The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

How do prose writers bond and cite? Shared themes and images are important for both poetry and prose, but unlike the lyric poem, fused to the language and rhythms of its birth, prose and dramatic genres are presumed to be more resilient – orphaned without trauma and adopted with gratitude into new families. Novels, stories, and plays are routinely “realized” outside their original languages, garnering international fame in all manner of translations, to audiences that have no idea of the context or sound of the source. (Occasionally one even hears the comment that a translation can, and should, improve on the original. A variant on this position was voiced by the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera in 2007, when he argued that the aesthetic value of a given novel could be appreciated fully only in the “large context of world literature,” which for him meant by those “without a knowledge of the original language.”4) Confounded by the success of their product and uncertain about the specificity of their tools, professional prose analysts frequently default to plot summaries, the work’s “message,” the perspectives of its narrators, its reflection of real-life events, and how its fictive personalities do or do not cohere as people who resemble us, their readers, and their friends. These are all valid categories and inquiries. But they apply as readily to philosophy, sociology, politics, cultural anthropology, psychology, and simply getting through the day as they do to verbal art.

This profligate applicability of stories to life was one reason why the Russian Formalists, attempting to professionalize literary study in the 1920s, took up the challenge of narrative prose with such missionary fervor. They devisedtechnical categories for its analysis that were deliberately, polemically blind to personality and to ethics: objective terminology and procedures that would qualify artistic prose as aself-consciously “literary” (or “poetical”) construct.Itisofenormous significance that the most aggressive and fertile of these Russian prose theorists,

6The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

ViktorShklovsky(1893–1984), wrotebrashandinfluential essays onthe artistry of Miguel Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Laurence Sterne, all the while working solely, and apparently with full confidence, in Russian translation. Shklovsky did not know Spanish, English, or any foreign language. Did he consider his monolingualism a handicap? His practice as an analyst of prose suggests that in his view, a higher-order authenticity residing in the very structure or movement of literary narrative permits it to transcend the specific material out of which it is made. No verse theorist could take seriously the “scientific” results of such a method applied to his chosen subject matter.

In balancing these two wings of the Russian tradition, the poetic and the prosaic, Flaubert’s remark to Turgenev about that “flat poet, Pouchkine” has been a warning to the present volume. Flaubert was not wholly wrong. Pushkin taken out of Russian becomes two-dimensional with treacherous ease. Part of the reason, surely, is that his lyric gift was not especially pictorial. He tended to avoid metaphor, which is among the easiest elements of a poem to be transferred out of one language into another. Instead of image and metaphor, Pushkin manipulated for poetic purposes various grammatical categories, largely case endings and the verbal aspect peculiar to Slavic tongues – all the while delivering a lucid, pure, almost conversational speaking line.5 Other great poets of thicker, more startling texture, such as Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), built so inventively out of Russian phonemes that each verbal unit literally explodes on the ear with a mass of lexical and rhythmic associations. Such effects can hardly be registered outside their native element. But some genres of poetry (longer narrative poems, ballads, and many types of verse satire) communicate powerfully in translation, and these will be selectively stitched in to the chapters that follow. Perhaps most important, the lives (and deaths) of poets – heroic, sacrificial, prophetic – are themselves texts of the utmost centrality to the Russian literary canon.