Russian literature. A short introduction

Rozanov, created a world where there was no separation between body and spirit, flesh and intellect. As the scholar Stephen Hutchings has pointed out, Rozanov’s was an existence where ‘the most exaggeratedly profound formulations are arrived at “over a cup of tea” or “in the lavatory”’. The writer firmly believed that ‘a hole in a sock that never grows larger, and never gets darned’ was a better expression of everlasting life than ‘the dry and abstract term “immortality of the soul” ’, and believed sexuality was an essential, indeed perhaps the essential, form of spiritual expression. In his People of the Lunar Light, Rozanov insisted upon the perverted nature of religious celibacy (monasticism was for him a form of displaced, or not so displaced, homo-eroticism); procreative sexuality, preferably ritualized in the way that it was by Jews (who reserved copulation for the eve of the Sabbath) was a godly act. Sexuality, too, was the only way of resolving the otherwise unresolvable problem of how to produce a dialogue between self and other, retaining the identity of each yet allowing free communication between them.

A similar attempt to embrace the bodily world is evident in one of the most enlivening and vivid responses to Socialist Realism, Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of François Rabelais, which celebrated the physicality of the ‘carnival’, glorifying the temporary suspension of rational decorum and the resurgence of ‘the lower bodily stratum’. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival drew on a great deal more than the actual practices of fairgrounds and folk festivals, though the fashion for circus and vaudeville in 1920s Soviet literature, theatre, and film was definitely part of the background to the book. Rather, the evocation of the medieval carnival was used to create an imaginative space with many kinds of cultural resonance. Among these are the Stalin regime’s own promotion of a decorous and conformist kind of carnival, the Symbolists’ fascination with Dionysiac religion, in which the body of the god was repeatedly destroyed and repeatedly made whole, and popular traditions about lands of plenty and joy beyond the known world (as evoked also in Aleksandr Chayanov’s Journey of My Brother Aleksei to the