The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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 War and Peace and Crime and Punishment appeared in the same thick journal, The Russian Herald, during the mid-1860s; traces of Tolstoy’s 1805 war turn up in the mouth of the police investigator Porfiry Petrovich while he is interrogating Raskolnikov.3 These were the dialogues that endured. When dialogue was desired with the transitory (non-fictive) world, readers became skilled in a pre-emptive interpretive strategy known as “Aesopian language.” It assumes that Russian authors, unfree to state in print what they really mean, don the sly mask of the fabulist Aesop and encode each utterance with latent content, intended for those with ears to hear it. A curious relationship then developed between literary authors and Russia’s fledgling civic and professional discourses – the quasi-public speech of salons, theatre foyers, student circles, meetings of medical societies, scholarly gatherings, jubilee anniversaries for famous artists or scientists, lawyers at public jury trials.4 This growing professional class adored literature and relied on its heroes and themes to authenticate their public statements. The respect was often not returned: literary authors, in their fiction, continued to portray “group” and public speech either satirically – or criminally. It would appear that many creative writers

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 15

considered civic speech, mediated by institutions and a rising corporate consciousness, an unwelcome rival.