Russian literature. A short introduction

the mortality of their lips,

and the immortality of the power

that pressed their lips together,

(like an angel squatting

and stacking coppers in piles,

five copecks, and light copeck pieces . . .

‘Shoo!’ he says to the children,

the birds and the beggars,

‘Shoo, go away,’ he tells them:

can’t you see what I’m doing?) –

I stare, and in my mind I sketch them,

like my own face, in a glass darkly.

The images of a money-counting angel and of ‘spiteful piety’ are contradictory and even shocking. They recall Rembrandt’s late portraits of elderly women (hence the phrase ‘Patient as an Old Master’), in which supreme artistic beauty is made out of material that is not obviously handsome (unlike the jugs and jars celebrated by Mandelstam). In the same way, the nineteenth-century prose writer Nikolay Leskov’s stories turned the early nineteenth-century Russian provinces into an extraordinary retrospective Utopia, a world of small-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, but also of sanity, tolerance, and bodily joy. His extraordinary and touching tale, The Sealed Angel (1873), expressed a vision of art as at once profoundly spiritual and rooted in reality: a combination of inspiration in its most literal sense and of careful craftsmanship. The icon of the title is not only a symbol of faith repressed by bureaucracy (it is confiscated and ‘sealed’ with a layer of wax, in a sublime gesture of secular indifference to the uniqueness of the icon), but also of religious art. As explained by the Red-Haired Man, the story’s main narrator, and a member of the conservative and pious Old Believer sect, to a well-intentioned but sceptical Englishman, the icon stands for a kind of artistic integrity to be found only in traditional practices: