Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Black humour of this kind survived at even the darkest eras of history, such as the late 1930s. To be sure, in Socialist Realist texts, humour that was not of the unintentional sort was limited to crude jokes directed at a narrow range of social types (shirkers at work, women who used too much make-up, men who tried to lay down the law to their wives). In unofficial writing, though, a vivid and subtle feeling of the ridiculous survived, and pompous bureaucrats were its main targets (in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, comic vengeance is exacted on a whole crowd of such people). In texts of this kind, humour was a survival strategy, but it was also a manifestation of freedom, a means of transcending oppression, a gesture of indifference towards authority. The exhilirating carnival foolery celebrated by Bakhtin was only one form of challenging official puritanism. The humour of the ‘holy fools’, the popular saints of early modern Russia whose filthy habits and bizarre behaviour assailed ordinary proprieties, and thus called into question conventional ideas about goodness, also worked its way through into some later literary texts. Kostoglotov, the protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, who is saddled with an absurd name (Boneswallower), and is, in every obvious way, decidedly unamiable – surly, brusque, unrepentantly naive – moved like some latterday, secularized version of the holy fool through 1950s Soviet society, saving no one but himself, yet at the same time exposing the illusions upon which the ideals and aspirations of those surrounding him were based.

The uniqueness of Russian literature (and Russian culture more generally) has been held by many Western observers to lie in precisely this ability to embrace spiritual and material worlds. As the classicist and Russophile Jane Harrison declared in 1919, ‘The Russian stands for the complexity and concreteness of life – felt whole, unanalysed, unjudged, lived into . . .’. But as I come to the end of this short tour along pathways suggested by Pushkin’s ‘Monument’, I would not want to leave you with the impression that this chapter has spoken ‘the last word’, that we have reached the heart of the maze. Rather, there is no such heart: we have met the beginning of a path leading backward. For Pushkin, the last word was not ‘O Muse, be obedient to the command of God’, but ‘Don’t dispute with fools’: which leads back to the discussion of savoir faire placed here in Chapter 6. We saw in Chapter 5 that judging life has been a constant preoccupation of Russian writers, while Pushkin himself is an illustration that intelligent Russians have had just as large a talent for, and inclination towards, analysis as their counterparts anywhere in the world. In Russia itself, writers have often been regarded as sages, as moral guides to how life should be lived; but there are many other reasons for reading Russian literature. Like any other literature, it represents the world in new and extraordinary ways, it investigates areas of human experience that we sometimes prefer not to think about (madness, homicidal urges, tyranny); and it offers not only intellectual stimulation but the sensual delight of language stretched to its limits, of laughter, and of flights of imaginative fancy.

Further reading

Preface

N. Cornwell (ed.), A Reference Guide to Russian Literature (London, 1998), and V. Terras (ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1984) (the latter lists more writers, but the bibliographies and articles in the former are fuller). Among single-volume histories are R. Hingley, Russian Writers and Society (London, 1975) and Russian Writers and Soviet Society (London, 1978); D. S. Mirsky, History of Russian Literature (New York, 1949); C. Moser (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge, 1992); V. Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1991); R. Bartlett and A. Benn (eds.), Literary Russia: A Guide (London, 1997) is useful on museums. Fuller reading lists, as well as source notes for the entire book, are available on the OUP website at //http:www.oup.com/

Chapter 1