The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

As used here, the phrases “literary tradition” and “literary canon” refer to works of creative fiction that satisfy three criteria. First, these are the created worlds (or writers’ biographies) that generations of Russians have been raised on and are expected to recognize, the way English speakers recognize the shape of one of Shakespeare’s plots (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet) and Spanish speakers the tribulations of Don Quixote. Merely mentioning the name is enough to bring up the story, for these are common denominators, a sort of cultural shorthand. Although these plots are themselves often of international (or pan-European) origin, the Russian canon is unusually rich in common denominators that peaked first in other national literatures and then were adapted, with fierce enthusiasm and particularity, as Russia’s own (the “Russian Hamlet,” the “Russian Don Quixote”).

Second, texts become canonical when they are repeatedly referenced, recycled, and woven into successive artistic worlds so that they never entirely fade

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from view. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (set between 1805 and 1819) had an impact in its own time (the 1860s), inspired an opera (by Sergei Prokofiev in the 1940s), a steamy parodic sequel titled Pierre and Natasha (in the 1990s), and along the way a mass of reverent and irreverent illustrations, films, spin-offs, caricatures, and comic strips. Natasha Rostova has now become a personality that can enter other stories (including real-life ones); she is not limited to the plots that Tolstoy created around her.

And finally: the literary canon is proof of the legitimating aesthetic judgment of readers over time. Of course politics, censorship, taste, prejudice, accidents of loss or discovery, and approved reading lists play a role in the canonizing process. But overall, canonic works survive because they are excellent. Excellence in an artwork is both formal (that is, due to its efficient aesthetic construction) and “psychological” – that is, we recognize a classic because it has rewarded multiple interpretations of itself from multiple points of view, over generations.

During the century that it has existed in adequate English translation, the Russian canon of novels and plays has acquired a reputation and a certain “tone.” It is serious (that is, tragic or absurd, but rarely lighthearted and never trivial), somewhat preacherly, often politically oppositionist, and frequently cast in a mystifying genre with abrupt or bizarre beginnings and ends. The novels especially are too long, too full of metaphysical ideas, too manifestly eager that readers not just read the story for fun or pleasure but learn a moral lesson. These books are deep into good and evil even while they parody those pretensions. If there is comedy – and Russian fiction can be screamingly funny – there is a twist near the end that turns your blood to ice. Russian literary characters don’t seek the usual money, career, success in society, sex for its own sake, trophy wife or husband, house in the suburbs, but instead crave some other unattainable thing.

How one should respect this reputation and received “tone” is a delicate issue. In the literary humanities, an Introduction is a subjective enterprise. It has a shape of its own, which means big gaps and broad leaps. It is not a history, handbook, encyclopedia, digest of fictional plots or real-life literary biographies, and even less is it a cutting-edge textbook summarizing, as science textbooks can, the “state of the art.” No in-print genre today can compete with search engines or updatable online resources for objective information of that sort. An Introduction probably works best as a tour guide, pointing out landmarks, road signs, and connecting paths. Since its purpose is to lead somewhere more complex than the point at which it began, it should introduce names, texts, and themes that an interested reader can pursue elsewhere in more detail. A non-Russian author inviting a non-Russian audience to enter this territory is thus obliged, I believe, to select as exemplary those literary texts and tools

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that are accessible “from the outside.” They must exist in decent translations, survive as genuine works of art in their target languages (here, English), and be capable of accumulating cultural weight beyond Russia’s borders.