Russian literature. A short introduction

tradition, Agincourt). The imagery of Blok’s cycle recalled not only the Zadonshchina, a late fourteenth-century text celebrating the victory at Kulikovo, but also The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a still more famous twelfth-century text eulogizing a glorious Russian defeat. This intertextual double-exposure was only one of many layers of ambiguity in a text whose perspective slipped between the fourteenth century and the time of its composition, and which – as was revealed by Blok’s contemporaneous essay ‘The People and the Intelligentsia’ – was also intended as a lament for the ‘infrangible boundary’ between the ‘Tatar’ intelligentsia and the ‘true Russian’ lower classes.

In a sense, then, one could see Russian literature as at once colonial and post-colonial, speaking simultaneously from the viewpoint of conqueror and conquered. Nikolay Trubetskoy, the most original thinker in the Eurasian group, took a militantly relativist attitude to European culture – ‘European culture is obligatory only for the group of nations that created it’ – which was very much in the spirit of négritude, the self-assertion movement among Francophone African and West Indian intellectuals in the 1940s, and of African-American philosophy as well. For Trubetskoy, the diversity of Russian culture was a source of pride, as was the racial mixture in the Russian Empire. So far as landscape was concerned, though, the Eurasian sensibility was attracted to the familiar rather than the exotic. It was the steppe, rather than the impassable mountain ranges of the Caucasus, that had become the preferred imaginative space. Rivers, the only borders in the steppe, were seen not only as ‘infrangible boundaries’ between battle-lines, but also as frontiers that might be crossed by stealth, or used as trading routes. Exactly so was the Russian language, the primary symbol of national difference for a Westernized Russian such as Turgenev, now seen as permeable to the East, distinguished from other Slavonic languages by its capacity for absorbing Turkic loan-words and phonetics.

Ten years after writing ‘On Kulikovo Field’, Blok himself moved from seeing tragedy in the binary inheritance of Russian culture, ‘Tatar’ and