Russian literature. A short introduction

apparently wished to be taken seriously. The character did not even have the grace to repent his misdeeds or sympathize with his victim. It was and is difficult to see the story as a fable; it is much easier to appreciate it as a grim and convincing sketch of the mentality of a murderer, prowling in his stocking feet through his own house to surprise his victim, and detachedly remembering the feeling of his knife cutting through first whalebone, then flesh. A similar communicative uncertainty was evident in Anna Karenina, which was at once a moral tale about appropriate married life and a delineation of the horrors of that life. Exploiting marriage as a convenient starting point for an encyclopaedic exploration of Russian society in which everything has meaning, it was at the same time obsessed with quotidian detail whose beauty lay in the fact that it had no meaning.

But what Mikhail Bakhtin was to term, in a famous study of Dostoevsky, the ‘polyphony’ of novelistic discourse, the absence in it of a unified, reliable, omniscient point of view, did not necessarily equate with an absence of moral or philosophical certainty. The exuberant linguistic vitality of Gogol’s play The Government Inspector, which shows the full bawdy energy of colloquial Russian constantly bubbling up through the characters’ pathetic attempts to ‘speak proper’, was intimately related to Gogol’s concept of the play as a spiritual morality drama, an illustration of the vices that he believed polluted the human soul and would come to light at the Day of Judgement. For Gogol, linguistic propriety and impropriety were different aspects of the same human error: the assumption that it was possible to conceal frailty and weakness from the all-seeing eye of the deity.

This inextricable blending of ‘medium’ and ‘message’, of didactic purpose and expressive range, continued to be found in some Soviet writing, despite an upsurge of state interference on the one hand and intellectual conformity on the other. A case in point was the poetry of Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky’s post-1917 writings are often considered to