Russian literature. A short introduction

scientific genius), the ‘revolutionary moralist’ Radishchev, Belinsky, and Dobrolyubov, with the radical poet Nikolay Nekrasov the sole example of an imaginative writer.

Right until the end of the Soviet era, ‘progressiveness’ – which is to say, the holding of views that could be represented as foreshadowing Soviet ones – was the primary criterion by which work by dead writers was judged as fitting, or not, for acknowledgement as ‘classic literature’. ‘Progressiveness’ was to be found in Chernyshevsky’s plodding, formulaic novel of women’s liberation, What is to be Done? (1863), but not in Dostoevsky’s The Devils (1871–2), which the second edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia labelled a ‘virulent slur upon the Russian movement for political liberation’. It was to be found in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but only to a much more limited degree in Anna Karenina (decidedly a novel of the second rank, from an official Soviet point of view, because of the unfortunate prominence in it of adulterous passion). It was evident in Nekrasov’s socially critical poetry, but most definitely not in the ‘idealist’ works of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism. It was evident in radical periodicals of high principle but decidedly modest literary merit, such as The Spark, but not in the artistically ambitious (and politically liberal) Modernist journals of the early twentieth century, such as Apollo or The Scales. Accordingly, it was selections from the former journal, and not the latter two, that appeared in the ‘Poet’s Library’, the most prestigious series of retrospective editions of poetry, published by the leading house ‘The Soviet Writer’.

Emphasis upon ‘progressiveness’ had especially piquant results where eighteenth-century literature was concerned. That the reign of the ‘reactionary’ Catherine II (herself one of the first Russian women writers) had been a far more productive era for Russian letters than that of the ‘progressive’ Peter I was bad enough; far more embarrassing was the conservatism of most Russian writers themselves, who were much more likely to pen court odes celebrating autocracy than to attack