Russian literature. A short introduction

believed, religion had infused every aspect of secular life. The fact that imaginative literature was itself a Western concept (as I mentioned in Chapter 2, textual production in medieval Russia was dominated by ecclesiastical needs) did not worry the Slavophiles, since they believed it was possible to combine the best features of Western and native Russian ‘enlightenment’ (prosveshchenie). The culmination of their ideas, in a literary sense, was the work of Dostoevsky, a socialist sympathizer transformed by the experience of mock execution and incarceration in a labour camp into an Orthodox believer, a conservative, and by far the greatest ‘theological’ writer of the nineteenth century. The memoirs, novels, and stories that Dostoevsky wrote after his return from Siberian exile were not ‘religious’ merely in the sense that they focused upon themes of transgression and repentance, or topical issues such as the reform of the church courts, or because they included characters who were believers. They were also permeated by religious concepts that shaped structure and plot as well as appearing in arguments, most importantly sobornost (a term coined by Khomyakov to describe a social unity modelled upon that of the sobornaya tserkov, the phrase used for ‘Holy Catholic Church’ in the Orthodox Creed) and kenosis (‘emptying out’, a term denominating the striving to commune with others, to the point of self-loss). Both of these concepts were central to Dostoevsky’s final and most obviously Orthodox novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80). They underlay the portraits of Alyosha Karamazov and of his teacher Zosima, whose godly death was a counterbalance to the brutal parricide at the heart of the novel. They were also at the heart of the Fable of the Grand Inquisitor, where the Inquisitor himself spoke for a utilitarian, ‘Western’ view of Church power working in the world to right material injustice, while the silent Christ stood for spiritual probity of a non-interventionist, contemplative kind.

At some levels, then, there could scarcely be a more instructive contrast in styles than between Pushkin and Dostoevsky. On the one hand, there is The Brothers Karamazov, a sprawling, immensely ambitious study of