The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Literature, they insisted, was a profession and a craft. It could even become a “science” (in Russian, the word for science, nauka, refers not only to empirical hard science but to all scholarship, and to systematic or methodologically consistent thinking in general). Literary creativity – or as the Formalists preferred to call it, “literariness” – had an arsenal of techniques and devices for achieving its effects. Writers cared about life’s problems, of course, but mostly they cared about learning how to write. For this to happen, they needed to master the tools of their trade. Some Formalist critics, like Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) in his study The Young Tolstoi (1922), went so far as to claim that Tolstoy’s obsessive “self-improvement lists” and periodic condemnations of his own behavior in his diaries, as well as his elaborately public, exaggerated confessions later in life, were tasks more intrinsic to “literariness” than to conscience. Diaries of the sort Tolstoy produced were designed to experiment with various literary forms of punitive self-exposure, not really to combat, or repent of, the actual sins being recorded – which often continued unabated. This skeptical verdict on Tolstoy’s spiritual quest was an extreme Formalist position, and Eikhenbaum himself later backed off from it. Mostly the group sought to understand the role of formal strategies or “devices” in a literary tradition. Apprentice writers studied devices for portraying character, plot, imagery, and emotional tone that had been developed by their predecessors. In their own creative writing they worked subtle changes on these earlier formulas, expecting their readers to recognize when an old, worn-out, automatized device was being brought to the surface and replaced by something else. To “lay bare” an old device was one of the tasks of parody.

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 All those forms involve a struggle against outdated behaviors and forms, to be sure.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,

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 17

almostacontemporary)ofboth Gogol and Dostoevsky. The best Decadent and Symbolist-era novels, such as Fyodor Sologub’s Petty Demon (1904) or Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916/1922), are saturated with the nineteenth-century classics, in dense networks of allusion recombined and often distorted so that tragic motifs become comic and comic motifs tragic. Pushkin House (1971) by Andrei Bitov (b. 1937) portrays the Russian intelligentsia, betrayers of culture who are themselves betrayed by communism, through the affectionately garbled lens of masterworks by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky: the real and enduring Russia of the literary imagination. One trademark device of the postmodernist poet and performance artist Dmitry Prigov (1940–2007), author of over 35,000 poems, is to swallow up and re-accent other poets’ words: his spectacular recitation of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin as a Buddhist mantra always brought down the house. For such indefatigable inventiveness with cultural artifacts of the past, Prigov won a Pushkin prize in 1993. Such parody does not discredit or overthrow its predecessors, but addresses and confirms them. The point of this address is not to displace the writers who came before, a futile and impoverishing exercise, but to become worthy of joining them.