The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

And finally: unlike the progressive, falsifiable sciences or (at the other extreme) the capriciously marketed world of fashion, great literature does not date. It accumulates contexts rather than outgrows them, for literature is designed to speak to the current needs of the person who activates it. Who are these “activators”? Although today’s Russian school curriculum might no longer require War and Peace or Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don – too many other texts compete, and time is in shorter supply – the great Russian novels continue to be read around the world with undiminished fervor.

With that fact in mind it is worth asking, in Milan Kundera’s spirit, whether a literature need belong to its own nation at all. Russian lovers of the word are of two minds on this issue, professing two ideals. In the first, that peculiar chauvinism exemplified by Dostoevsky, Russian literature is a common denominator for the world, yet only Russians are privileged to understand it. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some leading Russian sociologists still see in the Russian national character a “negative identity” driven by self-deprecating exceptionalism, ennui, sentimentality, constant expectation of

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catastrophe, and an alarming xenophobia.8 It is indeed true that these character traits read like a home page for the darker sides of Dostoevsky’s novels. But it is also true – and this is the second ideal – that Russian literature long ago slipped out from under the tutelage of the nation that produced it. Russian artists – in literature, theatre, dance, music, film – have inspired more disciples and “schools” around the world than any other single national culture. Since the early 1990s, a bit of that openness has been coming home.

Chapter 1

Critical models, committed readers, and three Russian Ideas

“Apart from reading,” Dostoevsky’s Underground Man complains, “there was no place to go.”1 The metaphor is striking. So central was proper reading to the cultured Russian’s self-image and sense of realitythat poetry, fictional literature, memoirs, diaries, even personal letters from and among great writers almost constituted a place. The authority of these fictive or quasi-fictive residences was compelling and truth-bearing. What is the best point of entry into these alternative worlds?

Several models were considered for this book. The first was the most conventional: selected writers and their works juxtaposed to one another in chronological sequence. A second model suggested itself around distinctive Russian genres: saint’s life, fairy tale, war epic, “notes” or casual jottings [zapiski], prison memoir, dysfunctional utopia, industrial production novel. Yet another structure emerged when the focus shifted to recurrent Russian heroes (or anti-heroes): righteous persons, fools, rogues, wanderers, frontiersmen, Europeanized fops, nihilists, superfluous men, salvational women, the merciful or tyrannical tsar. Special note was made of those types that did not takeroot in Russian soil or appearedonly lateonher literaryhorizon: thebeauti-ful sinner, the chivalric knight, the virtuous merchant, the benignor productive bureaucrat. Each of these three formats raised interesting questions. How are we to explain the enduring popularity of the unconsummated love story or the epic that ends in defeat or dissolution of the goal? What about “heroless epic narrative” – the attempt to paint humanity on a vast historical scale and dispense with personal agency? However intriguing those questions were, ultimately the last two models, focusing on genres and heroes, were stripped down to a “glossary” of representative types in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 was then given over to the traditional narrative forms – often undated or anonymous – that dominated cultural life up to the modernizing reign of Peter the Great (d. 1725). The remaining chapters then unfold chronologically.

Several factors ledtothis compromise decision. First, Russianliterary“types” do not cluster especially well in the abstract. They are historically conditioned and best grasped within those conditions. What is more, the practice of

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