Russian literature. A short introduction

alternative and better reality as something elusive and insubstantial. It was associated with mysterious, uncommunicable experience, what Aleksandr Blok called, in one of his poems addressed to the Beautiful Lady, ‘the call of dim life/Splashing secretly within me’. It manifested itself in the colours of ‘non-being’, of death and of spiritual life at one and the same time, whiteness and transparency. Though, as David Bethea has pointed out, Utopian writing was the polar opposite of apocalyptic writing, in that it anticipated a paradise in the future (often a technological one) rather than mourning the loss of the ‘original pristine faith’ of the past, in practice the two discourses often exploited similar imagery – as, indeed, did Socialist Realism, whose spotless factories, ever-patient party officials, and peaceful, hard-working labourers made it a form of bastardized Utopianism. Just so did the traditions of pre-Petrine Russian religious literature find themselves preserved in Socialist Realism’s earnest commitment to expressing the ‘elevated belief of human beings in Sublimity’, as a typical Soviet Realist, Vera Panova, put it in 1972.

But not all Russian literature by any means has been driven by a puritanical distaste for quotidian existence, for the material world. Some writers (the early twentieth-century short-story writer Aleksey Remizov, for instance) gave their demons the comforting substance of folk myth, of the malevolent creatures (house spirits and wood demons) that had to be placated with bread and milk. Mandelstam rebelled against the Symbolist emphasis upon esoteric myth by proclaiming the virtues of ‘domestic Hellenism’, of ordinary, though handsome, objects such as jugs and honey-jars. Other writers created a kind of ‘domestic Orthodoxy’, of mundane but fervent spirituality. Olga Sedakova’s limpid poem ‘Old Women’, for example, sees the secular and the spiritual, the sinful and the pious, as inseparably fused:

Patient as an Old Master,

I love to study the faces

of pious, spiteful old women,