Russian literature. A short introduction

may be most elusive when easiest to realize makes the book seem more like a successor to Jane Austen’s Persuasion. To be sure, it has some impressive English-language descendants – they include Nabokov’s Lolita and Vikram Seth’s verse novel about San Francisco, The Golden Gate – but these arch and self-conscious texts simply enhance Western readers’ conviction that Pushkin is peculiar in terms of his own, supposedly immediate and spontaneous, culture.

Yet all the major Russian writers were avid readers of European literature; if they reacted against it, they also learned from it. Anna Karenina may be at some level a riposte to Madame Bovary, but there is a direct connection between an image in the opening pages of Flaubert’s novel – Charles Bovary’s hideous hat standing for the inconsequential life remarked by the author alone – and the insignificant stubborn burdock that Tolstoy’s narrator notices at the beginning of Hadji Murat. During the eighteenth century, Russians had been haunted by fears that their literature was too imitative, too dominated by translations. Such fears were replaced during the nineteenth century by pride in native achievements, but receptivity to French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian literature continued. Even writers who had only a poor knowledge of Western languages absorbed foreign material avidly. Dostoevsky’s novels were as indebted to Dickens as they were to Gogol. Though the writer detested the real England when he visited in 1862, that only confirmed his adulation for Dickens. After 1917, love of foreign literature survived not only the bitterness of exile, but the cultural isolation endured by writers who stayed behind in the Soviet Union. Anna Akhmatova’s admiration for T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, and Joseph Brodsky’s for John Donne, are only two of the better-known relationships with Western literature; a more unexpected instance is Marina Tsvetaeva’s enthusiasm for the best-selling American novelist Pearl S. Buck.

By no means all the commentators who shaped Anglophone readers’ views of Russian literature were unaware of the artistic affinity of