The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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

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