Russian literature. A short introduction

‘Russian’, to seeing this as a source of strength. His 1918 poem ‘Scythians’ (quoted here in Robin Kemball’s translation) celebrated a tribe that had been seen since classical Greek times as the epitome of vigorous barbarism. The Scythians stood for the resurgent life of Russia, traditionally the bulwark against incursions from the East, but now threatening to overwhelm enfeebled Western civilization with its hybrid vitality:

So, Russia – Sphinx – triumphant, sorrowed too –

With black blood flows, in fearful wildness,

Her eyes glare deep, glare deep, glare deep at you,

With hatred and – with loving-kindness!

Yes, so to love, as lies within our blood,

Not one of you has loved in ages!

You have forgotten that there is such love

That burns and burning, lays in ashes!

The ‘Scythian’ side of Russia was implicitly associated, in Blok’s representation, with the creation myth of the Russian Revolution, understood by the poet in his first and enthuasistic response to it as a coming to power of the formerly oppressed, ‘barbarous’ underclasses. The association was not peculiar to Blok. The history of representation of the East was intimately intertwined with that of representation of ‘the people’ (narod, a noun signifying both ‘people’ and ‘nation’). In a culture where, as late as 1897, only 21 per cent of the population was literate, the divide between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ had sometimes been understood to map on to the division between ‘Westernized’ and ‘native Russian’. With the rise of the Slavophile movement in the 1830s, the idea that cultivated Russians were foreigners in their own country became a cliché in literature and in journalism. There was a realization that the discovery of uncorrupted exoticism did not always require a visit to the Caucasus: it could also be found in the Russian countryside. In the 1820s, some Russian Romantic writers, like their counterparts in other European countries, began to