Russian literature. A short introduction

‘Russian’ and ‘Western’ traditions. Many were authors themselves – indeed, the most impressive English-language interpretations of Russian literature have tended to be literary rather than critical. The short stories of Chekhov, in particular, left marks on the work of writers in English such as Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and William Trevor. Chekhov’s stories were models of how to contrive small-scale narratives that almost evaded the onward drive of plot, and captured a character’s entire world in a few moments that were both exemplary and elusive. Chekhov’s writing accorded well with Anglophone admiration for unnoticeable virtuosity (it is not for nothing that the term ‘craft’ also means ‘stealth’). But if greatness in prose involves hardly seeming to write literature at all, then some of Pushkin’s narratives – The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Dubrovsky (1832–3), or The Captain’s Daughter (1836) – are likely to disappoint. Here, plot matters a great deal, and the need to provide a resolute ending seems uppermost. In addition, Pushkin’s closeness to French models (Chateaubriand’s René or Constant’s Adolphe, the poetry of Parny and Lamartine) does him no service in Anglophone culture, which has traditionally equated ‘French’ with ‘trite, superficial, and pretentious’.

To be fair, Pushkin’s strangeness is not something felt only by foreigners. Russian commentators have remarked it too. Those of pro-Western sympathies have considered it a sign of Pushkin’s unique status as a truly civilized person in a society of shameful backwardness; for nationalists, on the other hand, it has been a signal tragedy, a symbol of the alienation of intellectuals from the ‘Russian people’. The philosopher Gustav Shpet, a late follower of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles (the movement that arose in the 1830s in order to lament the harm that had been done to Russian culture by Westernization), saw Pushkin as ‘an accident’. His writing was ‘precisely his writing, the writing of a genius who did not emerge from the Russian national spirit’. But whatever their feelings about Pushkin’s expression (or not)