The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

For some periods, the benchmark writers anchoring the edges of literary space are so different from each other that each begins his own literary tradition. This is the case with the Romantic era, where the “Pushkin” and “Gogol” lines are antipathetic. But in other periods, agreatwriter will combine elements of both poles in a conscious quest for new and healthier hybrids. Under such conditions, one can speak almost of a “dialectical” development of characters and themes. The task of the mediating author is to challenge the oversimplification that is endemic to binary thinking and thus to re-complicate the field. To take only one example, the most timeworn binary in all of Russian literature: Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky. Like Pushkin and Gogol from an earlier period, these two were seen as incompatible geniuses. But writers appeared – one thinks of Anton Chekhov – whose gift it was to bridge, test, break down, and transform the most canonical hero types and legacies. Just as Pushkin reworked the cliche´s of European Romanticism in his short stories of the 1830s, so did Chekhov provide explicitly modest, non-melodramatic reworkings of bigger-than-life, tragic Tolstoyan plots in the 1880s and 1890s. Chekhov’s characters (like every other literate person alive in Russia) have read Anna Karenina and envy its profound insights. But they aren’t living in that novel. As creatures of Chekhov’s pen, to react in a Tolstoyan way to their plight can be part of their problem, even if it was part of Tolstoy’s solution. On occasion, a more recent author at the end of the chain can turn prior inherited worlds inside out or upside down. One example is Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), who, in 1930, suspended socialist realist time-space and – dreamily, as if in a trance – inverted a Stalinist-style production novel into a construction pit that eventually became

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a grave. In no way are these inversions or syntheses assumed to be superior to the benchmark authors who flank them. They are simply complex in a different way, for the intelligence of a literary tradition is not linear or progressive. It constantly grows in all directions without invalidating its earlier truths. For that reason there is no single optimal place from which to view it. But some students of the Russian tradition have seen in it a darker and more severe pattern than the binaries and triads offered here.

One such skeptic is the cultural historian Steven Marks, in his 2002 book titled How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. By what criteria, he asks, does the cosmopolitan common reader sense a work as “Russian”? Not by its length, setting, characters, spirituality, moral demands – in other words, not by a stable list of traits or revealed truths. “Russianness,” Marks argues, is a special attitude toward the outside world, one that is dismissive or condemnatory. When nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian ideas caught on around the world – and catch on they did – it was not because they “worked” or were “true” in any practical (or even moral) sense, but because they were designed to startle, destabilize, and negate. This nay-saying was practiced at a very sophisticated level. From Napoleon’s defeat to the defeat of Gorbachev, in Marks’s reading, the refrain was the same: resent the bourgeois, consumer-oriented, progress-bewitched West. Out of such restlessness and resentment came Russian maximalism, irrationalism, messianism, mysticism, utopianism. On censored Russian soil, these unruly ideas were either promptly banned, or else co-opted by the state and turned to sinister purpose. But they were a source of inspiration to revolutionaries and dispossessed people everywhere else around the globe. This ecstatically nihilistic edge to so many Russian achievements in art is key to their enduring success.