Russian literature. A short introduction

Women (1796), the language of upper-class women should have been the model for Russian culture: in ‘Why Russia Has So Few Literary Talents’, he referred to ‘those charming women [ . . . ] on whose conversation we might hope to eavesdrop in order to embellish a novel with genteel and felicitous expressions’.

Women, then, were perceived as ideal readers – at least of certain kinds of literary material – and as exponents of the brilliant conversation which prose writers sought to imitate in their novels. The particular place in which this perception was enacted was the zala or the gostinaya, the saloon or drawing-room in a private house or apartment. Throughout the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, it was customary for prominent figures in society, many of them women, to keep open house on one day a week. Writers and musicians would be invited to perform their works in front of the visitors, who might include other artists and distinguished foreigners as well as members of the Russian social elite. One of the most famous such ‘salons’ (as they came to be known in the late nineteenth century) took place in the Moscow house of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya during the early 1820s: Pushkin was among the writers who attended, and who penned respectful tributes in the hostess’s album.

It is important, though, not to exaggerate the significance of the salon as a literary institution (as opposed to an instrument of polite culture more broadly, a place where men might acquire ‘that particular tenderness of spirit and taste that many hold to be the especial gift of women’, in the phrase used by a conduct book translated into Russian in 1765). In early nineteenth-century Russia, as opposed to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, mixed company was not the place for heavyweight literary discussion (such as might take place between men when on their own), but rather for light-hearted banter and flirtatious verbal fencing. Artists would perform pieces likely to be successful in such a setting (witty and brilliant, rather than profound). Though salon