorkyon Russia’s new optimismisa good bridge to ourfinal exemplary“West-ern” import, the utopian hero (and its anti-utopian shadow). Literary utopia has a lengthy European pedigree, beginning with Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. But utopian thinking remained robust longer in Russia than in the West. Again paradoxically, the eagerness and acuity with which Russian heroes debunked their surrounding reality, and the impatience with which the nihilist discredited
fatally deficient, perhaps it made better sense to stick with the ideal. Idealist logic was the reverse of Bazarov’s scientific nihilism, which required above all that the material world be made to “work.” But it is characteristic of these utopias that the reader can never be convinced that the scenario is not simply a sly undercutting of the entire idea. Even the most famous of revolutionary utopias, Chernyshevsky’s 1862
Anti-utopias, it turns out, are as double-voiced as utopias. It is both impossible to remain as we are, and impossible to survive in a society where our current vices have been eliminated. Vladimir Mayakovsky (1894–1930) was a Bolshevik poet, committed in word and deed to the futuristic slogans of the new regime. But in the final scene of his dystopian comic drama
The heroes we might yet see, and what lies ahead
This gallery of favored Russian heroes has not been strong in certain categories widespread in Western fiction. Virtuous merchants and productive bureaucrats are few, beautiful sinners are rare. Has the twenty-first century already irreversibly changed this repertory? After the collapse of cultural controls, the
58
classics ceased to be lavishly subsidized and the boundary between “high” and “low” literature began to erode. Russian literary space openly welcomed persons and themes that had always been on the brink of taboo: detective fiction featuring state security personnel or the ruling dynasty or party; crime where the state is to blame; wars that Russia has lost or is losing (like Afghanistan and Chechnya); attractively snappy capitalists. And also, to be sure, explicit pornography, violence, and misogyny. Whereas the tsarist-era and Soviet canon held women’s rights sacred (and preferred salvational women to superfluous men), that prejudice is now gone. Instead we begin to see a partial return to the bawdy mixed prose of the eighteenth century, to wide-open (not Aesopian) satire, and to the amoral ethics of the folk tale. These and other narratives of the pre-Pushkin era are the subject of our next two chapters.
Traditional narratives
Russian medieval culture was rich, but not in the printed word. Folk and religious art was visual and aural: folk tales, epic and everyday songs, round dances, charms for healing the sick, rituals for marrying and burying, laments for men lost to the army during recruiting season, saints’ lives and the liturgy. In 1563, Tsar Ivan the Terrible allowed a printing press to be set up in Moscow. The first book published in Russian on Russian soil, an elaborate edition of readings from the Apostles for use in the liturgy, appeared in 1564. In 1565, the press was destroyed by a mob incited by clerical authorities. Accused of heresy, the master printer Ivan Fyodorov “fled for unknown lands” - but printing continued under the protection of Tsar Ivan himself.1 This cautionary tale,
59
60
in which an absolute ruler pushes through a modernizing reform against the popular will, resonates throughout Russian history. Although printing made steady gains, until the late seventeenth century, the small number of literate Russians preferred scrolls to printed books.
Traditional texts were performed in connection with specific communal rituals. This sense of the “oneness” of a literary work with its experienced environment remained an ideal for many Russian writers, long after the triumph of the privately authored, privately consumed book. In his final years, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) provocatively declared a wedding song and a well-timed anecdote or joke preferable to a symphony or a novel. At the time of his death, the visionary Symbolist composer Aleksandr Scriabin (1872–1915) was planning a vast choral work of divine revelation,
All of these narratives – ecclesiastic and folk – could accommodate miracles and the supernatural. Russian medieval genres did not know the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, only between entertainment (profane stories) and edification (sacred stories). As in most pre-modern oral cultures, if a given legend did not seem true for its contemporary audience, this was no proof that it was “made up”; it had been true for grandparents or ancestors, who had witnessed it first hand or heard it from a trusted second party. All events, consciousnesses, and narratives were linked in a single, integrated continuity, told or experienced. Just as no person could stand alone, fully outside a clan or community (for every person at least has parents), so no literary work stood alone.
But integration did not mean homogenization or a dissolving of the one into the many. Just as every individual is born of two discrete parents but does not duplicate either of them, so was every medieval text perceived as indispensable to the integrity of the whole. No body was excluded from a community merely because it happened to be orphaned or deceased. Churches were understood also to be bodies – or more precisely, human faces with eyes, ears, and heads
(onion domes rose up roundly on necks;
From this animated and integrated cosmos, we will discuss only a small number of text types: the saint’s life, the folk- or fairy tale, and two famous hybrids: the folk epic of
Russian saintly prototypes originated in Byzantine Christianity but mutated while moving north. Reasons for this mutation have been found in Russia’s peculiar time-space. Her official conversion to Christianity was abrupt. It affected cities and towns but hardly registered in the countryside. As Christian stories and motifs spread slowly over the Russian plain, they blended with, rather than replaced, pagan worldviews. This fused belief system came to be known as
East Slavic paganism was the product of a landlocked agricultural empire. Gods of sun, moon, stars, and wind did exist, but prayers were directed down to the life-giving black soil rather than up to celestial deities. Bodies did not “rise” after death but were reabsorbed into the womb of
62
the anthropomorphized antics of Mount Olympus, fueled by rage, jealousy, revenge, rape, and meanness of spirit, either natural or normal - and certainly no model for human behavior. Kindness, fidelity, and the capacity to nurture were valued over freedom or valor.
The center of human life, the peasant house, was embedded in four elements, the same four known to the medieval West. Two were mythical-metaphysical, masculine in gender, intangible, and behaved “vertically” (that is, they “rose”): air
Since native Russian paganism had no established priesthood and Russian villages no temples, it was easily “conquered” by Christianity. But the pagan cosmos was pragmatic and overall tolerant. It made room for the officially new and then re-coalesced around the well, the barn, the hearth. Up through the eighteenth century, Church and state authorities in the cities attempted to stamp out pagan “survivals” in Russian rural culture - much as the Bolsheviks attempted to stamp out Christian “survivals” in the first half of the twentieth. But in the nineteenth century, the authorities gave up trying. Precisely that century witnessed the phenomenal flowering of a Russian literature that freely integrated motifs of paganism, Christian monotheism, and modernization. All of Dostoevsky’s great novels must be read in these three dimensions at once.
Saints’ lives: sacrificial, holy-foolish, administrative, warrior
The first type of Russian Orthodox
eleventh-century Kievan Primary Chronicle as “The Martyrdom of Boris and Gleb” (in Z, pp. 101–05). Boris and Gleb, two teenaged sons of the Kievan Prince Vladimir, Baptizer of Russia, were slain in 1015 by their elder brother Svyatopolk (later knownas“theAccursed”)inapreemptivesuccessionstruggle. Both brothers had armed retainers and thus the power to defend themselves; they chose not to do so, which is essential to the potency and pathos of their story. When Svyatopolk’s men arrived to commit the deed, Boris chanted the Psalter and prayed that this sin not be held against his eldest brother. Gleb, when informed of the murder of Boris, burst into tears and resolved also not to resist the assassin’s knife. These two youthful martyrs – who had accomplished nothing for the faith except to assent unresistingly to death – were soon venerated as “interceders for the new Christian nation.” Their submissive act freed the fledgling and vulnerable Kievan state from threat of civil war.
This non-violent, self-negating response to evil has nothing of the masochistic or epic-heroic about it. The boys did not wish to die. To
The second saintly prototype is the canonized holy fool or Fool in Christ, the
At this time Moscow was “gathering together” (that is, subduing in geno-cidal campaigns) the scattered Russian lands, including Novgorod. Michael advised his city to sue for peace. Holy fools intervened “illogically” in politics – but not always in defiance of the crueler, more powerful side. Sometimes, as
64
did Michael, they saw reality more sensibly than the politicians. And second: Michael’s unexpected appearance at the Klopsko monastery was marked by what would become a characteristic exchange. Upon seeing this strange monk, the abbot inquired: “Who are you, my son, a man or a devil? Why did you come to us? Where are you from?” And the as-yet-unnamed Michael responded: “Are you a man or a devil? Who are you? Why did you come to us? Where are you from?” (Z, p. 302). This mirror or echo-dialogue is an instructive example of holy-foolish discourse, which, dressed up in more literary garb, will become the verbal dynamic of carnival, of certain types of dissident speech, of avant-garde poetry and the Russian Absurd. The interrogator asks a question confidently because he (unlike, he presumes, his interlocutor) is in his right place, a stable and recognized identity. The interrogated party responds by casting back the question unchanged, thus turning a hierarchical inquiry into a horizontal pan-human one, the
Not all observers of “foolish” behavior responded positively to it. We provide here only one post-medieval example. In Chapter 5 of his quasi-autobiographical
No nation can live by sacrificial martyrs and holy fools alone. Our remaining two saintly types are more survival-oriented and pragmatic. Saint Theo-dosius, who founded the Caves (or Crypt) Monastery in Kiev in 1074 and then became its abbot, represents the monk-administrator. He was an essential figure in Moscow’s steady expansion east and northward across a vast continent. The monastic complex, Russia’s omni-purpose civilizing and colonizing structure, served at various times as military fortress, place of worship, and prison. The task of its administrators was not to jolt or confound society – the
duty of the confrontational fool – but the opposite: to organize, discipline, and inspire it to prayerful and productive labor. With his own monks, Theodosius proved himself a gentle and patient advisor. His Life, written by the chronicler Nestor (Z, pp. 116–34), portrays him as an astute psychologist who counseled monastic residents on the virtues of self-control and self-reliance. To his enemies, however, Theodosius could be uncompromisingly severe. In his youth, those enemies included his own possessive mother, who fought tenaciously to keep him within the biological family fold, beating him without mercy when she discovered he had girded his loins with iron chains. He escapes her, of course, for his vocation is preordained. When his mother tracks him down, she discovers that she will have access to him only if she enters a convent. Her love drives her to it – and eventually she provides the chronicler Nestor with her son’s story. This model of a working male community under threat at the edge of the civilized world, led by a spiritual ideologue who must overcome (among much else) the protective and procreative instincts of the family, will combine with the traditional Russian epic hero (
Our final exemplary saint’s life, that of the first Russian warrior saint, also had a revival during the Stalinist period. Alexander (1220–63), later called Nevsky because of his 1240 victory over the Swedes on the Neva River, became Prince of Novgorod in 1236. Two years later, Mongols were at his doorstep, but a miracle of spring flooding made the swamps impassable and kept the fierce horsemen at bay. Alexander reigned for sixteen years, fending off the attacks of Swedes, Lithuanians, and Teutonic knights from the west while buying off the Mongol overlords with tribute to the south and east. His Life, composed around 1280, is the first hagiography of a secular prince and military leader. It is titled “Tale of the Life and Courage of the Pious and Great Prince Alexander” (Z, pp. 224–36). Wherein lies the courage?
In the Russian context of exposed borders and the nightmare of an all-front war, courage for a virtuous state-builder meant knowing when to subdue one’s pride in theinterests of national survival.Against the well-armed, highly aggressive Catholic nations to the west, Alexander fought lightning-swift, strategically brilliant battles. In such maneuvers, pursuit of glory was possible and appropriate. (Before one such battle, recalling the partisan gods in ancient Greek warfare, Saints Boris and Gleb appeared in a vision to one of Alexander’s allies – less as martyrs of non-resistance than as heroes of national unity.) But a very different strategy was required to fight Khan Batu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, whose “Golden Horde” came to occupy most of Eurasia after the fall of Kiev
66
in the 1220s. The steppe frontier was endless and could not be defended. Thus the Church blessed Prince Alexander in his journeys of taxpaying tribute to the Mongol capital on the Volga River. Two centuries later, when internal rivalries fractured the Horde, Muscovite tsars pitted one khanate against another and reunited the Russian lands.
In the Stalinist period, Saint Alexander Nevsky was rehabilitated. Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film
In times of national trauma, it is common for governmentsto turn to military heroes as patriotic rallying points. For this purpose Russia’s warrior saints have proved surprisingly durable, even during officially atheistic periods. Throughout the post-communist 1990s, a reinvigorated Russian Orthodox Church won enthusiastic new converts among Russia’s armed forces, humiliated and impoverished by the loss of the Soviet empire.9 In 2004, the Air Force and the Patriarch (with the full approval of President Putin) jointly celebrated the ninetieth anniversary of the world’s first heavy bomber unit (the fighter plane
Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the Deathless)
The Russian folk tale [
stories in 1872, especially his brief prose tale, “A Prisoner of the Caucasus.” “If you try to say anything superfluous, bombastic, or morbid, the [common people’s] language won’t permit it,” he wrote his friend Nikolai Strakhov in Marchof that year.11 Tolstoy was certainly not surrendering his right to instruct his readership. But he suspected what Lu¨thi noticed above, that neutrality inspires trust whereas narrative exhortation does not – and Tolstoy wished to be trusted.
Among the distinctive features Lu¨thi findsin European folk-tale language are one-dimensionality, lack of depth, and an abstract, detached style. Recasting Tolstoy’s auto-critique in Lu¨thi’s terms, what is “not permitted” in folk narration is thick description and a conflicted inner life marked by doubt or self-pity. What is it like to live in a depthless world? The hero has one clear, linear task. At the end of it lies his reward, usually a princess. While accomplishing the task, he encounters various helpers, whose gifts or services are all palpably material. Helpers and obstacles appear from nowhere and disappear without a trace; a dark void opens up on either side of the narrow path of the plot. Whatever is on that path, however, is lit up in brilliant primary colors: metallic reds, golds, blues. Throughout his travails the hero expresses no astonishment, curiosity, longing, or fear, and apparently does not experience pain. He never reassesses his goal or his reward.
Many of these pan-European traits are common to the Russian
The most famous Russian folklore villains are Koshchey the Deathless and Baba Yaga.Koshchey, the simpler of the two, is an archaic figure,a sorcerer, often
68
portrayed as a skeleton (his name is related either to the word for bone,
Baba Yaga, “Old Woman Yaga,” is a far more ambiguous and powerful figure.12 Witch, cannibal, earth goddess, Mistress of the Forest, she lives in a hut on chicken legs that rotates in expectation of the unwary visitor. This quasi-animate dwelling is surrounded by a fence made of stakes readied for human heads. Inside her hut, Yaga’s sprawling grotesque body cannot move; one leg is always of bone (or iron), the other often of excrement, her nose is hooked to the ceiling, her breasts hang over a rod, her genitals foam. Outside her hut, she travels in a mortar and pestle. (The famous ninth episode - or “picture” - in Musorgsky’s 1874
We will now consider two variants of the same exemplary tale. The first, “Faithful John,” was collected by the Brothers Grimm; the second, “Koshchey the Deathless,” by their Russian counterpart Aleksandr Afanasiev. Placed side
by side, they suggest how a specific folk-tale plot might change in emphasis and value system as it migrates east. The most prominent difference between the two variant tales is the presence of Koshchey and Baba Yaga.
From a Russian folk perspective, “Faithful John” is a very Western plot. The many European versions of this tale – including the French “Old Fench” from Lower Brittany and the Swedish “Prince Faithful” – all open as an incipient love story. All are fueled by mercantile interests and test the hero in the manner of a knight from the Age of Chivalry. The old king dies, leaving his adolescent son in the care of Faithful John. The new young king is allowed access to everything in the palace but the room with the portrait of the Princess of the Golden Dwelling. Of course the king glimpses the portrait and falls instantly in love. To court her, he orders that five tons of family gold be crafted into various artifacts. He packs these into a ship, and he and Faithful John sail across the sea to the princess. She adores gold and is persuaded to come on board to view the wares of this “merchant.” Only after the ship has sailed away does she discover that the merchant is a king; swayed by the gold, the royal lineage, or perhaps even the prince himself, she consents to be his wife.
While still at sea, Faithful John overhears three ravens predict that the young king will not consummate his marriage. He will mount a horse that will fly off, his bridal costume will burn him to death, and his bride will faint away during the nuptial ball. Interventions and antidotes are possible against these disasters, but anyone who warns the king in advance of them will be turned to stone. John intervenes in the first two temptations and the mystified king tolerates it. But when Faithful John revives the insensate queen by sucking three drops of blood from her right breast, the king loses his temper and condemns his servant to the gallows. Then John tells all and turns to stone. He is only brought back to life several years later when (such are John’s terms) the king agrees to behead his own twin sons with his own sword. The sons are beheaded, the stone statue revives, John replaces the children’s heads, and all five dwell together in happiness.
As this well-known folk tale migrated throughout Eastern Europe, it absorbed local motifs and amplified different virtues. One commonly anthologized Russian variant appears in conjunction with a “Koshchey the Deathless” tale. A number of crucial details are altered. Romantic love is far less in evidence. There is no positive mercantile theme (no courtship that exploits the princess’s appetite for gold), no ships at sea (Tsarevich Ivan sets out in search of his bride on foot). A great deal more casual violence is encountered on the way – and the tests administered to hero and heroine alike come from the world of untamed nature, not from the realm of domesticated animals or manufactured goods. The tsarevich comes upon his “Faithful John” – here, Bulat the
70
Brave – while the latter is being flogged in a public square for non-payment of a debt to a rapacious merchant. The tsarevich is informed that the man who redeems Bulatwilllose hiswifetoKoshchey.Allthe same,Ivanpaysthe debt, and from then on Bulat manages everything. He courts the destined bride Vasilisa the Beautiful with the wing of a chicken, a duck, and a goose (she is frightened, silent, and Bulat must negotiate for her by supplying both their voices). He abducts her from her tower. Twice Bulat slays the pursuers sent by Vasilisa’s father. But even Bulat cannot straightaway slay Koshchey, who steals Vasilisa while Ivan (like most tsareviches, kindhearted but singularly inept) is asleep. The two men eventually locate Vasilisa in Koshchey’s hut – and remarkably, separated from her father and childhood home, the silent bride has become the wise and crafty female force, the “donor,” or helping aspect of Baba Yaga. Through three deceits, Vasilisa seduces her bony, braggart captor into revealing the location of his death. Ivan and Bulat set out in search of it. Along the way, various animals are almost killed for food (a dog, an eagle, a lobster) but then at the last minute spared; they become the indispensable helpers. The death is found in the egg, Koshchey is reunited with it, and at this point the contour of the Grimm tale resumes.
Twelve doves, relatives of Koshchey, inform Bulat that his master will be killed by his favorite dog, or horse, or cow. He who enables the tsarevich to avoid these threats will be turned to stone. The threesome returns home, the marriage is consummated, and the tests begin: Bulat slices the threatening dog in half, then decapitates the horse and cow. Incensed, Prince Ivan orders Bulat to be hanged, and the faithful helper, confessing, slowly turns to stone. In this version too, only the blood of the two slaughtered royal children (a son and a daughter), smeared on the stone, will bring Bulat back to life. But one detail of this final episode is worth noting. In the German version, the king carries out the sacrifice of his two sons on his own and then tests his wife after the fact, to see if she would have consented to it. No such test of the female is necessary in the Russian tale. There, the prince consults with his wife
There are other East–West divides. European Cinderellas run themselves ragged for their evil stepmothers (one senses a work ethic here), even though they never lose their beauty while doing so. Russian Cinderellas tend to be more realistic as regards the effect of unremitting physical labor on human bodies. Idleness and laziness is never a virtue, of course, but many Russian heroines happen to have magic dolls from their mothers who miraculously do
everything, permitting their own hands to remain attractively soft and white. Onthe male sideofthe genre,Western Prince Charmingstend to beenterprising young men, whereas the Russian Ivan-Tsarevich is a bumbler not unlike Ivan the Fool, relying on helpers or miracles. The cosmopolitan Pushkin, barely out of his teens, burst into fame in 1820 with his first long narrative poem
Hybrids: folk epic and Faust tale
To complete this rudimentary literacy in Russian traditional narratives, it remains to consider two hybrids. The first is the
Some of the earliest mythological
72
With the collapse of the Kievan state by the middle of the thirteenth century, these early heroic songs migrated to central and northern Russia. To their familiar repertory of enemies (nomads or heathens from the eastern steppe) the Kievan epic heroes then added villains of the darkened forest and swamp. One such foe was the highway bandit Solovey [“the Nightingale”], who lived in a huge tree and whose very whistle could deafen or kill a passerby. North or south, the defense of Russia remained the
Ilya was a poor peasant’s son, born a cripple. Or in other versions, Ilya, like the folk hero
Motifs from the life of Ilya of Murom pervade Russian culture – inverted, parodied, or stylized, depending on which phase of his career is highlighted. For his
Imperial Russian Army in August 1914. The heroic Muromets squadron flew 400 sorties between 1914 and 1918, until its designer Igor Sikorsky abandoned it for a more manageable aircraft to be called the “Alexander Nevsky.”
Each expanding border, greeted by a patriotic cheer, also brought an increased vulnerability. The traditional types of “survival heroism” sampled so far – that of Ilya Muromets, Alexander Nevsky with the Mongols, Boris and Gleb, even the gentle colonizing abbot Theodosius – developed primarily in response to the demands and threats of the northern, eastern, and southeastern frontier. In that arc of confrontation facing the Eurasian land mass, both Kievan and Muscovite Russians viewed themselves as civilized enlighten-ers against pagans and nomads. Our final exemplary hybrid text comes from another sector, the Catholic and Protestant West.
These heretics to the west – well-armed, educated, cultured, carriers of the European Renaissance – presented a very different threat to Russian integrity than did the Tatar khans, who taxedheavilybut in principle tolerated the Orthodox Church. The theological academies of Kiev were already important centers of Latin literacy at a time when books were being banned and musical instruments burned by more conservative Orthodox authorities in Muscovy further north. The Northwest–Southwest cultural border remained highly porous to all modes of entertainment and aesthetic expression. A century before Peter the Great, literate Russians had access to love poetry, Jesuit school drama, satires, popular histories, picaresque narratives, Faust tales, and chivalric romances in crude Russian versions. Bowdlerized adventure tales of European, Greek, or mid-Eastern origin were hawked in the towns in the form of woodcut prints [in Russian,
The Grudtsyn-Usovs were a well-known north Russian merchant family and the tale is precisely situated, historically and geographically. In 1606, during Russia’s inter-dynastic“TimeofTroubles,”theseniorGrudtsynmoved eastwith his wife and son to Kazan to escape the invading Poles. When Mikhail Romanov became tsar in 1613, Savva was twelve years old. His story is a quasi-secular – and sexually explicit – multiple hybrid, with components of documented history, witchcraft, Faust tale, adventure story, travelogue, jousting bout, and an Intervention of the Holy Virgin, all framed by the redemptive formulas of a Russian Orthodox saint’s life. Integrated into one biography, it is the life of a sinner whose courage during the drawn-out torments of his repentance permits the storyteller to reframe demonic experiences as a sacramental trial. Its plot divides into three phases.
74
The first is the period of Savva’s seduction, fall, and pagan bewitchment. Apprenticed in the city of Oryol, Savva is befriended by a wealthy elderly citizen, Bazhen Vtory, who has a young beautiful wife. The wife seduces Savva so successfully, and he cooperates so enthusiastically, that the young man, startled at his own appetite, resolves to refrain from carnal activity (at least for the duration of one holy day) for the sake of his soul. The wife, enraged, devises exquisite punishment: having slipped him a magic love potion to increase his desire, she connives with her unknowing husband to expel him from their home. Savva grieves and begins to waste away.
The second phase begins when Savva summons up the devil: “If someone would do something so that I might again take sexual pleasure with this woman . . .” Suddenly a young man appears, offers to intervene, asks Savva to provide a brief written note renouncing Christ, and again Savva is welcome in Vtory’s house. The wife is not exactly in league with the devil. She is “incited” by him – and one of the fascinating aspects of the tale is its ambivalent, borderline treatment of human responsibility. The externalized medieval model of “an angel on one’s right shoulder, a devil on one’s left,” battling over possession of the helpless human soul, coexists with a more modern internal explanation: “Human nature knows how to lead the mind of a young man into iniquity” (p. 455). Is human nature the victim, the carrier, or the willful initiator of the vice? Is the body choosing to pursue its pleasure, or has the body itself been taken captive and thus deserves our sympathy? This archaic image of an outside “devil doing it to us” remained vital, deep into Russian literature’s maturity: in the art of Gogol and Dostoevsky, in the mystical poems and stories of the Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), and in plays and novels by the Soviet-era Mikhail Bulgakov, all of which combine folk devils and grand Lucifers with astute human psychology and rigorous moral accounting.
The two “brothers,” Savva and his false friend, become inseparable. They travel to the friend’s home – which is Hell, of course, but on the horizon of earth, a city of gold – to present Satan with the God-rejecting letter. At this point the tale veers off to the west, much as the leaner Grimm tale, “Faithful John,” had opened up to absorb a Koshchey-the-Deathless subplot when that famous German folk tale moved east.
Several aspects of this remarkable final segment prefigure the later, great moral Realists, most notably Leo Tolstoy, whose 1890 story “The Devil” begins
with a similar psychological dynamic. Savva both knows, and does not wish to know, the true identity of his patron. His dilemma is at the core of traditional Russian religious thought, which values self-discipline and believes in the transfiguration, rather than the condemnation, of the human body. The devil depends for his effectiveness on a mix of outer stimulation and inner inclination. We know that evil has triumphed within us when we lose control, when our desire cannot be satisfied, when it becomes insatiable and thus unstable. This is the truth that the gentle Russian ascetics such as Abbot Theo-dosius (and Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima) speak to the fanatics among their flock. The devil exploits the bad habits of the undisciplined body, but it is still our body and we still must answer for it. This lesson, which became central to the Russian psychological novel, registers in lapidary fashion on the body of Savva Grudtsyn.
Savva has fallen ill, and he is persuaded by a “wise, God-fearing woman” to take confession. The devil-brother immediately appears to him, waving the contract. For days, weeks, Savva undergoes the most awful physical tortures: he is thrown against the wall, onto the floor, throttled “until he begins to gasp and foam comes from his mouth” (p. 470). The bystanders can do nothing. Nor – significantly – do they attempt to do anything. The tale is marvelously dry-eyed. The Tsar is informed, so that there will be no ugly litigation should the courageous youth “die in such miserable plight” and those who are attending him be held accountable. All parties understand that Savva’s repentance must be paid for in the currency of the initial sin. For every hour of pleasurable uncontrolled lust, he will undergo an equivalent hour of torment.
In the final step of his return to life, Savva has a vision that the Mother of God will save him on Her holy day – but only if he agrees to take monastic vows. He is carried, crippled with torment, to the door of the church. A voice commands him to get up and enter the sanctuary; like Ilya Muromets, he rises to his feet as if he had never been ill. Suddenly, a “most marvelous miracle” occurs: the God-rejecting letter flutters down from the cupola, and “all writing was erased” (p. 473).
Miracle, magic, law
This survey of saints’ lives, folk tales, one epic
76
ancient heritage, in an attempt to start the culture anew. Before we survey this eighteenth-century divide in Chapter 4, can any generalizations be made about Russia’s traditional dual-faith culture?
Medieval versus post-Petrine Russia is often discussed as part of a larger question, “Russia versus the West.” Yury Lotman, together with his colleague in cultural semiotics Boris Uspensky, offered a highly provocative and controversial schematization of this binary in two now-classic essays from the late 1970s.14 The first essay, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture” (1977), argues that traditional Russian culture had no concept of “progress” in the tentative, gradualist, Western sense of the term. It could not, they reasoned, because the archaic Russian mentality does not acknowledge “neutral zones” where value has not yet been assigned. Either a space is “protected” and monitored by theappropriatesaint, or “unprotected”and open to all manner of devils and mischievous spirits. How a given culture organizes its profane time-space is reflected in the structure of the otherworld or afterlife that it projects. And it is significant, so Lotman and Uspensky argue, that the Russian Orthodox wing of Christianity never accepted the Roman Catholic concept of purgatory, nor developed its own analogue for it.
Purgatory shares with other transitional chronotopes the idea of a “surplus,” a “free tomorrow” during which the nature of our destiny can be altered by our own efforts (or by the efforts of those praying for us). Precisely that idea was lacking. Rather than such linear progress, historical motion in the Russian context more resembled an oscillation between fixed positive and negative poles. If, in tenth-century Kiev, a pagan temple was torn down, the Christian equivalent had to be built
“Doubled” or superimposed sites are rich concentrators of meaning, but they are fragile. In the blink of an eye and with no explanations or intermediate steps, they can flip from godly to demonic, from clean to unclean – and back again. One good example, consonant with the temples mentioned by Lotman and Uspensky, comes from the early, ebullient post-communist 1990s: the rebuilding of Moscow’s gargantuan Cathedral of Christ the Savior, demolished by Stalin’s order on December 5, 1931.15
In 1994, on the initiative of theRussian Orthodox Patriarch AleksyII together with Moscow’s ambitious Mayor Luzhkov, it was resolved that an exact replica would be reconstructed on the precise site of the original cathedral. The church had been dynamited to make way for a massive Palace of Soviets, eight meters taller than the Empire State Building, topped by a 6,000-ton statue of Lenin. But
for two decades, nothing went up. Construction accidents were common. In the popular imagination, the denuded site was seen (with a mix of irony, superstition, and reverence) as “sacred” and thus its new profane mission cursed; it was rumored that a local holy fool visited the construction pit and predicted that nothing would rise out of it. In 1958, Khrushchev ordered the huge hole in the ground refitted as a heated swimming pool. Considerable public debate over the future of the site went on during the glasnost years, beginning in the mid-1980s: suggestions ranged from an empty site with a play of light to a small chapel or museum commemorating the victims of Stalinism. The Millennial Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus'(988-1988) gave fresh impetus to a “sacred” solution. The final decision to rebuild the cathedral, taken by secret decree, played in to a massive revival of Moscow’s elaborate mythology of sacred towers, Kremlin walls, and twelve gates - proof of her status as the Third Jerusalem, heir to Constantinople, in fulfillment of the Heavenly City prophesied in the Book of Revelation.16 The completed structure is topped by a huge golden cross on its cupola, symbolizing the repentance of the Russian people; its underground levels feature a business center, oversized parking lot for foreign cars, luxury sauna, and restaurant. The reconsecration of the cathedral in 1997 was a major victory for the energetic and enterprising patriarch, the culmination of his campaign to return nationalized property to the Church and reassert control over confiscated saints’ relics. This reclamation of “lost” relics was relatively easy for Aleksy to arrange, since he had been elected Patriarch in 1990 after thirty-two years in the church hierarchy with simultaneous service in the ecclesiastical subsection of the secret police, the KGB. Without such collaboration, he could not have risen through the ranks of the Church to wage battle with the remnants of the atheistic state.
Lotman’s second essay devoted to the East-West divide deals more with psychology than with the demonics of time-space. It has an intriguing title: “‘Contracting’
Magic (incantations, charms, spells, curses, talismans) is a formula, a “contract” drawn up with a concrete goal. It should be distinguished from divination - the reading of stars, moon, thunder, numbers, marks on the body-which is the “attempt to predict something or to reach a correct decision about it rather than to cause it.”17 Magic always works against a fixed or closed future: it desires to make something happen. It presumes that the proper recipe or artifact, invoked by a qualified practitioner, will produce that desired result. If a given charm fails to work, this does not mean that charms don’t work, only that
78
the recipe was wrong for this particular application and the practitioner must learn the correct one. Magic is predictable. Belief in it gives rise to signs and to publicly accessible codes. In his classification of medieval Russia as a magic-driven culture, Lotman supplies four defining factors: reciprocity (the magician and the natural force respect each other); compulsion (the proper formula will compel the force to obey); equivalence (in the transaction between magician and nature, each side has a measure of responsibility and power); and a contractual relation (which can, of course, be “broken” through misinformation or deception). Contracts bind.
Magic is necessary because the workings of the world are fixed but hidden. Miracle, as Orthodox Christian believers understood it, was freer, less symmetrical, and thus less reliable than magic. It depended on intangibles and immeasurables: divine grace, strength of belief, the unknowable. The founding miracle for Russian believers was the Resurrection of Christ. During the dread and risk of that original Passion, for Jesus as well as for His disciples, there was no proof that anyone would rise again. (It might be said that into this slender stretch of time, the “second day” between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, Dostoevsky fit all of his great novels.) A sense for the miraculous could restore hope to the desperate in spirit. But one has no right to
In closing this chapter, we might expand on some implications of Lotman’s models. Vis-a`-vis Russia, defenders of Western liberal democracy habitually feel rational, secular, “advanced,” progressive, law-abiding, tolerant of others’ rights – in a word, politically mature. But in the eyes of a Russian believer with the worldview Lotman has described, that bundle of liberal-political virtues is simply archaic or pagan magic, at a lower level of civilization and spiritual sophistication. Pagan Rome, together with the principles of pagan Roman law, was “magical”: compulsive, contractual, enforceable, imperial, and inevitably violent. The logic of magic tends to standardize all parties and variables, to remove the irreducibly individual human face. It is no accident that the Devil, a master at demanding the written contract, believes in conventional signs.
But miracle itself has no logic. Nor is it dialogic. It is an unconditional gift, an orientation of myself to the world regardless of how the world treats me back.
Lotman’s two essays suggest a final lesson to be learned from model biography, useful for the watershed of the eighteenth century: that moral guidance can be provided by a culture in two valid but fundamentally opposed ways. Each aspires to a different ideal. The first way is guidance through a relatively fixed and impersonal system of law. This law is codified, “blind,” and legitimized to the extent that it applies to all, precedes the individual case, and follows its own rules. The second way is guidance through an integrated human personality. This personality – or face,
Western eyes on Russian realities: the eighteenth century
The Russian eighteenth century left little trace on any literary canon beyond Russia’s borders. It is remembered as a century that borrowed its forms, themes, and expertisefrom the West, first from Protestant Europeand then from France. To borrow, translate, codify or imitate an alien cultural canon was not considered inappropriate, however; quite the contrary. “Originality” was neither a value nor a virtue. Reason and human nature were presumed to be universals. The poetics of neoclassicism, which ruled the European continent, relied on an idealized imitation of ancient models. What
Russia’s special path began in religious history. The Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe shared a lingua franca in Latin. “Underneath” that largely
80
static foreign tongue, vigorous local vernaculars developed that were sophisticated enough by the sixteenth century to produce literary masterpieces. In contrast, Russian Orthodox Christianity had always conducted its liturgy – and communicated its texts – in an archaic Old Church Slavonic. Its writing system (called “Cyrillic” after the ninth-century Thessalonican missionary Cyril and his brother Methodius) had been adapted from the Byzantine Greek alphabet, supplemented with new letters devised for uniquely Slavic sounds.1 This abstract, ecclesiastical language, vaguely comprehensible to its dispersed congregations but native to none, suited the needs of a borderless continent with migrating populations and contiguous, shifting dialects. But it increased Russia’s isolation from the West. With Church Slavonic as their linguistic “binder,” there was little impetus among the Orthodox Slavs to master Latin or Greek, the portals to pan-European culture. When language reform began in earnest under Peter the Great, as part of his ambitious attempt to order and rationalize all aspects of Russian life, the initial tactic of the reformers was to work with this chaotic but familiar “Old Slavonic mass”: cleansing it, simplifying it, and defining high, middle, and low styles according to the proportion of archaic words that each layer contained.
In 1700, the Russian language, both spoken and written, was porous, receptive, shapeless, and lacked fixed norms for orthography or pronunciation. Polonisms, Latinisms, and Germanisms abounded. Tsar Peter – a regimenting mentality in all things – staffed his Foreign Office with corps of regulators and translators. Dictionaries, glossaries, and lexical commentaries became the rage at court. But no number of tsarist decrees could create a linguistic equivalent when the concept was lacking in the Russian language or in native Russian culture, which was the case for most technical terms and many abstract words. Even the forward-driving impetus of linear narrative, with its values of novelty and suspense, lacked a dignified literary container. More common for written texts in the Russian pre-modern era was “word-weaving” [
82
[1892–1941] in the twentieth) kept alive this vigorous archaic stratum of militant, “unintegrated” language, full of wild metaphoric associations and primitivist sound patternings, deployed to almost surreal effect.
By the eighteenth century, state-approved innovations in technology and bureaucracy had boosted the production of secular texts. The printing press was an accepted reality. Ecclesiastical censorship lost its monopoly in 1700. But the core problem of inter-cultural translation remained. How can a word, which makes sense in the context of its own source culture, be recreated in empty semantic space? The translator could provide a paraphrase in the form of a definition – a bulky solution. More common was the practice of “doublets,” embedding the foreign word (usually transliterated into Cyrillic) in the Russian text, followed by a parenthetical explanation (if one could be found – although often the Russian equivalent had an entirely different aura). Translators were most successful with concrete physical things. When a paraphrase or approximation could not be found, often the foreign word just sat there, in its own alphabet and alien script, grammatically uninflected and unresponsive to the rules of Russian declension or conjugation.
The difficulty of orienting oneself in this unmonitored polyglot sea was one reason why the Russian upper classes, by the second half of the eighteenth century, arranged matters so that their children learned to speak French from infancy, relying upon that language for all “civilized” society interactions. The wealthy families had multilingual teams of nannies and tutors on their estates (consider Tolstoy in the nineteenth century, Nabokov in the twentieth); the poorer nobles and gentry could generally afford only one miserable, underpaid, often ignorant immigrant from France, Polonized Ukraine or the German states. It is no surprise that some of the best neoclassical comedy in the eighteenth century was
Our exemplary genres are limited to two irreverent literary experiments, one dramatic and one prosaic, followed by one end-of-the-century response to them that transformed this irreverence into respect. The first genre, Russian prose comedy, was especially adept at ridiculing Gallomania; the second, Russia’s primitive picaresque novel, broadened the ridicule to include, among many other targets, literary pretense and high court poets. Triumphant over both these satiric projects was Sentimentalism, which took French influence seriously, even piously, and integrated it into a new prose style that swept up the Russian readership. All three genres – prose comedy, the picaresque, and Sentimentalist prose – enjoy a vigorous afterlife in the nineteenth century.
All three parody that problematic eighteenth-century mandate, “pursuit of national identity by means of imitation.” To remind us of that mandate and as backdrop to this circuitous assimilation of European forms, one mid-century Russian tragedy will suffice.
When Aleksandr Sumarokov (1717–77), codifier of Russian neoclassicism and a prolific tragedian, published his Russian-language
The chronotope of comedy was different. Self-improvement was the goal here as well, but upright behavior or abstract edification was insufficient for it. In 1747, in his so-called “Second Epistle,” Sumarokov addressed this question. Comedy, he wrote, should “correct manners by mockery; to amuse and bring [moral] benefit is its basic law.” Satire should cut along the same lines, only deeper: its task was to “censure vices” and ridicule “passions, follies, wit-lessness.” Sumarokov’s own twelve verse comedies were poor instantiations of this ideal, however, remaining trivial, weakly plotted caricatures (often of Sumarokov’s personal enemies) that only rarely rise above farce. His failure here is significant. Tragedy addresses the lofty and eternal, whereas “manners” remain a local affair. And how could
84
Foreign models were nevertheless assumed to be indispensable. Not only did the codes of neoclassicism advocate it, but Russia had no well-developed native traditionof genteel scripted comedy. “Going to the theatre” was not part of early modern Russia’s upper-class culture. When Muscovite envoys were posted to fifteenth-century Florence or Elizabethan London, they either did not see plays or poorly understood what they saw.4 In the early eighteenth century Peter the Great tried to create, under imported German management, a state-sponsored public theatre in Red Square. Ill-wishers sabotaged the construction, audiences had to be bribed to attend, and the plays were uniformly rendered in an archaic biblical style completely at odds with their content and with spectators’ interest (p. 48). Like the printing press under Ivan the Terrible, it would appear that theatre, too, was destined to be a “reform from above,” a Western craftiness foisted on the unwilling populace by a visionary autocrat – or tyrant.
The three empresses who succeeded Peter passionately loved masquerade and theatre. The most gifted of them, Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), wrote plays herself on a variety of themes: satires on religious hypocrisy, adaptations of Shakespeare to Russian conditions, even folkloric opera libretti (including one on Baba Yaga and a
Neoclassical comedy, Gallomania, cruelty: art instructs life
In 1769 Catherine II, in imitation of the Enlightenment, encouraged self-correcting domestic satire by personally sponsoring a satiric journal. The timing was delicate. Two years earlier the Empress had decreed that no enserfed peasant could lodge a complaint against his master (owner) – a momentous step in the transformation of serfdom into fully legalized slavery. This juxtaposition of a retrograde social policy with tolerance in the literary sphere was not lost on Catherine’s liberal-minded aristocratic critics. The most famous of the publisher-journalists, Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), sparred with the Empress for two decades in his irreverent journal
Revolution provided startling proof that ideas could result in the decapitation of monarchs. Catherine had Novikov arrested and incarcerated in Peter and Paul Fortress in 1792. He was freed only in 1796, after her death.
In an absolutist state, the balance between acceptable, self-improving mockery and the unacceptable censure of political realities is a fragile one. For the next two centuries, Russian culture and Russian prisons would be populated by writers, artists, stage directors, and composers who gambled and lost while negotiating this tightrope. The practice of comedy under Catherine the Great is a good test case, because the rules for its composition and the range of its character types were so uncomplicated - and also because the very idea of a secular literary establishment was still so fresh. The tense relationship that later became “Poet versus Tsar” was still Poet
Russian playwrights imitated two popular French models: the
Some Russian “manners” were relatively safe to address simply by mocking an isolated targeted vice. Such was Catherine II’s strategy in her comedy
86
patronage. Two are comedies. One (both blacker and more tuneful) is the libretto for a comic opera.
Denis Fonvizin (1745-92) was a translator, statesman, and liberal political philosopher as well as the author of Russia’s two best eighteenth-century comedies,
The plot delivers no surprises. Indeed, the “speaking names” attached to the characters at once reveal their virtues and vices. The virtuous ward Sofya [Wisdom] is separated from her beloved Milon [Dear One] by the machinations of her repulsive host family with its two false suitors: the loutish sixteen-year-old “minor” Mitrofan [Greek, “mama’s boy”] and his uncle Skotinin [Mr. Pig or Brute]. The true lovers are duly united in the end, thanks to the device of the heroine’s uncle, Starodum [Old-Thought], who returns from Siberia in the nick of time to provide a dowry for his niece, join up with the righteous government inspector Pravdin [Mr. Truthful], and expose the evil-doing of the play’s villain, the abusive serfowner and doting mother Prostakova [Mrs. Simpleton]. In the final act, Prostakova fails in her na¨ıve attempt to kidnap Sofya for her worthless son. Her wealth is confiscated by official decree, at which point even Mitrofan casts her out. All these threats and moral cleansings happen in the most improbably well-timed way. Defeated villains immediately collapse into craven beggars. Neither the fate of the lovers nor the exposure of the tyrant - both foregone conclusions - provides the moral infrastructure. That function is filled by the sermons of the old-fashioned moralist Starodum, one of the play’s two
For Fonvizin’s audience in the 1770s, the “old-thought” of Starodum was still ratherrecent.StarodumidentifieshimselfasaproductofPeter theGreat’svigor-ous, masculine policies on universal service, economic progress, Western-style education, and enlightened patriotism so different – we are meant to infer – from the frivolous politics of bedroom and ballroom under the subsequent empresses. Starodum delivers his sermons on this energetic upright life as if from a pulpit. He does have interlocutors, but he rarely listens to or learns from them. His style and language belong to an enlightenment treatise, proclaiming on matters precious to Fonvizin: the proper education of youth (the lout Mitrofan being the negative example), the temptations of inherited wealth, one’s duty to the fatherland, the value of personal honor above rank and of service above favoritism, and the virtue of independent economic initiative. Starodum’s sojourn in Siberia prompts from him a paean to that region of Russia where “money is drawn from the earth itself,” a place – unlike the imperial court – that “rewards labor faithfully and generously” and does not require a man to “exchange his conscience for it” (Act III, ii).
Performances of
This shift from “Gallomania” to “Gallophilia” – from ridiculing French influence to loving it and relying on it – is one of the major watersheds preparing us
88
for Pushkin. We return to Karamzin’s achievement at the end of this chapter, for his Sentimentalism proved exceptionally durable on the Russian literary landscape, holding its own against irony and existential despair well into the twentieth century. But first we must sample the ridicule itself. Two targets were beloved by eighteenth-century satirists. One was the favorite of court playwrights: the French language as worshipped, parroted, and fractured by Russians. The other, embedded in crude prose, was more subversive, for it included among the targets of its parody the aristocratic court with its neoclassical genres and “acceptable” comedy.
Gallomaniaisnowhere more perfectly exposed thaninFonvizin’s 1769 comedy of manners,
Well into the nineteenth century, Gallomania retained its moral resonance. The great successor to these satiric playwrights is the Gallophobic (and quatra-lingual) Leo Tolstoy in
Prokofiev allots an intoxicating, dreamlike time-space separated from the surrounding action. These slightly off-balance waltzes can be seen (or heard) as visitations from the Sentimentalist tradition, and they condition the emotionally vulnerable Natasha to its dangerous fantasies.7
Soon after Fonvizin’s
Whatwas the“misfortune” caused by acoach? Two Gallomaniac landowners, the Filyulins (Mr. and Mrs. Ninny) desire to buy the latest fashionable coach from Paris. To get the necessary funds, they decide to sell some serfs to the army (a life or death sentence: the standard term of service was twenty-five years). Since the bailiff wants the peasant heroine Anyuta for himself, he selects her lover Lukyan as one of the serf recruits. Lukyan is promptly shackled and led away. The situation is saved only when, for a sizable bribe, the Filyulins’ household jester Afanasy (labeled in the libretto simply “
This inserted Jester is a morally blank, unsentimental, folk-comic type. He sings two arias that owe little to the ethos of enlightened self-improvement – or even to the ethos of enlightened despotism – and much to the cynical, pragmatic, resigned ethics of a Russian secular fool. In his first-act aria, the Jester chides the two desperate lovers for not knowing how to joke. “Why be sad and why go moan?” he sings. “It’s best to spit, spit on everything in the
90
world, / It’s all in knowing how to dance to someone else’s tune / The trick’s to be a jester and a rogue.”8 In the second act, the Jester urges the fettered Lukyan simply to die at the first opportunity, because: “It’s really the best way; you can’t imagine how bad this world is.”And finally – after the Gallomaniacruse works– he delivers another aria on Lukyan in his new role: “What joy it is, / What sweetness to the heart” to have a coachman who “Instead of shouting ‘Here we come!’ / will shout in French! / . . . and no one on the street will understand!” In the closing scene, the Jester gathers the grateful peasants around himself: “What were you crying about? Where the
Like Melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare’s comedy
Chulkov’s Martona: life instructs art
Mikhail Chulkov was of non-noble birth, an actor, journalist, and low-level bureaucrat who announced openly that his “pen was for sale.” His activity
as author and literary adaptor coincided with a controversy over the writing of novels that erupted in the 1760s. Was prose fiction serious literary art? Could novels and tales edify – or only entertain, distract, titillate, thus mocking the edifiers and self-improvers? In 1759, Sumarokov, then the director of the Russian Imperial Theatres, weighed in with the opinion that novels, unless elevated by dignity and usefulness, could cause readers a great deal of harm. Chulkov’s eventual response to this lofty neoclassicist position was an omnibus narrative titled
The heroine, with the unRussian name Martona, was probably modeled on Fougeretde Monbron’s “
Is the self-serving voice behind such a story in any position to mock the immoral behavior of others? Probably not, but such was hardly Chulkov’s
92
intent. Evidence from his other work suggests that
The novel hints early at its irreverent anti-literary end. One of Martona’s lovers, an illiterate copy clerk, tells her of a neoclassical ode that turned up in their office; the chief secretary assured them it was “some sort of delirium, not worth copying” (p. 38). In a later episode, Martona befriends a merchant’s wife who “writes novels with introductions in verse” (somewhat like Chulkov’s own novel)andfanciesherself acritic. “Sobusy wasshe at versifying,” Martona notes, “she very seldom slept with her husband” (p. 58). This female friend presided over a literary salon, where nothing was natural or healthy: a decrepit old man seduces a thirteen-year-old girl, a young swain courts a toothless wealthy old crone, and in the midst of this “licentious brothel” a “short little poet,” sweating profusely, “kept shouting verses from a tragedy he had composed” (p. 59). This fraudulent salon, which eerily prefigures the grotesque “Literary Feˆte” in Dostoevsky’s 1870 novel
These performances are themselves parodies of the literary genres they pretend to be. The merchant’s wife decides to get rid of her husband. On commission, Martona’s servant concocts a poison that induces temporary insanity in the victim (the servant calls his harmless handiwork a “comedy”); he then proceeds to expose the wife’s perfidious intent to the whole salon in a
Martona herself, or whatever higher storytelling voice stands behind her – was premised on the fact that authors have nothing to “teach.” Life’s experience teaches. Chulkov’s heroine, like every picaresque protagonist, is not a reader but a survivor.
Chulkov’s Martona might have an even more potent (and more politically charged) rags-to-riches prototype than was earlier suspected. Recent research has suggested that Martona is modeled not only on a French clothes-mender who became a successful courtesanbutalso on Peter theGreat’swidow,Empress Catherine I, who, with the help of former lovers and allies, ruled Russia precariously from 1725 to her death in 1727.11 The woman who married Peter I was a commoner, perhaps even a servant, in a Lutheran household. She is believed to have lost her first husband at the Battle of Poltava at the age of eighteen. Her first name was Marta; she was an excellent housekeeper and cook. Tsar Peter was only the most powerful in a series of increasingly distinguished lovers, and he was also the most constant. If this hypothesis about Martona/Marta-Catherine I is correct, then
Neoclassical comedy and the picaresque novel, enriched in the early nineteenth century by an explosion of interest in vaudeville, provide an essential backdrop to Pushkin’s short stories, the dramas and narrative epics of Gogol, and Dos-toevsky’s great novels. These masterworks are most comic precisely at those points where stock characters or scenarios from eighteenth-century satire are recycled in the context of contemporary (and often more frightening) Russian reality. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Pushkin’s
94
stock-in-trade episodes on stage, the Empress Catherine II would have laughed heartily. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, however, fops and fakes are not only foolish. They are also lethal. Virtue no longertriumphs at the end. Manners are not corrected by mockery. Bouts of madness are not due to some magic potion slipped into an unsuspecting body from the outside. The madman has become shrewd, sly, multidimensional, manipulative, and this complicates our sympathy. Comic scenes in Gogol and Dostoevsky easily became demonic without the reassuring envelope of the Enlightenment.
Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”
Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), prosewriter, literary reformer, essayist, and Russia’s first major historian, almost single-handedly moved Russian literature across the century’s divide. His prose fiction has not stood the test of time. But Pushkin and his generation could not have begun to write without him, and the plots, characters, and scenarios made famous by Karamzin surface uninterruptedly in all forms (poetry, short story, drama, opera) throughout the nineteenth century. Several factors contribute to his pivotal role.
Karamzin experimented with a wide number of genres. Uncommonly for the time, he favored English and German literature over the ubiquitous French, thus broadening the traditions on which Russian writers could draw (and also lessening the merciless heat focused on Gallomania). Among these pioneering works were his
Why was this task so timely? Fonvizin, we recall, wrote neoclassical comedies in the 1760s and 1770s remarkable for their racy dialogue and rudeness. These dramas were an enormous step forward from the stilted tragedies penned by his colleagues at Catherine’s court. But Fonvizin’s language-masks, for all their responsiveness, were brittle. The spectator’s pleasure increased to the extent that the characters on stage did not understand one another, or made fools of themselves, or were indecorously exposed in public. Such negative types, which
constitute the major delight of this sort of comedy, move without mediation from comic buffoon to violent bully to abject vanquished villain. Decency did not have its own voice. Karamzin sought to fill in the missing “decent” layers with a style that was appropriate for empathetic communication. Only then, he believed, could Russian prose become polite, witty, nuanced, playful, and thus a part of belles-lettres.
Some men-of-letters resisted these reforms. The so-called “archaists,” or Russian-language patriots, preferred to develop the potentials of this eighteenth-century rawness rather than bleach it out. They feared, not without cause, that such prettified Gallicized Russian would become a linguistic “blandscape,” even though the “old style” was an unspeakable amalgam of bookishness (at the upper end) and crudeness (at the lower). But even to these conservatives, Karamzin was indispensable. To him Russia owes the very concept of a “reading public.”12 Karamzin advocated universal literacy, for women and children as well as for “minors.” He encouraged reading –
A peasant girl, Liza, living with her widowed mother on the outskirts of Moscow, is seduced by Erast, a young nobleman from the city. The seduction is roundabout. What first attracts the hero is Liza’s virginal innocence, so unlike his carnal relations with women in town. But after some time spent on chaste kisses under the ancient oak, the two consummate their love (during the obligatory thunderstorm). Erast begins to lose interest once his ideal shepherdess becomes merely his mistress. Eventually he leaves her on pretext of going to war, gambles away his wealth, and arranges to marry a rich noblewoman. When Liza comes across his carriage on a Moscow street, Erast cannot avoid explaining matters – and then shows her the door with a hundred rubles and a farewell kiss. In despair, Liza drowns herself in the pond near the ancient oak. Her mother dies immediately of grief. Erast, the inconstant lover, cannot be consoled. The narrator hears this story from the miserable man a year before his death.
Such seduce-and-abandon plots are found in every culture. In the West today they survive robustly in serial soap operas, teenage romances, comic strips. When they were new, however, as they were for the Russian 1790s, they shocked and mesmerized the upper classes. Russian heroines might have behaved like this, but they had not been revered for it. A cult developed around the pond where Liza met her end. Still, “Sentimentalism” is inadequate to Karamzin’s achievement. A better word would be “Sensibility,” as in Jane
96
Austen’s novel
In Western Europe, Sentimentalism, or Sensibility, had a somewhat different profile.13 Western novels - from Richardson’s
In the 1830s, Pushkin several times rewrote the Poor Liza plot, with varying degrees of affectionate irony. Dostoevsky, who knew his Karamzin thoroughly and loved all of it, gives us an urban “Poor Liza” as na¨ıve prostitute in his
Liza survives, gets over her infatuation, and marries someone else. When Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a composer of profound Sentimentalist vision, turned Pushkin’s tale into his opera
But the most complex commentary on all Russian seduce-and-abandon plots is surely Leo Tolstoy’s final full-length novel,
In closing, let us note one paradox shared by neoclassical comedy, Chulkov’s picaresque novel, and Karamzin’s Sentimentalism. The high-minded, virtuous heroes in all three categories become, to later audiences, dismally boring. Starodum and Pravdin, Milon and Sofya, Erast and Liza, even Martona’s lovers when they begin to behave, are one-liners with a one-dimensional afterlife. In contrast, the Brigadier, Prostakova, Skotinin, Mitrofan, Martona, Knyazhnin’s Jester are unforgettably vital - and ubiquitous. This dilemma took its toll on many writers, most tragically Nikolai Gogol. Gogol’s inability to portray a positive character was one factor contributing to his creative, and then physical, death. But Pushkin, Russia’s other Romantic-era genius, will find several ways out. His true heroes are known not by their virtue, but by the more complex concept of honor. A personal friend of Karamzin and much indebted to him, Pushkin nevertheless undertook to roughen up Karamzin’s prose, re-masculinize it, reclaim it from the salon and take it into the real outdoors. In the process, Pushkin the poet, prose writer, and dramatist became for Russia what Shakespeare is for the English-speaking world, an unsurpassed standard. To his astonishing century we now turn.
Sculpture of Aleksandr Pushkin by M. K. Anikushin, installed on Arts Square in Leningrad in 1957. Photograph by Michael Julius.
The astonishing nineteenth century: Romanticisms
In the early nineteenth century, 5 percent of Russia’s people could read. The fate of literature was in the hands of several dozen gifted, well-born, multilingual innovators, concentrated in the two capital cities and writing for one another. No literary “profession” existed, nor a “public opinion”; criticism of new poems or dramas took place in salons, theatre foyers, private correspondence. But this tiny community of cultured readers and writers, although cut off from the mass of their countrymen, never doubted that it was part of mainstream European culture. It passionately followed shifts in literary taste on the continent and, as neoclassicism gave way to cults of sentiment, furiously debated each step.
Like Romantics throughout Europe, Russian writers reacted against overly rationalisticviewsof human nature andthe universalizingclaims of theEnlight-enment. The gothic and grotesque came into fashion. E. T. A. Hoffmann popularized cults of the poet, of creative madness and the fantastic; the early Dickens opened up the urban slum as an exotic locale with an ethnography of its own. Folklore, the unique spirit of one’s native language, and national history began to compete with the neoclassical convention of borrowed plots and stock characters. Russia rapidly absorbed the major Romantic prose genres from Europe: society tale, novel-in-letters, “travel notes,” “southern” (or orientalist) tale, diary and memoir, historical romance. But for all this cosmopolitanism, the
99
100
two Russian Romantic-era writers who are the focus of this chapter – Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) and Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) – are difficult to place on the European map. Although each endorsed the Romantic view of “poet as national prophet,” neither embraced Romantic rebellion, or even Romantic individualism, as usually defined. With his impeccable taste, implied audience of insiders, and unquestioning faith in the power (and responsibility) of the poet to elucidate rather than mystify with words, Pushkin remained in many respects a neoclassicist, an eighteenth-century writer.1 And as regards Gogol, no ready-made genre conventions apply. His Ukrainian folk and terror-tales, his humanoid caricatures and unclassifiable, out-of-control plots can pass from irrepressible laughter to unspeakable dread in the space of a phrase. Among the canonical Russian writers, the brief life of Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) probably comes closest to reflecting the pan-European Romantic spirit.
During the reign of Alexander I, literary patronage came to an end.2 Writers were obliged to seek other means of material support. Under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), the publicist Nikolai Novikov had stoutly refused to serve solely the interests of the empress – and to finance his publishing activities, he sold off inherited estates. Nineteenth-century writers were rarely so fortunate. They owned and managed (that is, mortgaged) serfs, served as military officers, worked as government bureaucrats. A commercially viable press began to function in the 1830s, but the best writing was not always the most marketable. Pushkin insisted on a decent price for his work, but he did not successfully make the transition from aristocratic to middlebrow readerships and was saddled with debts his entire life. Gogol scraped by on loans, subsidies from his mother’s estate, and publishers’ contracts. Occasionally a writer succeeded at a spectacular, high-profile imperial career. Karamzin, for example, was appointed to the salaried post of Historian Laureate in 1803, and until his death in 1826 he labored full time over his highly acclaimed
Although the era of patronage was over, what remained, as a fact of life and a theme of literature, was Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks. In 1722, Peter replaced promotion based on birth by a merit system with fourteen ranks, which provided the infrastructure to his decree on obligatory state service.3 Mandatory service had never been popular and in 1762 it was rescinded by Catherine the Great’s spouse, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762). But the basic
structure of promotion, reward, and formal titles - which determined how a gentleman was addressed in public and what salaried positions he was allowed to pursue - remained in place, with small modifications, until the Bolsheviks abolished the Table of Ranks in 1917. Without a sense of this stratification it is difficult to grasp the dynamics of prestige, ambition, and humiliation in tsarist Russia. Its mechanisms of flattery and shame - the distinctive psychological fuel of much Russian Romantic prose - could function with grotesque precision, especially in the imperial capital. One’s sense of honor and sensitivity to insult was conditioned by one’s birth in conjunction with one’s rank.
The fourteen ranks had three parallel branches: military, civil, and court (that is, “attached to the imperial court,” “courtier”). Rank Fourteen was where one began. Any rank above Eight (after 1856, any rank above Four) bestowed hereditary nobility. Many benefited from this system; sons of the gentry and even of low-born scribes and secretaries could now work their way into the nobility. Some professions, however, had no rank assigned to them at all - such as musicians before the founding of a degree-granting conservatory in St. Petersburg in 1862 - and thus officially did not exist. One’s rank guaranteed rights (such as existed in the Russian Empire): the right to own human property, the right to be exempt from public flogging. In official documents, a person’s rank came first. When addressing a person formally it was procedurally obligatory to use titles, which were multi-syllabic, bulky, and intrusive (ranks One and Two were addressed as “Your High Excellency”
Pushkin and honor (its reciprocity, roundedness, and balance)
Pushkin was acutely aware of the rewards and constraints of official rank. They often conflicted with two other values precious to him: professionalism as a
102
writer, and noble birth. The poet possessed a distinguished genealogy of which he was very proud. On his father’s side the Pushkins were an ancient, although impoverished and marginalized, boyar family. His exotic mother, known as “the beautiful Creole,” was a granddaughter of Abram Gannibal, a black African who had been captured as a boy and educated as a favorite of Peter the Great (rising to rank Four, major general). Scarcely out of his teens, Pushkin was already celebrated as Russia’s supreme poet. But he never “served the state” with distinction on
Pushkin was to rise only one notch above the miserably low rank assigned him upon graduation from his boarding school, St. Petersburg’s imperial Lycee: the Tenth (civilian collegiate secretary). Many of his best friends were dashing officers. Pushkin felt his unglamorous official status keenly; but when the politically suspect and financially strapped poet volunteered for the army in 1829, he was turned down. In 1831 he was promoted to titular councilor (rank Nine), with access to imperial archives. He did receive one further dubious honor, however. On New Year’s Eve, 1834, Tsar Nicholas, desiring to gaze on Pushkin’s breathtakingly beautiful wife at imperial balls, named the poet a “kammerjunker” or Gentleman of the Bedchamber (court rank Eleven; the courtier ranks had no equivalent to civilian Ten). Pushkin considered this rank humiliating for someone of his years and stature, and furthermore it obliged him to escort his wife to palace events. Outraged, he avoided wearing the hated green uniform and (so it was said) even sabotaged it, ripping off a button and refusing to repair it.4 After Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel defending his wife’s honor in January 1837, his widow bravely respected his wish to be buried in his frock coat, not in uniform - a gesture that greatly irritated the tsar. When his opponent, the young and well-connected French officer Georges d’Anthes, was eventually deported from Russia, the reason given was “for killing the kammerjunker Pushkin.”
Birth, service rank, and social status came together for Pushkin in the concept of
promotion while heroes like himself were passed over. Precisely such corrupting “advancement by genealogy alone” was eliminated, one century later, by Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks.
One’s official title was tied to self-respect on more mundane planes. How promptly need one pay gambling debts – or any debts at all – to a person of lower rank? Is it a fresh insult to a dueling opponent to bring, as one’s official second, a man of low birth or of lesser (or no) rank? Quite possibly the tragic subplot of Pushkin’s novel in verse
The duel of honor, initially devised to confirm aristocratic courtiers as a military-social class, was codified in the Italian Renaissance as a secular (and usually illegal) ritual response to perceived insults in which “extreme violence was meted out with extreme politeness.”6 As an institution it came late to Russian culture, which did not experience an Age of Chivalry and continued to preferfistfights toformalduelsup until theend of the eighteenth century.7 Once arrived, however, the duel came to occupy an ambiguous place in nineteenth-century literature, not unlike gambling. In a society so stratified and closely watched, where every button was mandated, the right of a gentleman to duel became his right to define the limits of his own dignity and patience, to decide for himself how he would be punished and punish others. As soon as a challenge was issued, strict codes governed the response, whether or not the aggrieved party felt personal outrage. Failing to issue a challenge when provoked was also dishonorable. If a gentleman was insulted by a person who then refused to accept a challenge to a duel, or if a challenge that should have been issued for some reason was not, one means for the insulted party to restore his honor was to commit suicide, or at least to attempt it. In Tolstoy’s
104
refuses to be maneuvered by a military code he despises. Perhaps Vronsky, pressing his revolver to his chest and pulling the trigger, was in despair at losing Anna; but for certain he was desperate to restore his honor.
To duel and gamble meant to assert one’s individual initiative and thus to act, and feel, more free – even though, paradoxically, the outcome was utterly out of one’s control. Staking everything on a single bullet (or card) opened a person to arbitrariness and fate. Pushkin participated passionately in both duels of honor and games of chance. He favored high-stakes games and tended to lose heavily (his known losses at cards amount to 80,000 rubles, his wins to a mere 7,000); he had a reputation for playing honestly and for paying his large debts “conscientiously, even when his opponents cheated.”8 In Pushkin’s most famous short story, “The Queen of Spades” (1833), the cautious hero Germann ends up in a madhouse after he fails to win on three cards (three, seven, ace) that he had been promised, in a dream, would yield him a fortune. He played them as per the instructions – but at the last moment, inexplicably, the ace turns into a Queen of Spades. Germann’s error had not been gambling. It was his
“Chance, in Pushkin’s view, was the servant of the greater thing that he called fate.”9 This seeming paradox lies at the heartof Pushkin’s creative art and personal worldview (the poet was morbidly superstitious); it unites spontaneity and constraint in a fashion peculiar to this poet. Symmetry, often of dazzling complexity, governs his worlds. Events are balanced and circular; for all the easy banter, nothing is forgotten and no escape is possible from the choices and accidents that each hero must answer for. Exemplary here is Pushkin’s novel in verse,
Representing the poetic aspect is, first of all, the Onegin stanza itself, the novel’s structural “paragraph.” As tightly coiled as the novel is garrulous and expansive, this stanza is remarkably flexible: a fourteen-line verse unit in iambic tetrameter, with a regular scheme of feminine and masculine rhymes, arranged in three differently rhymed quatrains (first alternating, then pair, finally “ring”
construction) followed by a rhyming couplet (AbAb CCdd EffE gg).10 Pushkin invented the stanza in May 1823, intrigued by Byron’s verse narratives and most likely also inspired by the freely rhymed salacious verse of the seventeenth-century French fabulist La Fontaine. With several notable interruptions, eight chapters (over 5,000 lines) of these sturdy, intricately rhymed stanzas propel the plot of
The poeticality of
Tatyana sends Onegin a lovesick letter in Chapter 3. He sends her lovesick letters in Chapter 8. He lectures her on the modesty befitting an honorable maiden in Chapter 3 (she listens but is silent). She lectures him on his duties as an honorable man in Chapter 8 (he listens but is silent). No one gets together, each slides by the other, each is in love with the other but not at the same time, and for this reason energy in the novel is stored, not squandered. Such precious, unspent pressure figured high among Pushkin’s ideals for a well-balanced work of art, and he provides several metaphors for containing it. One occurs near the end of
Imagine a kaleidoscope: a tube with a set of mirrors at one end and a slot for the eye at the other. Life’s myriad events, confusions, coincidences, accidents – what Pushkin called, collectively,
106
consciousness (the pioneer in that realm is Mikhail Lermontov, still a decade away). His complexity lies in his juxtaposition of multiple reflecting surfaces. Pushkin produces consciousness and intelligence in his characters (and pleasure in his readers) by the intersection of many planes. Thus he attends fastidiously to how, when, and by whom story lines are cut off and then resumed, and when the reader is allowed to hook up the various parts. In
Pushkin was a born poet who labored hard to learn the art of prose. Although he eventually managed to write lines that didn’t scan, he never abandoned the symmetrical ideal. In his finished prose works of the 1830s (only four were completed out of thirty begun), roundedness – returning to the beginning, but at another level – became his compromise with the linear impulses of accumulation, conversion, and collapse. Delaying the reward, or stripping back a disguise to reveal that we remain what we have always been, could turn an incipient tragedy into a comedy and a mass of quotidian details into a potential poem. Of course Pushkin as prose writer employed so-called “situation rhymes” (the prefiguring and echoing of narrative events), but his poetic nature demanded more: not just the repetition of similar parts but a structural symmetry within the work as a whole, subordinating even free personality to its sway.
The primary task of prose writing (as Pushkin practiced it) was to design the maximally efficient action for the characters that would reveal the integrity and symmetry of their motives. In 1822, still exclusively a poet, Pushkin jotted down a few thoughts about prose. “Precision and brevity,” he wrote, “these are the first virtues of prose. Prose demands ideas and more ideas . . . As regards the question, whose prose is best in our literature, the answer is:
of five very short stories,
Like Karamzin’s story, “The Stationmaster” is a flashback told by an outsider. But unlike Karamzin’s emotionally implicated narrator, Pushkin’s author is drily reportorial. At no point do we know which way the story will go: “folds,” slices, gaps, and overlappings in the narrative hide the end from view. The high-spirited, low-born heroine, Dunya, is seduced to the city by the dashing, smooth-talking officer Minsky. Her father the stationmaster (civil servant fourteenth class) is convinced that she is ruined – for how could she not be ruined? – and he trudges off to Petersburg to fetch her home. His worldview is reproduced in the woodcuts of the Parable of the Prodigal Son that hang on the walls of his station; quite naturally he sees himself as the magnanimous, all-forgiving father of that edifying tale. But Pushkin never allows a story to be seen from one perspective alone. Minsky won’t give her up, and Dunya prefers not to come home. As it turns out, Minsky marries his Dunya, and her life with him is incomparably better than continuing to serve her father in that shabby station. The risk she took on impulse was the type of risk worth taking by the young; the timing was right, and not every prodigal act need have prodigal-son consequences. The embittered father dies of drink and the story ends on Dunya’s visit to his grave, some years later, accompanied by servants, an elegant carriage, and three little children in tow. She is deeply sorry (we are given to believe), but not at all repentant. Dunya’s escape with Minsky was a gamble against the odds of the seduce-and-abandon plot.
Pushkin loves to reward impulsively na¨ıve actionswith good luck.Attimes he does it “just so,” with comedic simplicity, allowing his characters to be smarter (and luckier) than the plots they inherited from some earlier literary tradition – and that we think will trap or punish them. Usually, before the happy ending can be rounded off, unconventional heroines like Dunya must admit that their selfish behavior caused others pain, even if they do not regret their act.
The remaining four Belkin Tales work playful variations on cliche´d plots of European Romanticism, with a subtle admixture of the poet’s own anxiety about his social status and rank.13 The delight and fantasy of each tale is how honorable or “healthy” behavior – usually young people of marriageable age trying to get together – so easily triumphs over obstacles of class or parental resistance. Thus we have a Romeo and Juliet story that ends happily, a dueling tale in which no one is killed, a stalled courtship where it turns out the boy and girl have been married to each other all along. There is a powerful core of pure, Shakespearean festive comedy in Pushkin. This comedy shares little with the
108
didactic social comedy of Fonvizin or Knyazhnin from the 1770s–80s, although girl and boy get together in those scenarios too. Eighteenth-century comedy leaves its trace throughout the Belkin Tales (and throughout Pushkin’s prose) in different, more decorative ways – in the secondary characters, for example, who are often quite “unRussian”: the sassy maid as go-between for her mistress (a French
As we shall see, Gogolian time-space has a different shape altogether. Although also comic, it cannot support anything like a wholesome appetite or a circular, homecoming plot. Honor is not relevant to it, although rules most definitely are. Gogol is Russia’s first Kafka, her supreme chronicler of bureaucracies and the insecurities of social life as it registers on the shy and the neurotic.Heis the patron saintof heroes who linearly bolt outofa narrative and disappear. Before we move to Gogol’s realm of Russian Romanticism, however, a few words are in order on the legacy of the first Belkin Tale, “The Shot.” It links Pushkin’s troubled consideration of the duel of honor in
Duels
As love is displaced and misses its mark in
killed in either duel – and
The most subtle variant on the Silvio model in Russian literature after Pushkin is the duel between Pechorin and Grushnitsky in the “Princess Mary” segment of Lermontov’s novel
For Romantic ironists of Lermontov’s sort, a duel brought relief. Such unan-chored skepticism is not a dominant note in Pushkin, whom Lermontov worshipped. In no way could Pushkin be called na¨ıve – but his irony was gentler, more forgiving of others, and for all his inflammatory response to attacks on his honor, he retained until the end his faith in the visionary Poet’s ability to transcend the trivial spite of the mob with an inspired poetic word. Lermontov’s prose and worldview are more brittle and bitter. Two lyric poems, each called “The Prophet” [“Prorok”], illustrate this difference between the two Romantic-era poets.
In 1826, Pushkin wrote his “Prophet,” a biblical vision of terrible force. A six-winged seraph appears to a man “tormented by spiritual thirst” in the
110
wilderness, rips out his tongue, installs the forked tongue of a wise serpent in its place, tears out his heart and replaces it with a smoldering coal. Then the voice of God instructs the benumbed man to “Rise, and see, and hear, / Be filled with My will, / and traversing land and sea, / Set fire to the hearts of men with your Word.” In 1841, the year of his death, Lermontov wrote his own “Prophet,” also in iambic tetrameter, picking up where Pushkin’s vision had left off and most likely a disillusioned response to it. Lermontov’s prophet peers into the eyes of people and sees nothing there but “malice and vice.” His neighbors and closest relatives cast stones at him; he wanders the desert like a beggar, proclaiming his truths to the silent planets and stars. Back in town, he becomes a pathetic spectacle: elders point him out to their children with a smug smile. “Look at him: . . . The stupid fellow, wanted to persuade us / That God was speaking through his lips!”
Both prophets suffer, physically and spiritually. Both are outcasts. But for Pushkin, the public is a more transitory thing. His focus remains on the sacred mission of the Word, prophetic or poetic, indifferent to the vanities of the present audience – just as, in
In an age that admired public display, the duel was a form of self-expression and even self-realization. But the scandals that electrified the Western European public – Victor Hugo’s claim that Romanticism was “liberalism in literature,” for example, or Lord Byron’s outrageous personal behavior over several continents – were not practical options in Russia, where poets were more heavily censored and words (poetic or otherwise) were more quickly criminalized.14 Throughout his brief life, Lermontov acted (and wrote) in a manner so insolent and provocative that by 1840 he had been reduced to a line battalion, twice exiled to the Caucasus, and assigned to a punishment battalion by personal order of Tsar Nicholas I. But Lermontov did not die in battle. In the spirit of his own fictional Pechorin, he provoked a challenge from a former schoolmate and was killed on the spot at the age of twenty-seven.
Pushkin provided another variant on the duel of honor, in Chapter 4 of
in the kitchen pantry. Finally these two young hotheads manage to arrange a confrontation. But old Savelich, Grinyov’s stubborn serf-servant, interrupts their sword fight, appalled that his young master is “poking at others with iron skewers” (a bad habit that Savelich blames on a dissolute French tutor). Why not punch each other out with fists in the Russian way, and forget it? Grinyov is badly wounded by Shvabrin’s saber, but the tone of the entire event is comedic. Honor and the honorable testing of one’s courage quickly cease to be the issue. Rather, the duel and subsequent injury clear the air so that authentically human relations can resume (in this case, the stalled love subplot). It teaches the participants some other more important lesson about life, unrelated to the original insult and the straitjacketed ritual that must answer for it.
This type of comic, or comically framed, duel produced a rich harvest in the second half of the century. In Chapter 24 of Turgenev’s
Tolstoy devised a more complex variation on the duel of honor in his
The actual event is a comedy of errors. Pierre has never handled a pistol in his life. The pine forest where they meet is so full of wet, deep snow and rising mist
112
that bodies – even Pierre’s immensely fat, bulky body – can scarcely be seen. Pierre’s second dutifully attempts to reconcile the opponents, but even though Pierre agrees it was all “desperately stupid” he can’t be roused to stop it, asks his second “what to shoot at,” and then waves him away. Staggering toward the barrier, the nearsighted Pierre pulls the trigger, seriously wounds Dolokhov, and then, sobbing in remorse, exposes his broad chest to his opponent’s bullet. Dolokhov fires and misses. As in Turgenev, the comic replay of a death-dealing ritual enables a breakthrough to otherwise unavailable wisdoms.
Up to this point, Dolokhov has been a scoundrel, cardsharp, and partner in mischief to the despicable Anatol Kuragin. Returning from the duel and perhaps dying, he confides to his friend Nikolai Rostov that everything is folly and lies except his “adored, angelic mother,” who will not survive the news of his wound. Rostov – and the reader – realize that what was most important to this man had been invisible on the surface of his life, unsuspected throughout all these pages of the novel, until a bullet broke down his defenses. “To his utter astonishment, he [Rostov] found out that the rough, tough Dolokhov,Dolokhovtheswaggeringbully,livedinMoscowwithhisoldmother and a hunchback sister. He was a loving son and brother.”15 Such moments of biographical revelation, triggered by the unpredictable outcome of a life-and-death event like the duel of honor, induce humility in Tolstoy’s readers. Central to Tolstoy’s Realisticmessage (inspired partially by theproseofPushkin, the lesson of the Prodigal Son woodcuts on the stationmaster’s wall) is that life never submits wholly to any single writing-up of it, and pockets of private experience, revealed by chance, can remake the perceived world. Episodes like this glimpse of Dolokhov’s family, randomly made available to the heroes but carefully planned by the author, soften the effect of Tolstoy’s overwhelming, panoptic narrative authority.16
Our final variant on Pushkin-era duels is Chekhov’s 1891 novella,
doesn’t Bazarov have a duel with someone or other?”17 Layevsky shoots into the air, but von Koren aims directly at his opponent’s forehead. Suddenly a comic episode erupts, recalling the duel-side antics of the serf Savelich in Pushkin’s
Meaningful dueling scenarios that “remember one another” can be traced in a straight line from
The vagary of rank was not in itself an obstacle to dueling. Pushkin, at civilian rank Nine (titular councilor), was of the same low status as the poor clerks in
114
Petersburg tales by Gogol and Dostoevsky, perhaps even a little below. But a different dynamic operates in the “Gogol line.” A larger role is played by laughter – an immense resource that the “Pushkinian” writers exploit only slightly, for brief stretches, and in a decorous, responsible manner quite foreign to the Gogol school. But also, for Gogol, a fundamentally different shape governs the fictional plot.
Public honor pursued through the dueling code requires that parties take themselves with high seriousness, stay put, and fire according to the rules. Having done so, a person “saves face.” Further explanations or public confessions are inappropriate. Gogol prefers to work in more evasive, private realms. His heroes do not stay put. They move
Gogol and embarrassment (its linearity, lopsidedness, evasiveness)
By temperament and upbringing, Pushkin was an aristocrat, thoroughly at home in European culture. Rank, honor, and pedigree were for him second nature. Nikolai Gogol, in contrast, was a provincial, the son of a minor landowner raisedin Ukraine. Hisgraduation certificatefrompublic school conferred upon him the lowest rank, ‘collegiate registrar’ (civilian rank Fourteen). When Gogol moved to Petersburg at age nineteen, nothing in the imperial capital’s estranged, glittering, regimented social system could have struck him as natural or organic. For Gogol – a brilliant stylizer of Ukrainian folk tales, which he filled with demons, witches, and gothic villains – Petersburg proved to be marvelous creative material. His stories quickly became foundational for the Petersburg Myth.
Before entering that urban landscape, however, with its caricatures in uniform and detachable human parts, we will consider one “provincial” anecdote (Gogol’s shortest story, as it happens), which he intended for an almanac edited by Pushkin in 1835. It introduces in miniature the dynamics of a Gogolian narrative, psychological as well as spatial. This little stretch of text contains no
fantastic or grotesque episodes of the sort we see in the Ukrainian folk tales or Petersburg stories. It passed unnoticed in the press. But Tolstoy later remarked that he was tempted to call it Gogol’s best work, and Chekhov felt that these few pages were worth 200,000 rubles, so perfectly did they concentrate Gogol’s genius. The anecdote is “The Carriage.”
A cavalry regiment enters a provincial town, largely mud and pigs. The storyteller describes the town with hyperbolic relish. Gogolian digressions, it must be said, are not elegant or elegiac, as in Pushkin’s
and there was Chertokutsky, hunched in a preposterous position and wrapped in his dressing-gown. “Ah, here you are!” said the general in surprise. And with that he slammed the door shut, pulled the apron back over Chertokutsky and drove off, with the gentlemen officers.
(p. 157)
Thus does the anecdote end, in a perfect cul-de-sac of Gogolian psychology. The coverlet of the carriage is peeled back to reveal the error, the sin, the little white lie or the absentmindedness that we had hoped to conceal. We are exposed, and the audience departs. The effect here might be compared with the equally abrupt mid-scene blank-out that ends
116
imagine Tatyana’s husband challenging Onegintoa duel after finding hisfriend in his wife’s boudoir. But what can Chertokutsky do, except wince? Or in Dostoevsky’s more spiteful and malevolent variant on the scenario, gnash his teeth? Talk his way out of it? It will only get worse. The witnesses have already driven away. Since embarrassment cannot be remedied, its carriers must wear masks, or go mad, or (literally) come apart.
Consider Gogol’s Petersburg fantasy “The Nose” (1836). A nose disappears from the face of a collegiate assessor (civilian rank Six), turns up in a barber’s freshly baked roll, is seen strolling about the city, and then one morning for no reason reappears on its distraught owner’s face. This much-loved story (Dmitry Shostakovich set it as a Modernist opera in 1930) has accumulated interpretations over the years ranging from Russia’s first Absurdist work to clinical testimony on castration anxiety. But more scandalous for Major Kovalyov than the “absolutely preposterous smooth flat space” between his two cheeks is the fact that his nose, which he tracks down at prayer in the Kazan Cathedral, refuses to repatriate for reasons of rank. “You are mistaken, my good sir,” says the Nose. “I’m on my own [
In Gogol, the absurd aspects of rank blend with the sentimental and the frenetic. Each of these intonations is thickened by an “artless” storyteller who on occasion (as at the end of “The Nose”) demands to know why writers choose such implausible incidents in the first place. But illogicality governs not only events; it permeates every level of the narrative, down to the sounds and punning components of words. A metaphor is developed so richly that it replaces the reality it was supposed to clarify. A non-logical combination of words is masked by sensible syntax. The hero of “The Overcoat” (1842) is a copying clerk and titular councilor (civilian rank Nine), Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin. His last name comes from the Russian word for “shoe,”
Akaky himself is so timid he can hardly carry on a conversation, mumbling meaningless particles in place of nouns and verbs. He enjoys copying and is indifferent to rank. But the Petersburg frost makes a new overcoat imperative. He saves up for it, falls in love with it while the tailor is sewing it (or “her”: the Russian word for overcoat,
The clerk Akaky is meek. Other pathetic clerks in Gogol’s Petersburg are ambitious. One such is the hero of
Like his madman Poprishchin and his con man Chichikov from
Perhaps a private, evasive, deceptive psyche like Gogol’s can be most accurately grasped by a creative writer of equivalent genius. Pushkin, with his brilliantly visible public life, is well served by several full-length biographies in English, most recently the fascinating and irreverent account by T. J. Binyon
118
creature,” Nabokov writes. His basic units were not ideasatall but “focal shifts,” abrupt and irrational. “Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight . . . but with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent.”22 Respect for rank, good taste, clarity of confrontation, the straight line of honor that permits one to come back home with head held high: this is Pushkin’s familiar landscape. And on the other side, we have Gogol: the sudden crooked “focal shift” of evasion and embarrassment, what Nabokov called “a jerk and a glide,” with the hero darting away out from under our nose.
Pretendership (two authors, two plays, two novels)
As our final juxtaposition of Pushkin and Gogol we will consider, very selectively, four famous works – one novel and one play for each. Our focus for all four is “pretendership” – in Russian,
In contrast to Pushkin, both of Gogol’s pretenders – or better, imposters – are fictional creations with wholly civilian concerns. Khlestakov from
off the foolishness or venality of the terrain. In Gogol’s messianic vision, such inconstancy of personality was not creative or playful but unclean, demonic. Pushkin’s historical pretenders, Grishka Otrepiev from 1604 and Pugachov from the 1770s, were in their time also perceived as “demonic,” branded villains and Antichrists. Let us first consider the two plays.
Gogol’s provincial town is taken up by identity crises of a comic and disreputable sort. The Mayor’s primary anxiety is to determine whether this “inspector” is as corrupt as himself and therefore can be bribed into silence about the town’s petty vice. In Gogol, extended contact between characters makes them (and us) increasingly nervous; people corrode one another as communication proceeds. Pushkin, in contrast, presents his pretenders as positive, even honorable personalities, men in whom value is allowed to accrete. They might be pretending, but the more time we spend with them, the truer and fuller they become. Let us begin at the point in these two plays when the freshly arrived “pretender” is receiving petitions. In Pushkin’s
The opposite dynamic operatesinGogol. In
120
the town officials, although for different reasons. The proper response of an audience to this devolving fiasco would be horror, released through a guffaw. Gogol was appalled at the stiffness of the 1836 premiere and insisted that the one positive character in the play had been overlooked: Laughter.
Pushkin’s and Gogol’s dramatic pretenders resemble each other in their restlessness, improvisatory skills, lightness, and ability to take on any number of verbal masks with no friction at the transitions. Khlestakov improvises, like Pushkin’s Dmitry, but with opposite valence: he is successful to the extent that he can take value away. The relevant “petitioning” scenes in
In Act IV, the Judge, Postmaster, School Inspector, Warden of Charities, and finally the landowners Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) drop by to “pay their respects.” The judge bungles his bribe and Khlestakov, surprised, picks up the money from the floor and asks to “borrow” it. This success emboldens him. He hits up the postmaster for a loan outright, and with each visitor the requested sum rises. Finally Khlestakov barks in the first breath at Bobchinsky / Dobchinsky: “Got any money on you? A thousand rubles?” Getting away with pretense simply speeds up the scam; it never creates weight, shame, or a public face. Since all parties are equally nervous and guilty, all play the same game of hide-and-seek.
Againstthe advice ofhismanservantOsip (“getout while thegoingisgood!”), Khlestakov lingers, as Chichikov will linger in
mayor shouts at the audience. “You’re laughing at yourselves!” This Gogol line of pretenders will inspire buffoons, rogues, madmen, and nihilists of a severity and hilarity undreamt of by Turgenev’s pure-minded Bazarov.
Pushkin fully appreciated Gogol’s gift and nourished it. When in 1834 Gogol wrote to the poet asking for a real Russian anecdote to work up into a comedy, Pushkin obliged with one about mistaken identity based on his own experience: the poet loved being on the road and was once taken for a government official himself. But Pushkin’s worldview was tethered to the aristocratic honor codes of his time. Remarkably, his criteria for honor remain stable regardless of the time and place: a military adventurer in 1604 or an illiterate Cossack rebel in 1774. Inhis historicaldrama, Pushkin presents Dmitry as false, but asuseful and enabling to others. Only once, when he tries to be “true” in his confession of love to the Polish princess Maryna Mniszech, does his confidence falter. Pugachov too acts confidently, at times even magnanimously. Pushkin’s pretenders have nothing to gain by running away and there is, in any event, nowhere for them to go; their stories are over.
For the two novels,
In Chapter 8,Pugachovdemandsthat GrinyovrecognizehimasTsar PeterIII. “Judge for yourself,” Grinyov responds. “You’re a sharp-witted person: you’d be the first to realize that I was faking . . . I swore allegiance to her Majesty the Empress; I cannot serve you.”26 Pugachov is impressed by this sincerity (by this willingness to ignore hierarchy and address him eye to eye) and sets Grinyov free. A similar exchange occurs in Chapter 12. Pugachov has just liberated Masha Mironova from the clutches of the villain and traitor Shvabrin.
122
The humiliated Shvabrin reveals that Masha is not the priest’s niece, as had been claimed, but the Captain’s daughter. Pugachov turns angrily to Grinyov, who again decides to tell the truth. “Judge for yourself. Could I have declared in front of your men that Mironov’s daughter was alive? They would have torn her to pieces” (p. 340). Pugachov bursts into laughter, agrees, and sets both Grinyov and his sweetheart free. These conversations resemble displays of honor between equals, between two enlightened noblemen – not an exchange between a young high-born officer and an illiterate Cossack rebel. To be sure equality does not mean endorsement. At no point, note, does Grinyov approve of Pugachov, his rebellion, or his wanton violence. But close up they speak the same language. They have nothing to conceal and can easily default to a language of trust. Such clarity and truth-telling will be interpreted, on the institutional level, as treason.
What, finally, about the pretender Chichikov in
After the ruin of Plyushkin,the roadstops. Chichikov lingersintown, nursing a slight cold, and now that he has stopped traveling, words about him begin to gather and stick. Ominous rumors circulate about his identity: is he a ravisher of maidens, perhaps Napoleon in disguise, perhaps even the Antichrist? By the time he bursts out of the story, Chichikov has become so encrusted with ludicrous pseudo-identities that his actual biography – if we believe the form in which Gogol provides it in the final chapter – is somehow dissatisfying, intolerably drab.
The moment of Chichikov’s escape takes place in some indescribable realm. Deflated, disgraced, he is in his carriage heading out of town. Suddenly the carriage becomes a troika, flying up and down hillocks:
Chichikov merely kept smiling, jouncing a little on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian doesn’t love fast driving? How should his soul, which yearns to go off into a whirl, to go off on a fling, to say on occasion: “Devil take it all!” – how should his soul fail to love it? Is it not a thing to be loved, when one can sense in it something exaltedly wondrous? Some unseen power, it seems, has caught you up on its wing, and you’re flying yourself, and all other things are flying . . .27
The authentic new hero has become movement itself, the boundless Russian space into which Chichikov escapes, bleak, dingy, dispersed – as Nabokov writes, “Russia as Gogol saw Russia” (p. 107). Nabokov then adds that for Gogol, Russia was “a peculiar landscape, a special atmosphere, a symbol, a long, long road.” The bursting-out along this road need not be strictly linear; both geographically and stylistically, it can be a zigzag or a swirl. Digressions, hyperbolic metaphors and brokenidioms can twist in a moment’s time from the grotesque to the pious, fromthe pious to the insane. Whatever principles govern the brilliantly excessive verbiage of Gogol’s prose, they represent the opposite of Pushkin’s, which were, we recall, “precision, brevity, ideas and more ideas.” “The prose of Pushkin is three-dimensional,” Nabokov says crisply; “that of Gogol is four-dimensional, at least” (p. 145).
What can be said in summary of these two very different worlds and legacies, Pushkin’s and Gogol’s? Pushkin certainly knew anguish and the impulse to escape. But part of being an aristocrat meant avoiding plots based on comic “impersonations upward” by people of low rank. His own “poor clerk” Evgeny from
Gogol does not do genteel pastoral masquerades of this sort. His material is more voluble, patchy, and vulnerable. It takes the form of the miserable private madness of poor Poprishchin in
124
of little use to Dostoevsky, except as a ‘Golden Age’ recalled in childhood or projected into a utopian dream. The first realm of Gogol’s that Dostoevsky will appropriate is the painful, embarrassed world of the ambitious poor clerk who insists that he cannot be the person he knows he really is – but unlike Gogol’s timid little men, these characters will find some other person, or some theory, to blame for it.
In fact, so brilliantly did Dostoevsky apply his new devices of psychological prose to Gogol’s flattened world that Gogol himself was somewhat eclipsed.28 In part this was due to Gogol’s confusing ideological profile: his final published book,
Pushkin’s posthumous life is another story. Beginning in the mid-1850s, he became an idol and a myth. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy cultivated a special relationship with Russia’s premiere poet. In 1880, at the unveiling of a statue to the poet in Moscow, Dostoevsky delivered a speech declaring Pushkin a national prophet, the savior and beacon of his people, and his fictive heroes a force for moral good – in terms that would have stunned the poet, but that electrified the audience. Tolstoy, in every way Pushkin’s equal as an aristocrat, was not present at the ceremony (Turgenev had invited him to speak but Tolstoy politely declined; he disapproved of jubilees, for others and for himself). Tolstoy was the first major Russian writer not to pass through the Romantic school. “Read
Realisms: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov
At some point between 1845 and 1855, the Russian nineteenth century breaks in two. This watershed was real not only in the judgment of later literary historians (“Romanticism” before that time, “Realism” after it); contemporaries also acutely felt the discontinuity. Political, social, and military markers were overt. In 1848, revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe caused panic among the imperial censors and internal police, recalling Catherine II’s reaction to the Terror in France in the early 1790s. In 1856, a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War finally convinced ruling circles of the need for modernization, railroads, and a mobile labor force. The new tsar Alexander II, succeeding the reactionary Nicholas I in 1855, committed to wide-ranging reforms.
Withinthe alienated creative elite, cultural evolution was more gradual. Since the 1830s, literature had been out of the hands of poets in aristocratic salons or the imperial court and increasingly the business of entrepreneurial booksellers
125
126
and journalists. This new commercial class saw its most lucrative markets not in poetry but in prose – and especially in the long serialized novel, indispensable for retaining and satisfying subscribers with installments stretching (if possible) over years.
Russia’stwo major citiesweredevelopingdifferentculturalmythologies,each of which would prove exceptionally durable. As an alternative to “bureaucratic, cynical, pleasure-seeking” St. Petersburg, the ancient but newly rebuilt city of Moscow came into its own – “young, idealistic, inspired, philosophical,” identified with Russocentric or Slavophile beliefs and influenced by German Romanticism.1 Non-noble background was no longer an obstacle to literary activity, as it had been to the critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48), a doctor’s son and autodidact whose passionate, opinionated, highly influential screeds on the Russian writers of his day unerringly selected the most gifted. Writers and critics now met in “circles” and constituted an intelligentsia, a mixed class based on education and ideological commitment rather than birth or government rank. At last, in the 1860s, the cultural traffic between East and West became two-way. Upper-classRussians still spoke and read West European languages – but not as reliably as before. More important than the fading out of multilingualism at home, however, was the fact that some Western European countries began to consider Russian literary products worthy of translation into their own languages. In part because of the lengthy residence in France of the urbane, highly respected Ivan Turgenev, Russia began to be seen as a place that might contribute to the European literary canon.
This diversification, democratization, andEuropeanizationofRussian literature coincided with the beginning of Russia’s serious revolutionary movement. All great writers took a stand toward it or featured fictional heroes from it. Russia’s first political dissidents were dreamers and closeted debaters. Without practical experience and with no political responsibility, this idealistic and inef-fectualgenerationbecame knownasthe“fathers,”the “peopleofthe[eighteen]-forties.” On the far side of the mid-century divide, their sons and daughters became radical populist activists, the so-called “people of the sixties.” Their goals and tactics varied: some were peaceful educators, others went abroad to Geneva or Paris, still others threw bombs. By century’s end, the number of Marxists and internationalists had grown dramatically. Around these polemics and political sympathies a new literary tradition was constructed. Famous Romantic-era heroes (Onegin, Pechorin, Chichikov, Akaky Akakievich) were reclassified in civiccategories,into “superfluous heroes” for upper-classprotag-onists and “naturalist,” pathetic portraits for the urban poor. Neither Pushkin nor Gogol would have understood literary creativity catalogued in this way.
With a brief aside on poetry in an age of prose, this chapter is limited to the work of three titans: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Our strategy will be to take themes and genres familiar from the Romantic era – issues of rank, honor, embarrassment, comedies of self-improvement, the “love story” and “death story” – and suggest how they continue to live inside new literary worlds and answer to new realities. In the previous chapter, for example, we saw that the duel of honor, a central ritual of self-respect and the cause of death for two great writers, survived into the Realist period largely in parodied forms. (This is not to say, however, that Realist-era authors were immune to its appeal in their own lives. In May 1861, Tolstoy venomously provoked a quarrel with the placid Turgenev, his elder by ten years, over a private matter – the latter man’s education of his illegitimate daughter – and challenged Turgenev to a duel with pistols. Friends intervened and the confrontation was averted.) Perhaps because it was so often parodied, dueling retained some literary currency. Other canonized Romantic themes were not so much parodied as pried open, examined from the inside, and given a deeper consciousness.
Consider, as a test case, Gogol’s Petersburg stories of urban poverty and humiliation. His narrators look in on the story from the outside with some glee, moving the sufferer rather quickly to his denouement. Akaky Akakievich falls ill and dies within a page, Poprishchin is committed to a madhouse in half-a-dozen diary entries after which we can assume he dies there – or at least falls silent. Following in Gogol’s footsteps, Dostoevsky takes the same clerk but postpones the end, endows him with more self-awareness and pride, and cuts off the escape. Madness must be lived through at length, and dying people talk right down to the finish line. Since Dostoevsky’s clerks are not just alone but terribly lonely, they seek wherever possible to turn their inner torment into an addressed dialogue. Thus – to take only the pre-exile fiction – DostoevskyfirstreworksPoprishchin’sclerklyconfessions as an epistolary novel (
128
One aspect of Gogol’s storytelling remains constant for Dostoevsky’s art from start to finish, resurfacing in the Symbolist novel. This is the suspicion that authorship itself is the product of demonic pride – and thus a cunning, evasive, unreliable narrator is the most appropriate vehicle for it.2 When “doubles” appear to the tormented heroes in Dostoevsky’s mature work (most famously, Ivan Karamazov’s petty devil), they infuriate and terrorize their interlocutors not by threats of eternal fire and brimstone, but by reminding them of their earlier words, ideas, or creations, which – however wise or clever they seemed at the time – now embarrass them. The devil straps our old stories to our back and won’t let us outgrow them. “I forbid you to speak of ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ Ivan exclaimed [to his apparition], blushing all over with
shame.”3
What about Tolstoy? Although also a great master at portraying social anguish and public shame, in his deepest concerns Tolstoy starts and ends elsewhere. Of more significance to him than exposure and censure by others (for Tolstoy always rushed to censure himself first) was honor. His definition of the term was not Pushkin’s – Tolstoy respected different codes, and he related “honor” more directly to “honesty” as he understood that quality – but it was well within the Pushkinian tradition. For Tolstoy too there was a violent component to honor, the obligation to face hostile fire and sudden death. But Tolstoy takes honor out of the duel and places it on the battlefield. War remained centrally important to him, even after his crisis and conversion of the early 1880s, when he began to advocate exclusively non-violent modes of resisting evil, including conscientious objection to military service. Near the end of his life, this committed pacifist was still working on his Chechen novel
In the death of this brave warrior we witness the creation of a Tolstoyan “double,” not by a psyche splitting in two (as in Dostoevsky), but by a body being severed from the spirit. The death of Hadji Murad is a lapidary Tolstoyan
moment. During this brief and narrow passage, two perspectives emerge in what had been one coordinated human being. But who precisely is the “he” / “him” referred to in the above passage? By the end of the dying, the kicked and hacked corpse has “nothing in common with him.” So “he” still exists. But where? Is Hadji Murad “dead”? Nowhere in his fictive or theoretical writings does Tolstoy insist on an afterlife, only on “light,” and he adamantly rejects taking any miracles in the Gospels literally, especially the Resurrection. Such delicate, God-like maneuverings by Tolstoy around the life–death boundary are not unique to his war scenes, of course. The culminating moments of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and the flickering final seconds of Anna Karenina perishing under a train produce similar distancings and doubled perspectives. But for all that he excelled at sickness and suicide, Tolstoy returned again and again to the behavior of men under fire as a recurrent marker of courage and honorableness. One cannot imagine Dostoevsky doing war stories – even though the most formative moment of his own life was a scaffold experience, where certain death, he believed, was three minutes away.
Biographies of events, and biographies that are quests for the Word
As a framework for these and other paradoxes in the fiction of Russia’s two greatest novelists, it is helpful to keep in mind their biographies. These celebrated lives qualify as novels in their own right – and in the minds of some, as legend or saints’ lives. Both writers drew deeply on their own experience for their art. Both grew into the role of national prophet and participated in their own mythologization. Each had a “break” in his literary career.
For Dostoevsky (1821–81), the break was traumatic, geographical, and coerced from the outside. In 1849 he was arrested for illicit political activity and condemned to death by firing squad – a sentence that was commuted at the last minute to four years’ hard labor in Siberia followed by six years’ duty as a garrison soldier. Between 1850 and 1859, which coincided with the more general “break” in the Russian nineteenth century, Dostoevsky lived a life apart from his nation’s literature and society. In Siberia he experienced a re-conversion to Russian Orthodoxy as well as the onset of chronic epilepsy, so severe that he referred to his attacks as “little deaths.” In 1860 Dostoevsky returned, much changed, to a much changed homeland. Although he had written startlingly innovative works before his arrest, most notably
130
This was not an easy task, and Dostoevsky had few means of support. In 1865, at age forty-four, Dostoevsky fled Russia to write and evade his creditors (he had taken on his deceased brother’s debts); he gambled everything away. After marrying his stenographer in 1867, he remained abroad for four more years, fleeing debtors’ prison. Of their four cherished children, two died: their first, Sonya, as an infant in 1868, and ten years later the youngest, Alyosha, of epilepsy at age three. Through all these evictions, migrations, compulsions, crises and tragedies of his post-prison life, Dostoevsky wrote constantly and with great discipline: every night, from eleven o’clock to five in the morning, by candlelight, sustained by tea and cigarettes. In Petersburg, Dresden, then the Russian provinces, he steadily produced and then serially published his four great novels:
concentrating.5
Dostoevsky’s whole external biography, in fact, can be seen as a series of unexpected “little deaths” followed by disciplined resurrections, from night to morning. These tribulations were imposed, by and large, by external agents and conditions: by a police state in 1849, by nagging poverty, and by his own dysfunctional body, which flung him down and required him to rise on his own. To tell the story of this life, it is enough to point to its events. Dostoevsky did this himself. Working as editor and journalist during the 1870s, he was known to display – like stigmata – the scars from his leg fetters and insist that they gave him the right to speak on behalf of the suffering Russian people. And yet for all the traces of victimization in his life, Dostoevsky never tolerated theories (or lawyers, or juries) that blame a crime on the environment. Criminals are free and make choices. Responsibility accrues and repentance is required. Among Dostoevsky’s many complaints against socialism, both the secular utopian sort and its demonic apotheosis in Ivan Karamazov’s “Grand Inquisitor,” was its promise to replace this radical freedom with material and mental security. Hence one of Dostoevsky’s great paradoxes: the healthy, free mind demands continual destabilization and doubt if it is to exercise acts of faith, but our deeds are stable, answerable, and belong to us alone. In his
voice of a Gogolian narrator. Dostoevsky the novelist remained a newspaper man.
Tolstoy’s temperament and experiences were different. So was the “break” in his life. It was triggered by observation and moral outrage rather than by punitive acts against his person, and was coerced, as it were, from the
Indeed, taking away and giving up could bring only positive gains. To Tolstoy’s uncompromisingly logical mind with its belief in Rousseau’s doctrine of natural good, evil was acquired, unnatural, a byproduct of bad contracts or bad habits. Evil might well disappear once we shed the habits and material burdens that sustain it. As always, Tolstoy began with himself. His own formal “break” with the world of privilege came in 1880, at age fifty-one, at the peak of his fame. He marked it by a highly publicized
132
the Church. The break was not as severe as it seemed, however. Tolstoy’s gift had always been for a radical estrangement from what others claimed to live by. He had never been comfortable with his era, his rank, his society, his self, and the pleasure he received from writing had always struck him as illicit. Renouncing both
Yet by some curious twist of fate, Tolstoy’s quest to simplify human nature and return us to nature coincided with the worldwide graphic revolution. Dos-toevsky (d. 1881) had been his own agent and handler. The printed word was his medium. Tolstoy, living three decades longer, became the world’s first multimedia celebrity – and he was handled by others. Not only photographers but car-toonistsand newspaper columnists pursuedhim, orbetterstalked him, through telegraph, wax cylinder, color photo, newsreel, film. The “wealthy Count dressing up as a peasant” was mercilessly satirized in the public domain.6 But the media assisted Tolstoy too. Even while parodying his image, it spread his word. This mattered, because Tolstoy did not like to travel or to speak publicly from podiums, as Dostoevsky had loved to do; he preferred to receive guests at home, one on one. As Yasnaya Polyana became a place of pilgrimage for “Tolstoyans” from around the world, access to the great man was increasingly controlled by his wife, children, and domestic staff. Some Tolstoyans were arrested and imprisoned for their beliefs; others were exiled. Beyond his excommunication by the Church in 1901, however, Tolstoy, to his anguish, was not touched by the arm of the state. For the final twenty-five years of his life Tolstoy was kept under police surveillance, but neither Tsar Alexander III (r. 1881–94) nor Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) was foolish enough to add a martyr’s crown to his glory.
At century’s end, Maksim Gorky (1868–1937) came to know both the aging Tolstoy and the ailing Chekhov in the Crimea. In a complex tribute to the older writer composed after Tolstoy’s flight from Yasnaya Polyana and final illness, Gorky wrote: “I have always been repelled by that stubborn and despotic urge of his to turn the life of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy into the saintly Life of our
BlessedboyarLev.”7 Itwould havesanctifiedhis wisdom andmadeit irresistible, equal to those leg-iron scars that lent such authority to Dostoevsky’s word. But as a radical activist devoted to social reform, Gorky saw only part of the truth. Dostoevsky had been tied to his time; his scars were historically determined and thus inevitably dated. Tolstoy’s relatively “empty,” unpersecuted life freed him up to become a carrier for ideas valid for all people of all times. And this is what Tolstoy craved. The one section of
The two men chose never to meet, but much lore circulated about their opinions of each other. Dostoevsky deplored Tolstoy’s tendency to write “landlord novels” set in an historical period irrelevant to the teeming present. Gorky recalls Tolstoy saying that Dostoevsky lacked the courage to create healthy heroes; indeed, he “didn’t like healthy people. He was convinced that since he himself was sick, the whole world must be sick.” “It’s odd that so many people read him,” Tolstoy later remarked. “I can’t understand why. It’s difficult and futile – all those Idiots, Adolescents, Raskolnikovs, and the rest, things aren’t like that, it’s all much simpler, more understandable.”8 After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Tolstoy wept. But nevertheless he wrote soon after to their common friend, Nikolai Strakhov: “one cannot place on a pedestal for the instruction of posterity a man who was all struggle.”9 These two biographical trajectories – Dostoevsky’s labor-camp martyrdom and return to life, and Tolstoy’s pure trans-historical moral outrage – are the most influential literary variants of a “righteous person” [
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), with one-half Tolstoy’s life span to work with, matured as a writer in the all-but-blinding aura of both great novelists. Although he had a marked “Tolstoyan period,” Chekhov took a different path. For him, bigness of form and excessive energy in articulating an idea – or in carrying out an idea – already bordered on the fraudulent. Bodies, voices, ideas, and intentions in Chekhov’s world are more quickly exhausted. Pretensions to pan-humanity (Tolstoy) or to messianic struggle (Dostoevsky) were to him equally flawed. In Chekhov’s life, the most important extra-literary events were training as a doctor, traveling to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island north of Japan in 1890, and dying, for fifteen years, of tuberculosis. An urbane, confident, ironical man, he remarked in 1894, in a letter to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, that he had cooled toward Tolstoy: “Reason and justice tell me that there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat.”10 Chekhov did not seek to propagate a Word. But no writer could ignore the legacy of Russia’s two massive novelists.
134
Time-spaces (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy)
The Tolstoy/Dostoevsky parallel lives can also help us grasp the organization and value-hierarchies of their respective literary worlds. Very early, during Tolstoy’s lifetime, readers sensed that these two worlds were incompatible. In 1902, the Symbolist poet and critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky published a lengthy comparative study in which he called Dostoevsky a “seer of the spirit” (a poet of faith and mystic revelation) and Tolstoy a “seer of the flesh” (a singer of corporeality and unclouded vision). In 1929, in what proved to be another tenacious opposition, Mikhail Bakhtin defined Dostoevsky as “dialogic” or polyphonic (character-centered) and Tolstoy as “monologic” (author-centered).11 The dialogic writer emphasizes horizontal relations and dispersed, centrifugal, competitive points of view; the monologist, in contrast, stresses the vertical, the centripetal, the absolute. Since there is some measure of truth to these broad binary generalizations as they relate to our two novelists, we expand on them here.
Dostoevsky’s most memorable heroes are depicted in an unstable or borderline phase of their lives. This brief slice of their life is under great pressure. The heroes are being tested at an extreme “threshold” moment; one can almost see the outline of the scaffold behind them, that moment in late December 1849 when Dostoevsky, at age twenty-eight, was led out by drumroll to the Semyonovsky parade ground already dressed in his shroud. We meet Raskol-nikov on the brink of committing a murder. Myshkin is in a pre-epileptic state for much of
Dostoevsky favors built-up, congested environments: a prison barracks, a tenement building, houses strung out along a street. Spatial thresholds – windows, door-jams, corridors, fences, stairways, and landings – are prominent in this architecture. The plot leaps forward at moments of tense eye-to-eye contact over a threshold, as when Raskolnikov, in a panic, commits two murders just inside the door, or when the jealous Rogozhin pulls a knife on Prince Myshkin,
the Idiot, at the top of the stairs. For Dostoevsky, truths are released in crisis time. In the calmer, more coherent and linear time-space of the criminal trial, such as the lengthy legal procedure during which Dmitry Karamazov is found guilty of parricide, truths are bungled or lost. At the end of
Around the edges of a Dostoevskian townscape, nature can be oppressive. Petersburg is a city of dirty slush, rain, unbearable heat, but its weather is always symbolically marked. Nature can also seem magical, as it does to the Dreamer wanderingthe streetsduring
In Dostoevsky’s typically explosive, “built” environment, natural and biological cycles are muted. Over time, families tend to break down. Except for the occasional unsatisfying snack in a pub, discussion over cognac, or scandal at a funeral feast, Dostoevsky’s characters do not sit down to regular meals, nor do they sleep normal hours, go out to work, or observe fixed schedules. If a child is born, it dies within hours or weeks. Men and women often rush, but to nowhere in particular, simply beyond the boundaries of the story. This abruptness and disorder is only partly explained by poverty. Energy is not spent on maintenance or on routine material things. (In
136
articulate even when drunk, and keen to debate topics in ethical philosophy. The pace can be frenetic – these huge novels are short on clock time, lasting from a few days to a few months – but there is always time to tell one more story.
Dostoevsky’s novels are immediate,
This is Bakhtin’s main point about Dostoevsky as novelist. Dostoevsky endows his heroes – including his negative ones – with so much independence, mobility of perspective, uncertainty of motive, and potent storytelling skill that readers, wishing to know what is going on, bypass the author
This strategy, we should note, does no one any favors. Being so aware of oneself can be painful and paralyzing. The Underground Man is the first to realize that he is crippled, made ridiculous, and encouraged in his cruelty by his “hyper-consciousness,” which anticipates responses to himself and refutes them in advance. But such is the logical paradox. In that most terrible of satires on the abuse of our freedom to construct a self, Dostoevsky’s trapped underground voice reasons thus:
The final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so, long live the underground! Though I did say I envy the normal man to the point of uttermost bile, still I do not want to be him on those conditions in which I see him (though, all the same, I shall not stop envying him . . .) But here too, I’m lying . . .
(
The inevitable “uttermost bile” that results from such radical indeterminacy fueled Maksim Gorky’s lifelong resistance to Dostoevsky, both on his own behalf and in the name of the new Soviet state. One could not build anything durable in the presence of that dialectic. What is more, the dialectic admits of no anchoring of the self in a supra-personal framework. “The time has come to attack Dostoevskyism all along the line,” Gorky wrote in 1933. “I should prefer that the civilized world were unified not by Dostoevsky, but by Pushkin.”15 Gorky’s juxtaposition of these two writers is intriguing. If freedom for Pushkin is the right to stand one’s ground and act as a man of public honor, then freedom for Dostoevsky is an individual’s right to choose, capriciously or soberly, in the presence of partial knowledge. This principle will not unify the world. Since freedom is the goal and since Dostoevsky allows truths to be multiple, a high priority in his prose is always to increase the number of available perspectives and to complicate all possible resonances of the spoken word. Then truths can test one another at their points of intersection.
The time-space of Tolstoy’s novels differs from Dostoevsky’s in almost every way. Tolstoy, of course, is no stranger to tragedy and crisis, nor even to the most Dostoevsky-style crisis of all, murder. (Two famous Tolstoyan narratives from 1889, “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Devil,” both involve the killing of a woman out of jealousy.) But he handles the cause and aftermath of such crises differently. In his 1890 treatise, “Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?”, Tolstoy remarks in passing that Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov did not kill the old pawnbroker with an axe on the day of the murder but had been killing her for months, lying feverishly and resentfully on his couch in his garret, making the possibility of that murder a habit of his mind. Tolstoy sensed that with Dostoevsky, for all that he multiplies perspectives on events and filters them through gossipy untrustworthy narrators, a tragic act (when it finally comes to
138
pass) tests not a person but an
In the great Tolstoyan novels before 1880, the ability to assume and then to shed many different ideas while remaining open to a variety of life situations is the defining mark of a successful hero. A great deal of talk goes on in these novels too, but, unlike Dostoevsky’s astonishingly “casual” conversations on cosmic matters, much Tolstoyan talk is “small.” Tolstoy greatly values observation and practical skills – knowing how things work in a hands-on way – but he does not tolerate much abstract philosophy from his heroes. He mercilessly exposes academics and book-writing intellectuals (like Levin’s half-brother Koznyshev in
RecallingourChapter 2on heroes and plots,wemightsaythat Tolstoy doesn’t do “types,” just as he doesn’t do (and doesn’t believe in) formal institutions. The closest his ideal hero comes to one of our categories might be the Fool – not of the holy variety, to be sure, but the bumbling, well-meaning fool, honest where honesty has no place, awkward in society and continually ridiculed by society for his eccentric ways. Pierre Bezukhov and Konstantin Levin are both questing fools in this sense, continually surprised by themselves, and Tolstoy richly rewards them for it.
We might make a corollary observation. Tolstoy mistrusted “official authority”: policemen, military recruiters, tax collectors, the arm of the law, the word of the monarch. He felt that official power could
Petrovich, a police investigator, is a key instrument of Raskolnikov’s salvation, and by the end of the novel almost functions as his spiritual foster father and confessor. The police officers on the Petersburg streets of
Tolstoy’s reluctance to work with types is related to the high value he puts on gradual, minute-by-minute effort and change. Idleness, anger, “lying on the couch for months” not so much thinking about that specific pawnbroker as simply not taking oneself in hand to act in a positive way (as Raskolnikov’s best friend Razumikhin acts; he is, for Dostoevsky’s palette, a very Tolstoyan hero): these were the errors that led Raskolnikov to murder, and that will lead Pozdnyshev to murder his innocent wife in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy’s novels center squarely on the conviction that we act not out of our ideas but out of our bodies. And if ideas have logical consequences, then bodies have needs. Since these needs arise out of our most basic anxieties and hungers, we all recognize them and share them. We build structures to contain them so that our consciousness and energies can be freed up for other tasks. In Tolstoy’s patriarchal, work-oriented, hearth- and agrarian-centered worldview, marriage should be one such structure. Closely connected to marriage is habit. Indeed, for Tolstoy, the most satisfying type of love was not romantic-erotic or melodramatic – selfish states that were bound to collapse – but habitual kindness, attentive to the other’s tiny, ongoing idiosyncratic needs, what he called “active” love.
Tolstoy, perhaps unfairly, did not see enough of this stable, finely differentiated love in the Dostoevskian landscape, love that feared crises rather than flared up eagerly during them. In a related complaint, Tolstoy also professed surprise at Dostoevsky’s “careless,” and in his view often monotonous, narrative style. The charge might appear odd, given the brilliant diversity and manifest excitement of a Dostoevskian hero’s high-pitched life. But Tolstoy’s own fictive scenarios suggest that he considered crisis and hysteria in themselves monotonous, homogenizing behavioral states. For the duration of this unnatural condition, people tend to sound and act alike, regardless of what might have triggered the blow-up. For Tolstoy, only stable forms of living and
140
interacting can create genuine heterogeneity. In his late treatise
In 1877, Dostoevsky published a two-part review of
Wherein lies the special texture of Tolstoyan reality? Above all, it feels slower and more “filled-in.” We tend to see it before we hear it talking. Even in violent descriptions of war, human gestures seem somehow more ordinary, on a continuum with everyday life. Given the chance, they will slip back to civilian norms – as happens to the astonished Nikolai Rostov during his first battle, noticing the blue eyes of the young French soldier he was on the verge of bayoneting. Nature in Tolstoy is not primarily symbolic, as the Petersburg climate is
for Dostoevsky, but at all times it is thickly present. Simple bliss at one’s physical surroundings can cause characters to shout with joy (the lengthy pastoral insert on the Rostov family fox hunt in
Although men in hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.19
Tolstoy doesn’t like cities. All Tolstoyan narratives have a stern moral geography. Life in the countryside is healthiest. Messy and profligate Moscow, that “big village,” was tolerated by Tolstoy (his own large family had a town house there); but he loathed rank-obsessed, military-bureaucratic Petersburg. Of course Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky also did not like Petersburg – but they were fascinated by the place and understood the vitality of its myth and the infectiousness of its atmosphere. Tolstoy was simply physically disgusted. Worthy people fall sick in cities and recuperate outside them.
Nature, for Tolstoy, is necessity. He respects it. And nature cannot be rushed. Cities, and the suspicious railroads that connect cities to one another, create the illusion that human goods can be packaged by strangers and rushed from one place to the next. Convictions, like families, are born and mature slowly, on the basis of repeated contact. In Tolstoy’s novels we see people making jam, gathering honey, sewing dresses for balls, slowly giving birth (each contraction) and slowly dying (each spasm) – in what is more a direct presentation than a telling. When Tolstoy compares Moscow on the brink of Napoleon’s entry to a “dying hive” (
Tolstoy does not banish doubt or self-criticism. In that area Tolstoy is easily Dostoevsky’s equal. He offers us a vast, variegated panorama of confusions,
142
uncertainties, and entrapments. But with Tolstoy, sooner or later we sense that all the critics and doubters are, as it were, in the same doubt together. Consider the end of his late, great tale “Master and Man” (1895). A wealthy merchant freezes to death in a blizzard and saves the life of his workman Nikita with the warmth of his own dying body. We then learn that Nikita, “more sorry than glad to have survived,” lived another twenty years, forgave his wife her infidelity, was relieved to release his son from the burden of feeding him – and (here is the stirring final line) “whether he is better or worse off there where he awoke after his death, whether he was disappointed or found there what he expected, we shall all soon learn.”20 In Dostoevsky, there is no sense that we shall ever all learn the same thing, even after death. Nor is such assurance required.
This Dostoevskian point of faith is illustrated well in one scene from the greatest twentieth-century product of the Gogol–Dostoevsky line in Russian literature, Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel
“one theory is as good as another. There is even a theory that says that to each man it will be given according to his beliefs. May it be so! You are departing into nonbeing, and from the goblet into which you are being transformed, I will have the pleasure of drinking a toast to life
everlasting!”21
In the Dostoevsky line, there is simply no single vantage point from which, as Tolstoy put it with such lapidary assurance, “we shall all soon learn.” In the radical freedom that Dostoevsky will not relinquish, each of us might
Tolstoy was never wholly convinced of this need. In fact, in his writings on the far side of his “break,” noticeably in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), the opposite appears to be the case: growing into one’s own courage and wisdom
means precisely
Of course Tolstoy valued acts of loving. But in his mature years, what he valued more and more was love that streamed out uninterruptedly from the “I” – regardless of what might trigger it and how it might be received. Where, or upon whom, that love landed was of secondary importance. Tolstoy doesn’t do doubles, at least not demonic ones; one suspects that his lonely, questing positive heroes do not need the company of another person sufficiently to undertake the agony of conjuring one up. Like true fools, while looking after themselves they will stumble on to what they need. Pierre Bezukhov bumbles his way around to Natasha Rostova, a most unlikely match; Tolstoy makes certain that Kitty remains unmarried long enough for his favored Levin to get over his injured pride and bumble his way back to her. Meanwhile, if his fictional creations need a friend, Tolstoy himself will be that “friendly other.” First he shows the reader what happens, then he tells us what the characters think about what happened, then he tells us what the author thinks about what the characters do and think. A typical Tolstoyan description of an event is multilayered – but contrary to the presentation of a Dostoevskian event, each Tolstoyan layer tends to reinforce the same perspective rather than to relativize or undermine it. One scene from
144
Count Vronsky makes a surprise visit to Anna on the day of the steeplechase (Part II, ch. 22). While waiting on the veranda for her son Seryozha to return from his walk, Anna informs Vronsky of her pregnancy. We are told that the presence of Seryozha was always an embarrassment to the two lovers, invoking in them the feeling that a sailor might have after glancing at his compass and confirming that he had indeed strayed from the proper course – but the sailor, Tolstoy hastens to add, was unable to stop, because to stop would mean to acknowledge that he was lost. This observation then receives a further gloss: “This child with his na¨ıve outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.”23
These three confirmations (or redundancies) effectively plugupthe meaning of the scene. In Tolstoy’s view, this is not a bad thing. For the task of responsible art lies not in its ability to multiply fictions, positions, or voices (that was Dostoevsky’s passion), but to justify why this particular fiction is true from all sides. This does not mean that truth is simple (or that behaving truthfully is easy or simple). Nor does it mean that experience can be transmitted in generalized terms. In his individualizing, sequencing, and pacing of tiny shifts of emotion, Tolstoy has no equal. But infinitely diverse experiences can, and must, reveal compatible eternal truths.
In his late treatise
nor the orienting poles of the objective world. Like his senior contemporary Karl Marx and his junior contemporary Sigmund Freud, Tolstoy had created a theory that, maddeningly, could not be proved false: if you disagreed with it, either you were displaying your false (polluted, stupefied) consciousness, or you were involuntarily repressing the truth.
Tolstoy’s
If Bulgakov’s
him courage.”24
This ideal of the delimited path, which bestowed on the penitent a freedom
146
out” (
Dostoevsky and books
Dostoevsky was devoted to the printed word, and so are his fictional characters. Several strategies exist for “replaying the words of a book.” Dostoevsky was adept at them all. The author can take an earlier literary character and re-run his plot, but only after endowing the character with more consciousness and thus with more intricate conflicts. Such is Dostoevsky’s technique in
Hoveringoverthesesplit,frightened,defensivevoicesis anarratorwithaccess to all three perspectives – but only erratically. That access might be an illusion
as well. The reader cannot know, just as Golyadkin’s mind cannot know, the reliability of any source. Although the beginning and end of the story remain Gogol’s, the madman’s experience in between is thicker and scarier. The reader no longer merely observes a single disintegrating consciousness but participates in it, and must work hard to ascertain who is speaking, and from where. This technique, which grew out of an apprenticeship to Gogol, became Dostoevsky’s signature narrative style.
Another strategy for replaying a book occurs in Dostoevsky’s maiden work,
The darkness of this theme expands as Dostoevsky’s talent matures. Both
148
which he wished to be remembered. And everything is a fiasco: the audience guffawsat it, the pistol misfires, and Ippolit dieswithout fanfare,in the margins, almost unnoticed further on in the novel.
A poor clerk like Devushkin fretting over his look-alike in “The Stationmas-ter” or “The Overcoat” is a form of affectionate parody. Other sorts of Dos-toevskian interventions, not in secular books but in the Book – the Christian Bible – were closer to blasphemy. One such is the Grand Inquisitor’s recasting of the Three Temptations of Christ in the Wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11) in
Such embeddings and re-accentings of prior literary texts were not of special urgency to Leo Tolstoy. He distrusted equally both the original and its subsequent wrappings.
Tolstoy and doing without words
Tolstoy hoped that the media revolution would not only advertise his own moral message, but also make all verbal art more honest. In August 1908,
on his eightieth birthday, he was interviewed about the cinema. Of course this new technology will be exploited by businessmen – “where are there not businessmen?”, Tolstoy remarked – but films were wonderful: responsive, infectious, and so much more flexible to write for than the stage, which was “a halter choking the throat of the dramatist.” “You will see that this little clicking contraption with its revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers,” he insisted. “The cinema has divined the mystery of motion, and that is greatness.”27 At the end of his life, the world’s most famous word-smith and enemy of technology contemplated writing a screenplay. He foresaw in the art of (still silent) film a chance for images to live forever, sacrificing none of their wholeness, visibility, or mobility: one answer, perhaps, to the insult of death. Significantly, it was capturing the motion that mattered. Tolstoy leapt at the possibility of communication that reduced the need for uttered words.
For just because a writer is a superb craftsman with his chosen material – in this case, words – does not mean that he need trust or respect the morality of his medium. Tolstoy often found himself in this dilemma. His despair was not that of the Romantic or Symbolist poet who lamented that inspiration was always so divine and execution so tedious. Tolstoy was just as suspicious of poetic inspiration (in his view, a markedly indulgent form of intoxication) as he eventually became of meat, liquor, grand opera, and sexual arousal. What appalled Tolstoy was second-hand experience, and from that perspective his relation to books is fascinating. One of the best read and most learned men of his age, Tolstoy detected falsehood in almost all formal systems of education. He was a compulsive diarist and a superb letter-writer. But early on, Tolstoy wished to express what he felt to be true more directly, from the point of view of nature itself.
His major challenge in this matter of uncovering life’s truth was not competition with earlier worldly writers (Gogol or Pushkin) but the very fact, or indignity, of having to pass human experience through the word at all. Language was too convention-driven, the act of writing too prideful, the act of reading too passive. Dostoevsky worked variations (and at times vicious parodies) on earlier writers or plots to whom he was indebted. Chekhov in the early 1880s wrote dozens of slight but amusing parodies of earlier literary styles from Karamzin to Gogol to Turgenev. Tolstoy, however, rarely took on other writers in his fiction. Why add another obfuscating layer of words? In Chapter 10 of his 1852 tale “The Raid,” he remarks on the relationship between Russian courage and French phrase-making on the battlefield. When a man “feels within himself the capacity to perform a great deed, no talk of any kind is needed.”28 Tolstoy had always been eager to shock us out of being a mere audience: not only to other writers, but equally to the products of his own writing self.
150
A startling example comes in Tolstoy’s 1855 Crimean War story, “Sevastopol in December,” designed as a “tour” addressed to the reader-“tourist” in the second person.29 Here you see a pile of coal, over there frozen manure, the carcass of a horse, now notice this whizzing cannonball, a cart full of corpses, a gorgeous sunrise, an amputation clinic, and although your first impression is disagreeable, look more closely, for “the truth is altogether different.” But of course looking more closely into his story will never equal being there. Gradually this truth (a complex one) becomes clear to the reader, as we are drawn in to the suffering and heroism of the scene. Once drawn in, we begin to feel guilty for being mere observers via the printed word, whereas the war is being fought by participants whose bodies are dying. It is testimony to Tolstoy’s art in these Sevastopol sketches that the tsar wept at the courage and patriotism he saw displayed there, whereas other readers consider them among the most damning anti-war literature ever written. Later, in a famous episode in
Chekhov will use the same second-person ethical “wake-up” device of the guided tour in his grim parable “Ward Number Six” (1892), in order to introduce his reader to the lunatic wing – or prison – of a corrupt provincial hospital. “If you do not mind being stung by nettles,” suggests the narrator, “let us go along the narrow path . . .” The inmate Ivan Gromov (who suffers from persecution mania) and Doctor Ragin (the good-natured but slothful medical man who negligently committed Gromov to the ward years earlier) are intellectual opponents of Dostoevskian intensity. Both incline toward philosophy. Quite by accident, the doctor rediscovers his patient and begins visiting him, for he is “the most interesting person in town.” Citing the Cynic Diogenes, Ragin rationalizes his inability to intervene against evil deeds. Gromov, disgusted, responds with a defense of activism. The story ends as it must: Ragin’s medical staff diagnoses him as ill (that is, imprisons him in the ward) together with his patient; Ragin dies of a stroke on the first evening spent locked inside a reality thathehad not botheredtoregisterorresist whilehewasfree. Both Gromovand Ragin had been passionate readers of books. And remarkable about both the bookish Pierre Bezukhov and the bookish Doctor Ragin – healthy, thoughtful, free men – is the extreme slowness of their waking-up to the difference between reading a book, and being there. “Ward Number Six” is often taken as Chekhov’s criticism of Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-violent resistance to evil.
Doubtless it is that – but it also sounds a chord of recurrent Tolstoyan concern. How can reading, as a habit of the body and mind, be made less pleasant, less easy, more a goad to action?
It is characteristic of this “Tolstoyan” story of Chekhov’s, and of Tolstoy himself, that the very process of reading is targeted for attention rather than the content of the work being read or witnessed. Dostoevsky tells you straight out that Devushkin is reading Pushkin and Gogol (and precisely which stories); immediately a dialogue starts up between works of literature. But Tolstoy scholars are still debating the identity of the unnamed English novel that Anna Karenina is reading on the train back to St. Petersburg after meeting Vronsky in Moscow, and also – to shift to the performing arts – the identity of the unnamed opera that Natasha watches in
The finest example of this concern is Tolstoy’s late story “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889). Not music itself, but remembering how his wife had created such music with the violinist “for no practical reason” is what enflames the jealous husband Pozdnyshev, both against his wife and against Beethoven. Pozdnyshev considers himself a “madman,” and the courtroom that tried him for murdering his wife concurred with the criminal, bestowing a verdict of temporary insanity. But as with all of Tolstoy’s fools and social outcasts – quite distinct from the Gogol–Dostoevsky line of madmen, who are not used in this way – a truth is transmitted through them that is intended to wake up the rest of comfortable humanity. Tolstoy stood behind many of Pozdnyshev’s maddest views. The powerful art of music, like the powerful art of the word, should be deployed only in the service of brotherhood. At the very least, it must not draw attention to itself as art, and whatever emotions it arouses must be usefully discharged, attached to a desired action. If a funeral, then a lament; if a battle, then fife and drum. Since the salon provides no proper moral conduit for channeling the energy released by art – just small talk and sherbet – how could there not be infidelity, jealousy, murder?
Best of all is to show people doing without words altogether. Responsive glances from a loving face will do the necessary work. The most famous of these word-free scenes in Tolstoy, the courtship between Kitty and Levin in
152
unexpectedly at a dinner party at the Oblonskys in Moscow. Timing is all. By now she has recovered from her rejection by Vronsky; Levin too has recovered from the insult of her initial rejection of him. Through glances and gestures, Kitty and Levin forgive each other and already trust in each other’s love. The actual marriage proposal is conveyed through a parlor game,
An equivalently famous episode in
In Tolstoy, as in Pushkin, “understanding what one needs to know” depends not on accessing or citing a verbal narrative, but on proper maturation. Lay down the right habits or structures in the individual, and wisdom will come at the right time - even without words. This knowledge cannot be forced by merely “talking it out,” with oneself or another person. The most terrible example of that hopeless strategy is Anna Karenina’s lengthy “monologue” to herself before her suicide (Part VII, chs. 26-31). By this point in the novel, Anna’s heightened consciousness rivals the Underground Man’s in its alertness to its own perversity. She makes impossible demands on Vronsky and impossibly
contradictory demands on herself (unwilling to give up society, son, or lover, she is aware that no structure exists capable of containing them all). She will punish Vronsky for that fact, not for the infidelity of which she accuses him even as she knows her suspicions are unfounded. Everyone she sees on that fatal ride to the train station is reduced to mean-spirited caricature. She is not in delirium – that is the terror of the passage – but she understands her needy self with absolute clarity and does not wish to entertain any other opinion about it: “my love grows ever more passionate and self-centered, and his keeps fading and fading . . .” (p. 763). Only at the final moment of her life does the candle flare up “by which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief, and evil” (p. 768). In addition to lies and grief, that book might have contained truth – but Tolstoy, here as with the dying Ivan Ilyich, gives his questing heroes access to it only at the final irreversible moment, after the wretched pattern of their lives has claimed its due.
Anna’s awful death prompts one additional contrast between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: how best to come to terms with one’s guilt. In a Tolstoyan world, which is intensely concerned that each autonomous “I” improve its behavior, the worst possible habit I can acquire is to insist on my helplessness and inability to initiate, on my own, some small betterment in my life. In a Dostoevskian world, relying on oneself is no special virtue – but the “I” does have obligations. Here, the worst habit for any character is to say that someone else is guilty. Best always is to insist that “
Poets and novelists (Dostoevsky and Nekrasov)
The controversial opposition above, between single-voiced (or individualistic) monologism and multivoiced (other-dependent) dialogism, we owe to Mikhail Bakhtin – who assigned Tolstoy, his less loved example, to one side of the divide and Dostoevsky to the other. But Bakhtin initiated an even more controversial
154
binary in his writings of the 1930s, between novels and poetry.31 True novels, he argued, strive toward polyphonic fullness, with competing voices that address one another horizontally, and they are “Copernican” to the extent that the author is displaced from the center of the fictive universe (novels are open, translatable, and thrive on alien input). Purely “poetic style,” in contrast, tends toward the single-voiced and unitary, locating its idealized, silent, or solipsistic addressee along a vertical axis (poetry talks to itself in a static utopian language, associated by Bakhtin with a “Ptolemaic” worldview that demands affirmation and identity, not dialogue). Bakhtin’s novel–poetry distinction is striking, but crude and (unless qualified) easily refuted. Our partial refutation of it here will permit us to touch briefly upon the fate and variety of poetry during the age of the great Russian novel (1850s–80s), through an episode in the work of Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky, arch-novelist and polyphonist, remained throughout his life a Romantic realist. Although he did not write poetry himself, he was temperamentally attuned to the vigorous civic verse being practiced by Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78), journalist and leading poet of the “Realist school.” Poetry did not disappear at the end of the Golden Age, with the deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov. But it changed its status and venue. The radical wing of Russia’s fledgling institution of literary criticism declared poetry no longer the voice of the gods but (at best) a rhythmically effective means of communicating social ills. When the aristocratic salon gave way to the bookseller’s market, lower-brow poetic genres began to flourish: satires, street ballads, urban romances, opera libretti, and folk-based narrative poetry (often in authentic dialect, with shocking rhythms and images) describing the lot of the Russian peasant. Nekrasov excelled in the last of these genres, both while a struggling student and later as a publisher. In 1846, Nekrasov acquired the journal
Nekrasov, like Dostoevsky, was a newspaper man. He was also a pioneer in poetic – and
Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories, in which the reader is taken on a “tour” of a city under active bombardment as if it were a museum (or a guidebook). Nekrasov’s images from this poem end up not in Tolstoy, however, but in Dostoevsky, at the moral center of Raskolnikov’s graphic dream of the beating, and then brutal murder, of an exhausted mare.
Nekrasov’s narrator in
156
Anton Chekhov: lesser expectations, smaller forms
Chekhov’s relations with Dostoevsky were not profound. He referred to him rarely in his letters, ironically in his works, and had to force himself to finish
To be sure, the novel did have some competition. In the 1850s, the ethnographic “sketch” [
Chekhov was obliged to support himself by his pen and early became a master of the chatty topical sketch. In his hundreds of commissioned stories
he parodied almost every style and genre that Russian literature had known. In his “Death of a Clerk,” a comic rewriting of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” a titular councilor inadvertently sneezes on a general during an opera performance at the Bolshoi Theatre and, unable to persuade the general to take his apology seriously, dies (literally) of shame.34 Such cameo parodies were supplanted in the mid-1880s by his first mature work, the spatial tone-poem “Steppe,” published in a serious literary journal when Chekhov was twenty-eight. After 1888, he rapidly acquired the perspective and intonation peculiar to him, one far more lyrical than parodic or chatty. Chekhov is lyrical not in the way of most lyric poets, however, but in a distinctly “clinical” way; as a medical doctor. How Chekhov looked at the follies of the body, and to what extent he felt an author had the right to intervene, diagnose, systematize, and pass judgment on those follies, will be our focus in this final section.
Tolstoy cast a long shadow on Chekhov’s generation. But not all of the mature Tolstoy struck Chekhov as reasonable – especially his theories on sexuality and illness, of obvious interest to a doctor. Together with Russia and much of Europe, Chekhov read “The Kreutzer Sonata” in 1889 and followed the ensuing scandal. In various supplemental tracts to that story, Tolstoy argued that women instinctively dislike the carnal relation, that intercourse while pregnant or nursing causes hysteria, and that celibacy within marriage would guarantee the physical and spiritual health of both parties. In response, Chekhov complained to his friend Aleksei Pleshcheyev in February 1894 that Tolstoy “out of sheer stubbornness has never taken the time to read two or three pamphlets written by specialists.” Chekhov was correct: Tolstoy had no use for specialists. Gorky reports Tolstoy saying of Chekhov that his profession spoiled him. “If he hadn’t been a doctor he would have written still better” (“Memoirs,” p. 71). In Tolstoy’s view, a clinical approach to the human condition could only blur its duties. In 1897, Tolstoy remarked that Chekhov was highly gifted but “writes like a decadent and impressionist, in the broad sense of the term.” In the winter of 1900, Tolstoy took in a performance of a Chekhov play at the Moscow Art Theatre and wrote in his diary (January 27): “Went to see
The play provides no moral resolution. There is also no cumulative action, motion, or lessons learned. The old professor and his young wife Elena arrive at the beginning and depart at the end. The presence of this provocative couple throughout four acts inspires one unsuccessful declaration of love, one unsuccessful suicide, one unsuccessful seduction; in fact, “everyone in this play is a loser.”35 The closest thing to a “deed” is the professor’s fantastic proposal to sell his daughter Sonya’s estate on terms advantageous to him in his retirement. Comically impotent moments are highlighted by references to literary classics.
158
In Act III, the professor launches his self-serving plan by quoting the mayor’s opening line from Gogol’s famous play: “Gentlemen, I have invited you here to announce that we are about to be visited by a government inspector.” The joke falls flat. Later in that same explosive scene, Sonya’s uncle Vanya, enraged, shouts at the old professor: “My life’s ruined. I’m gifted, intelligent, courageous. If I’d had a normal life I might have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky. But I’m talking nonsense, I’m going mad . . .” Indeed, Tolstoy would not like this sort of comedy. And Dostoevsky – for whom madness was metaphysical and symbolic – would not have understood it either. Chekhov’s four great dramas and over six hundred short stories represent an ambitious, calculated descent from the didactic comedy of earlier centuries and from the heights of the Great Russian Novel as well. We will view this descent through two lenses: illness, and the
Like Dostoevsky, Chekhov was ill for much of his creative life with an incurable disease. Unlike Dostoevsky, who chose to see in his own chronic epilepsy some visionary potential or symbol (while remaining objective enough to give his disease both to a scoundrel, Smerdyakov, and to a righteous man, Prince Myshkin), Chekhov did not make a special point of trying out his consumption on his fictive characters. When he does, as in “The Black Monk” (1894), the result is distanced and chilly: the morally flawed and hallucinating hero dies in a rush of blood from the throat, presided over by an apparition of the sinister monk. But no judgment is passed on the unhappy hero.
Tolstoy despised doctors, and in this area he never missed a chance to pass judgment. He never allows his heroes to be cured by medical professionals. Freed from French captivity (which had, characteristically, disciplined his body and improved his health), Pierre Bezukhov falls ill for three months, “but despite their treatment – with bloodletting and various medicines – he recovered” (
Chekhov saw what medical people can hardly avoid seeing: that possessing a mortal body means sooner or later something will go wrong with it – it will make a fool of itself, sicken, and die. Cancer and consumption follow their own rules, of course. But the same treatment, or the same accident, can have no effect on one organism, awful consequences on another, curative effects on a third. The body is not obliged to explain itself. Thus the body cannot be conceived as a moral unit. Medical records are neither shocking nor symbolically meaningful. They are records of an organism’s rise and fall. Pain, too, is simply there; it buys nothing and redeems nothing. In what is probably the most famous passage in all of Chekhov, from his short masterpiece “Lady with a Pet Dog” (1899), we are shown how this moral blankness can actually be recruited for human well-being and hope. Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna are sitting on the beach at dawn and listening to the “monotonous muffled noise of the sea”:
It had made that noise down below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda existed; it was making that noise now, and would continue to make that noise in that same hushed and indifferent way when we are no longer here. And in that permanence, in that complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, is perhaps concealed a guarantee of our eternal salvation, a guarantee of the constant movement of life on earth and of endless perfection.36
In Chekhov, then, pain, illness, and dying are tragic in a clinical and local sense only, not in a moral sense. Death is not punitive, and survival is more a matter of good fortune or timing than of ethical absolutes. Two stories are exemplary in this regard, among the darkest in the canon. In each, one detects a doctor’s trained eye, and a doctor’s tactful, tolerant commiseration that does not pretend to know what it cannot know.
The short story “Enemies” (1887) opens five minutes after Kirilov, a district doctor, has lost his only child, a boy of six, to diphtheria. His wife is stretched out in despair over the dead body; the doctor’s hands are burnt with carbolic acid, the standard disinfectant for this contagious disease. At that moment a neighboring landowner knocks, in a panic, to summon the doctor: his wife has just fallen dangerously ill; can the doctor come? Kirilov says no, he is in mourning. The distraught man persists; finally the doctor, in a stupor, climbs into his carriage, and upon arrival at the man’s manor house it is discovered that the wife had feigned illness to run off with her lover, their house guest. Both doctor and client are stunned. This farce allows each to give furious vent to his individual grief. “Never in their lives,” Chekhov writes, “had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The unhappy are egotistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each
160
other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart . . .”37 In this story there is no philosophy, no attempt at transcendence, no defense of the nobility of suffering. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy would have tried to provide both. Most Chekhovian characters lack the energy for such transformations.
The second story does present an epiphany, but it is a clinical one – and also stained with carbolic acid. This is “The Name-day Party” (1888), narrated from the perspective of a woman seven months pregnant. Throughout the tedious day, corsetedin to conceal her condition, the wife watches her attractive husband act the charming host to younggirls while she, exhausted, obliged to be gracious to unwanted guests, resents both him and his reluctance to confide his troubles to her. Name-days – the Russian equivalent of birthdays, celebrated not on your birth date but on the official day of the saint after which you were named – were important family events and full-day celebratory affairs. It is an ordinary stressed day in the obligatory social life of a marriage. But it ends with premature labor, an operation, death of the infant, an unknown number of blank days and nights, the despair of the husband, and for the wife, a “mistiness in the brain from chloroform” and “dull indifference to life.” The husband weeps by the window and wrings his hands: “Olya! Why didn’t we take thought for our child?”
But there had been no reason to take special thought. At the end of this bleak story, no specific person or event is to blame. It was a ghastly accident. Chekhov is astute at presenting the frivolities and insincerities of both social and family life, and the name-day party was indeed a strain. But neither corsets nor social conventions were necessarily lethal to an unborn child. If the doctors treating Olya discovered why her body had suddenly broken down and miscarried, Chekhov doesn’t tell us. He cannot and will not do what Tolstoy does in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” written two years earlier, which is to condemn everything the suffering hero had lived by – that entire round of legal and social duties that made up the life of the condemned judge, Ivan Ilyich – in order to justify the ghastly accident (cancer) that led to his death. No narrator has the right to reconstitute moral causality with such assurance and pass final judgment. About this matter Chekhov felt very strongly: he even wrote “A Tedious Story” (1889), his counter-version of a “bad death,” in response to Tolstoy’s didactic Ivan Ilyich.
On this matter of radical contingency and tragic accident, Chekhov would have considered Dostoevsky even less of a precedent. The symbolic move made at the end of
children, perhaps, can be found in mid-career Tolstoy: the fate of Petya Rostov in
One means for adding dimensions to a work of slender compass is to evoke earlier, familiar literary worlds and fictive characters. The young Dostoevsky did this brilliantly with Gogol, and Chekhov often avails himself of this strategy. But mere isolated interjections tend to be ironic or unkind. In
In the 1886 story “A Calamity,” a young woman with a sluggish, preoccupied husband is being courted passionately by a neighboring lawyer, Ilyin. He is ashamed of his behavior but attractive to her because of it. Trains are prominent
162
in the story – some train whistle is always interrupting his entreaties – but not as a tragic motif. The story ends as the heroine is rushing out the door to a tryst with the persistent and lovesick Ilyin; her husband wasn’t interested in hearing about her temptation, her daughter suddenly struck her as phlegmatic. The young wife is disgusted at her own duplicity, appetite, and ordinariness (to that extent she is still an “Anna”). But to balance those self-recriminating Tolstoyan moments, she is also curious, excited, and willing. Chekhov does not dismiss the seriousness and validity of lust. Like a doctor he gently probes its dynamics. The heroine will learn some sort of lesson from this “Calamity,” but it will not be a tragic one.
The same non-tragic message, albeit in a cynical key, underlies “Anna on the Neck” (1895). Anna Petrovna, eighteen-year-old beauty from a poor family married against her will to a pompous middle-aged bureaucrat, quickly perceives that her husband values her solely as a social asset and stepping stone to higher rank, the Order of St. Anna. This husband is no unexciting but inoffensive Aleksei Karenin; he is a direct descendant of Dostoevsky’s Luzhin. But Chekhov’s Anna cannot get out of the marriage in time, as Dunya Raskol-nikova did, and must adjust to her new reality. After she succeeds in pleasing the appropriate “Excellency” at a gala ball, she calls her husband a blockhead to his face and more honest relations between them are established. Her infidelities become her own business. And she is no longer visited by her nightmare, that a “storm cloud or locomotive was moving in on her to crush her.”
In “About Love” (1898), the third rewrite of the novel, Chekhov is already parodying Tolstoy in a deeper, more spiritually satisfying way. Rather than merely supply alternative erotic andcynical contexts for the
are granted immunity, which means, a plot “timed” in their favor. Chekhov will have none of that.
Alyokhin and his Anna Alekseyevna are in love. But being neither Anna Kareninas nor Vronskys, not possessing the selfishness or the heroic initiating power required to launch the
“I realized that when you love someone, your reasoning about that love should be based on what is supreme, on something that is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in the way that they are usually understood, otherwise it is not worth reasoning at all.”38
What might that supreme thing be, that replaces all reasoning? Chekhov does not say. Although the title of his story echoes Tolstoy’s imperious position-papers from his final two decades – “About War,” “About Religion,” “About Relations between the Sexes,” “About Life,” – a less Tolstoyan final verdict, unsettling in its openness, could hardly be imagined for a story about extramarital love.
A year later came the most famous Anna story in all of Chekhov, “Lady with a Pet Dog” (1899). Here too we have our share of trains and theatres. But this is a genuine love story, one of the world’s greatest, in which Chekhov mixes Tolstoyan prototypes, and at times Tolstoyan diction, to achieve a new perspective on adultery and adult responsibility. Dmitry Gurov, from whose perspective the tale is told, resembles a Vronsky, or perhaps an Oblonsky; Anna Sergeyevna, whom he meets in Yalta, is a timid, inexperienced Kitty. But there is an important difference: neither Gurov nor Anna Sergeyevna is free. Both have Karenin-like spouses: Gurov’s wife is a bluestocking intellectual, Anna Sergeyevna’s husband a “flunkey” who serves in some provincial office. The first half of the story is written in the voice zone of a Stiva Oblonsky, from a light philandering position. Anna Sergeyevna’s departure on a train back north at the end of the story’s Chapter 2 concludes that type of infidelity plot, the “successful one-time affair” that hurts no one and leaves no scars. But then the second half of the story takes both hero and heroine by surprise. It begins to resemble the expansive mid-parts of Tolstoy’s novel, where the reader realizes,
164
with excitement and growing dread, that (however absurd it seemed at first) the love between our two adulterers is real. The fact that Vronsky might be a frivolous military officer unworthy of a person of Anna’s caliber, or that Anna is trying to have it all in a society where she will be lucky to have even a part, is completely unimportant; they simply love each other, as Tolstoy amply demonstrates. And love works changes. Vronsky becomes stronger, better,more self-critical. Likewise with Chekhov’s Gurov: he becomes dissatisfied with his Moscow life. He can’t forget Yalta. He tracks down Anna Sergeyevna in the city of S., after which she begins to visit him in Moscow. The “supreme thing that replaced all reasoning” now sits at the center of their lives. A rhythm is established that reflects a deep, and deepening, fidelity. The story ends on the verb “
At issue here is not only that Anna Sergeyevna, however unhappy, will not commit suicide. The key to the change that Chekhov works on a Tolstoyan worldview – and, I believe, on a Dostoevskian worldview as well – can be found at the story’s end, in Gurov’s meditations en route to the hotel where Anna is waiting for him. He is explaining to his daughter how thunderstorms work. At the same time he is marveling at the inevitability of a human being having a “double life.” There is nothing pathological about this doubling. That we can act in the world
This entire meditation, with its binary structure and frequent repetitions, recalls Tolstoy’s style. But its moral is purely Chekhovian. Ideally for Tolstoy, there is always an integration between inner and outer. Before a spiritual epiphany can occur, the false life must be brought into line with the true life. The Tolstoyan self strives toward wholeness, even if the moment does not and cannot last. There should be nothing to hide – which is one reason why the Tolstoyan narrator grants himself such extraordinary access to his heroes’ inner lives.
The Chekhovian self is more modestly constituted. Its credo is not self-perfection and self-completion, but some other thing, perhaps acceptance of
the “indifferent noise of the sea” that, according to some strange impersonal contract, promises us salvation. Chekhov’s truths, if he has truths, are not punitive, not public, and not symbolic. Tolstoy could not agree to this. The inadequate, makeshift, purely private and secret structures that sustain true human relations in Chekhov’s most luminous stories could not, for Tolstoy, be an acceptable moral resolution. So Tolstoy was to some extent correct when, in 1897, he remarked that Chekhov “wrote like an impressionist.” He was wholly incorrect to suggest that Chekhov wrote like a Decadent.
By the turn of the century, “getting out from under Tolstoy,” explicitly and implicitly, was a major task forthe new generation of Russian writers and artists. This “seer of the flesh” seemed far too cramped and archaic. Writers looked to Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov for guidance. Many of them celebrated precisely what Tolstoy despised: mixed-art extravaganzas, opera, the potential of St. Petersburg as a cultural icon. But what they insisted upon most earnestly was mystery at the core of a narrative and of a self.
Symbolist and Modernist world-building: three cities, three novels, and the Devil
In 1893, eight years before publishing his magisterial study “L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” the Symbolist critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) wrote a curious essay titled “On Reasons for the Decline of Contemporary Russian Literature, and on its New Tendencies.”1 It is often taken to mark the end of the Age of the Novel and the beginning of the Symbolist era. In this essay, Merezhkovsky discusses the arrival in Europe of Impressionism, an artistic movement – he approvingly notes – that cared more about mystical content and a heightened
166
use of the poetic symbol than about art’s responsibility to socioeconomic problems. Russian literature too had experienced the split in European nineteenth-century culture between a materialist-scientific worldview and an idealist one. But Merezhkovsky then insists that the master Russian prose writers – Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Ivan Goncharov (1812–91, author of
Merezhkovsky, a herald of the later Symbolists, had lost patience with literary strategies devised to create the “illusion of reality.” No writer of genius, he felt, could be motivated by so meager a desire. Since the 1880s, the market for poetry hadbeen growing.In fact,theabundanceofpoetic talentin thispre-WorldWar I generation encouraged later critics to apply retroactively the label “Silver Age” to these decades, invoking as benchmark the glorious “Golden Age” of Pushkin and fabricating between the two eras a direct spiritual bond. This revived passion for non-representational poetic worlds did not occur ina vacuum. Interest in spiritualism, ghosts, se´ances, exorcism, folk taboo, and the ethnography of religious cults had flourished throughout the Age of Realism as a vigorous minor line investigating “Homo Mysticus.”2 By century’s end, curiosity about metaphysical and visionary experience had become a legitimate topic of study in learned circles. The founding, in 1885, of the Moscow Psychological Society at Moscow University fed a resurgence of interest in Kant and German Romantic philosophy.3 Professors and philosophers openly identified themselves as “idealists” – but this did not imply reclusive mystics or ivory-tower intellectuals. Idealists argued passionately in the public arena against the reigning tenets of positivism (the theory, made famous by Auguste Comte [1798–1857], that valid knowledge is received solely through sense experience) and on behalf of the autonomy of philosophy, professionalization in all disciplines, and non-reductive approaches to the human being. Spiritual life had reemerged as a serious competitor among public ideologies promising to restore human dignity. Several events in particular were key for the three Modernist writers whose novels are the focus of this chapter.
168
The fin de sie`cle: Solovyov, Nietzsche, Einstein, Pavlov’s dogs, political terrorism
Between 1877 and 1881, Russia’s first great speculative philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) delivered a series of spellbinding lectures in St. Petersburg on what he called “Divine Humanity” or “Godmanhood.”4 The audience included both a skeptical Tolstoy and an enthusiastic Dostoevsky, who was Solovyov’s good friend. The first lecture was devoted to Russia’s need for “positive [or affirmative] religion,” understood as the striving toward an absolute or ideal principle, which was the opposite of materialist positivism. “Contemporary religion is a pitiful thing,” Solovyov declared. Reduced to a ritual, “a personal mood, a personal taste,” it was no longer able to inspire or unite humanity. Several candidates had been put forward to fill the void, but all had proven inadequate: the institution of the Church, the ideals of socialism, the French Revolution, empirical science. Christian faith provided one part of the solution, by affirming the unconditional significance of each individual in the eyes of God. But secular humanism must complement this faith and converge with it.
A second factor in this religious renaissance, and seemingly at cross purposes to it, was the profound impact on Russian culture of Friedrich Nietzsche. Debts here were varied and vast. The ideas of the “super-human,” a radical reassessment of all values, and a “will to power” that could bestow health, dignity, and autonomy on creative artists naturally appealed to the tiny trapped Russian intelligentsia. The debt was to some extent reciprocal. In 1888, Nietzsche had remarked that the Dostoevskian underground “contained the most valuable psychological material known to him” – suggesting that the German philosopher was prone to take seriously metaphysical worldviews that Dostoevsky subjected to cruel satire; the novelist’s doubts were congenial to Nietzsche, the Christian epiphanies were not. Still, turn-of-the-century Russians found much to admire in Nietzschean thought. Symbolist journals like
The first generation of Russian Symbolism coincided with a renaissance of interest in Classical Greece and Rome, and to this group the most vital mythic vision revealed by Nietzsche was the myth of Dionysus. In that vision, the life force is simultaneously destructive and creative, cyclical, rebellious, ecstatic, at times nihilistic, but always transformative. The end point of Russian Dionysianism was a “new man.” For some, this coveted figure coincided with
the Second Coming of Christ; for others, with a charismatic leader of the masses or a neo-Romantic cult of the poet as quasi-divine prophet. The poetic variant was especially attractive, since it integrates Dionysian inspiration with the Apollonian ideals of restraint, sobriety, and disciplined form. In this spirit, Merezhkovsky wrote an essay for the 1899 Pushkin Centennial claiming that this most perfect of poets was precisely “the Russian solution to the tragedy of dualism dramatizedbyNietzscheand symbolizedbytheApollonian–Dionysian polarity” – the genius who could bridge spirit and flesh, art and life, East and West.6 Unsurprisingly, Leo Tolstoy vigorously condemned the Nietzsche cult (which he encountered in vulgarized form and which he vulgarized further). In January 1900, the same month
animals.”7
A final factor jolting Russian art out of the mimetic-Realist groove was Einstein’s revolution in the physics of time and space. The theory of relativity, made public in 1905, augmented Newtonian laws of energy, mass, and momentum with the innovative postulates that time could dilate, length could contract, and the “reality” of time and space depend upon the perspective, distance, and velocity of the observer. These ideas affected not only science; they also stunned and fascinated creative artists working in all media. In Russia, Einstein was invoked to legitimize multiple and local points of view, individual initiative, and fantastic theories for restructuring life and abolishing death. That consummate physicist fed into longstanding Russian debates over the freedom of the soul against the dead determinism of matter. Readers of
170
To this confluence of philosophy, science, physiology and metaphysics we must add two crises of a different sort: the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution on the ruins of Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and an intensification of political terrorism. After decades of isolated terrorist acts against the government – which some in the artistic avant-garde applauded, but most deplored – revolutionary violence against officials suddenly rose steeply.8 There were 9,000 targeted casualties throughout the country between 1905 and 1907. Terrorist attacks and banditry became so common that they were no longer featured individually in the newspapers but listed in special sections devoted to that day’s assassinations and “expropriations.” The type of terrorist also changed. In the nineteenth century (except in the fictive visions of Dostoevsky, who foresaw everything at its most ecstatic and terrible), an aura of self-sacrificing asceticism still surrounded such violent acts, as if they were the work of a righteous person, a
In 1923, Evgeny Zamyatin, a naval engineer, wrote an essay summing up the effectsonRussian Modernism of Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, Einstein’srelativity, and the campaigns against the “illusion of realism.” He titled it “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters.” His opening question was: “Ask point blank: ‘What is revolution?’” His answer:
Revolution is everywhere, in everything . . . A literature that is alive . . . is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck.
In a storm, you must have a man aloft. Today we are in the midst of a storm . . . Only yesterday a writer could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak (a genre scene); but who will want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? . . . Let yesterday’s cart creak along the well-paved highways . . . What we need today are automobiles, airplanes, flickering, flight, dots, dashes, seconds.9
Zamyatin’s “sailor aloft in the storm” could not differ more profoundly from Tolstoy’s sailor with a compass in
Modernist time-spaces and their modes of disruption
Our sampling of the Symbolist–Modernist period will be organized around three great novels (and in passing, some poetry) associated with two myth-laden cities. The first novel, set in the imperial capital, is Andrei Bely’s
Although these three works belong to different stylistic traditions, intriguing comparisons can be made. Each novel disorients and disrupts the flow of the narrative, to achieve the “estrangement” and displacement so important to the texture of post-Realist prose. Bely’s Symbolist novel
172
Apollon Apollonovich wanders in to his son’s study and removes the curious tin to his own room. The son is frantic. At the end of the novel the bomb explodes, but no one is killed.
This anticlimax with the sardine tin is emblematic. Every time one of the novel’s heroes entertains a “creative disguise” or a show of power, something goes wrong: ordinary suspenders flash forth from under a red domino costume; the targeted senator retires from his ministry in humiliated confusion and is reconciled with his unfaithful wife precisely when his death is supposed to be a meaningful political statement; and in a subplot, a minor officer tries to hang himself in disgrace but the plaster cracks, the ceiling falls in, the noose won’t hold. Apocalypse and strong closure are everywhere prepared for during these agitated revolutionary days, but they default to more shabby, compassionate, everyday outcomes. The result is a strange landscape: Bely’s “third world” of transformative word-symbols almost peaks at several points but then unceremoniously peters out. In this aspect, the events of the novel recall Chekhov’s
This pulsation between tragedy and farce, and between a rational and an intuitive response to the world, is essential to the novel’s rhythm. Bely held that the excellence of an artwork was proportional to its kinship with music. Music is structured emotional flow; the “world of appearances” (that is, palpable, fixed form) is always a constraint on that flow, on our free experiencing through time.11 The author-poet, who works in a medium located halfway between the poles of architecture and music, must balance the claims of space and time. The scenes in
Zamyatin wrote his Modernist novel not under the aegis of Symbolism but under the star of Einstein’s relativity. Zamyatin too is in the Gogol– Dostoevskian tradition of storytelling, in which fictional characters go out of their mind together with portions of the narration containing them. The concern that so occupied Bely, however – the transfiguration of the self through verbal art – is different in Zamyatin. The son of an Orthodox priest, Zam-yatin made rich use of biblical subtexts in
Fall in the book of Genesis to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who castigates Christ for his reluctance to work the miracles required to guarantee humanity its material security.12 Despite these motifs, Zamyatin was a wholly secular writer, and skeptical as regards divine or mystical allegory. Although authority is everywhere in OneState, neither miracle nor mystery has a place. The world of
All citizens (“numbers”) of OneState are named with an initial letter plus a numerical digit. Males begin with consonants (the hero is D-503), females with vowels (O-90, I-330). D-, the novel’s Adam, is a mathematician by profession, and his prefix is written in Cyrillic, д, a letter derived from the Greek delta, also the mathematical symbol for change. The novel’s Eve, the seductress I-330, is named not with the Russian equivalent of this vowel, и, but with the Latin ‘I’: the English first-person singular pronoun, the dangerous unit that has broken away from the “We.” The double-agent doctor who is in league with I-330 also carries a Latin prefix, S- (snake, G.
Zamyatin constructed his
Cube Square. Sixty-six powerful concentric rings: the stands. And sixty-six rows: quiet faces like lamps, with eyes reflecting the shining heavens, or maybe the shining of OneState. Blood-red flowers: women’s
lips.13
As long as D-503 remains a loyal subject of OneState, he perceives three-dimensionality, depth, and the capacity to absorb and project personal desire – what the doctors diagnose as the birth of a “soul” – as illness and imminent death. Forty diary entries (his forty days in the Wilderness) chronicle his metamorphosis from an obedient servant of impersonal reason into a
174
grasping, loving, rebellious singularity, a process that D-503 both craves and bitterly resents. The beautiful I-330, midwife to the birth of his soul, is a member of the
His soul expanding, D-503 watches with horror as his diary, begun as a dutiful and devout propaganda piece for the missionary spaceship of which he is First Builder, transforms itself into a treasonous document. There is nowhere to tuck it away; its pages, increasingly full of anguish and doubt, are discovered on his glass desk through the glass walls of his room and become incriminating evidence. After the rebellion of the
This closing scene especially has resonated throughout twentieth-century anti-totalitarian literature. In discussing his 1948 novel
death.”14
Dostoevsky’s paradoxical Underground provides only one subtext to the dynamics of
He is alive only in the wild, free gallop, only in the open steppe . . . Christ victorious in practical terms is the grand inquisitor . . . The true Scythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple cassock . . . and will hasten into the steppe, to freedom.15
Several years later, Zamyatin structured
Bulgakov’s
176
modesty and reduced expectation rather than in Scythian rebellion or excess, and one that
Such double-tiered, “palimpsest” narration need not in itself be disorienting. What startles the reader is Bulgakov’s chronotopic play, that is, the fact that miracles, madness and magic do not occur in the environments where we would most expect them. The Moscow chapters are crammed with supernatural happenings, devils (sublime and petty), vampires, witches, hallucinations, carnival trickery, and yet are set in a familiar city full of recognizable streets, buildings, Soviet-style communal apartments, famous landmarks, as well as real people and events out of the Stalinist 1930s. This invasion of the comic-diabolical into everyday activities – professional meetings, tram rides, visits to the theatre or grocery store – recalls much more the texture of Gogol than of Dostoevsky, who doesn’t really have an “everyday.” Bulgakov’s use of this device in the Moscow chapters functions in part as political allegory. As the Terror gained momentum after 1936, innocent people were disappearing as if by witchcraft, their apartments sealed and their names effaced from public record.
If Moscow is the humdrum demonic, what of the Jerusalem chapters? They constitute a genuine historical novel – perhaps even a “novelized history.” Bulgakov was a meticulous researcher, and in the early drafts of his novel he footnoted sources for the scenes describing Yeshua’s arrest, Pontius Pilate’s migraine and political cowardice, the machinations of the High Priests, the anguish of Judas, and the stations of the Cross from the perspective of a tormented disciple. Of course, in the official judgment of atheistic Moscow in the 1930s, these New Testament chapters would have to be declared a “fiction.” Inside the chapters, however, we would expect to find some evidence, intona-tional or visual, of the miracles that animated the disciples and sustained their faith. This is not the case. Regardless of who relates the crucifixion – and
the installments are respectively related orally by the Devil, dreamt by a Muscovite poet, and read silently by Margarita as part of the Master’s novel – all narrators are identical in their sobriety, authority, majestic high-Realist secular style, and compassionate psychological detail with no trace of miracle. The Jerusalem chapters are clearly all the same book – the Master’s novel – regardless of who delivers it, or when, or how. Such a confluence of realistic diction in
Thus we might say that the boldest “estrangement from reality” in
At one point the Master, terrified he will be arrested for the crime of writing about Jesus in an atheist state, burns his novel. Woland hands the book back to its author intact with the comment that “manuscripts don’t burn.” But
178
Such a Modernist project, which presumes the existence of other worlds to which poets have privileged access, recalls Bely’s
Mikhail Berlioz, editor, atheist, and head of the Writers’ Union, meets the “strange professor” at Patriarch’s Pond in Moscow. Berlioz and his poet-friend are suspicious of this foreign-looking fellow, especially when the three get into a debate about the historicity of Jesus Christ. Suddenly the professor whispers to them: “Keep in mind that Jesus did exist”:
“You know, Professor,” answered Berlioz with a forced smile, “we respect your great knowledge, but we happen to have a different point of view regarding that issue.”
“No points of view are necessary,” replied the strange professor. “He simply existed, that’s all there is to it.”
“But surely some proof is required,” began Berlioz.
“No, no proof is required,” answered the professor.16
At this point the professor’s foreign accent “somehow disappears,” and the first installment of this true story flows out from behind the text. Bulgakov had originally planned his novel as a “Gospel According to the Devil.” This Devil, a sad, thoughtful figure, remains the novel’s wisest, most authoritative source of knowledge, the coordinator of its various planes, and – like Zamyatin’s
Bulgakov’s first biographer suggested that the idea for a “Gospel According to Woland” might even have come to Bulgakov from Tolstoy, who, after his “break” in the 1880s, “rewrote the Gospels to make them more logical and coherent.”17 Bulgakov,the sonofa professor of theologyat theKievan Academy,
was well versed in religious controversies and texts. He also deeply loved Leo Tolstoy. In the 1880s and 1890s, in pursuit of a faith that was compatible with reason, Tolstoy had produced his own version of the Gospels, deleting all the supernatural prompts. Bulgakov eliminates the same miraculous layers and legends from the Master’s novel. The truth does not need them.
Bulgakov’s Satan figure, Woland, thus emerges as a fascinating bridge figure between our two great nineteenth-century philosopher-novelists. As we saw in the preceding chapter, which introduced Woland conversing with Berlioz’s severed head at Satan’s Ball, this devil is firmly in the Dostoevsky line of “multiple valid truths.” Individuals (in this case, the Moscow public) are allowed to live – and die – by their own professed beliefs. To be sure, most of these beliefs are shoddy, and Woland’s devilish Gogolian retinue forces their hypocrisy to the surface. A more profound debt is owed to that clownish devil who turns up in
For all his debts to Dostoevsky and Gogol, however, Bulgakov’s Satan also realizes an authorial fantasy very precious to Tolstoy: the ethically ideal relation between an author and a reader. Except when he is the mouthpiece for an installment of Christ’s Passion, Woland is a taciturn man. This is appropriate. He shows rather than tells. Woland might have originated in Ivan Karamazov’s devil. But in Bulgakov he is sobered up, transformed from a chattering buffoon into a seer, and serves both the Gogol–Dostoevsky and the Tolstoy line.
City myths: Petersburg, Moscow, OneState
What is the Petersburg Myth, and how does Bely’s novel named after that city contribute to it? This question was formalized as a research area in the mid-1980s, when Yury Lotman and his fellow semioticians turned their attention to the “Petersburg text” as exemplary of the cultural symbolism of cities.19 With Russian space in mind, they drew up several robust distinctions. First, the city as a demarcated site could stand in one of two relationships to the undeveloped territory surrounding it. Either it could spread out to absorb and
180
personify its surroundings – such was the historical experience of Rome – or it could become the antithesis of that surrounding space, perceived to be in an antagonistic relation to the wilderness it ruled. In the former “absorptive” model,the citybecomes a symbol for the organic core of the universe. Nomatter where on the map the city is actually located, it feels like the “center,” a nested place. Such concentric cities are static and eternal, often situated on hills, and believed to mediate between heaven and earth. Examples are Jerusalem, Rome, and Moscow. (There is logic to Moscow’s two epithets, “New Jerusalem” and “Third Rome.”) Opposed to such concentric cities are eccentric ones, often situated on the threatened edges of empires, built as outposts on seized or conquered land. Born in violence, eccentric cities frequently have apocalyptic myths attached to their ends. They seem “willed” and inorganic, driven by crisis and subject to floods, earthquakes, and aggressive invasions. When they win, they become symbolic of a victory of mind over matter, but when they lose they spread doom, rumors of the Antichrist, and reinforce the principle that surrounding nature is hostile to human habitation and will always do battle with it.
Lisbon and Alexandria are two of the world’s great, doomed “edge cities,” but for Russia, the prototype is St. Petersburg. This city of stone was founded in 1703 by a fiat of Peter the Great as a military beachhead on a stoneless, uninhabited watery inlet. Built by conscripted labor, it fostered portents of catastrophe and death – especially by floodings and sinkings – from its earliest years. But also (and somewhat counterintuitively), its very artificiality and abrupt genesis came to represent rational utopia, the grandeur of imperial will. As one legend relates, since the swamp sucked everything in, Peter forged the city in the air and then laid it gently down on the soft earth. An airborne artificial city can do without a foundation, without organic history from the bottom up. In similar manner, the myth of Petersburg began not on the solid ground of lived experience but in literature and oral legend – which then fed into its history and in fact created that history.
Petersburg was illusory, phantasmagorical, a stage set. Gender ratios and demographics added to the sense of artifice. Petersburg exploded in size and population during the nineteenth century (whereas Napoleon’s invasion and burning, plus cholera epidemics, checked the growth of Moscow). Owing to so many military personnel, males outnumbered females in Petersburg by almost three to one, and this high number of wifeless men assured a huge population of prostitutes and attendant diseases.20 Masquerades, uniforms, military and civilian ranks – all forms that cover up and standardize the body – were the norm. In the early Bolshevik years, the fashion for public spectacles that reenacted historical scenes as street theatre further blurred the distinction
between an actual event and its stylization for posterity. Outside those rituals, masks, and tightly fitting costumes was chaos: invisibility and the abyss.
In this startling set of images from urban semiotics, we see the outline of a Nietzschean dichotomy.Petersburgis anunstable,apocalypticcity of Dionysian energies, barely contained by an Apollonian crust of rock and granite. This tension sits like a coiled spring at the center of Bely’s
Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely provided the myth with its pedigree in prose, but Pushkin the poet is its founder. His 1833 narrative poem
In Petersburg, power erupts unexpectedly and punitively: the emperor, the river, a conspiracy, a sudden frost. These eruptions cause personal losses that can drive residents out of their minds. But before that moment, there is a flash of insight more profound than anything that could have evolved in a gentler way. During one of the extended drunken hallucinations in Bely’s
182
(ch. 6, p. 214). Such is the fate of consciousness in this odd urban site, which the Underground Man calls, at the beginning of his
If the “Bronze Horseman” launches the imperial nineteenth-century Petersburg Myth, then
Throughout the poem, Blok imitates or partially quotes snatches of folk song, popular spiritual verse, Bolshevik slogans, staccato-like curses, robber and gypsy songs, urban romances. In his lectures on Russian literature from the mid-1920s,Bakhtin hadcuriousthingstosayabout themultivoiced,decentered quality of speech in Blok’s
But any justification of
Bakhtin’s musings here help explain the end of the poem, which surprised the poet himself. A starving dog trails behind the twelve guards. A blood-red banner precedes them. And invisible in the snowstorm, invulnerable to bullets, “In a white wreath of roses – / Up ahead, Jesus Christ.” This idea of invisible transcendence, exemplified by a dozen rowdy soldiers being led by a force in which they themselves do not believe, was glossed by Blok in an essay he wrote during that same month of January 1918, titled “The Intelligentsia and Revolution.” He noted that “the great Russian artists – Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy – were immersed in gloom” but had endured it because they believed in the light and knew the light. Now the Russian people are bolder. They believe simply in life, in “doing everything themselves,” in “awaiting the unexpected” and believing “not in what exists but in what ought to exist,” now that the Russian people, “like Ivan the Fool, has jumped down off its
sleeping-ledge.”23 A new hero was born out of the Nietzschean binary between Dionysus and Apollo: the Bolshevik recruit as trigger-happy unholy fool.
One recent study of physical Petersburg opens on the observation that its middlespaces arefew.24 Surprisingly, perhaps,forthe officialproletariancapital of the world, industrial spaces like factories were not welcomed into the literary myth but exiled to its margins (either to the outskirts of the city, or to the Urals and the south). In Petersburg stories proper, the copy clerk Akaky Akakievich and his pre-industrial quill pen are recycled up through the twentieth century. Huge urban castle-fortresses, once the luxury residences of aristocrats and the royal family but now decaying, subdivided tenement houses, suggest anything but a modernizing “window to the West,” which was the ideal city of the Petrine Imperial Project. In this time-space, urban rumor is always frenetic. A Petersburg text foregrounds Gogol’s truth (which Dostoevsky then made a point of honor): that once uttered, any story will almost inevitably circulate, incorporate new and usually nastier elements, and become gossip or slander serving the interests or pathologies of its most recent speaker (the urge to re-speak out of one’s own perspective being universal). Such runaway, randomly multiplied words are arguably the collective hero of Bely’s
What is the Moscow Myth, and how does Bulgakov’s
184
energy of their revolutionary city, Moscow was a retreat. It looked back, not forward; inward, not beyond. After Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) introduced her fellow poet Osip Mandelstam to Moscow in 1916, taking him on tours of ancient churches and cemeteries and persuading him that Russian history was as worthy of his pen as ancient Greece or medieval France, Mandelstam’s cosmopolitan poetry broadened its scope to include Russian architecture, history, and fate.25 Tsvetaeva herself wrote a cycle of poems in spring and summer 1916, “Verses about Moscow,” that self-consciously juxtaposed the two cities as male–female, imperial–provincial, prideful–humiliated, the seat of power versus the ringing bells of faith. Its fifth poem declares:
But higher than you, tsars, are the bells.
As long as they thunder forth out of the sky-blue depths –
Moscow’s primacy is indisputable.
– And the entire forty times forty churches
Laughs at the arrogance of tsars!
In two brilliantly mocking poems from her 1931 cycle “Verses to Pushkin,” Tsvetaeva portrays her great predecessor’s relationship to Petersburg as that of rebellious poetic genius against the arrogant Tsar Nicholas I – “butcher, censor, poeticide.” Moscow was a messy city, not in official uniform, and thus her virtues were more than skin deep.
Inwardness, warmth, darkness, and moistness – the qualities of fertile soil – are central to the myth of Moscow as a regenerative site. It was in Mother Moscow (restored as Russia’s capital in 1918) that the first underground metro system was constructed in the Soviet state between 1931 and 1935, an enormous showcase task.26 To compensate for a scarcity of skilled technicians and a rushed timetable, the government resorted to prison labor bolstered by cults of heroic sacrifice and youthful enthusiasm. The “metro-builder” became a new national hero, an unprecedented type of frontiersman who would conquer the underworld much as arctic explorers conquered the North Pole and cosmonauts would later conquer outer space. The underground stations – at unheard-of depths of twenty to thirty meters, designed to double as bomb shelters – were to resemble palaces, radiant with light. Taming the damp, at times recalcitrant earth for the metro project became Moscow’s equivalent to taming the floodwaters of the Neva for the Petersburg Myth.
Moscow, first mentioned in the Kievan chronicles in 1147, is three times as old as Petersburg. But the myth feels somehow younger, more diffuse, greener, and – one might say – more promiscuous. Moscow’s huge city houses were old, wooden, walled in with shabby fences behind which their owners cultivated large vegetable gardens, after the manner of the Russian village. People lived not
in the streets, cafe´s, or paved squares, but at home. Unlike Petersburg, full of bureaucrats and military personnel, Moscow has been traditionally associated with tradesmen, families, and children.
A good introduction to the Moscow Myth was provided after the 1997 celebration of the city’s 850th birthday by the cultural historian Svetlana Boym, an eyewitness to the festivities.27 Boym claims that the myth of the city was consolidated during that jubilee year as never before in its history. In a series of mass spectacles aided by the latest technology, Russian tradition was reinvented alongside a nostalgic tribute to Soviet grand style. The tradition invoked was dual: Moscow as the Third Rome, and Moscow as the Big Village. In the first myth, initiated by a seventeenth-century monk more as a warning against abuse of power than as glorious prophecy, Moscow was declared the heir to both Christian Rome and Byzantium, an image of heavenly Jerusalem. She was to be the final Rome; “a fourth there shall not be.”
The “Big Village” myth was equally fraught. Moscow’s mayor since 1996, Yury Luzhkov (who, we recall from Chapter 3, sponsored the reconstruction of Christ the Savior Cathedral in the early 1990s) has a passion for monumen-talization. Not any monument will do, however: only those in accord with a healthy, regenerative, slightly childlike and na¨ıve vision of the city. Neither the imperial fac¸ades of Petersburg nor the unhappy post-communistwork of memory and grief is appropriate for the refurbished Moscow Myth. A serviceable common language was found, however, in the cozy, intimate characters from rural Russian folklore, in a mix of commercialism with the cartoon, church bells with pagan ritual. This sense of Moscow as both wonder tale and Christian terminus is central to Bulgakov’s
As prosewriterandplaywright,Bulgakov waspermeatedbyGogoliantexts. In 1924,he published thestory “Diaboliad,”where a Soviet versionofGogol’spoor clerk Akaky Akakievich goes mad after the manner of Dostoevsky’s Golyad-kin in
186
demonologyalready “Muscovized”– thatis, reorientedtowardfertility,botched reincarnations, and the production of biological as opposed to mechanical monsters. When body parts come off in a Gogol Petersburg tale (recall “The Nose”), they strut around the city as incarnated Rank, identifiable not by the face (if there is a face) but by the official shape of the button. When living bodies are rearranged in Bulgakov, they either proliferate out of control or – to the horror of all – become human beings.
Like Chekhov, Bulgakov was trained as a medical doctor. He understood and respected physiology. The first of his science fiction – or science-gone-wrong – tales,
Along the lines of these early Gogolian exercises, in his
from a congenial, authoritative distance, as might a responsible historian or an epic poet. Ethically,
Can there be a myth of the future? If so, how does Zamyatin’s OneState distribute, on either side of its Green Wall, the mythical essence of Russia’s two major cities? One way of reading the novel
The overwhelming binary remains city versus country, the urban factory versus the rural village or steppe. Inside OneState, the architectural principle of Petersburg reigns, albeit grossly exaggerated and essentialized: the triumph of the grid, square, box, the regimented “life in uniform” with its respect for reflecting surfaces, external rank, and standardized norms. It is one of Zamyatin’s masterful twists on the Petersburg tradition to represent the birth of D-503’s individuated consciousness (the birth of an “I” out of a “We,” recounted in entry 16) as the softening up of a mirror. Throughout the Gogol– Dostoevsky line, the anguish of a hero’s isolation, humiliation, and descent into madness is portrayed with the help of mirrors. These poor clerks gaze at themselves, are revolted by what they see reflected in that flat surface, deny that it exists, fantasize a substitute – and as a sign of their madness, a Double emerges. D-503 too resists his own reflection. He has been happy. But his soul flares up anyway. As the doctor explains to his bewildered patient (p. 87):
Take a flat plane, a surface, take this mirror, for instance. And the two of us are on this surface, see, and we squint our eyes against the sun . . . But just imagine now that some fire has softened this impenetrable surface and nothing skims along the top of it any longer – everything penetrates into it, inside, into that mirror world . . . The plane has taken on mass, body, the world, and it’s all inside the mirror, inside you . . . And, you understand, the cold mirror reflects, throws back, while this absorbs, and the trace left by everything lasts forever.
This is a Moscow moment, absorptive, dark, and (once begun) unstoppable, when some living impulse “takes root” inside. In Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, mirrors are flat and doubling – a sign of insanity. Inside OneState, a “softened” surface is criminalized. But it is a sign of budding sanity.
188
If inside OneState is the regimented city, then outside is the Big Village. This image, too, is exaggerated. Exiles from the city don’t need houses at all; homes have reverted to the trees out of which they were built. Separating the city of OneState from the forested wilderness is the glass Green Wall. The point of passage is the “Ancient House” – one of those ramshackle wooden homes tucked away down Moscow streets and alleys – presided over by a decrepit old woman who is all wrinkles and smiles, a Baba Yaga in league with the Mephi, able to control the boundary between life and death. Spiritually, I-330 is one of her daughters. Of course Zamyatin, a builder himself, is not advocating the Outside as anything like productive freedom. D-503 describes his visit beyond the Wall as a Dionysian nightmare: “It’s as if they set off a bomb in my head and all around, piled in a heap, are open mouths, wings, screams, leaves, words, stones...Icouldn’tmove, because I wasn’tstanding ona surface, but something disgustingly soft, yielding, alive, green, springy” (pp. 148–49).
The naked humanoids in this fantastic place are covered with glossy fur. They bask in the sun, drink wines, nibble fruit. Much in this wilderness partakes of the Moscow mythic cluster of values: fertility, an abundance of food and drink, natural rhythms and cycles, the sense that the ground underfoot is black earth, not stony pavement. Moscow is what survives when the utopian planners fail and the machines blow themselves up. Within her domain, life is supported at any cost and corporeal reality is never sacrificed for mathematics or a mere disembodied idea. At the last minute, I-330 arranges to slip O-90, pregnant illegally with D-503’s child, beyond the Wall to give birth. There, amid the moss and the screeching of birds, the child will be permitted to live.
Twenty-first century Russia has already worked huge changes on these city myths, which in time will register on the new literary canon of the post-communist era. In 2003, St. Petersburg celebrated its 300th birthday with a massive facelift of all architectural and sculptural monuments and an immersion in its canonical city texts. But partly for this reason, Petersburg, Pushkin’s celebrated “window to the West” and Russia’s City of the Revolution, feels more than ever like a museum, a nostalgic site. Revolution has become an old idea. What is new is where the money and markets now are, which is Moscow in its post-Village phase. This globalized “city of the future,” bristling with anti-Western rhetoric but oriented toward the capitalist corporation, scrubbed clean of its most painful historical events or packaging them as “tours” and theme parks, is planning an ambitious International Business Center, “Moskva-City,” of glass skyscrapers and gleaming pedestrian bridges to the west and southwest of the historic center.29 With the razing of the gargantuan Rossiya hotel, a monolith from the Soviet 1960s that overlooked St. Basil’s Cathedral, the
Kremlin itself will be incorporated into a vast, slick new mall with majestic vistas, porticoes, and arcaded fac¸ades. The plans indicate no turrets or onion domes.30 It remains to be seen if any aspects of the older, more organic and black-soil traditions of the Moscow Myth can survive this onslaught of high technology and commercialization.
These single-city novels by Bely, Zamyatin, and Bulgakov, together with the loosely defined urban myths generated by each, provide a bridge to our next chapter, which will cover some of the same years (1920s–50s) from the perspective of a more politically approved ideology, socialist realism. In early Leninist terminology, the geographical opposition of “city” (proletariat) versus “countryside” (peasant) was often expressed in terms of “consciousness” versus “spontaneity.” Consciousness in this Marxist sense meant not individual creativity, inspiration, or (as it often did for Dostoevsky) the freedom of personal will and the responsibility of choice, but was applied more narrowly, to mean an awareness of the dialectical shape of history and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Opposedtothis party-mindedawarenesswas “spontaneity”:people reacting anarchically, instinctively, out of their immediate anger or blind need, peasants burning manor houses or peasant-soldier recruits deserting the Imperialist War of 1914–17, voting for peace with their feet. Both energies, Lenin knew, were essential for revolution. But which energy would control and exploit the other? Hundreds of early Bolshevik-era novels were constructed around this dichotomy. Many believed that a symbiotic relation between these two forces was possible, at the level of the individual body as well as the body politic.
Russian Futurists, Constructivists, Cosmists, Nietzschean god-builders, and other immensely creativerevolutionaryvisionaries desiredtoturn thebody into something healthy, expressive, coordinated, and free.31 The Bolshevik 1920s were an era of genuine lyricism about the possibility of the machine to liberate human labor and everyday life, not into inhuman regimentation or totalitarianism but into a kind of disciplined rhythmic dance. The enemy was not the Crystal Palace or OneState, which no one had ever seen, but the chaotic filthy sweatshop and the germ-laden tenement, which were everywhere.32 Ready to sweep the old factory and slum away were the ideals of efficiency, hygiene, and technological beauty.Inthe aesthetic sphere, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) trained his acting company in “biomechanics,” a course in athletics and bodily self-discipline that incorporated eurhythmics, labor-efficiency studies, stylized use of gesture, and even the reflexology of Pavlov’s laboratories toward the ideal of a standardized, externalized, and thus democratized expression of emotion. In the 1930s, this theatricalization of the body would be regimented into sports parades, mass physical culture extravaganzas, and military exercises.
190
The relationship between Modernist aesthetics and the most destructive totalitarian regimes of twentieth-century Europe – Fascism and Stalinism – has long been in dispute. On the Russian front, one transition can be found in the closing sentences of Leon Trotsky’s
Then Trotsky ends his treatise on a vision so mystically romantic that it recalls an utterance from Zamyatin’s D-503 in his most true-believing phase, before the birth of his doubting soul. “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent . . . to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman,” Trotsky wrote (p. 256):
Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process . . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise.
Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and murdered in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940. But the utopian sentiments expressed in those final lines continued to inspire, guide, and torment writers throughout the Stalinist years.
The Stalin years: socialist realism, anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness
It is always difficult to reconstruct the appeal or the relevance of a losing side. All that remains are the products, without the living, electrifying myths or manipulated audiences that sustained them. The Stalinist period of the Russian literary tradition (1928–53) is one such massively discredited enterprise. Politically, economically, militarily, culturally, the Soviet Union was a “command state”: governed by decrees from above and profoundly unliberal in its professed ideals.
This chapter limits itself to the literary side of the Stalinist experiment. Appalling violence, waste, caprice and lies disfigured those years, but boldness and a thrilling enthusiasm illuminated them as well. We tend to forget how very bad Western capitalism looked in the 1930s and 1940s, with its worldwide depression, unchecked military aggression, abominable race relations – and thus how courageous and appealing many found the Soviet insistence on an entirely new basis for literary and political culture, a fresh slate of heroes
191
192
and plots. Our starting point will be 1934, the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers. That Congress declared the doctrine of “socialist realism,” formulated two years earlier, as the official (and sole) successor to the Russian literary tradition as we have presented it so far in this book. In his opening speech, the recently repatriated Maksim Gorky, president of the Writers’ Union, surveyed that tradition and found it seriously flawed, especially in two widespread nineteenth-century movements he proceeded to classify as unac-ceptably bourgeois: “the old romanticism” and “critical realism.” To help us grasp Gorky’s plea for a clean literary slate for Russia, and to better orient us in the resulting ideological terrain, we must first clear away two enduring Western misconceptions – two bad binary oppositions – about artistic creativity in the Stalinist period.
First is the familiar opposition of “collaborator” versus “martyr.” This convenient yet dysfunctional Cold War binary divides up the residents of a totalitarian society into two camps: conformists or dissidents, the triumphantly self-righteous or the suffering victim – which was itself a Romantic cliche´ that Gorky deplored. Most people, including artists, are neither. They simply survive, balancing daily the benefits and costs of being useful, “normal” citizens in their society. This means taking a stand at some points, lying low at others, and constantly devising compromises to protect one’s comfort, dignity, work, and family. Moreover, during these years the collaborator often
The second bad or inadequate binary pits “free” against “unfree” art. Liberal or open societies usually insist on the right of creative artists to be political or apolitical as it suits them. In this regard, Stalinism grotesquely narrowed the sphere of the private: every personal act was potentially political. This politicized dimension was not necessarily punitive or imposed. Recent work on
Stalin-era diaries suggests that “forging an identity,” for a young Soviet citizen, was not the individualizing process familiar in the West (or in Tolstoy), with its goal of a unique voice free from societal constraint. More likely it was the reverse, a striving for the transcendence of the personal: “a Communist should make himself permanently at home in a heroic universe by means of uninterrupted, sustained ideological thinking and acting” and should understand failure as a matter of one’s “personal deviations from a mandated norm.”1 This model recalls the saint’s life, which a human subject internalizes and “grows into” as into an ideal prototype. Such self-fashioning complemented a more general shift toward active monitoring of creative acts. To the negative censorship familiar from tsarist Russia (deleting what could
The Soviet state had another carrot, however, which in the minds of many creative artists worked to offset the constant intimidation, control of culture by thugs and hacks, and silencing of the disobedient. This was the fact that the state and Party were committed to sponsoring serious art - and, at the same time, to ensuring that a large spectrum of artistic media and genres were considered “serious.” As part of the Leninist cultural revolution of the early 1920s, lavishly financed outreach programs in the popular arts reached mass audiences. Factory workers were organized into brigades and bussed to theatre performances; crews of writers and musicians were dispatched to factories to explain operatic plots and teach workers how to write poetry. Such aggressively proletarian programs were discontinued in the 1930s. By that time artists no longer explained their craft; their craft was explained to them by censorship and repertory boards. But traces of this cultural populism remained. Musical theatre and film were valued as moral education, not only as entertainment, and the nation’s most gifted artists produced magnificent scenarios, propaganda canvases, and musical scores on commission.
As state violence became more capricious and widespread in the upper ruling circles, public campaigns intensified for “culturedness”
194
for dealing with the functional necessity of intercourse. A brisk public debate developed over the best ways to avoid sexual arousal (“Never drink alcohol . . . Upon waking, stand up at once . . . Urinate before going to bed . . . Flirtation, courtship and coquetry should not enter into sexual relations . . . There should be no jealousy”).2 In 1927–28, as part of this high-profile debate, Vsevolod Meyerhold defended to Party skeptics his staging of Sergei Tretyakov’s play
With this agenda in the moral and physiological sphere, conflicts of state interest were inevitable. Some high-ranking Bolsheviks, who promoted a healthy and harmonious body for the New Soviet Man, advocated the prohibition of all alcohol – but in 1927 Stalin (following his tsarist predecessors) instituted a state monopoly on vodka, justifying it as an indispensable revenue source for Russia’s industrialization.3 These clean-living campaigns might strike us now as na¨ıvely high-minded, but such priorities appealed powerfully to many artists, as much for Tolstoyan reasons (subduing our “animal” side) as for political ones. Many took pride in the fact that in communist Russia, “healthy art for the people” was not obliged to cater to a Hollywood market mentality aimed at pleasing the crowd at any price, nor (at the other extreme) to an arrogantly isolated, incomprehensible avant-garde. Indeed if need be the tastes of both elite and mass audiences could be ignored, since the official success or failure of a work was judged “scientifically,” before its publication or performance, by Party committees. Serious art in Russia meant serious social engagement toward a positive goal, determined in a collectively “conscious” – not an independently “spontaneous” – manner. Consciousness, once achieved, was always unified, goal-directed, and stable: a second-order simplicity.
Collaborator versus dissident, free versus unfree: such categories are too rigid to be useful. From the perspective of Russia’s most gifted creators, it is possible that the maximally criminal aspect of Stalinist cultural policy might turn out to be not its cruelty, wastefulness, utopian or dictated aspects – although those qualities certainly applied – but the fact that it was so arbitrary and discontinuous. Party-line shifts were abrupt, unpredictable, justified by coded or meaningless phrases. Even those who wanted to cooperate (a far more compassionate verb than the sinister “collaborate”) could never be sure how to go about it. This arbitrariness – defined here as a demand that does not need to justify itself – is called in Russian
result (at best) is indifference, a quick default to irony, loss of creative initiative, and at worst, paralyzing fear.
Faced with this reality, some writers (and the editors and publishers who vetted their work) began to practice “the genre of silence” – a phrase coined by Isaak Babel in self-defense at the 1934 Writers’ Congress. During the most dangerous periods, the entire culture-producing apparatus could grind to a halt. In more flexible years, Babel and other great artists (among them Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak) worked in literary fields less ideologically regimented than creative writing: translation, adaptations for stage, screenplays, literary scholarship or textology, literature for children. In a bureaucracy this vast, it was easy not to know precisely how one fit in to the “system,” or why one was cast out. Why was Pasternak not arrested in 1938–40? (a miracle). Was some lower-level rival, not the Party or party line, responsible for denouncing Shostakovich’s work in 1936? (he thought so). Some creative artists, of course, were unwaveringly proud to be part of the social command. But artists of the highest talent could not be put repeatedly in a position where they trusted neither the inner rules that governed their own creative imagination, nor the outer rules that governed the society of which they were a part.
Massive literacy campaigns, begun in the early 1920s, created millions of new readers, both among the rural population of European Russia and (in newly devised alphabets) among those peoples or tribes in Siberia that previously had no written language. Approved authors and books had unimaginably large print runs. Newly re-canonized and cleansed, classic Russian writers flooded the country in millions of copies, especially during their centennials (Tolstoy in 1928, Pushkin in 1937). Thus cultural expansion and cultural contraction occurred together. Alongside the gradual curtailment of foreign travel for ordinary citizens came the disappearance of foreign (European) language instruction in the schools. Only specialists received this training; the ordinary Russian reader encountered the outside world through carefully controlled translations. Russian high culture – which for two hundred years, through all degrees and severities of censorship, had been among the most polyglot in Europe – became officially monolingual. This narrowing, in conjunction with the closing down of churches and religious education, resulted in the new Soviet reader’s unprecedented reliance on the state and Party for intellectual and spiritual guidance.
Throughout the 1920s, a profusion of literary groups competed for readers. For most of them, the devastated economy and paper shortage ruled out anything like the “thick journal” of nineteenth-century fame, but relations between these groups were nevertheless articulate, shrill, and saturated with ideology. Proletkult (“Proletarian Culture”) was founded during the Civil War, on the
196
slogans of class struggle. In 1923 the Futurist-inspired LEF (“Left Front of Literature”) was attacked by the more militant “On Guard” and “October” groups, which had no patience with formally innovative poetry even when it supported the Bolshevik cause. Peasant writers and proletarian writers each had their own national organizations. Some insisted on the author’s right to be political in an individually chosen way (excluding, of course, the option of opposition to Bolshevik rule); Trotsky labeled these non-aligned but non-hostile writers
By the mid-1920s, a certain “normalization” had set in. One index of stability was Maksim Gorky’s decision in 1927 to return to Russia from Sorrento, Italy, after seven years of self-imposed exile. Such returns into the lap of Stalinism would be repeated by other great Russian creative artists, including the composer Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 and the poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1939. A world-famous and well-traveled writer before the Revolution, Gorky had exiled himself once before, 1906–13, to the Italian island of Capri. There he befriended Lenin and other visionary revolutionaries. But his relations with Lenin became tense, and at times bitter, during the Revolution, especially over repressions of the cultural elite. By temperament Gorky was more a revolutionary humanist than a Bolshevik (he was not a Party member). His humanitarian activity on behalf of threatened writers embarrassed the more iron-fisted of the Bolsheviks. But Gorky, an autodidact from a working-class family with no formal schooling after the age of eleven (and with no “suspicious” foreign languages at all despite his several sojourns abroad), had achieved the Soviet-era equivalent of the status that Count Leo Tolstoy enjoyed under the Old Regime. Ties with Lenin, together with his fame and reputation for moral goodness, made him a difficult man to silence. Lenin himself pressed a second voluntary exile on Gorky in 1921, “for reasons of his health.”
The regime trumpeted Gorky’s return as a political and cultural triumph, rewarding him with fabulous gifts. He received a former millionaire’s mansion as his Moscow residence, an estate in the Crimea, an unlimited bank account (although Gorky cared little about money), and the honor of having towns, streets, schools and factories namedafterhim while he wasstillalive. Atthe same time, police surveillance over Gorky (sustained at modest levels during the exile years through members of his own household) significantly increased. Surely Gorky’s monolinguality heightened his willingness to return; unlike the quatra-lingual Prokofiev or Tsvetaeva, Gorky carried Russia within him wherever he was and could make for himself no other verbal home. It seems that he accepted
the chairmanship of the Writers’ Union in 1932 with the intent of saving lives, as he had done in 1919–21. But deeper affinities to emerging Stalinist norms must have played a role as well: his unquenchable idealism, his intolerance for truths that depress and deplete, and his preference for hope (which Gorky saw as a form of creativity) over the harmful facts of the present.
The stabilization of literary politics in the mid-1920s turned out to be more apparentthan real: the spectrumwas shifting. One early harbinger of thechange had been the so-called “philosophers’ steamship” in 1922, the deportation to Western Europe of Russia’s prominent idealist philosophers and religious thinkers (with no right of return). This gifted group lent prestige and visibility to the Russian emigration until the end of World War II. Philosophy permitted to remain active on Soviet soil increasingly came to share the tenets of dialectical materialism – or, as it was popularly known, “diamat.” This world-view became part of the (willing or unwilling) mental equipment of all Soviet citizens, who were required to take academic courses in the discipline at all levels of their education. Dialectical materialism could be resisted, amended, and parodied (as Bulgakov does brilliantly on several levels in his novel
Dialectical materialism might be laid out simply as follows. All reality, in its essence, is material. Matter is objective and primary. But matter is not
198
Dialectical materialism has other aspects less compatible with a religious worldview, however. Although all material nature forms an interconnected whole, there is nothing absolute or eternal in that whole. Development is not the result of a uniform evolutionary process but is punctuated with periods of cataclysm: qualitatively different, revolutionary change. All change is the result of a conflict between opposing tendencies, which in principle can be resolved temporarily in a new synthesis. During the Stalinist years, what it means to know, act, and succeed within the confines of such a doctrine had a profound effect on the psychological motivation of literary heroes, as well as on the shape of the plot in which they moved.
What was socialist realism?
In April 1932, by official decree, all independent writers’ organizations were dissolved and replaced by a single Union of Soviet Writers. The word “union” [
Stalin called Soviet writers “engineers of the soul.” To be recognized as a writer – and thus to be officially employed (a non-trivial obligation in a state with anti-parasite laws) – one had to do more than write and submit one’s work. One had to be a member of the Union. Since the Writers’ Union had a financial division (
literary policy, a vital part of Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan (1933–37) that was to enact Soviet Russia’s official transition to a classless society. The ideological charge to writers was “socialist realism,” defined in the statutes as “demanding of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development.”
The weirdly abstract nature of that definition was first explicated for a Western audience in 1959, by an insider, Andrei Sinyavsky – that same writer who, as an e´migre´ two decades later, would publish his Sorbonne lectures on Ivan the Fool. In his essay “What Is Socialist Realism,” published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky explained that the doctrine seems odd to outsiders because the concept of “revolutionary development” has nothing to do with any visible or palpable reality. The “socialist realist” writer is neither realist in the old way – he does not attempt to describe “what exists,” as did Tolstoy or Chekhov – nor is he socialist in an overtly political fashion, oriented toward today’s struggles. This new type of writer hardly sees the present. What
Sinyavsky’s tone in this 1959 essay is caustically provocative, as befits a Purpose that had grown decrepit and cynical over a quarter century. But Sinyavsky faithfully repeats many of the points Gorky made in 1934, even though Gorky uses the phrase “socialist realist” only once. For its time and place, Gorky’s speech was astonishingly cosmopolitan. Much of it is devoted to the history of world literature, and how Soviet Russia might enrich that history by overhauling its repertory of heroes and plots. We consider only two of his most influential positions: his blistering critique of “bourgeois literature,” and his hopes for a new Russian alternative to it.
Throughout his 1934 speech, after the manner of so many Russian critics from Belinsky to Bakhtin, Gorky projects onto the world at large what are essentially native Russian values: traditional folk worldviews, prejudices against mercantile activity, Russified Marxist truisms. He begins by confirming that labor, the spoken word (incantations, spells), and a “materialist mode of thought” lay at the base of all primitive cultures.6 He then insists that “when
200
the history of culture is written by Marxists, we shall see that
What should the new Soviet person strive to see? This person should not dwell on the dark or perverse sides of human nature. Those are “survivals,” relics, reality not in its “revolutionary development” but reality stuck motionless somewhere far back on the path. Access to the “truthful, historically concrete representation of reality” depends on one’s Party-disciplined eye picking out the proper details on which to focus, and ascertaining where, on the ladderto the future, they belong. Truth in this context might be compared to an energy field surrounding and infusing the subject; immersed in the proper class or collective milieu, any person could become “conscious” and begin to see. Under the new regime, literature was no longer primarily a record of self-expression, and not even “a form of passive ideological reflection, but an active, ‘healthy,’ controlled ideological instrument, not a mirror any more but a weapon.”7 History could be hastened along by attitude alone, an energy resource that never runs out -even when a population is devastated by every conceivable type of war, famine, economic collapse, personal loss, and grief.
Four socialist realist principles eventually governed what a conscious subject, inside and outside the fictional text, is privileged to see.8
cultural diversity (within, of course, a framework of ideological uniformity). In practice this meant that folk songs, legends, colorful costumes and superstitions, local peasant and tribal rituals were allowed their own expression, even their own national language, and could coexist alongside the more “consciously” proletarian plots of hydroelectric dams, cement factories, and metros.But likehistorical factsinsideapatriotichistoryplayduring theRoman-tic era, “authenticity” here was ornamental, sentimental, pre-packaged, and essentially powerless.
The third principle in this quartet, class-mindedness, became less important after 1936, when the new Soviet Constitution declared that the USSR had become a classless society and thus all class antagonism was officially ended. Such conflictlessness made it difficult for fiction writers to find, from within the domestic population, villains, rogues, or any negative principles out of which to construct plots. A new genre appeared: the “optimistic tragedy.” This manic optimism affected writers personally as well as creatively. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958), perhaps the greatest prose satirist of the 1920s and like so many comics and clowns a clinical depressive, wondered why, if reality could be manipulated and human bodies and natures reforged through attitude alone, he was such a failure at it. In the 1930s, Zoshchenko began writing deeply auto-therapeutic texts, such as
Socialist realism, like every other party line in Stalinist Russia, was never a fixed formula, and certainly not in the 1930s. En route to cleansing Russia of her superfluous heroes and depraved plots, quite a bit of humor and self-criticism remained. Language satire was one vital site for it. Much as eighteenth-century playwrights, including the Empress Catherine II herself, had satirized awkward and ill-learned Frenchifying among the upwardly mobile rural gentry, so the garbled Soviet-speak of the new, barely literate peasants-turned-officials, full of acronyms and poorly digested Bolshevik slogans, was ridiculed by masters of oral narrative or
202
and thus potentially sympathetic human face – is naturally individualizing. The right to integrate such disoriented language into art was an indispensable safety valve in a society that otherwise demanded ever more conformity and obedience.
Satire and criticism were tolerated, even welcomed, if the target of the satire was a corrupt official or a “NEPman,” one of the small entrepreneurs who flourished between 1921 and 1927. (Bulgakov’s “Adventures of Chichikov” from the mid-1920s follows this approved formula.) The vast expansion of government bureaucracy had provided many berths for swindlers; both state and reader benefited by having this fact made public. The most beloved hero in this vein, however, was thoroughly unruly and seemingly of no benefit to anyone but himself. This was the con man and imposter Ostap Bender, heir to Gogol’s Khlestakov, created by a pair of comic journalist-novelists known by their pen names Ilf and Petrov (Ilya Fainzelberg, 1897–1937 / Evgeny Kataev, 1903–42). They published two famous novels about this trickster,
Outright mockery of the heroic task of socialist construction was not permissible. If authors desired to provide an alternative or ambivalent perspective on the state-building or state-defending events of the 1930s and 1940s, the literary means had to be indirect. The three exemplary prose works for this chapter, two novels and one play, were selected with this problem in mind. The basic plotline of each (parodied to various degrees) reflects the simplified types and roles canonical for the era. A positive, politically conscious hero who furthers the Purpose is confronted by an “enemy” – which can be either a person or a concept, usually faceless, always heartless. A third indispensable actor is the “masses”: hungry, responsive, confused, in need of leadership and an “idea.” This cast of characters invariably seems flattened and two-dimensional when compared with the peaks of nineteenth-century psychological prose. Its “simplified” quality can inspire us, irritate us, amuse us or depress us, depending on the genre in which the characters are embedded and the attitude we bring to the Purpose being pursued.
Only one of our three exemplars is canonically socialist realist. The other two hover around the periphery of that doctrine, build off its needs, mouth its words, envy or parody its self-confidence, and expose its impossible pretensions. Fyodor Gladkov’s
(Gorky’s 1906
Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958), a self-made writer from a family of poor Old Believerpeasants,became aMarxistearlyin life andwashelpedbyGorky toward aliterary career. “Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoyintoxicatedme,” Gladkov wrote in an autobiographical note. “Pushkin and Gogol left me cold.”11
Gladkov’s fondness for Dostoevsky (and his indifference to Pushkin) leaves its trace in the extraordinarily lush hyperbole of his prose and its heightened emotional aura. His world is one of uninterrupted crisis time and precarious threshold space. Characters are constantly grinding their teeth, clenching their fists, gasping, frothing, flailing their arms. Maximalism is the norm. When Gleb recruits the old-regime engineer Kleist to the factory’s cause, he promises
204
him 5,000 workmen, all the material he wants, his word of honor to shoot any saboteurs on the spot, if only he will complete a task that should take a month within four days (p. 116). Kleist is skeptical at first, but then won over. “Heroism means doing the impossible,” Gleb remarks to his female comrade Polya (p. 55), who tosses her curly head in agreement – in this novel, men and women flirt via such phrases. Gladkov taps into Nature’s wanton energy as well, with nourishing and intoxicating metaphors that we can almost taste, as in the opening lines of the novel: “Behind the roofs and angles of the factory the sea foamed like boiling milk in the flashing sunlight. And the air, between the mountains and the sea, was fiery and lustrous as wine” (p. 1).
The ruined factory is always at the center of our vision. Inside this structure, however, the production of cement is intermittent at best. Production starts up halfway through the novel but is immediately interrupted by armed attacks from anti-Bolshevik forces in the surrounding mountains (tsarist Whites, anarchist-peasant Greens, hostile Cossacks). Mostly the factory is the site of party meetings. Unlike the “boiling milk of the sea” and the lustrous wine-like open air, indoors everything is tobacco smoke, screaming, tramping, rush, filth. Notwithstanding this local ecology, however, Gladkov’s novel introduces a new chord in the Russian literary canon: the positive presentation of bureaucratic work. To be sure, bureaucrats can always ossify into self-serving scoundrels, and Gleb is forever threatening to line them up and shoot them. The image of the bullying (and lecherous) Party boss was censored variously in different editions of the novel. But overall, Gladkov presents the stern, leather-jacketed, bronze-faced committee chairmen and security police, who answer to “higher organs” and authorize inhumanly cruel measures, as necessary, positive repositories of consciousness.
Thus the novel
This new positive role for committee work went hand in hand with an enhanced role for the secular book. In a novel otherwise obsessively taken up with deeds and deadlines (“do it on time or be shot”), the seemingly passive
act of reading is an important marker of virtue for Dasha, the novel’s most positive heroine. Amid disintegrating households, ailing children, and ripening treason, she spends hours at her undusted desk, struggling to grasp the truths contained in a Marxist-Leninist textbook. The lessons are learned. Early in the novel, soon after Gleb’s return, the couple visits their daughter Nyurka in the children’s home. When the matron – whom Dasha suspects of stealing from the children – remarks that “Your Nyurochka is such a lovely little girl,” Dasha tenses up: Stop that, she says, “they’re all equal here, and they all ought to be lovely” (p. 39). While Gleb is away at party headquarters and Dasha is otherwise occupied, Nyurka dies from malnourishment; she “flickers out” in the children’s home. Her mother, we are told, is in anguish but steels herself to conceal it from others. Never do we see that she regrets her decision to abandon her present child for the sake of the equitable flourishing of future life.
Gleb has an equally tensed moment, but for him it is formative. He has been home only a few days and is campaigning to be elected head of the Factory Committee. His most persuasive qualifications are his Civil War stigmata. He has looked death in the face and – he tells the meeting – “I’m as tough as Koshchey the Deathless” (p. 67). Do you need proof? He tears off his tunic and shirt. By the light of the oil-lamp (recalling the vessels placed before holy icons) the assembled voters see: wherever he touches his chest, side, and neck, “purple, pallid scars” show forth. “ ‘Shall I take down my trousers?’ ” he then shouts. “ ‘I’m wearing the same sort of decorations lower down . . . Choose me for this job!’ ” None of the workers dares to approach Gleb. “They looked at his naked body, all knotted and scarred. Dismayed and shocked by his words, they steamed with sweat and were silent, glued to their seats” (p. 68).
Significantly, Gleb’s war wounds are all on the surface. He seems to have suffered no lasting internal damage, and this anatomical diagnosis has some metaphorical weight. Being wounded did not cause Gleb to doubt, but only hardened his resolve. The crisis time, threshold tension, and theatrical bodily display in this novel recall a scene out of Dostoevsky – minus, of course, the genius, richness of ideas, and unreliable or ironic narrator – but in the Dostoevskian novel, crucifixion and resurrection imagery must always serve the inside of the person, not the surface. The depthlessness in socialist realist characters cannot ultimately be explained by the techniques of the psychological novel. They require a different framework, perhaps one more akin to the simpler forms of epic.
Boris Gasparov has put forth the following hypothesis to explain the socialist realist innovation in character construction.13 The classic psychological novel is built on continuity. Events in it are internalized, remembered, brooded over, recovered in a crooked way, partially confronted or evaded. The illusion of
206
depth in each character derives from this sense of uninterrupted development combined with inner incompleteness – for at any given moment, the hero is multidirectional. Doubts coexist with convictions. The Modernist novel, in contrast, overtly experiments with
There is also a Tolstoyan moment in the closing scene of the final chapter, titled “A Thrust into the Future” – Tolstoyan not in style, but in idea. The factory is again working. The dedication ceremony is under way, brass bands playing, the speaker’s platform vibrating, Gleb is “pale and glazed,” his face convulsed. Gleb does manage to utter some slogans, but the novel ends entirely focused on the mute mass deed. As deeds go, a cement factory would hardly have interested the sage of Yasnaya Polyana – although he would have approved the transcendence of sexual love and the escape from the trap of the biological family. But the reopening of the factory is
with these priorities. It is significant that throughout the Stalinist period, the quest for a “Red Tolstoy” continued. Appropriately trimmed and packaged, his legacy was not incompatible with many versions of socialist realism. A “Red Dostoevsky” or “Red Chekhov” is inconceivable.
With its lack of irony and its advocacy of a straightforward Purpose, socialist realism (if judged by Enlightenment criteria) seems to infantilize its participants. For skeptics, this is one reason why children’s literature enjoyed such high status under communism. But more substantial reasons exist for the high priority placed on writing fiction for the young. Intense interest in the proper upbringing of the “New Soviet Child” (Gorky founded the first post-revolutionary magazine for children in 1919) reinforced Russia’s distinguished research record in developmental child psychology. Writing for children attracted brilliant literary talents who were also shrewd child psychologists – most notably the poets Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) and Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969), both prote´ge´s of Gorky – as well as avant-garde poets and prose writers interested in Modernist, Formalist techniques of “estrangement.” But children’s literature was always ahaven.The “world from theview of thechild”is an ancient mode of protest against servility and convention, from the Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to the response of the childish Natasha Rostova to an opera performance in
Like Nikolai Gogol, Evgeny Shvarts (1896–1958), son of a provincial doctor, was active in amateur theatricals asa child and displayed a great gift of mimicry. In the early 1920s, Shvarts arrived in post-Civil War Petrograd, where he associated with Surrealist, Absurdist, and Futurist poets; by the end of the decade he was working for children’s literary magazines and the Leningrad Children’s Theatre.In 1933 he was invited by the Experimental Workshop of the Leningrad Music Hall to create a “Soviet fairy tale.”15 His first attempt, a satire against obstructionist bureaucrats, already exhibited his trademark deadpan tone. His basic recipe mixed everyday routine with the fantastic; concretely realizing metaphors (the bureaucrat really
Shvarts had a talent for performing the brief, incongruous, manic-dramatic anecdote. He was famous for his jingles and madcap improvisations (a nervous
208
tremor in his hands made it impossible for him to speak from notes). He managed to ply his trade throughout the worst Stalinist years. The fairy-tale format provided optimism without the ambitious bombast of the production novel; moreover, since villains were essential to the folk tale, evil could be portrayed close up even after class antagonism had been formally dissolved by the 1936 Constitution. Shvarts was not repressed, but his best work – a dozen plays in all – either never made it to opening night, or else played once and then were abruptly withdrawn. Only posthumously did his plays enter permanent repertory.
The depthless and detached narration of the folkteller’s art would seem to work against its successful dramatization. But Shvarts, at home in the avant-garde from his early Petrogradyears, overcomes this handicap by estranging the fairy tale from itself – making it, in its dramatic form, “self-aware.” Characters comment to one another on theirown fixed function in the plot, which provides them with the security of distance and a certain solace. The most comic and most politicized of Shvarts’s plays to speak out in this way is his 1943 classic,
Lancelot is unimpressed by the Dragon’s argument. After all, most of the people he liberates, in story after story and kingdom after kingdom, advise him against such heroics. His task is not only to save the maiden but to wake up the bewitched, collaborating town, to bring it to new consciousness, however
quixotic – or holy-foolish – the gesture. Shvarts’s characters are cool and flat, surprised at nothing, like “real” fairy-tale folk. Lancelot courts Elsa as Bulat the Brave courted Vasilisa for the Tsarevich: matter of factly, without exaggerated desire or anxiety. He reminds her that neither of them has much freedom within the genre; he has to fight the Dragon, she will have to love him for it. The “animal tale” is also present in this play – a genre whose task is to expose specifically human folly. A plain-speaking, truth-telling cat, disgusted at the town’s cowardice, teams up with a donkey serving a group of craftsmen with
The Mayor and his son Heinrich reproach Lancelot. Call off this challenge, don’t fret our dear old Drag, things were quiet here and the Dragon was busy purging our enemies, so who invited you? They bribe Lancelot to withdraw. But the conventions must be observed; “professional villains and heroes” have their obligations, the battle in the sky must begin. Although Lancelot is mortally wounded, he lops off all three of the Dragon’s heads. The town takes note. The Mayor, startled, commands the townspeople not to believe their own eyes but only the official communique´. Eyewitnesses can be mistaken until the course of history is properly understood.
Act III, set one year later, pits the innocence of the fairy tale, with its mandatory transformations and happy ending, against more acerbic types of folk-tale narrative: animal tales and tales of everyday life. In the last two, we recall, the most sinister path is usually the most sensible, and nothing need work out for the heroes at all. Which type of folk tale will this turn out to be? The Mayor is now President, Heinrich is Mayor, and history has been rewritten. It is now officially the President who killed the Dragon – that’s his new epithet, Dragon-Slayer – and all his enemies are in prison. He is about to marry Elsa. But something has changed. The letter “L” keeps turning up on walls. The animals and fish can’t be forced to talk. Elsa’s father can’t be bribed with a 153-room apartment with a view. And Elsa, during the wedding ceremony, says “no.” The gathered functionaries discount her errant remark, but at that moment Lancelot materializes, greets the crowd, and marches the villains off to prison. The President and his Mayor son make feeble excuses but do not resist. Every rogue and villain in this play knows who he is. Then the returning hero surveys the townsfolk and announces to his Elsa that they must work to “kill the dragon in each of them” – tedious yet necessary work, he says, “more fine-grained than embroidery.” As in Pushkin’s historical romance
210
saved at the last minute by a miracle that no one has any right to expect. But mercifully the genre requires it.
In the final act, Elsa’s father, who for the first time in his life has just resisted a bribe and thus ceased (for the moment) to collaborate, says to the President: “Stop tormenting us. I’ve learned how to think, and that is tormenting enough.” The moment is stunning. Shvarts’s play builds on a long line of Russian fictions that portray the breaking-out of an individual consciousness from the benumbed or terrorized collective, often unwillingly, sometimes as a fool, sometimes as a martyr and a hero – but invariably as a person who is “learning to think.” Always there is a wound and a sense of loss. We recall D-503 from Zamyatin’s
himself” separate, since (he persuades himself)
The discomfort over Shvarts continued into the post-Stalinist and then post-communist periods. Akimov’s Comedy Theatre in Moscow revived
Andrei Platonov and suspension
Shvarts was not a dissident. But his techniques of “estrangement,” his mastery of folk narration, and his belief in the correctives of a child’s quick and healthy wit were effective responses to rigid party-mindedness. Many such strategies were devised by survivors whose lives and works fell somewhere between the extremes of “collaborator” and “martyr.” Among great writers in
212
this category, the life and works of Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) are the most haunting.
Platonov departs from our other exemplary writers in having no special city. He is associated with open spaces: wilderness, steppe, desert, tumbleweed, the wandering of lost people or tribes through exotic Siberian and Asian-Russian locales. Activityinthatwide-open space iscontemplativeratherthan aggressive; it does not know the frenetic pace of the production or construction novel. But Platonov was not a “peasant writer” with nostalgia for the pre-industrial village or patriarchal homestead – not, in other words, like Russia’s most famous twentieth-century Slavophile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Platonov was part of the new Russia. He knew machines and admired them. In his world, however, the human body is the furthest possible thing from a machine.
Born in the south of Russia into a poor metalworker’s family, Platonov, the eldest son, trained as a metalworker and hired himself out to build electric stations. After the Revolution he found work as a specialist in land reclamation in central Russia, where he gained first-hand knowledge of the terrible famine in rural areas during the early 1920s. In the mid-thirties, after Stalin’s savage drive to collectivize the peasantry, he made a trip to Turkmenistan in Soviet Central Asia, where the poverty, drought, and suffering had yet to find its chronicler. Throughout these years he wrote steadily: ten novellas, a hundred stories, four plays, six film scenarios, and dozens of critical articles.
Platonov began publishing seriously in 1927, although in small editions. His heroes and plots were out of step with the time: dreamers and drop-outs at grandiose but unrealized construction projects. When, in 1931, Stalin happened to read a short story of Platonov’s that struck him as sympathetic to the rich peasants (called kulaks or “fists”) then being deprived of their lands and goods, the author found himself almost unemployable. In 1938, his only son, age fifteen, was charged with counter-revolutionary conspiracy and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in a far northern camp. Through the intervention of Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84), Party-approved author of
the first and greatest philosophical commentary on the structure, language, energy level, and party-mindedness of Gladkov’s 1925 production novel
The production of cement, like the destruction of the fascist enemy, is a straightforward material task. Platonov’s position on “matter” is far more potent and strange. Socialist realist works presume that the material world can be shaped for the better. There will always be sabotage, fresh destruction, violence, waste, decay, natural disasters –
Platonov’s two great themes are the persistence of inert matter and the weariness of the working body. In
214
girl, the mascot and muse of the builders. They bury her deep down in the pit, almost in solid rock, so the earth can no longer harm her.
In Chapter 11 of
The death of Nyurka, the Chumalovs’ daughter, works another variant on the same task, that of “steeling” the body and controlling emotions. Part of
the “revolutionary romanticism” of Gladkov’s novel lies in its patches of very old-style sentimental pathos. Nyurka’s life is “flickering out.” Every morning and evening Dasha stops by to see her, but “the child had become all bones, and the skin on her face was yellow and rumpled likean old woman’s” (p. 243). Ideologically, the mother has gone forward: she is the New Soviet Woman and activist, her red headscarf flashes as she strides down the village path. The child, the new generation, has stayed behind. When Dasha asks Nyurka if she feels any pain or wants anything, the child answers: “I want to stay with you, so that you’d never go away – and always be near . . . and some grapes . . . near you, and grapes” (p. 245). After this exchange, Dasha leaves the Home, flings herself down on the grass, and sobs – but goes back to work. The child was her “life’s sacrifice”; we are told the loss was unbearable, but she bears it. She will not grab up Nyurka, feed her, or refuse to part from her. We do not see the actual death; it’s not clear that Dasha was present for it. When Gleb gets back from his meeting, Dasha tells him that “Nyurka is no more” with eyes full of tears. But the first subsection of the next chapter (ch. 16) is titled: “Our Hearts Must Be of Stone.”
Let us now consider equivalent scenes in
Some peasants grew bloated, some vomited, and those who let their livestock be collectivized “lay down in their empty coffins” and made their homes in them, “feeling sheltered and at rest.” The expropriating Bolsheviks employ a tame bear to sniff out hoarded food. But edible food is not to be seen; the entire episode is swarming with flies from these carcasses, which seem more alive than their peasant owners. The kulaks too are exhausted. The bear pokes at them with its paw, the requisitioners prod or smack or push them over, and when they die their bodies are simply stacked up. The passage from life to death is scarcely perceptible. One peasant asks his horse if it wants to join the collective farm. “‘So you’ve died?’” he says, getting no response (p. 100). But then we read that “the horse’s life was still intact – it merely shrank in distant
216
poverty, broke up into continually smaller particles, and could not weary itself out.”
The kulaks aredispatchedona raft downthe river,afterwhichthe peasants on the
Recall how Nyurka had clung to her mother and begged for love and for grapes, speaking like an ordinary little girl, without ideology. Nastya, living in a novel written five years later, is anothersort of being,sunk immeasurablydeeper into the Stalinist period of re-education and transformation. Her mother dies early in the book, after which Nastya announces to her adoptive collective that at first she “didn’t want to get born,” she was afraid her mother would be a bourgeois, but “as soon as Lenin came, I came too” (p. 62). She goes to school and learns to chant and to compose letters, one of which she sends to her protector: “Liquidate the kulak as a class,” she writes. “Regards to the poor kolkhoz, but not to the kulaks” (p. 84). Instead of signing her name on a document, she signs a hammer and sickle (p. 119). All these childish gestures are somehow both comic and awful. When Nastya dies one night of a chill, the minuscule remaining energy of the pit-diggers dissipates. For she was the forward-looking emancipated one, already living in the future; the adults were the emotional relics, held back by matter and weariness, hoping to learn from
her example. If Nyurka’s death in
The “right to the lyric” in an Age of Iron
If judged by Gorky’s 1934 speech, socialist realism in literature would appear to be a doctrine designed for the longer forms of prose. Lyric poetry, with its personal addressee, contemplative texture, attention to subtle shifts of emotional state, and intense respect for privacy, could hardly recommend itself in this era of large, heroic narrative forms. But in fact, the smaller poetic forms flourished, although the official function they filled was not that of the Golden or “Silver” Age. The lyric was respected as efficient, earnest, truthful, euphonic speech. When overtly non-political, it was free to be sentimental. A vigorous campaign for the “right to the lyric” was mounted in the mid- to late 1930s, which peaked around three jubilee celebrations: the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937, the 150th of Byron’s birth in 1938, and the 125th of Lermontov’s birth in 1939.22 A socialist realist climate took naturally to hyperbole and heroic extremes. The huge event of World War II, its “aboveground” moral simplicity, to a certain extent clarified and unified public poetry. The most exquisite lyric cycle of the Stalin years, however, could not be made public: the “Requiem” of Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), inspired by her son’s arrest, written in 1935– 43 but not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987. This sequence of ten short, compact, painfully concrete poems, framed (or insulated) by a preface, dedication, prologue, and epilogue, begins with the poet waiting in a prison queue, promising to give voice to the Terror, and ends with that same woman cast in bronze by the banks of the Neva. The cycle passes through every lyric register, from denial through lament, protest, folk ditty, chant, and elegy. In the penultimate poem, “Crucifixion,” we see Mary silent near the Cross that bears her dead Son, with Magdalene sobbing and the Disciple turned to stone – but the Mother stands apart, “no one dared look at her.” At the deepest reaches of dissidence and grief, one is beyond being watched or seen. We recall in Blok’s
One final image might be added to this poetic sequence on sacrifice and appropriate vision, from “Hamlet,” the first of the “Poems of Yury Zhivago”
218
appended to Pasternak’s great novel of the Revolution,
In the early, ambitious Bolshevik years there were spirited debates over “crises” in all inherited literary genres. In 1922 Osip Mandelstam, one of the century’s very great lyric poets, predicted the end of the novel. The European novel, he wrote, had been perfected over an immensely long period of time as “the art form designed to interest the reader in the fate of the individual.” Its two identifying features, “biography transformed into a plot” and “psychological motivation,” require a “special sense of time,” developmental and continuous. That sense, Mandelstam insisted, has been lost. Personal psychological motifs are now impotent; individual action has become abrupt, disconnected, and cruel. “The future development of the novel will be no less than the history of the atomization of biography as a form of personal existence,” he predicted. “We shall witness the catastrophic collapse of biography.”24
To be sure, Mandelstam was wrong about the novel. But Mandelstam’s musings in the 1920s are instructive in light of our three exemplary Stalin-era writers. Their fictional worlds are very much a product of the ideology of their time – which, among other savageries, did indeed further the “atomization of [individual] biography” in a ghastly literary sense. Gladkov, Shvarts, and Platonov represent very different ways of accommodating the Stalinist experiment as Maksim Gorky laid it out in 1934 at the First Writers’ Congress. All were to some extent “believers.” Gladkov created a master socialist realist
narrative to celebrate the experiment, in earnest and single-voiced fashion. Shvarts produced ironic, double-voiced but also strangely inspirational fairy tales that required a miracle to bring off their happy ending. Platonov suspended the experiment, ran it in slow motion almost below the voice barrier, and was barely heard in his own time. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the first Thaw in 1956, a broader and more public coming to terms began.
Coming to terms and seeking new terms: from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of the millennium
The first half of the twentieth century in Russian literature can be surveyed in terms of its successive doctrines: Symbolism, Futurism, Acmeism, socialist realism. The second half has conventionally been linked with changes in temperature. The journalist and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) provided the impetus for the “seasonal” metaphor with his minor but immensely influential post-Stalinist novella,
220
The Thaw that opened out into a meltdown, initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev (in office 1985–91), became famous around the world as glasnost, literally “openness” or “the right to public voice.”
Thaws were erratic and unreliable. At the peak of the first Thaw in 1956, Aleksandr Fadeyev (b. 1901), competent novelist and dutiful head of the Union of Soviet Writers from 1946 to 1954, felt the ice shifting and shot himself. Even before Stalin’s death, writers began to call for “sincerity” and “honesty” in literature (tentatively, timidly, with a pureness of heart that is now hard to believe). These pioneers discovered, to their astonishment, that they were not expelled from the Writers’ Union or arrested for their outspokenness. Since this premiere post-Stalinist Thaw (1954–56) raised issues repeated in later freezings and meltings right up to the final collapse of communism, a brief look at some of its landmarks will help place our exemplary texts and writers.1
This first Thaw was bracketed by two institutional sensations: the Second Congress of Soviet Writers, called in 1954 after a twenty-year hiatus, and the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, where Khrushchev first officially criticized aspects of Stalinist policy, albeit during a secret session. To be sure, neither Congress publicly entertained the possibility that all of communism – or even all“guidancefromabove”–wasa badthing forwriters,any morethanCatherine the Great, satirizing the abuses of her regime from the safety of her imperial court, had entertained the possibility that serfdom should be abolished or that her autocracy should become less absolute. But this semi-official exposure of state crimes emboldened the liberal critics. The gains of this initial Thaw fall into four categories: rehabilitations of repressed writers, renewed contact with the outside world, newly permitted literary heroes and plots, and an internal criticism of socialist realism itself.
Posthumous rehabilitation, which cleared for public mention and re-publication many writers who had been put to death or silenced, could be disorienting. Often no reasons were given for the initial repression, nor for the sudden return of the victims to official life. Names restored to the Russian canon included Babel, Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko (who had four more years to live), and Meyerhold – although the fates of these artists had varied widely, from mere reprimand by Stalin-era bureaucrats to the most brutal murder. Zamyatin remained under taboo. National pride could at last be openly registered for the fact that Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), friend of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gorky and e´migre´ since 1919, had won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933. Also restored to life was Fyodor Dostoevsky. He was not wholly snuffed out during the Stalinera, ofcourse, but unlike the magnificently manipulated and co-opted Tolstoy, Dostoevsky had been under a dark cloud since his massive discrediting by Gorky even before the Revolution. His greatest works
222
had been weeded out of libraries and banned from school reading lists. In 1955, Dostoevsky was officially recognized as a “great classic Russian writer” and his collected works reissued to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death.
It became somewhat easier for Russians to see, and be seen by, the outside world. More translations into Russian appeared, many of them on the pages of the newly founded journal
Encouraged by the indifference, or disgust, shown toward the Soviet literary establishment by its more sophisticated colleagues in Eastern bloc countries, some Russian writers began to question the very idea of a single authoritative definition for what literature should do. Initial discussions about socialist realism were guarded and painful. All the “-mindednesses” proclaimed in 1934 (party-, idea-, class-, people-) now seemed tainted. Perhaps writers did not need a “basic method” or a unified goal at all? But the best Russian writers – and their critics, the public intellectuals who wrote about literary art – had always served some higher thing. It was part of their professional definition, that which set Russian literature apart from the rest of the world. Usually this service had been rendered to a collective abstraction: the Russian God, Russian historical destiny, the Russian Word, the People, the good of the nation, the international proletariat, humanity’s moral improvement, a Higher Beauty. Neither self-expression nor market demand seemed a satisfactory substitute. If a socialist realist definition of literary purpose was no longer adequate, should it not yield to some other, more worthy priority?
Moreover, socialist realism, however weird and harsh by Western standards, was Russia’s own invention. With that doctrine in place, she did not have to compete. She was blazing a different path. Reformist calls for more “variety” in plot or character development sounded suspiciously like a defense of those decadent bourgeois novels that Gorky had exhorted Soviet writers to discard. Those novels were still the sop and opiate of the Western world, inclining their readerships to value private life over public duty, illicit love over fidelity, pleasures over economic productivity, doubt and weak closure over faith in the future, and an obsessive curiosity about the darker human impulses. Of course in literature one wanted to hear “confessions rather than sermons” – as one bold essay put it in 1953 – but what was to keep those confessions from becoming
the cruel, indulgent ramblings of an Underground Man? Or worse? To be sure, dialectical materialism and “reality in its revolutionary development” were dry slogans when hacks and toadies applied them to art, but they were more than political opportunism. They implied that human beings could improve themselves by taking the high road. No one at the Writers’ Congress doubted the enormous benefits of the Thaw for “freedom
The virulent campaign directed against Boris Pasternak over the Nobel Prize in Literatureis oneindex ofthe tension and confusion.When Pasternakreceived the prize in 1958 for his novel
Pasternak was compelled to renounce the Nobel Prize. If he had left the country to receive it, he would not have been allowed back in. Other international prizes (Venice Film Festival, Cannes) were tolerated, but Soviet authorities bristled about Stockholm. The uneasy relationship between Russian writers and that coveted prize has helped shape the foreign footprint of the Russian canon. Since the founding of the Nobel prizes in 1901, five Russians have won the award for Literature, three of them while on Russian soil. (That Leo Tolstoy, the world’s most famous writer, was still alive during the first nine years of the
224
award and not selected for it was a scandal – although the bard of Yasnaya Polyana would surely not have accepted: he craved repression, not one more award, and the idea of literary honor linked to, and financed by, the discoverer of dynamite could only have struck the pacifist Tolstoy as obscene.) The three “Soviet-based” laureates are Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965, for his war epic
Of Russian Nobel laureates, the most heroic in productivity, longevity, and resistance has been Solzhenitsyn. He will be this chapter’s first, “Tolstoyan” anchor for its survey of the post-Stalinist literary field. Our second and contrasting anchor will be the most “Dostoevskian” of the women prose writers of the next generation, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938). The third section of this chapter, devoted to three younger prose writers of the post-communist period already well established in English translation, makes no attempt at anchoring or synthesis – only at sampling the rich variety out of which a twenty-first-century literary canon will emerge.
The intelligentsia and the camps (Solzhenitsyn)
Solzhenitsyn is a master of several prison-camp genres, each informed by his privileged position as an intellectual reduced to the ranks of the unfree.
Stalinist practice had grotesquely distorted this Tolstoyan motif, with the willing (or recruited) support of the literary establishment. In 1934, Gorky and thirty-five other prominent writers published a festive volume celebrating the completion of the 140-mile Belomor [White Sea] Canal in the far north. The Belomor project had been directed by engineers arrested for this purpose and built by slave labor, as a model for “re-forging” the social renegade into the New Soviet Citizen through corrective physical labor. Its brutal construction plan, which assigned prison crews the task of chipping with primitive tools through solid granite, cost 100,000 lives and resulted in a waterway too shallow to be of commercial value. Ivan Denisovich was not being “reforged.” Nor does his author focus on the perverse details of that far less harrowing one day. Solzhen-itsyn later remarked that his intent was not to document his own despair, which was very real, but “something more frightening – the gray routine year after year when you forget that the only life you have on earth is destroyed.”2 The “gray routine” of this day nevertheless knew its share of modest success and triumph. That restrained tone surely contributed to the story’s publishability in 1962. Solzhenitsyn’s older friend and fellow witness Varlam Shalamov (1907– 82) saw the Gulag inferno in less quotidian fashion. His collection of
Solzhenitsyn’s two quasi-autobiographical novels,
226
The cumulative effect of this strategy is a nightmarish myth spread out along the archipelago of camps – leaping from island to island. Its impact is more powerful than any footnoted facts could ever be, because we know we have access to only a small part of a larger, untellable or lost story. Awe grows as signatures and agents are withheld. This device serves both political and literary ends. It was first perfected by Gogol for his
A surprising number of Gogolian moments dot the three
Autobiographical novels, memoirs, and “experiments in literary investigation” were means for coming to terms with a political past that could not yet be openly documented or talked about. They were written “for the drawer” or slipped abroad for publication, waiting for the right time. Russia’s literary canon, however, was effectively timeless, internalized in each reader and ever ready for quotation. Solzhenitsyn’s debts to this canon are reflected in his Nobel Prize speech of 1970. Thematically that speech is permeated by allusions to Dostoevsky – from the 1872 novel
of truth across the barriers of nationality and generation. Politics, philosophy, official history, radios, newsreels can (and do) lie with elegance and impunity, but a lie in art will immediately be sensed as false. It will not survive. “In the struggle with lies, art has always triumphed,” Solzhenitsyn insists. “Age-old violence will topple in defeat.” Thus the writer must not despair but must recommit to the moral struggle, where he is now more necessary than ever. “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”5
In hissubsequent two decades of exile with his family in Cavendish, Vermont, sheltering his three sons from American consumer culture and writing without cease, Solzhenitsyn hardened and universalized his roster of rejections, very much in the style of the later Tolstoy. In 1992, on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet experiment, the prose writer and journalist Tatyana Tolstaya wrote a review of Solzhenitsyn’s just published
Indeed, he was transformed into an archetype from Russian folklore, into one of those immortal, omnipotent, and often ornery old people who lives in a distant, inaccessible place, on an island or a glass mountain or an impenetrable forest, once-upon-a-time-in-a-far-off-kingdom . . . rather like the ancient characters Koshchei the Deathless or Grandfather Know-all or Baba Yaga, a powerful old crone who lives in a forest behind a pike fence decorated with human skulls . . . In Russia it was claimed that the fence around the Solzhenitsyn estate was high and impenetrable, topped with barbed-wire snares, like a labor camp.6
The Solzhenitsyn fence had nothing to do with Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs or with the Gulag, of course; it was a modest wire structure to keep out the deer. But the extravagance of the Solzhenitsyn myth, well into an era when such modes of protest seem crankish, utopian, and outdated, speaks to its historical potency.
In January 1993, one month before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the National ArtClub’s medal of honor for literature. His wife accepted the award in his name; his son Ignat read a translation of his acceptance speech (a buffered arrangement also reminiscent of the Tolstoy household). The speech was titled “The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century.” It sums up this eclectic “Tolstoyan” mode of assessing the Russian tradition.
228
At fault, Solzhenitsyn insists, was a pursuit of novelty and “avant-gardism” at all cost. After the “general coma of all culture” that had marked Russia’s “seventy-year-long ice age” of communism, “under whose heavy glacial cover one could barely discern the secret heartbeat of a handful of great poets and writers,” Russians “are crawling out, though barely alive”:
However, some writers have emerged who appreciate the removal of censorship and the new, unlimited artistic freedom mostly in one sense: for allowing uninhibited “self-expression” . . . [Rather than seek eternal values,] many young writers have given in to the more accessible path of pessimistic relativism. Yes, they say, Communist doctrines were a great lie; but then again, absolute truths do not exist anyhow, and trying to find them is pointless . . . Before, [this revolt against culture] burst upon us with the fanfares and gaudy flags of “futurism”; today, the term “post-modernism” is applied.7
Solzhenitsyn is indeed no fan of the future or the post-. A bitter opponent of socialist realism in its coercive and formulaic guise, he nevertheless endorses something of that doctrine in its ideal ecstatic form, as did Leo Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn’s writing too can be humorless and morally inflexible, with a self-righteous narrator who takes pride in the ways Russia cannot integrate into the fast-moving consumer cultures of the rest of the world. Such a worldview is easily caricatured. In 1987, the satirist Vladimir Voinovich (b. 1932), several years into forced exile in Germany, published his “anti-anti-utopia”
Solzhenitsyn’s dissenting voice, first heard in 1962 with
Solzhenitsyn despised Stalinism while depending on its unrelieved awfulness to organize his heroes andplots. But the power and uncompromising moraltex-ture of his mid-career novels transcend political witnessing. Tolstoyan worlds lie just below the surface of all his writings, played out in intricate variations. Consider only one detail in
230
the Russian prose tradition reaches its natural apex: the monologic
Beginning in the 1970s and then at galloping pace since 1991, it became clear to emerging generations of Russian writers that both truth and evil were fragmented far beyond the point where a single psychology or single sinful target could organize them. Focus turned to modes of protest more subtly transgres-sive and imitative, more in the spirit of Pushkin’s ripped-off button at Nicholas I’s imperial court. The
In this new climate, the Tolstoyan pole of post-Stalinist writing met its rival in a revived, more dialogic and ironical Dostoevskian pole. What seemed to appeal most was Dostoevsky’s apocalyptically dark side, a cynicism that endorsed neither the spiritual generosity of the positive characters (Sonya, Alyosha, the Elder Zosima) nor Bakhtin’s celebrated polyphony, which detected in Dostoevsky the optimistic unfinalizability of all utterances. The new Dostoevsky was a dead-ended Muse. Solzhenitsyn, in the terms laid down in his 1993 National Arts Club speech, would recognize in this newly fashionable desperate literature the “pessimistic relativism” inseparable, in his view, from postmodernism. These dark intonations pervade the work of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.
The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)
Women in Russian literature, and Russian women as writers of literature, have not been a focus of the present book. A brief sketch of the legacy might therefore be useful. The Swiss author Madame de Stae¨l (1766–1817) and French novelist and feminist George Sand (1804–76) were both avidly read in
nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere on the continent. But Russian authors and readers alike were soon captivated by two domestically produced ideal types: woman as Muse (Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina) and woman as religiously inflected “savior” of a sinning man (Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmeladova). To some extent both became restrictive models, a fate hinted at by the title of one pioneering book that confronts this tradition head on,
In the 1920s, the era of Gladkov’s
By the mid-1930s, the conservative Stalinist revolution firmly placed “family values” front and center. Although women had been liberated full-time into the urban workforce ever since the 1920s, in their socialist realist dimension they were increasingly depicted nursing babies in the sunlight or harvesting grain with scythes or tractors. World War II exacerbated the tensions inherent in those dual roles as robust, relaxed mother and economic producer. When so many men did not come home, women stayed on as engineers, doctors, factory workers, sharpshooters and machine-gunners. They became the “positive heroines” in literary plots that still tended to feature feeble, drunken, inconstant, and superfluous men. The Russian super-heroine does everything. She is both surgeon and street-sweeper. Heavy physical labor has long been part of her lot, and female sobriety and longevity an economic necessity. As one impatient female voice put it in the 1980s, “national disgrace” comes not when
232
women are idle trophy wives at home but when they are out shoveling icy snowdrifts and pouring asphalt “that is then pressed by a steamroller driven by a
man.”15
By the 1970s, women’s voices were louder and ranged more widely. One of the most astute belongs to Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938), playwright, poet, and prose writer, whose own devastated childhood in children’s homes, on the edges of war and surrounded by the Terror, shapes her dark vision and style.16 Hers is a Dostoevskian “underground” voice, lodged inside a first-person perspective that thoroughly distrusts the natural world as well as other human beings. One of Petrushevskaya’s best stories, “Our Crowd” [“Svoi krug,” lit. “One’s own circle”] (written 1979, publ. 1988) opens on the words of the Underground Man, slightly modified but in the same arrogant, abject stream of consciousness: “I’m a hard harsh person, always with a smile on my full rosy lips and a sneer for everyone . . . I’m very smart. What I don’t understand just doesn’t exist.”17
There is this important difference, however. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is to such an extent a shade, an abstract philosophy, that his ailments, inner-organ complaints, and toothaches are all sensed to be metaphysical, which is to say,notsensedatall.Whenhetellsusthat“hethinks hisliverisdiseased”buthe’s not goingtodoctors–tohellwithdoctors–we appreciatethisinformationmore as an ideological position than a medical problem. The first-person narrator of “Our Crowd” does not just speak of disease but appears to be dying from it (probably some severe form of diabetes, as we learn in an offhand way): “in a single winter I’d lost both parents, with mother dying of the same kidney disease that some time ago had begun to show up in me and which starts with blindness” (p. 14). The plot of this story, punctuated by random violence and left unexplained to those who most need to know it (if their sympathy is to be aroused), is her attempt to find among her friends a surrogate mother for her soon-to-be-orphaned son.
Petrushevskaya’s universe is grim and unsentimental. It is also strongly anti-Tolstoyan, in its rejection of all benign, coordinating narrative authority and all hope for a spark or leap of communication between human beings. For reasons quite different from those of Evgeny Shvarts, she has a passion for the fairytale and haswritten several collections for adults. Inher handsit becomes a mechanical, faceless, morally blank genre. Her experimental plays, very popular in the 1970s, were produced by amateur student theatre groups before any official journal dared publish her prose (the Lenin Komsomol Theatre caused a sensation with
vehicles for substance abuse or casual suffering; they are symbolic of damage done to the spirit.18
In Petrushevskaya’s most ambitious piece of prose,
Of course she [her daughter Alyona] never lets on who she’s living with or whether she’s got a man at all; all she does when she comes here is weep. It was
Of Russia’s many reworked “Anna stories,” Anna Adrianovna is the most awful. If Chekhov in the 1890s had provided clinical and lyrical variants on the characters in Tolstoy’s great novel, pushing their plots up into the light of day, Petrushevskaya in the late Soviet period remains deep in the Underground. This feminized Underground is marked by certain features that Dostoevsky’s hero, or anti-hero, did not have to face. Apart from his brief contacts with Liza, the Underground Man hurts most of all himself – and Liza, after his final insult to her, will not come back. She understands that he has no capacity for sustained mutual relations of any sort. Underground women can hurt themselves too, of course, but given the range of their family duties (and cramped living quarters) in the Soviet context, usually they hurt others first, and far more effectively. These others are often children. And the adults come back.
Anna Adrianovna is matriarch of an apartment in which her entire dysfunctional family is “registered.” (In the Soviet era, the state provided its legally employed citizens with living quarters and regulated the square meters available to each resident.) Among those registered in this space are Anna’s mother (later moved to apsychiatric wardandthen to amentalhospital),herson Andrei (just back from two years in prison and still pursued by his criminal buddies), her daughter Alyona (who, after off-loading Tima, produces two more illegitimate children in the course of the novel). Petrushevskaya obscures chronology
234
and events, providing few external markers to help orient the reader; the time is simply night, when Anna Adrianovna writes it all up. What never changes, however, regardless of season, is the lack of space, food, and privacy. Locks are always being changed, doors slammed or pried open, and sooner or later some mouth, usually male, will turn up and eat the fridge empty. Or steal money. Anna begs bread, soup, and candy from her hosts and employers to feed her grandson, neglecting (she tells us) her own needs. She considers herself a martyr and tries to win our support.
As always in an Underground, the speaking voice is defensive, boastful, consumed by self-hate fused with self-love, and embattled. But again our heroine differs from the resident of Dostoevsky’s parent text. The original Underground Man’s existence is static. Half of his “confession” is a recollection of events already many years past. The entire document is enclosed, closed off, with its crises already well rehearsed and stylized. This is one reason why a “philosophy” can be so easily extracted from the
Of all the interactions in this stressed three-room apartment, the relation between mother and daughter is the most complexly double-voiced, allowing us some relief from Anna’s strident grip on the narrative. Lengthy direct dialogues and several embedded texts inspire our trust: Alyona’s na¨ıve diary of sexual initiation and subsequent humiliations, found and read by her mother who intersperses her own mocking comments, and then a strange entry written by Anna in the voice of her daughter (based on one of their hysterical exchanges). “That’s the scene I wrote,” Anna announces petulantly in her own voice; “fully self-critical, completely objective, though why on earth you might well ask” (p. 94). In some stretches of text, it is utterly unclear which side of Anna’s voice to believe; they seem to coexist in perfect, if hostile, balance. This situation is routine in Dostoevsky’s Underground, of course, where a single voice divides against itself. In Petrushevskaya, whole scenes divide, scrambling and compromising the speakers. Alyona has just called her mother, hinting that she’s very ill. Who will take care of her baby daughter, Alyona whimpers, now that another child is due to be born in two weeks (Anna didn’t know):
. . . what the whole conversation amounted to was this: Mummy, help me, hoist just one more burden on your back, you’ve always come to my rescue before, rescue me now – But daughter, I haven’t the strength to love yet another creature, I’d be betraying the boy, he couldn’t take it . . . – But what am I to do, Mum? – Nothing, I can’t do any more to help, I’ve given everything, my darling, all the money I have, my darling, my sunshine – I’m going to die, Mum, it’s terrible . . . (pp. 99–100)
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man could never have sustained such piercing, other-directed utterances from another voice center. He saw to it that no one needed him.
In Anna’s accounts, especially her rewrites of the constant vicious family squabbling, she is the heroine and sole provider. Reasons to sympathize with her certainly exist, although undercut by her own self-importance and preemptive irony. Aspiring writers – we know this from Dostoevsky – cannot be trusted. It is interesting that Western critics of
One day Anna comes home to find that her daughter, unhinged by their last fight, has taken all her children away. The apartment is deserted. At last Anna is completely alone and needed by no one: the authentic enabling condition for the Underground has arrived. At this point the manuscript breaks off. Doubtless Anna Adrianovna, as she falls silent, recalls the second poem in Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” a tiny lyric of four couplets, the last two of which read: “This woman is sick, / This woman is alone, / Husband in the grave, son in prison, / Pray for me.”
In the vastlyexpandedpoolof Russian literaryplotsbyandaboutwomen,
236
beings not be manipulated or denied their freedom of choice. “Anna” might even be the conventional nomination for this burden of the flesh. In 1990, Viktor Erofeyev’s three-page story, “Anna’s Body,” appeared in an anthology of glasnost-era writings.21 The plot takes place mostly in bed, alone, during one of her nightmares, amid cigarettes and cognac, lamenting her lost youth and the lovers who had jilted her. Various parts of that body had been going out of control for some time: “Sometimes Anna felt that she was Anna Karenina, sometimes – Anna Akhmatova, sometimes just an Anna on the neck.” At the end of her reverie she turned off the light, “passed her dry tongue over her lips, and, as in an old fairy tale, gobbled up the man she loved.”
Viktor Erofeyev (b. 1947, not to be confused with Venedikt Erofeyev, 1933– 88, author of the phantasmagoric
In 1990, the yearhepublished
We are only several decades into this unraveling process and cannot yet know which of the recent generations of writers and works will endure. Soviet communism’s twilight years yielded several precocious candidates. One is
liberal-humanist condemnation of Stalinist oppression (and thus in the Solzhenitsyn line of self-critique, a confession from educated society forced to face up to the camps) through a more absurdist and blankly postmodernist
fantasy.23
Bitov explores a theme much beloved in Russian literature, that of warring “Fathers and Sons,” in the context of an “evil Stalin” plot. A young literary scholar discovers that his father (a famous academic) had denounced his own father (an even more famous academic) during the height of the Stalinist purges, building a career on those paternal ashes. The grandson’s attempt to get to know his grandfather – who, it so happens, is not dead as assumed but unexpectedly rehabilitated – is a disaster. The old man, turned cynical and alcoholic in the camps, resents his rehabilitation, because it made a mess of his attempt to give shape and meaning to his fate: “The regime is the regime. Had I been in their place, I would have put myself away.”24 Not only was his life ruined; his martyrdom too had been interrupted. The old man disdains his grandson as a fop whose knowledge of life is nil, who doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know, who thinks he can work with life the way he works with his favorite books.
Indeed, that is the fantasy fueling
Confusion between the real and the fake ends up as indifference to the distinction: the perfect postmodernist scenario of a simulacrum without an original. Bitov’s
238
to accomplish that difficult and necessary deed: bridging the distance between high and low readerships.
Three ways for writers to treat matter: eating it, transcending it, cracking its codes (Sorokin, Pelevin, Akunin)
Under the old regime(s), state control of culture pursued a two-pronged ideal. The first was to subsidize high-minded, healthy, politically conformist literature; the second, to prevent the publication or circulation of literature that was low-minded or morally corrupt. Readers who rejected state guidance in these matters availed themselves of
The post-1991 literary market broke down that assumption. It began with a glut of the new. Once censorship lifted, a mass of texts appeared all at once: native “delayed” works (written decades earlier, like Bitov’s
imposed. Several emigre writers, including Solzhenitsyn before and after his return to Russia in 1994, made passionate pleas to restore the authority of the “thick journals” that had once carried high literary culture. But subscriptions plummeted. By the mid-1990s, with the legalization of multiple political parties, Dostoevsky was recruited and celebrated by Russian neo-fascists as an anti-Semite (replacing his earlier, “dissident” image as a Christian mystic). Tolstoy, sanitized and officially canonized since 1928, was declared anathema in 1994 by several reactionary chauvinistic parties for his criticism of Holy Russia, the Emperor, and the Orthodox Church. Calls even went out to young people to resist Tolstoy’s corrupting, unpatriotic teachings.25
A large number of new heroes and plots emerged, created by writers for whom Stalin and World War II were fully historical events, over before they were born. If they were parodists, these writers addressed a tradition that they had absorbed as a “relic,” not experienced in their own lives. Among the most controversial of these “workers with relics” has been the visual and verbal Moscow conceptualist artist Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), master at the metaphysics of disgust.26 Trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, Sorokin worked throughout the 1980s as a graphic artist and book illustrator. His stories were banned. In 1985, the Paris publishing house Syntaxis brought out his comic romance
240
Another key strategy for Sorokin is to peel back the clean, wholesome, and self-satisfied veneeroflate-Soviet-erasocialistrealism and, inthe deadpan spirit of Gogol, turn its ideas into food. Sorokin “realizes” metaphors. In one of his more startling stories, “Sergei Andreyevich” (1992), a star pupil listens dazzled to his high school teacher’s platitudes on a class field trip and then, coming across the teacher’s excrement lying in greasy coils in the grass, proceeds to eat it, greedily and reverently. But “eating it” can also be less ecstatic, a duty expected (or in the Soviet context, vaguely required) of each honest citizen. Early in his huge, eight-part novel
Sorokin won a National Booker award in 2001. In 2002, he achieved international visibility when the Putin-inspired youth movement “Moving Together” attempted to imprison him (unsuccessfully) on a pornography charge. Article 242 of the Russian criminal code was brought against the 1999 novel
It’s complicated. But it’s been complicated for a long time – Russian literature, that is. It’s an international brand. Like Russian vodka or Kalashnikov. In front of us passed the Mesozoic or Paleozoic nineteenth or twentieth centuries, where such extravagant animals lived. Everything was trampled down and eaten up by them. And here we are, on this field trampled down by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, by Bulgakov, Shalamov and Platonov, and we’re trying to create something new . . . But in general, there shouldn’t be many good writers.30
Like Petrushevskaya from an earlier generation, in turning his lens on the body with its undignified products, Sorokin forces us to see how the spirit is trapped in matter. In his 2002 novel
search of its secret members, the 23,000 “True People” are revealed only when struck on the chest with an ice hammer and forced to utter their real names. These awakened ones are carriers of the primeval Light, which will return to the Cosmos as soon as matter (death giving birth to death) is dissolved. Sorokin’s primary concern is everywhere to disentangle language from the body, to lay bare the workings of each, and to resist one being casually or thoughtlessly reproduced by the other.
Our second exemplary post-Soviet writer, Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962), also toys with Stalinist ruins and also denies any political intent. But he is not, in the brutal corporeal way we have just sampled, a “materialist.” Like the mystical Symbolists of the 1910s–20s, Pelevin builds his works “on the windowsill” between different worlds.31 His technique is one of constantly switching perspectives, back and forth across both sides of the sill. He resists writing on specifically “Russian subject matter”; in fact, he says, subject matter as such does not exist.32 He doesn’t care for Sorokin and considers postmodernism overall to be “like eating the flesh of a dead culture.” Influenced by the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev and the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, Pelevin has pursued a single question, to which the politics of post-communism contributes only tangentially: what is reality, and where must one stand to gain access to it? He gives the reader very few clues, and none at all from his personal biography.33 Contrary to the heroic Dostoevsky–Tolstoy–Solzhenitsyn model, where one’s life openly nourishes one’s art, Pelevin cultivates the image of a mystic recluse: rarely appearing in public, disappearing for long stretches of time (often to Tibet), and almost never granting interviews (only contradictory press statements). One suspects that this is the sort of biographical image Gogol would have cultivated, had he the means, managerial skill, and technology.
Pelevin’s first route to “reality” was science fiction. But he goes further than Gogol in “The Nose” or Bulgakov in
242
Pelevin manages to show us a bloodsucking mosquito who is at the same time a New Russian businessman, back and forth in the same scene and even from the same balcony – and a sexy housefly Natasha who flirts, sunbathes, and sips a drink full-size, only seconds before ending up as a speck on restaurant flypaper.
Pelevin’s work has been described as a “satirico-philosophical fantasy” as well as a “mix of super-science fiction and harsh realism.”34 In Chapter 1 we briefly mentioned the hero of Pelevin’s first novel
Life and death in their physiological dimension are not easily distinguishable in Pelevin’s later work. A devoted Buddhist, Pelevin gives us one lucid Eastern parable,
The most complex intersection that Pelevin makes with the Russian literary tradition is his 1996 novel
Moscow of the 1990s and the post-revolutionary Civil War circa 1919. Pyotr’s first assignment as a recruit of the Bolshevik secret police is to raid (read: shoot the audience in) a Symbolist cafe´, where some poets are putting on a little play called “Raskolnikov and Marmeladov” in the style of Chekhov’s
As the novel progresses, an Eastern element begins to displace the Dosto-evskian.During further dreams in theasylum, Pyotr becomes a discipleofVasily Chapayev (1887–1919), peasant commander for the Red Army on the Far Eastern front. Structurally, the Chapayev legend functions for Pelevin somewhat as the Jerusalem chapters and Yeshua/Jesus do for Bulgakov in that equally layered novel. The historical Chapayev, cut down in battle, was revered as a secular martyr of the Revolution and became part of its holy writ, a Stalinist icon adapted for stage, screen, and opera. But Pelevin returns Chapayev to his true guise as Buddhist seer. By the end of the novel, on the edge of discovering “inner Mongolia,” all matter is about to pass away.
Pelevin’s quasi-parodic mysticism and skill at bringing low philosophically highbrow plots have made him a bestseller, with a growing reputation outside Russia. However, both Pelevin’s Buddhism for the masses and Sorokin’s alleged pornography were eclipsed in the first years of the twenty-first century by the runaway impact of the most prolific practitioner of Russia’s fastest-growing genre, the
244
Akunin means “villain” in Japanese). Akunin is creator of a cycle of historical mystery novels around the detective Erast Fandorin, all set in the “terrorist” portion of the nineteenth century (1870s-1905). This Fandorin is as clean-living, energetic, disciplined, and self-reliant as the Sorokin hero is befouled and the Pelevin hero is multi-temporal. Fandorin is also a commentary and corrective update to our roster of Russian nineteenth-century heroes, beginning with the poor government clerk.
We first meet Fandorin in the opening novel of the series,
Like a Dostoevskian protagonist (Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Alyosha Karama-zov) designed to prolong the reader’s curiosity, Fandorin is a pleasure to look at: “long girlish eyelashes,” “a most comely youth with black hair ... and blue eyes . . . rather tall, with a pale complexion and a confounded, ineradicable ruddy bloom on his cheeks.”38 This combination of na¨ıve energy and blooming health is the Alyosha side of Dostoevsky’s good-looking men, neither Raskol-nikov’s fevers nor the sinister, strikingly beautiful mask of Stavrogin. What is more, Fandorin is squarely on the sleuthing and justice-bearing end of the murder mystery, not on the crime-committing or gothic end. Following longstanding Russian convention, Fandorin is spared having to deal with criminal sex and its hideous exfoliations.39 In this new post-communist positive hero, Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and wholesome bashfulness come together.
Erast Fandorin is a harbinger of Russia’s smooth new cosmopolitanism. Reborn for the international market, it is retrofitted to Dostoevsky’s turbulent final decade (from the troubled aftermath of the Great Reforms to the assassination of the Liberator tsar). Akunin skillfully taps into multiple readerships. Detective-novel buffs smile at the steady flow of affectionate parodies of Sherlock Holmes; history buffs marvel at the accuracy of detail, whether in England, Persia, or the Suez Canal. Akunin’s stories integrate Russia’s first
telephone, first terrorist bomb delivered by post to a civilian target, and the earliest imports of American gadgets – Remington typewriters and exercise trikes. But the Russian reader is probably most struck by the mass of familiar literaryreminiscences with moralvalencesreversed.Tsaristepaulettes, theTable of Ranks, imperial wars, and the Third Section (secret police) were all symbolic markers hostile to the great nineteenth-century writers from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Here they appear unambiguously as forces for good. From the perspective of a patriotic civil servant like Fandorin, these old myths take on new life.
246
mirror opposite of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: an inspired pedagogue aims to infiltratethe incompetent, corruptgovernmentsof theworld with something like philosopher-kings, and to that end she raises thousands of young men and women “with a sense of their own dignity” and “possessing the freedom to choose” (p. 230).
Mystery novels are not all that Akunin produces. He has a postmodernist side as well. Like Petrushevskaya, he has tried his hand “rewriting” (or co-writing) a Chekhov play. She did a variation on
The mystery novels, not the spoofs, are the global bestsellers. Akunin has been heralded as the creator of a “Slavic Sherlock Holmes” and a “Russian Ian Fleming.” Na¨ıvely but intriguingly, some politically conservative commentators in the West see in Erast Fandorin a new type of positive, proto-capitalist hero on post-Soviet soil. All Russia’s previous heroes (so this argument goes) were discredited by the fall of communism: the starry-eyed dissident-to-the-death extremist, the slovenly nihilist, the nay-saying anarchist, the Bolshevik activist negligent of family and faith. The new Akunin-style detective, we are told, is a person who, in the tradition of sober disciplined Chekhov and the Calvinists, draws up rules only for himself – and follows those rules.41
Akunin has a readership in the many millions. Whether his spic-and-span, code-cracking detective Fandorin is taken for a role model among post-communist entrepreneurs, or becomes simply a Russian contribution to the world’s repertory of private detectives, remains to be seen. Chkhartishvili himself – a professional linguist and translator from the Japanese in addition to being Boris Akunin – has confessed that with his bashful, brave detective he had consciously aimed to fill the space in Russian bookstores between serious literature and trash. In an interview from 2004 he left a revealing testimony about the genesis of his Fandorin:
When I was a kid there was never a Russian literary character whom I could imitate. I was either Sherlock Holmes or d’Artagnan or some other bloody foreigner. You cannot pretend when you are 11 or 12 that you are a hero of Turgenev. What would you do? Sob? Complain? I
approached this problem in a scientific way. I grafted a bit from every protagonist in Russian literature whom I admire. I took 10 per cent of Andrei Bolkonsky [from
What do Prince Bolkonsky, Prince Myshkin, and Grigory Pechorin have in common that Akunin might have admired? Those three nineteenth-century Russian heroes are all aristocratic and to varying degrees disdainful or eccentric; they are attractive to women but flout society’s expectations; and (for very different reasons) each is fundamentally indifferent to the turmoil or suffering he causes in others. Their private lives are often shrouded from view; their public persona is invariably enigmatic and compelling. Each novel in the Fandorin series is dedicated “to the Nineteenth Century, when literature was great, the belief in progress boundless, and crimes were committed and solved with elegance and taste.”43 If only as the post-socialist ego ideal for a readership still uncertain how to come to terms with the twentieth century, Erast Fandorin is worth watching: a resplendent new Russian Hero for our Time.
Solzhenitsyn was not correct about postmodernism, of course: by no means is it always nihilistic or pessimistic. But he is certainly correct that Russian experiments in this realm are not to be reduced to a single moral standard. Nor will postmodernist authors, or their successors, relinquish their right to laugh at horror and annihilate it with their own playful devices. One efficient example of such postmodernist resistance is a poem by the recently deceased (d. 2007) Moscow Conceptualist Dmitry Prigov, “Dialogue No. 5.” This piece of quasi-doggerel short verse, Prigov’s favorite subversive form, is a contribution to the “Poet versus Tsar” theme in Russian literature, here cast as a conversation between Prigov and Stalin.44
To prepare for Prigov’s 46-line composition, let us recall the conversation between the fifteenth-century holy fool, Michael of Klopsko, and the monastery superior, discussed in Chapter 3. The Blessed Michael turns up at the monastery gate. Thesuperiorquestionshim; but insteadof answering, this
248
Stalin retorts. “And how would it be if we left one letter off?” asks Prigov. “How would it be?” repeats Stalin, drawn inexorably into the mirror-imaging poetic logic of the exchange. “It would be Talin!” Prigov shouts back. Now his interlocutor is labeled Talin. “Talin!” Stalin shouts. And from then on down to nothing, the dictator is undone by the poet:
Prigov
And if we left another off?
Talin
Another?
Prigov
It would be Alin.
Alin
It would be Alin!
Prigov
And if we left another off?
Alin
Another?
Prigov
It would be Lin.
Lin
It would be Lin!
Finally Stalin ispromptedtoremove the singleremaining letter N – and there the poem stops. There is no one left to answer; the tyrant has literally, letter by letter, dissolved. In Prigov’s postmodernist exercise, power is tricked into dismantling itself by very traditional means. The Poet, feigning foolishness, sets up the framework, poses the enticing question, and controls the final creative – or annihilating – Word.
There are many ways for “one word of truth to outweigh the whole world.” True to the Tolstoy line, Solzhenitsyn prefers this truth to be uttered righteously, single-voicedly, with the intonations of a preacher or prophet. Prigov, who belonged to the Gogol–Dostoevsky line, relies on double-voiced cunning and carnival dismemberment to reveal that truthful word. Both approaches are dependent on a vast reservoir of inherited literary images and values – especially, one could argue, from the Sentimentalist tradition, more durable on Russian soil than either the analytical or the cynical. From Karamzin through Dostoevsky’s redeemed sinners, Tolstoy’s idea of art, socialist realism, Solzhen-itsyn, even Pelevin’s quasi-parodic mystic fusion of East and West, painful or isolating complexity resolves itself through emotion and communion. The contemporary Russian avant-garde does not campaign for a “blank slate” or “fresh start” – one of the more intoxicating fantasies from the revolutionary 1910s and 1920s. That fantasy is over. The critic Vladimir Kataev concludes his book
also predicted the demise of literature, the poverty of present-day writers. But these are cyclical complaints, Kataev assures his readers (p. 228), and never come true:
In their campaign against petrified language cliche´s, the postmodernists can be compared with wolves, the sanitary workers of the forest, who fulfill the honorable and necessary task of eating refuse and eliminating the weak so that the fittest remain, ensuring that life continues. But to consider – as the admirers of Sorokin do – that from now on one must write only the way he writes or not write at all, this would be like insisting that out of all the animals of the forest, only wolves should remain. Fortunately, nature permits nothing of the sort.
“Postmodernism today should be understood as a sort of pause, an intermission in the development of literature and culture,” Kataev advises (p. 231). “In general it might seem that literature has been completely crushed by the aggressiveness of other forms of information transfer. But as long as literature is alive, any development taking place in it – however endlessly distant from traditions it might appear – one way or another, ultimately returns to the classics.” This sentiment was given lapidary formulation by Mikhail Bakhtin, in the 1940s, during twentieth-century Russia’s darkest years. In a fragment devoted to Gogol’s laughter that has lost none of its relevance to the present century, Bakhtin wrote, “Only memory, not forgetfulness, can go forward.”46
Introduction
Michael Wachtel,
Prince D. S. Mirsky,
This understanding of literary tradition is eloquently argued in Michael Wachtel,
Milan Kundera, “Die Weltliteratur”,
This observation was made by the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) while editing some Czech versions of Pushkin in the late 1930s. See Jakobson, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry” [1960], in
“Some Words about War and Peace” [1868], in Leo Tolstoy,
Jeffrey Brooks,
The term “negative identity” comes from Lev Gudkov’s collection of essays (1997-2002)
1 Models, readers, three Russian Ideas
1
250
In
The reference occurs in
This underexplored area is currently being researched by Kathleen Parthe; see her “Civic Speech in the Absence of Civil Society,” European Association for Urban History, Stockholm Conference (2006).
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,”
Amy Mandelker, “Lotman’s Other: Estrangement and Ethics in
Nicolas Berdyaev,
Wendy Helleman, ed.,
Thomas Seifrid,
Kathleen F. Parthe,
Andrew Baruch Wachtel,
Prince D. S. Mirsky,
Parthe,
Marshall T. Poe,
Mikhail Epstein, “Russo-Soviet Topoi,” in
Mikhail Vasil'evich Il'in, “Words and Meanings: On the Rule of Destiny. The Russian Idea,” in
Alexander Pushkin,
Mikhail Veller, “Khochu v Parizh” [I Want to Go to Paris], as discussed in Alexei Yurchak,
252
Yuri M. Lotman, “Symbolic Spaces. 1. Geographical Space in Russian Medieval Texts,”
Ksana Blank, “The Invisible City of Kitezh as an Alternative ‘New Jerusalem’,” in
For more on these distinctions, see Pavel Florensky, “Spiritual Sobriety and the Iconic Face,”
S. G. Bocharov, “Vokrug ‘Nosa’” [1988],
See Nancy Ries,
Boris Gasparov,
2 Heroes and their plots
Simon Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Literary Demonism and Orthodox Tradition,” in
Kathleen F. Parthe´,
Margaret Ziolkowski,
Marcia A. Morris,
Katerina Clark,
SeeEwaM.Thompson, “TheArchetypeofthe FoolinRussianLiterature,”
A. Sinyavskii,
Russell Zguta,
For this Russian connection, see J. Douglas Clayton,
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); and Catriona Kelly,
Faith Wigzell, “The Russian Folk Devil and his Literary Reflections,” in
John Givens,
Helena Goscilo, “Madwomen with Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative
Svetlana Vasilenko, “Little Fool,” trans. Elena Prokhorova, in
See the section on
For a good introduction to these larger “geo-literary concerns” see ch. 1 of Paul M. Austin,
“Frol Skobeev, the Rogue,” in
Marcia A. Morris,
Nakobov provides for both
Simeon Polotsky: “The Merchant Class,” in
For a lucid survey of these (and other) pre-Byronic European heroes, see Peter L. Thorslev Jr.,
For a survey of the Gothic tradition as Russian writers assimilated it (largely from the British), see Mark S. Simpson,
This thesis is developed in Ellen B. Chances,
My survey here is indebted to Molly W. Wesling,
254
Letter from Turgenev to the poet Afanasy Fet, April 6, 1862, cited here from the Norton Critical Edition of Ivan Turgenev,
For a discussion of Maksim Gorky’s views on Dostoevsky, see Vladimir Seduro,
3 Traditional narratives
Isabel de Madariaga,
For a lucid introduction, see Dmitry S. Likhachev [Likhachov], dean of Russian medievalists, especially his “Religion: Russian Orthodoxy,” in
With the exception of the folk tales and the folk epic
The best introduction to “dual faith” remains George P. Fedotov,
Simon Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Demonism and Orthodox Tradition,” in
Faith Wigzell, “The Russian Folk Devil and His Literary Reflections,” in
For a pathbreaking study of Russian paganism and early Christianity from the perspective of their female traits, see Joanna Hubbs,
Katerina Clark, “Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice,” ch. 8,
John Garrard and Carol Garrard,
10 Max Lu¨thi,
Tolstoy to N. N. Strakhov, March 22/25, 1872, in
Her traits are exhaustively catalogued in Andreas Johns,
For the
English translations of both essays are available in Ju. M. Lotman / B. A. Uspenskij,
See Svetlana Boym,
For more on this fascinating story, see John Garrard and Carol Garrard, “Rebuilding Holy Moscow,” ch. 3,
W. F. Ryan, “Magic and Divination. Old Russian Sources,” in
4 The eighteenth century
Alexander M. Schenker,
William Edward Brown,
David J. Welsh,
Simon Karlinsky, “Beginnings of Secular Drama: Court Theater and Chivalric Romance Plays,” ch. 2,
256
For a balanced view of Fonvizin’s biography, see the Introduction by Marvin Kantor to
In Mira Mendelson’s libretto for Prokofiev’s
Iakov B. Kniazhnin,
Mikhail D. Chulkov,
Almost alone in the scholarly literature on Chulkov (which tends to condemn both Martona and her milieu), Alexander Levitsky develops this thesis of
Olia Prokopenko, “The Real-Life Protagonist of Mikhail Chulkov’s Comely Cook: A Hypothesis,”
Gitta Hammarberg, “The Literary and Intellectual Context,” ch. 1,
See Brown, “Russian Prose of the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century,”
5 Romanticisms
For the convincing case that Pushkin partook only sparingly of European Romanticism and not at all of “Realism” (a term that appeared on the continent and in Russia in its present literary meaning only in the late 1840s), see Boris Gasparov, “Pushkin and Romanticism,” in
For this transition from court patronage to professionalism via familiar associations, salons, and booksellers, see William Mills Todd III, “Institutions of Literature,” ch. 2,
Yu. M. Lotman, “Liudi i chiny” [People and ranks],
For a fascinating prehistory of Pushkin’s duel and the intricacies of his outraged honor, see Serena Vitale,
This reading of the Onegin-Lensky duel was first laid out by Yury Lotman in his Commentary to
Arthur Krystal, “En garde! The history of dueling,”
For more on “insult” and “honor” as they evolved in Russia from the eighteenth century on to the twentieth, see chs. 1 and 2, in Irina Reyfman,
See Ian M. Helfant, “Pushkin as a Gambler,”
James E. Falen, Introduction to his translation of Alexander Pushkin,
Capital letters indicate feminine rhymes (double or two-syllable rhymes with stress on penultimate syllable); small letters are masculine rhymes (single-syllable and stressed). See Vladimir Nabokov, “The ‘Eugene Onegin’ Stanza,” in Alek-sandr Pushkin,
For an intriguing scene-by-scene exegesis of this pyramidal symmetry, see Irena Ronen,
Alexander Pushkin, “On Prose,” in
See Irina Reyfman, “Prose Fiction,” in
David Powelstock,
Leo Tolstoy,
See Gary Saul Morson,
Anton Chekhov, “The Duel,” ch. 19, in
See Reyfman, “How Not to Fight: Dueling in Dostoevsky’s Works,” ch. 6,
Nikolai Gogol, “The Carriage,” in
Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose,” in
The Russian Formalists loved Gogol. This example is discussed in Boris Eikhen-baum’s classic essay “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is Made” (1918), in
258
Vladimir Nabokov,
For these arguments, see chs. 1 and 2 of Chester Dunning, with Caryl Emerson, Sergei Fom´ıchev, Lidiia Lotman, and Antony Wood,
V. N. Turbin, “Kharaktery samozvantsev v tvorchestve Pushkina,”
The best translation is in Nikolai Gogol, “The Government Inspector,” in
Alexander Pushkin, “The Captain’s Daughter,” in
Nikolai Gogol,
Stephen Moeller-Sally, “Spreading the Word,” ch. 4,
October 31, 1853.
6 Realisms
D. S. Mirsky, from his discussion of “The Moscow Circles,” in
Two excellent books discuss this theme: Adam Weiner,
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
For a lyrical evocation of this routine, see “The writer at work,” ch. 7 in Jacques Catteau,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 173–79. For a glimpse in Joseph Frank’s monumental five-volume biography of Dostoevsky (1976–2002), see ch. 8, “A Literary Proletarian,” in vol. V:
On Tolstoy and the graphic revolution, see Michael Denner, “‘Be not afraid of greatness . . .’: Lev Tolstoy and Celebrity” (forthcoming in
Maxim Gorky, “Memoirs” [Tolstoy], “A Letter” [1910], in Gorky’s
Gorky, “Memoirs” [Tolstoy], p. 35 and (from the 1910 letter) p. 63. Gorky’s memoirs are vibrant but stylized, and reveal as much about Gorky as about Tolstoy.
From Tolstoy to N. N. Strakhov, 5 December 1883 (in
Chekhov to Aleksei Suvorin, March 27, 1894, in
Mikhail Bakhtin,
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
See Deborah A. Martinsen,
On narrative duplicity and the distinction between withholding a story and not knowing it, see Robin Feuer Miller’s classic study,
See the discussion from the chapter “Anti-Dostoevsky,” in Nina Gourfinkel,
“Drafts for an Introduction to War and Peace” [late December 1865], Draft 3, in Leo Tolstoy,
260
For more on Tolstoyan psychology as reflected in narrative strategy, see Gary Saul Morson’s classic
“
L. N. Tolstoy,
L. N. Tolstoy, “Master and Man,” in
Mikhail Bulgakov,
See Bakhtin’s lecture “Lev Tolstoi” as noted down by R. M. Mirkina, in “Zapisi domashnego kursa lektsii po russkoi literature,” in
Leo Tolstoy,
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
Bruce Weston, “Leo Tolstoy and the Ascetic Tradition,”
Makar Devushkin to Varvara Alekseyevna, 8 July, in Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Conversation recorded by I. Teneromo and first published in English in the
“The Raid,” from Leo Tolstoy,
This seminal reading is by Gary Saul Morson, “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoi and the Poetics of Didactic Fiction” [1978], repr. in
Margo Rosen, “Natasha Rostova at Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable,”
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in
Nikolai Nekrasov, “O pogode” (1859), Part I, “Ulichnye vpechatleniia,” “Do sumerek,” 2,
Chekhov to Aleksei Suvorin, March 27, 1894, in
For a discussion of early parodies, see Karl D. Kramer, “Literary Parodies,” ch. 2,
Mouton, 1970), especially pp. 31–33.
See the ruminations by Leonid Heifetz, “Notes from a Director:
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog,” in
Anton Chekhov, “Enemies,”
Chekhov, “About Love,” in
Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog,” p. 183.
7 Symbolist and Modernist world-building
Dmitri Merezhkovskii, “O prichinakh upadka, i o novykh techeniyakh sovremen-noi russkoi literatury” [1893],
Ilya Vinitsky, “Where Bobok Is Buried: The Theosophical Roots of Dosto-evskii’s ‘Fantastic Realism’,”
For a survey of the institutions, philosophers, and literary critics who challenged positivism during these years, see Randall A. Poole, “Editor’s Introduction: Philosophy and Politics in the Russian Liberation Movement,” in
See Vladimir Solovyov,
See Edith W. Clowes,
Irina Paperno, “Nietzscheanism and the return of Pushkin in twentieth-century Russian culture (1899–1937),” in
262
January 16,1900, in
See Anna Geifman,
9Evgeny Zamyatin, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” in
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 107-12, esp. 107-08.
See the discussion of Bely’s 1909 essay “The Magic of Words” and its reflection in Bely’s novel in Vladimir E. Alexandrov,
A lucid discussion can be found in J. D. Elsworth, “Bely’s Theory of Symbolism,” ch. 1,
See Richard A. Gregg, “Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible, and
Yevgeny Zamyatin,
For a good discussion of parallels, see Robert Louis Jackson, “E. Zamyatin’s
Translation by Mirra Ginsburg in
Mikhail Bulgakov,
Ellendea Proffer,
Dostoevsky, “The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare,”
The two most important essays drawn upon here were published in 1984 in the Tartu school publication
See Sidney Monas, “St. Petersburg and Moscow as Cultural Symbols,” in
Andrei Bely,
M. M. Bakhtin, “Zapisi kursa lektsii po istorii russkoi literatury” R. M. Mirkinoi, “Blok,”
Alexander Blok, “Intelligentsia and Revolution” [January 1918],
Julie A. Buckler,
Simon Karlinsky,
Keith A. Livers, “Conquering the Underworld: The Spectacle of the Stalinist Metro,” ch. 4,
Svetlana Boym, “Moscow, the Russian Rome,” ch. 8,
Both stories are availableinEnglishinMikhail Bulgakov,
See Sabine I. Go¨lz, “Moscow for Flaneurs: Pedestrian Bridges, Europe Square, and Moskva-City,”
Nicolai Ouroussoff, “The Malling of Moscow: Imperial in Size and a View of the Kremlin,”
See Irina Gutman, “The Legacy of the Symbolist Aesthetic Utopia: From Futurism to Socialist Realism,” in
For debate over “Taylorism” and industrial futures, see Patricia Carden, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Aleksei Gastev and Evgeny Zamyatin,”
Leon Trotsky,
264
8 The Stalin years
Jochen Hellbeck,
See Eric Naiman,
See David L. Hoffmann,
Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr. was the pioneering Western scholar to take these doctrines and their effect on literature seriously; see his
Abram Tertz [Andrei Sinyavsky], “On Socialist Realism,” trans. George Dennis [1960], in Abram Tertz,
“Soviet Literature. Address Delivered to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, August 17, 1934,” in Maxim Gorky,
Mathewson,
Petre Petrov, entry on “Socialist realism,” in
See the comprehensive discussion in Keith Livers, “Mikhail Zoshchenko: Engineering the Stalinist Body and Soul,” ch. 2,
For an excellent overview of the functions filled by this hero, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The World of Ostap Bender,” ch. 13,
Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov,
Katerina Clark analyzes Gleb Chumalov as a mythical
See Boris Gasparov, “A Testimony: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony and the End of Romantic Narrative,” ch. 6,
Regine Robin,
For this early career, see Amanda J. Metcalf,
Yevgeny Schwartz,
Liudmila Filatova, “Konchen bal,”
Andrei Platonov,
Andrey Platonov,
See Thomas Seifrid, “Platonov and the Culture of the Five-Year Plan (1929-1931),” ch. 4,
Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, “Sorochinsky Fair,” in
Katerina Clark, “The Cult of Byron in the Stalinist Late 1930s” [excerpts of two chapters, on the Cult of Byron and the Stalinist Sublime, from her book in progress,
Lazar Fleishman, “The Trials of Hamlet,” ch. 10,
Osip Mandelstam, “The End of the Novel” [1922], in
9 From the first Thaw to the end
Two efficient guides to this period, which I draw on here, are Marc Slonim, “The Thaw,” ch. 27,
David Burg and George Feifer,
From “Lendlease,” in Varlam Shalamov,
266
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
“Nobel Lecture” [1970], in
“The Future According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn” [1992], repr. in Tatyana Tolstaya,
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century,”
Vladimir Voinovich,
“Repentance and Self-limitation” [1973] is one of Solzhenitsyn’s most overtly biblical essays, in theme and tone.
“Vladimir Putin pobyval v gostyakh u Solzhenitsyna,”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
This episode from Yevtushenko’s 1998 memoirs is cited and contextualized in Ser-guei Alex. Oushakine, “Crimes of Substitution: Detection in Late Soviet Society,”
Barbara Heldt,
Z. Boguslavskaya, cited in Robert Porter, “Female Alternatives – Narbikova, Petru-shevskaya, Tolstaya,”
For a biography, see Helena Goscilo, “Ludmila Petrushevskaya,” in
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, “Our Crowd,” trans. Helena Goscilo, in
Helena Goscilo, “Paradigm Lost? Contemporary Women’sFiction,” in
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya,
Natalya Shrom,
Viktor Erofeyev, “Anna’s Body,” trans. Leonard J. Stanton from author’s manuscript, in
Mikhail N. Epstein, “Postmodernism, Communism, and Sots-Art,” in
A good reading from each tradition exists in English: for the liberal-humanist critique, see Ellen B. Chances, “Pushkin House: The Riddles of Life and Literature,” ch. 11,
Andrei Bitov,
See Henrietta Mondry, “The Russian Literary Press, 1993-98: Critics Reach Reconciliation with Their Audience,” in
See Lipovetsky,
Sally Laird, “Introduction” to Vladimir Sorokin,
Konstantin V Kustanovich, “Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin,” in
A portion of the first part of
Interview with Vladimir Sorokin by Anna Narinskaya, “Ya vypolnil rol' kul'turologicheskogobul'dozera,”
Alexander Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of Post-Soviet Literature,” in
For this discussion of Pelevin as a second-generation postmodernist (or perhaps not one at all but some transitional, more “sincere” third category), see Ellen Rutten,
268
For good English-language discussions of Pelevin, see two by Gerald McCausland: his entry “Viktor Olegovich Pelevin” in
Vitaly Chernetsky,
Victor Pelevin,
Victor Pelevin,
Lipovetsky,
Boris Akunin,
For the parameters of sex crimes and for Russian bias against materialist acquisition, see Anthony Olcott, “Crime, Sex and Sex Crimes,” ch. 2,
A. Chekhov / B. Akunin,
See Leon Aron, “A Champion for the Bourgeoisie: Reinventing Virtue and Citizenship in Boris Akunin’s Novels,”
“Jasper Rees meets Boris Akunin,”
This point is made by Aron, “A Champion for the Bourgeoisie,” p. 149. Akunin’s English-language translator (or perhaps publisher) does not include this dedication in its Fandorin Series paperback.
Dmitry Prigov, “Dialogue No. 5,” from the bilingual anthology
V B. Kataev,
M. M. Bakhtin, “The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol'),” in
Words
bashmak shoe; boot, p. 116.
Bednye lyudi
Bednyi vsadnik “The Poor Horseman,” title of a chapter from Andrei Bitov’s
blazhenny blessed one; alternate name for a holy fool, p. 39.
bogatyr a hero from Russian folk myth, similar to a warrior saint, p. 60.
bolshev´ık lit. “majority person,” as opposed to “menshevik” (“minority person”); the Leninist wing of the Marxist Socialist-Democratic Party, victorious in 1917, p. 31.
byl´ına Russian folk epic, the hero of which is usually a
chort devil, imp, p. 35.
chronotope Bakhtin’s neologism for the time-space relationship in narrative,
p. 17. chudak oddball, misfit, p. 42.
dacha a cabin or small house, usually rural, used for retreats, p. 32. detekt´ıv detective novel, p. 243.
diamat Soviet compound word for “dialectical materialism,” p. 197. Dobroliubov “Mr. Lover-of-Good,” speaking name from Denis Fonvizin’s comedy
269
270
dvoeverie dual-faith; the blend of pagan and Christian
p. 29. dyavol devil (more imposing and terrifying than a
feuilleton lit. leaf, piece of paper (from Fr.); short, journalistic prose sketch, p. 156.
Gallomania a frenzy or mania for all things French, ridiculed in eighteenth-century comedies (especially Denis Fonvizin’s), p. 82.
Gallophilia the love of all things French (in contrast to Gallomania), p. 87.
glasnost' lit. “public voicedness”; first used in reference to lessened censorship during the Great Reforms (1861-64); entered English usage beginning in the mid-1980s, in reference to Gorbachev’s liberalization policies in the Soviet Union, p. 77.
grekh sin, p. 41.
groznyi terrible, awesome (in the sense of frightening to one’s enemies); refers to “Ivan the Terrible,” p. 52.
ideinost' idea-mindedness (lit. “idea-ness”); one of the tenets of socialist realism, that the “idea” of a work of art should embody the current high-priority party slogan, p. 200.
intelligentsia a mixed class based on education and ideological commitment rather than birth or government rank, p. 7.
Kalmyk Asiatic, Siberian ethnic group, p. 121.
Khanzhakina “Mrs. Hypocrite,” speaking name from Catherine the Great’s comedy
kitezhanka a woman from the legendary city of Kitezh, p. 30.
klassovost' class-mindedness; a tenet of socialist realism, acknowledging the social-class origin of art and obliging it to further the struggle of the proletariat, p. 200.
kn´ızhnik scribe; bibliophile; bookseller (pl.
kolkhoz collective farm, p. 216.
Koshchnoe tsarstvo Kingdom of the dead, p. 68.
kost' bone, p. 68.
Kotlovan
kulak lit. “fist”; well-to-do peasants who resisted collectivization after 1932, or anyone who profited under the quasi-capitalistic New Economic Plan, p. 51.
kul'turnost' culturedness, p. 193.
lesenka lit. “short flight of stairs”; refers here to a verse form invented by Vlad´ımir
Mayakovsky, p. 8. l'gat' to tell a lie, p. 49. lich´ına mask; outward appearance that conceals one’s true person, p. 30.
l´ıchnoe (nominative neuter declension of the adjective
to an individual, p. 30. l´ıchnost' personality; implies the moral character of a person, p. 30. lik [pronounced “leek”] face, visage, countenance, p. 30. l´ıshnii chelovek superfluous man, p. 54. Litfond acronym for “Literary Fund,” the financial division of the Union of Soviet
writers, p. 198. litso generic Russian word for “face,” p. 30. loshad'-kaleka crippled mare, p. 155. lubok woodcut print, one of the earliest forms of printing the written word in
Russia; now often used in the sense of “pulp fiction,” p. 73. luzha mud puddle, p. 49. Lyod
mag´ıcheskii kristall lit. “magic crystal”; crystal ball used for telling fortunes, a
famous image from Chapter 8 of
distributed illicitly, p. 238. Mat'-syra-zemlya Moist-Mother-Earth [Russian order is “Mother - Moist -
Earth”], p. 61. Mednye lyudi “Bronze Folk,” title of a chapter from Andrei B´ıtov’s
p. 237. Mednyi vsadnik
p. 237. Milon “Dear One,” speaking name from Denis Fonvizin’s comedy
(1781), p. 86. mit'k´ı eccentric followers of artist Dmitry Shagin in the 1970s; painters, poets,
filmmakers, and performance artists with an anti-work ethic, p. 42. Mitrofan “Mama’s Boy” (Greek), speaking name from Denis Fonvizin’s comedy
nachinaetsia begins, is beginning, p. 164.
narodnost' people- or folk-mindedness; a value precious to Slavophile thinkers
in the nineteenth century and revived as a socialist realist concept in the
1930s, suggesting that art should be accessible and appealing to the masses
by drawing on their traditions, language, melodies, rhythms, and values,
p. 200. nech´ıstaya s´ıla unclean force. One of many euphemisms for the devil, p. 61. nedorosl' “minor,” a young man in tsarist times who had not yet passed the
literacy exam qualifying him for obligatory civil service - and for marriage,
p. 86. Nepustov “Not-Shallow,” speaking name from Catherine the Great’s comedy
272
noga foot, leg, p. 242.
novyi slog “The new style,” p. 94.
O´chered'
o´cherk sketch (as a literary genre popular duringthe second half of the nineteenth century, a brief descriptive narrative in the Realist style), p. 156.
ogon' fire, p. 62.
okno window, p. 61.
o´ko eye, p. 61.
Old Believer one who refused to accept the official reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century, p. 30.
Orgbyuro acronym for the Organizational Bureau of the Union of Soviet Writers, p. 198.
o´ttepel' Thaw; period of diminished arbitrary government persecution, such as the post-Stalin years under Khrushchev, p. 220.
Ottsy i deti
part´ıinost' party-mindedness; a socialist realist concept whereby every act is a political act and the source for all correct knowledge is the Communist Party, p. 200.
Peresmeshnik ´ıli slavenskie skazki
perestroika lit. “Restructuring”; liberalizing reforms in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, p. 18.
Petrushka tragicomic hero of Russian puppet theatre, related to the tradition of Pierrot, Punch and Judy, etc., p. 40.
pletenie sloves lit. word-weaving - an aesthetic technique associated with pre-modern Russian prose texts that involves assonance, alliteration, and repetition to produce a rhythmic, lyrical effect, p. 81.
plut (pronounced
Polovtsians pagan tribes to the southeast of Kiev in medieval times, p. 44.
poputchiki (pl.) lit. “fellow travelers,” a term coined by Leon Trotsky in the early 1920s to refer to non-Bolshevik or apolitical writers who were nevertheless not hostile to the new regime, p. 196.
poshlyi vulgar, trivial, banal, p. 49.
poshlost' vulgarity, banality, p. 50.
poshlyak a vulgar, banal or trivial person, usually with commercial or consumer values, p. 49.
Pravdin “Mr. Truthful,” speakingname from Denis Fonvizin’s comedy
pravednik (f.
proizvol arbitrary political will or license; the exercise of power for its own irrational sake, or to intimidate, p. 194.
Proletkult acronym for “proletarian culture,” a radical organization of writers from the urban working class that flourished for several years after the Revolution, p. 195.
prorok prophet, p. 109.
Prostakova “Mrs. Simpleton,” speaking name from Denis Fonvizin’s comedy
Raskol 17th C. schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, p. 59.
samizdat lit. “self-publishing,” the underground circulation of texts in Soviet-era
Eastern and Central Europe, p. 238. samovar lit. “self-cooker,” a metal urn with spigot and internal tube for boiling
water for tea, p. 32. samozvantsvo lit. self-naming, pretendership, as in “pretender to the throne,”
usurper, p. 118. Shinel' “Overcoat.” Title of a short story by Nikolai Gogol, 1842, p. 117. shut (pronounced
skaz the literary device of a folksy, oral, usually digressive narrator, p. 201. skazka folk tale; fairy tale, p. 60. skomorokh (pl.
untainted by the West, p. 12. sluchai chance, p. 105. smekh laughter, p. 41. sobor synod, assembly; cathedral, p. 61. sobornost' togetherness; a sense of spiritual, ideological, or cultural togetherness,
p. 31. Sofya “Wisdom,” speaking name from Denis Fonvizin’s comedy
(1781) and also
p. 232.
tamizdat lit. “published elsewhere,” works smuggled out of the Soviet Union and
published in the West, p. 238. toska melancholy, grief, anguish, p. 50. tsarevich son of the tsar (prince, in the Western sense), p. 41. tselostnost' wholeness, p. 31.
274
vashe prevoskhod´ıtel'stvo Your Excellency; the appropriate mode of address for
third and fourth ranks in the Table of Ranks, p. 101. vashe vysokoblagorodie Your High Honor; appropriate for sixth, seventh, or
eighth rank, p. 101. vashe vysokoprevoskhod´ıtel'stvo Your High Excellency; appropriate for the first
or second rank in the Table of Ranks, p. 101. vashe vysokorodie Your Highly Born; appropriate for the fifth rank in the Table
of Ranks, p. 101. vertet'sya to revolve, spin, p. 62. Vestnikova “Tattler,” speaking name from Catherine the Great’s comedy
“Vprok” the title of Platonov’s short story, “For Future Use,” p. 203. vremya time, p. 62. vruchenie sebya self-giving, the giving or “handing over” of oneself without the
motive of personal gain, p. 77.
yurodivy (f. yurodivaya) holy fool, p. 39.
yurodstvo Khrista radi holy foolishness for the sake of Christ, p. 41.
zap´ıski notes or diary entries, p. 11.
zastoi Stagnation; usually refers to the years of cultural and economic stagnation
under Brezhnev (1970s-84), p. 220. zemlya earth (as in soil), p. 62. zhitie [pronounced “zhitiyeh”] saint’s life (hagiographic text), p. 62.
People
Afanasiev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1826-71) Russian collector of fairy tales,
p. 68. Akhmatova, Anna Andreyevna (1889-1966) p. 30. Works by: “Requiem.” Ak´ımov, Nikolai Pavlovich (1901-68) p. 210.
Aksakov, Sergei Timofeyevich (1791-1859) p. 45. Works by:
kum, Written by Himself.”
Babel, Isaak Emmanu´ılovich (1894-1941) p. 47. Works by:
Bakht´ın, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895-1975) p. 15.
Behrs, Sofya Andreyevna (later S. A. Tolstaya) p. 151.
Bel´ınsky Vissarion Grigorievich (1811-48) p. 14.
BelyAndrei (pseudonym of Bugaev, Bor´ıs Nikolaevich, 1880-1934) p. 17.Works by: “Magic of Words, The”;
Berdyaev, [Nicolas] Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1874-1948) p. 22. Works by:
B´ıtov, Andrei Georgievich (b. 1937) p. 17. Works by:
Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1880-1921) p. 182. Works by: “Intelligentsia and Revolution, The”;
Bor´ıs Godunov (r. 1598-1605) p. 59.
Borod´ın, Aleksandr Porf´ırievich (1833-77) p. 44. Works by:
Brodsky, Joseph Aleksandrovich (1940-96) p. 220.
Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich (1873-1924) p. 243.
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasievich (1891-1940) p. 16. Works by: “Adventures of Chichikov, The”; “Diaboliad”;
Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich (1870-1953) p. 221.
Catherine Romanova [Ekaterina Romanova] I (r. 1725-27) p. 93.
Catherine Romanova [Ekaterina Romanova] II (the Great) (r. 1762-96) p. 80.
Works by
“Culprit, The”; “Death of a Clerk, The”;
“Lady with a Pet Dog”;
“Calamity, A”; “Tedious Story, A”; “Name-Day Party, The”; “Peasants”;
“Steppe”;
Daniel, Yuly Markovich (1925-88) p. 220.
Den´ıkin, Anton Ivanovich, General (1872-1947) p. 29.
Derzhavin, Gavr´ıla Romanovich (1743-1816) p. 13.
Dolgorukaya, Natalya (1714-71) p. 45.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821-81) p. 4. Works by:
276
Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigorievich (1891-1967) p. 220. Works by:
‘Overcoat’ is Made”;
Erofeyev, Vened´ıkt (1938-90) p. 35. Works by:
“Russia’s
Fadeyev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1901-56) p. 221.
Fainzelberg, Ilya Arnoldovich (1897-1937) p. 202. Works by:
G´ıppius, Zinaida Nikolaevna (1869-1945) p. 74.
Gladkov, Fyodor Vas´ılievich (1883-1958) p. 65. Works by:
Gogol, N´ıkolai Vas´ılievich (1809-52) p. 13. Works by: “Carriage, The”;
The”;
p. 13. Works by:
Iskander, Faz´ıl Abdulevich (b. 1929) p. 53. Works by:
Ivanov, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich (1895-1963) p. 47. Works by:
Jakobson, Roman O´sipovich (1896-1982) p. 15.
Karamz´ın, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1766-1826) p. 27. Works by:
Lermontov, Mikhail Yurievich (1814-41) p. 12. Works by:
“Prophet.” Leskov, Nikolai Semyonovich (1831-95) p. 46. Works by:
Mandelstam, Nadezhda Yakovlevna (1899-1980) p. 9.
Mandelstam, O´sip Em´ılievich (1891-1938) p. 52. Works by: “Stalin Epigram.”
Marshak, Samu´ıl Yakovlevich (1887-1964) p. 207.
Mayakovsky Vlad´ımir Vlad´ımirovich (1893-1930) p. 7. Works by:
Merezhkovsky Dm´ıtry Sergeyevich (1865-1941) p. 29. Works by:
Meyerhold, Vsevolod Em´ılievich (1874-1940) p. 189.
Mikhail Romanov (1613-45) p. 59.
M´ırsky D. S. [Dm´ıtry Svyatopolk] Prince (1890-1939) p. 23. Works by:
Nabokov, Vlad´ımir Vlad´ımirovich (1899-1977) p. 4.
Nekrasov, Nikolai Alekseyevich (1821-78) p. 153. Works by:
Nestor (Chronicler) (
St. Theodosius.” Nicholas Romanov I (r. 1825-55) p. 53. Nicholas Romanov II (r. 1894-1917) p. 63. Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1744-1818) p. 84.
Olesha, Yury Karlovich (1899-1960) p. 57. Works by:
Panin, Nik´ıta Ivanovich, Count (1718-83) p. 86. Pashkevich, Vas´ıly Alekseyevich (1742-97) p. 89. Pasternak, Bor´ıs Leon´ıdovich (1890-1960) p. 195. Works by:
(Appended “Poems of Yury Zhivago” “Hamlet”);
[Eng.
Use”;
278
Pleshcheyev, Alekse´ı Nikolaevich (1825-93) p. 157.
Polevoy, Bor´ıs Nikolaevich (1908-81) p. 242. Works by:
Polotsky, Simeon (1629-80) p. 51. Works by: “Merchant Class, The.”
Praudin, Anatoly Arkadievich (b. 1961) p. 211.
Pr´ıgov, Dm´ıtry (b. 1940-2007) p. 17.
Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich (1891-1953) p. 3. Works by:
Pugachov, Emelyan Ivanovich ([1740]–75) p. 80.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich (1799-1837) p. 1. Works by:
Rad´ıshchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1749-1802) p. 27.
Rasputin, Valent´ın Grigorievich (b. 1937) p. 13. Works by:
R´ımsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreyevich (1844-1908) p. 29. Works by:
Saltykov-Shchedr´ın, Mikhail Evgrafovich (1826-89) p. 51. Works by:
Shalamov, Varlam T´ıkhonovich (1907-82) p. 225. Works by:
Shklovsky, V´ıktor Bor´ısovich (1893-1984) p. 6. Works by: “Art as Device.” Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1905-84) p. 9. Works by:
Shvarts, EvgenyLvo´vich(1896-1958) p. 203. Works by:
The”;
Epistle.” Suvorin, Aleksei Sergeyevich (1834-1912) p. 133.
Svyatopolk (the Accursed) (r. 1015-19) p. 63.
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ily´ıch (1840-93) p. 7. Works by:
Tertz, Abram (pseudonym of Sinyavsky Andrei Donatovich) (1925-97) p. 199. Works by: “What Is Socialist Realism?”
Tolstaya, Tatyana Nik´ıtichna (b. 1951) p. 227.
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich (1828-1910) p. 1. Works by: “About Life”; “About Relations between the Sexes”; “About Religion”; “About War”; “Alyosha the Pot”;
Tretyakov, Sergei Mikhailovich (1892-1939) p. 194. Works by:
Trotsky, Lev Dav´ıdovich (1879-1940) p. 190. Works by:
Tsvetaeva, Mar´ına Ivanovna(1892-1941) p. 6. Works by: “Verses about Moscow”; “Verses to Pushkin.”
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich (1818-83) p. 4. Works by:
Tynyanov, Yury Nikolaevich (1894-1943) p. 15. Works by: “Toward a Theory of Parody.”
Uspensky Bor´ıs Andreyevich (b. 1937) p. 76.
Vasilenko, Svetlana Vlad´ımirovna (b. 1956) p. 42. Works by:
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Aleksandrovich (b. 1933) p. 230.
Zamyatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (1884-1937) p. 49. Works by:
Zhukovsky Vas´ıly Andreyevich (1783-1852) p. 100.
Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895-1958) p. 192. Works by:
Places
Angara, River p. 13. Arzrum p. 28.
280
Bashk´ır, Steppe p. 45.
Belomor [“White Sea”] Canal p. 225.
Boldino Pushkin’s estate, where he had two legendarily productive autumns, p.
106. Borodino site of an extremely bloody battle between the Russians and Napoleon’s
army near Moscow in 1812, p. 150.
Caucasus, Mountains p. 28.
Chechnya p. 13.
Chern´ıgov p. 72.
Chud (pronounced
Dnieper, River p. 175.
Don, River p. 175.
Dushanbe formerly Stalinabad, in Soviet Taj´ıkistan, p. 210.
Ekibastuz Soviet prison camp, p. 224.
Kazan p. 72.
Kiev former capital of
K´ıtezh (pronounced Keetezh), p. 29.
Klopsko A monastery located near the northern city of Novgorod, p. 63.
Kolyma p. 225.
Leningrad Soviet name for St. Petersburg from 1924-91 (see also Petrograd, St. Petersburg), p. 42.
Magnitogorsk p. 25. Moscow p. 1. Murom p. 72.
Novgorod p. 40.
Ob’, River p. 45. Oka, River p. 72. Oryol p. 74.
Petersburg St. Petersburg (see also Petrograd and Leningrad), p. 28. Petrograd Slavic equivalent of the Germanic-sounding Petersburg (“Peter’s
city”), so renamed in 1914 by Nicholas II as a patriotic move during World
War I, p. 15.
Riga p. 72.
Sakhal´ın Island a penal colony north of Japan, p. 133. Sevastopol battle site in the Crimean War, p. 125.
Smolensk p. 74.
St. Petersburg original name for the former capital of Russia, p. 1.
Stalinabad now Dushanbe, in Tajikistan, p. 210.
Svetloyar, Lake p. 29.
Tobolsk p. 45.
Tula city South of Moscow, p. 131.
Ufa, region p. 45. Ural (Mountains) p. 45.
Vladivostok p. 53.
Yalta coastal city on the Black Sea in Crimea, p. 159.
Yaroslavl-Volga, region p. 29.
Yasnaya Polyana estate where Count Leo Tolstoy was born and buried, p. 131.
Yenesei River p. iv.
Yershalaim “Jerusalem,” in Bulgakov’s
General background and useful reference
Brown, Edward J.,
Harvard University Press, 2002). Brown, William Edward,
(Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980).
1980). Cornwell, Neil, ed.,
Routledge, 2001). Fedotov, George P.,
1975), vol. I:
vol. II:
M. E. Sharpe, 1999). Hubbs, Joanna,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Karlinsky, Simon,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Kelly, Catriona,
Clarendon Press, 1994). Mirsky, Prince D. S.,
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). Moser, Charles, ed.,
Cambridge University Press, 1992). Rzhevsky, Nicholas, ed.,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Smorodinskaya, Tatiana, Helena Goscilo, and Karen Evans-Romaine, eds.,
2006). Terras, Victor, ed.,
Press, 1990).
1991).
282
Wachtel, Michael,
Cambridge University Press, 2005). Zenkovsky, Serge A., ed.,
Dutton, 1974).
Biographies of Russian writers featured in this book
Bartlett, Rosamund, ed.,
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004). Binyon, T. J.,
Harvard University Press, 1990). Frank, Joseph,
1976–2002). Freeborn, Richard,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ed.,
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997). Kelly, Laurence,
2003). Kochetkova, N. D.,
Macmillan, 1984). Maude, Aylmer,
1987). Mochulsky, Konstantin,
Princeton University Press, 1971). Moser, Charles A.,
[Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 205] (Detroit: Gale, 1999).
Judith E. Kalb [Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 239] (Detroit:
Gale, 2001).
284
Literary Biography, vol. 285] (Detroit: Gale, 2003). Scammell, Michael,
St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Wilson, A. N.,
Russian literary criticism for the non-specialist relevant to the framework of this book
Bakhtin, Mikhail,
Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981).
University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Balina, Marina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds.,
Press, 2000). Brandist, Craig,
Pluto Press, 2002). Epstein, Mikhail N.,
Press, 1995). Erlich, Victor,
Yale University Press, 1980). Jakobson, Roman,
Rudy (New York: Belknap, 1990). Lipovetsky, Mark, with Eliot Borenstein, eds.,
N. F. C. Owen, ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Slavic Department, 1984). Shklovsky, Viktor,
Archive, 2000).
Afanasiev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich 68,
192 Akhmatova, Anna Andreyevna 30, 192,233,236 “Requiem” 217,218,233,235 Akimov, Nikolai Pavlovich 210, 211 Aksakov, Sergei Timofeyevich
97, 244, 245-46
170 Alexander III, Tsar 132 Avvakum Petrovich, Protopop “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself” 45
Baba Yaga 66, 67, 68-70, 84, 122, 188,
227,236 Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich 48,195,
201,221
17-18, 19, 34, 134, 136, 143, 153,
182, 199,230, 249 Behrs, Sofya Andreyevna (later S. A.
Tolstaya) 151 Belinsky, Vissarion Grigorievich 14,
126, 199
Bely, Andrei (pseudonym of Bugaev, Boris Nikolaevich) 166, 172, 173, 179, 181, 189, 204
141, 187–88, 189, 212 civilian vs. military 46, 47, 116, 140,
150 empire vs. hearth 32–33 free vs. unfree 45–46, 104–06, 127,
130, 145, 150, 192, 194 poetry vs. prose 4–7, 18, 106–07,
127, 153–55 Russia vs. West 76, 80–97, 110, 126,
169 sacred vs. demonic 30–32, 35–36,
73, 76, 119–21, 172, 175 settlers vs. wanderers 46–47, 213 Bitov, Andrei Georgievich 236–38
182
285
286
Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich 243 Bugaev, Boris Nikolaevich:
Andrei Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasievich 16, 74,
166, 185–87, 189, 192, 195, 221 “Adventures of Chichikov, The”
185,202
“Diaboliad” 185
Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich 221
Byronic hero 46, 54, 55, 109
Catherine I, Empress 93
Catherine II, The Great 80, 84–86, 94,
100, 106, 125, 201, 221 censorship 2, 3, 7, 24, 28, 125, 171,
193–98, 204, 206, 207, 211, 220,
238 Chaadaev, Pyotr Yakovlevich 4 Chapayev, Vasily 243 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich 12, 14, 20,
22, 27–28, 112–13, 115, 118, 125,
127, 132, 133, 149, 155–65, 169,
186,199, 207, 211, 221, 224, 233,
246
“Anna on the Neck” 162, 236
“Black Monk, The” 158
“Calamity, A” 161
“Culprit, The” 27
“Death of a Clerk, The” 157
“Enemies” 159, 161
“In the Ravine” 27
“Lady with a Pet Dog” 159, 163–64,
169, 211 “Little Trilogy” 162
“About Love” 162–63 “Name-Day Party, The” 160, 161 “Peasants” 27
Chernetsky, Vitaly 15
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich 156
Chkhartishvili, Grigory:
chronotope 47, 83, 176–77
Bakhtin’s chronotope 17–18, 34–35 picaresque as chronotope 91 purgatory as chronotope 76 time-space relationships 134–46, 171–79, 183
Chukovsky, Korney Ivanovich 207
Chulkov, Mikhail Dmitrievich 90, 97 “Bitter Fate, A” 27
communism:
Daniel, Yuly Markovich 220 defamiliarization:
220, 243–47 devil, demon, imp 20, 26, 29, 35, 41, 48, 61, 64, 67, 74–75, 76, 78, 114, 128, 176–79, 186 Dmitry the Pretender:
Grigory Dolgorukaya, Natalya 45 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 4, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, 29, 62, 72, 74, 75, 78, 93, 96, 113–14, 116, 117, 124, 125, 127–28, 129–31, 132–33, 134–40, 141–43, 144, 145, 146–48, 149, 151, 152, 153–55, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 176, 179, 181, 182, 183, 187, 189, 203, 204, 205, 207, 221, 224, 226, 230, 231, 234, 235, 239, 241, 244–46
50, 72, 113, 128, 130, 133, 134,
135, 138, 148, 153, 160, 169, 171,
179
37, 49, 55, 96, 128, 130, 135, 139,
152, 154–55, 156, 242
92, 96, 130, 148, 171, 226
146–47, 185 “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” 135
245
113, 134, 137, 138, 147, 152, 156,
174–75, 182, 223, 230–38
237
107, 108–14, 116, 127, 128,
237
Ehrenburg, Ilya
236 Erofeyev, Venedikt 236
face, visage, countenance, mask 22, 30–33, 52, 57, 60, 61, 62, 64, 78, 79, 116, 120, 122, 181, 186, 202, 244
Fadeyev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich 221
Fainzelberg, Ilya Arnoldovich:
fairy tales / folk tales 11, 19, 20, 25, 35, 39, 40, 43, 46, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66–71, 74, 75, 92, 99, 114, 115, 119, 122, 177, 203, 207–11, 212, 219, 232, 236
Fonvizin, Denis 86–89, 91, 93, 94, 108, 120
fools, holy fools, jesters 11, 39–43, 48, 54, 60, 62, 63–65, 71, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89–90, 94, 97, 138, 143, 148, 151, 152, 182, 199, 209, 210, 247
Fyodorov, Ivan 59
Gasparov, Boris 15, 32, 205 Gippius, Zinaida Nikolaevna 74 Gladkov, Fyodor Vasilievich 203–07, 218
288
Gogol, Nikolai (
“Nose, The” 116, 186, 240, 241
“Overcoat, The” 32, 116–17, 147, 148, 157
“Sorochinsky Fair” 216 Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich 167
Peshkov, Aleksei Maksimovich) 13, 25, 27, 47, 56, 132, 133, 137, 157, 191, 192, 196–97, 199–200, 203, 207, 214, 217, 218, 221, 222, 225, 229
holy fool:
Ilf and Petrov 202
Jakobson, Roman Osipovich 15, 222 jester:
Petrov Kataev, Valentin Petrovich 25
Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich
81 Knyazhnin, Yakov Borisovich 97, 108,
120
29 Koshchey the Deathless 66, 67–70, 74,
205 Kurbsky, Prince Andrei Mikhailovich
52
Lermontov, Mikhail Yurievich 12, 13, 17, 99, 100, 106, 109–10, 112, 113, 154, 203, 217, 245
76–79, 179–81, 185 Lukin, Vladimir Ignatievich 83
magic 24, 39, 61, 70, 74, 75–79, 105,
135, 142, 176, 177 Mandelstam, Nadezhda Yakovlevna 9 Mandelstam, Osip Emiliovich 184, 218 “Stalin Epigram” 52 Marshak, Samuil Yakovlevich 207 Marxism, communism, socialism 17, 25, 26, 36, 39, 130, 136, 191–219, 220–30, 231, 236, 246 mask:
“On Reasons for the Decline of
Contemporary Russian
Literature, and on its New
Tendencies” 166 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emiliovich 189,
194,218,221 miracle 8, 23, 24, 38, 40, 42, 56, 60, 61,
63, 71, 75-79, 129, 136, 173,
176-77, 210, 219 Mirsky, Prince Dmitri Petrovich
Svyatopolk:
171, 176-77, 183-87, 188, 189,
228 Mother Earth 8, 26, 61, 68, 71, 72
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich 4, 82, 105, 123, 238
“Life of St. Theodosius” 65 Nevsky, Alexander 59, 65-66, 73 Nicholas I, Tsar 53, 99, 102, 110, 125,
184,230 Nicholas II, Tsar 63, 125, 132 nihilistic hero 11, 55, 111, 112, 121,
246 Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich 84, 100
Olesha, Yury Karlovich
Dmitry
Panin, Count Nikita Ivanovich 86 Pashkevich, Vasily Alexeyevich 89 Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich 195, 220, 223-24
Pelevin, Viktor Olegovich 237, 241–44
Number XII, The” 241
Gorky, Maksim Peter I, The Great 11,27,29,39,59, 63, 73, 75, 80, 81, 84, 87, 93, 100, 102, 103, 180, 181,238 Peter III, Tsar 100,118,121 Petersburg, myth of 1, 20, 28, 30, 43, 114, 126, 135, 140, 165, 171, 179-83, 184 Petrovskii-Sitniyanovich, Samuil Emel'yanovich:
Andreyevich Vogau) 22 Platonov, Andrei Platonovich 20, 211-17,218,221
290
Praudin, Anatoly Arkadievich 211
person] 29, 35–39, 41, 43, 45, 56,
133, 158, 170, 230 pretendership 102, 106, 118–23 Prigov, Dmitry 17, 247–48 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich 3, 8, 66,
88, 196
106, 118, 119, 121–22 Pushkin, Aleksandr 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13,
17, 19, 20, 24, 28, 55, 88, 93, 94,
96, 97, 99, 100, 101–11, 112, 113,
114–15, 117–24, 126, 128, 137,
140, 141, 149, 151, 152, 154, 165,
167, 169, 181, 182, 188, 195, 203,
217, 230, 231, 245
119
181–82, 237
110, 113, 118, 121–22, 124, 209
104–06, 108, 113, 115, 123, 244
104
“Shot, The” 108–09, 113;
“Stationmaster, The” 107, 112,
147, 148
Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich 27 Rasputin, Valentin Grigorievich
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreyevich
121, 122, 201, 209 Ryurik 59
saints’ lives 11, 19, 36–37, 38–39, 59–61, 62–66, 73, 75, 129, 132, 193 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail Evgrafovich
“Art as Device” 15 Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich 9, 212, 224
116, 192, 195, 230 Shukshin, Vasily Makarovich 42 Shvarts, Evgeny Lvovich 203, 207–11, 218, 232
212 socialist realism 9, 14, 20, 29, 189–90, 191, 192, 197, 198–203, 204, 205–06, 207, 211, 213, 214, 217,
218, 220, 221, 222–23, 228, 231, 236, 240, 242 Sologub, Fyodor Kuzmich
156 Svyatopolk the Accursed 63
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 7
Tertz, Abram:
Donatovich Tolstaya, Sofya Andreyevna:
Sofya Andreyevna Tolstaya, Tatyana Nikitichna
227 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 16, 19, 20, 25, 32, 37, 39, 50, 60, 66–67, 82, 97, 111, 113, 114, 115, 118, 124, 125, 127, 128–29, 131–34, 136, 137–46, 148–53, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163–65, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 178–79, 182, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 203, 204, 206, 221, 223, 224, 225, 227, 228, 233, 239, 241, 245, 248
“About Life” 163
“About Relations between the Sexes” 163
“About Religion” 163
“About War” 163
“Alyosha the Pot” 27
“Death of Ivan Ilyich, The” 12, 129, 142, 145, 153, 160
“Devil, The” 74, 137
“Father Sergius” 35
“God Sees the Truth, But Waits” 46
“Kreutzer Sonata, The” 137, 139, 151, 157
“Master and Man” 12, 35, 142
“Prisoner of the Caucasus” 67
“Raid, The” 149
“Sevastopol in December” 150
292
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich (
Uspensky, Boris Andreyevich 76–77 utopian hero 56–57, 173–74
Vasilenko, Svetlana
Great 59, 63 Vogau, Boris Andreyevich: see Boris
Pilnyak Voinovich, Vladimir Nikolaevich
29
Westernizers 18, 80–97 wilderness 24–30, 37, 110, 181, 188, 212, 214, 242
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Aleksandrovich 230
Zamyatin, Evgeny Ivanovich 166, 170–71, 172–75, 178, 187–88, 189, 190, 221, 248
and Other Matters” 170 “Scythians?” 175