Russian literature. A short introduction

hostesses themselves sometimes treated the company to their own compositions (as in the case of Volkonskaya), for the most part the female contribution consisted of marriageable young women showing off their accomplishments as singers or players on the pianoforte (as in Jane Austen’s fictional drawing-rooms). Once Romanticism had brought to Russia the idea of art as a sacred activity that should be received in reverence and mute sympathy by readers, viewers, or listeners, participation in the salon became increasingly irksome to artists. When irritated by persistent requests to perform a party piece in Volkonskaya’s salon, Pushkin is alleged to have responded with a recitation of ‘The Poet and the Mob’, his assault on the stupidity of readerly expectation. (The accuracy of this story is questionable, since Volkonskaya left Russia in 1828, and the poem also dates from that year, but the fact that the anecdote had currency is an indicator of prevailing attitudes.) And in A Double Life (1846), a novella by mid-nineteenth-century Russia’s most talented female Romantic poet, Karolina Pavlova, poets give recitals in the heroine’s mother’s drawing-room to an artistically ignorant public who consider art a distraction from the main business of the day – contriving a lucrative match.

As Pavlova’s story indicates, by the 1840s polite culture and literary culture were seen as more or less completely incompatible, a shift in taste to which the rise of the heavyweight literary journal (or ‘fat journal’, as it was affectionately known in Russian) made a significant contribution. The editorial boards of such journals were invariably made up of individuals with strong political views, whether radical or conservative; literary texts appeared alongside political commentary (or were themselves a form of disguised political commentary). Genres such as the ‘madrigal’, or the ‘society tale’, representing the difficulties of expressing feeling while observing propriety, did not suit the new era. Tastes ran more to ballads of working-class Russian life, stirring tales of women’s liberation, and depictions of peasant suffering. Poetry of emotional attachment became a marginal genre. Both Aleksey Tolstoy and Karolina Pavlova composed fine poems dedicated to the