Russian literature. A short introduction

their work, with precisely these subjects. The Formalist theory that writers self-consciously shaped personal experience as art even while they were living it (termed in Russian zhiznetvorchestvo) ignored the fact that some writers were inspired precisely by life’s reluctance to subordinate itself to such reshaping (examples of this included some of the women writers discussed in Chapter 6 below).

Even once interest in the ‘distinguishing features’ of recognized writers proliferated, then, there was little concern with ‘faults’: rather than ‘biography’ in the Western sense, the writing of lives meant setting out an author’s ‘creative path’ (the authoritative life of Klyuev eschewed discussion of the poet’s homosexual love affairs and concentrated instead upon his artistic relationships with other writers and with journal editors). The essential task was to represent the life as a saintly path of suffering and triumph (podvig): deviations from this model provoked bitter debate, as in the case of the Russian-American critic Alexander Zholkovsky’s revisionist interpretation of Anna Akhmatova’s biography. Zholkovsky argued that Akhmatova saw her own suffering, political and personal, as a mark of distinction, and strove to emphasize and heighten it. She was not merely an inert and innocent victim, but actively sought out pain. She used others as the instruments of conflict (her history of relationships with men who were already attached to another woman is striking) and as a sounding-board for lamentation (Zholkovsky drew attention to Akhmatova’s compulsive desire for an audience, manifested in her repeated commands that her friends should drop everything and rush round to see her when she so required). In a furious response printed in Zvezda, the literary journal which had published Zholkovsky’s article, another Russian-American critic accused Zholkovsky of colluding in, and approving, Akhmatova’s oppression: ‘Only from a safe distance – whether geographical or chronological – can one write about history and literature with such unruffled alienation from human suffering.’ Life-writing was still widely seen as a genre demanding moral engagement and respect bordering on adulation, even when practised by scholars.