Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Nabokov’s Ada. The book also has at least two other niches in literary history. As a text set in a time before that in which it was actually written, it is, in a sense, the first great Russian historical novel. It was also a pioneering example of the serial novel, published chapter by chapter over seven years (1825–32) and appearing in complete form only in 1833. This piecemeal method of publication was later to be used for many other famous works, among them

War and Peace

and

Crime and Punishment

(though the instalments of these novels came out in journals, rather than in book form). In the course of serial publication, writers’ views of characters sometimes changed; they, and their readers, tended to see this positively, feeling that it gave their fictional creations the inconsistency and inscrutability of real people. It was rare for writers to make major changes to individual episodes before the book version came out: as Pushkin put it in the first chapter of

Evgeny Onegin

, ‘There are many contradictions/But I don’t want to correct them’.

One thing that Pushkin took authorship to mean, then, was the careful regulation by individuals of the manner in which their utterances came before the public. He also saw writing as an occupation which, though not exactly gentlemanly, at any rate helped raise the income necessary to a gentleman’s existence. But writing was also understood by him as cultural leadership. That Russia needed a literature equal in standing to that of France, Germany, or England, and that there existed no native literary tradition worth the name, were defining assumptions for Pushkin and his generation of Russian writers. In their view, the Russian literary landscape resembled the ‘empty waves’, gloomy forests, and boggy lichen-covered shores of the unimproved North that Pushkin evoked in the prologue to The Bronze Horseman (1833). Monotony, rather than chaos, was the precedent and stimulus to creation. ‘We have neither a literature nor [good] books’, Pushkin grandly asserted in 1824. Though he allowed merit to various predecessors, including Derzhavin and Ivan Krylov (best-known for his lively and vigorous fables), it was clear none of these was a ‘natural genius’ (Naturgenie) in the Romantic sense, or for that matter a national genius. In an essay written a year later, Pushkin explicitly denied the right of the brilliant scientist and pioneering poet Mikhailo Lomonosov to be recognized in this capacity, presenting him instead as a mere craftsman: ‘For him poetic composition was a pastime, or, as more often, an exercise undertaken out of a stern sense of duty [ . . . ] In our first poet we would look in vain for flaming bursts of feeling or imagination.’

8. Front cover of

Apollo

, no. 6, 1913.

The title page of

Apollo

(no. 6, 1913). Journals played an enormously important role in the publication of Russian literature from the late eighteenth century until the late twentieth. Pushkin’s

The Contemporary

, itself the successor to magazines such as

The Drone

and

The European Herald

, was followed by dozens of organs of all political hues. Soviet literary history naturally emphasized the role of radical journals, but conservative ones, such as

The Russian Herald

(which serialized works by both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) had at least equal distinction. The illustration here shows the frontispiece of one of the most important Modernist journals. At this period, literary magazines rebelled against the drab presentation formerly considered proper for serious publications. Beautifully designed and printed, and copiously illustrated, they, and their successors in the 1920s, are unique in Russian history as total works of art. From the early 1930s, Soviet magazines again reverted to the visual mediocrity current in the nineteenth century (and emphasized by the dreadful quality of paper and typefaces in use).