The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

With minor exceptions, this defines the transposable Great Russian prose canon, plus perhaps a dozen plays. It neglects the empire’s cultural minorities. This prose canon contains very few women (the Russian nineteenth century had no Jane Austen, George Eliot, or George Sand) – although groundbreaking research on Russian women’s writing over the past three decades has brought to light many formerly invisible authors and works. For reasons of space, the Russian e´migre´ community is excluded from this book (together with the aristocratic and very Russian genius of Vladimir Nabokov, who has stimulated a Russo-American industry of his own).

The most significant compression in the present volume, however, occurs in the realm of Russian poetry, which can only be a secondary presence in the story. The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry has already been written, by Michael Wachtel; the present book can be seen as a companion to it. Our tasks are quite different. Wachtel notes provocatively in his opening sentence: “The achievements of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy notwithstanding, Russian literature is a tradition of poetry, not prose, and Russian readers have always recognized it as such.”1 Russian readers, yes – but not the rest of the world. Europe ignored the Slavic tongues. Highborn, educated Russians of the imperial period were raised bilingually, spoke French in polite society, and many knew English and German as well. Europeans by and large did not presume that any benefits could be gained by learning Russian. And why should they? The Russian officers who occupied Paris in 1814 spoke French as purely and elegantly as their defeated foe. Some Russian writers, like Pushkin’s friend Pyotr Chaadaev as late as the 1830s, argued that the Russian tongue was unsuited to refined philosophical thought. This imbalance in language competencies contributed to a curious, and not unjustified, superiority complex in many great Russian writers. Most insistent in this regard was Fyodor Dostoevsky in his journalism of the 1870s. We can translate you, Dostoevsky proclaimed, but you cannot translate us. We can grasp, absorb and transfigure your legacy, but ours is mysterious, potent, for us alone. When the quatralingual Ivan Turgenev, living in Paris in the 1870s, presented some poems by Pushkin in his own French translation to Gustave Flaubert, the latter shrugged: “Il est plat, votre poe`te” [He’s flat, your poet].2

To set poetry at one pole and “the rest of literature” at the other is a familiar reflex in literary studies, and it comes at a cost. It satisfies our intuitive sense that the most marvelous aspects of a poem collapse outside its original language, or must be wholly recreated by a translator-poet of equivalent gifts, whereas prose

Introduction5

is somehow wide open, serving raw experience more than form. This binary view, unfair to the resources of both poetry and prose, leaves out rich stretches of artistic writing in between – ornamentalist prose, rhythmic speech, and “prose poems,” for example. But it nevertheless touches on an important truth. Prose is deficient in criteria and tools for precise measurement, whereas poetry has an agreed-on descriptive and critical vocabulary, beginning with rules of versification. In his Introduction to Russian Poetry and elsewhere, Wachtel argues that poets cite, converse, and bond with one another (that is, come together in a tradition) most intensely at the level of what is lost in translation. The reality of the work, its substance, is this complex of rhythmic patternings and specific aural cues. Only later does that technically identifiable mass come to be associated with certain themes (feelings, images, narrative experiences).3