The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

keenly valued goods, Russian “high” and “low” cultures were not isolated from each other. Plots, fads, and literary devices moved in both directions. Among the services rendered by recent scholarship is to remind us that most people, including great writers who live in authoritarian or “closed” regimes, have everyday lives and non-heroic appetites. The pull of pleasurable distraction interrupts the grimmest political threats as well as the temptations of tragedy and high significance. Pushkin, lofty persecuted poet, loved comic opera and formulaic verse comedy throughout his life. Sergei Prokofiev, repatriated to the USSR on the brink of the Great Terror, had long courted commissions (from Hollywood and elsewhere) for the frothiest film music. It was this rigid aspect of Russian reverence for its canonical writers and writings that began to loosen up in the 1980s, most frequently through affectionate irony, occasionally through abuse, but always with the sense (thrilling to some, terrible to others) that the stability of a massive and precious edifice was at stake.

Such, then, have been the major anxieties informing this project: the status of the “high” canon; the indispensability of the Russian language to it; and the self-mythologization of Russia’s literary tradition. For each anxiety, compromises were eventually found. Some parts of poetry survive admirably in translation, because form has many ways of making itself felt. It was my working assumption that the major literary works of a cultural tradition do submit to a technical treatment more rigorous and interesting than a paraphrase of plots, feelings, and ideas. Tools of analysis can be devised. Alongside the evolution of poetically analyzable structures – the ode, ballad, elegy, blank-verse lyric, revolutionary “stepladder verse” [lesenka] of Mayakovsky – one can also note a sturdy evolution of Russian prose from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. These “prose units” are partly thematic and generic (prose comedy, travel notes, society tales, ghost stories, newspaper gossip columns, the naturalistic “sketch,” the factory novel) and partly a matter of authorial voice and intonation (satire, travesty, confession). Genres borrowed from Europe encountered a body of Russian traditional (pre-Enlightenment) plots that had long circulated in urban and rural areas, some native to their regions and some trickled in from the south and west: incantations to the powers of the earth, miracle tales, stories of ritual sacrifice, Jesuit school drama, adventure plots, all of which survived well into the modern period. Evolution of these Russianized hybrids occurred within a larger familiar framework of pan-European literary “periods” of which Russian writers were keenly aware, the sequence from Neo-classicism → Sentimentalism → Romanticism → Realism → Naturalism → Symbolism → Modernism → Postmodernism. Irregular pockets of the pious, the baroque, the grotesque, and the absurd interrupt this spectrum. At least one

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movement (socialist realism) was deliberately designed to debunk, relativize, and humiliate European literary models.

Let me return in closing to the anxiety about “rudderless freedom” raised in the opening pages. Does Russia’s partially “normalized” post-communist literary life, which has greatly diminished the role and status of the creative writer, threaten the integrity of the tradition? Perturbations have been severe, but apocalypse is nowhere in sight. In-print verbal art continues to have splendid survival advantages, regardless of sinister twists in Kremlin politics and even in competition with today’s image-saturated, instantly accessible cybernetic world. To its immense good fortune, literature does not need the big budgets, collective efforts, or approved public spaces required to realize symphonic music, visual art exhibits, cinematic productions or large-scale architectural projects. Its more compact forms can be carried in the pocket, composed (and also carried) in the head. Heroic legends abound concerning this latter mode of survival under the most recent Old Regime. Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the great poet, committed her husband’s entire poetic corpus to memory “for safekeeping” during the Stalinist years, until it was no longer dangerous to write it down. Since literary texts are so very dispersed and so inefficiently, individually, privately processed, inertia tends to be huge. One can blow up an offensive monument but cannot gather up and burn all copies of a published novel. A state bureaucracy can ban a film or mutilate an opera, but it cannot prevent us from memorizing and mentally re-experiencing a poem in all its fullness.