Russian literature. A short introduction

works of a painstaking dullness rather than the young Pushkin’s sketchy brilliance.

If Pushkin can be seen as a pioneer, it is of ‘mixed genre’ texts. The narrative poem with prose ‘frame’ in The Egyptian Nights (1835) was, for instance, paralleled (though not imitated) in Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life (1844–7), a prose story using poetry to represent the thoughts and dreams of its protagonist, Cecilia. But given the preoccupation of Romantic literature throughout Europe with new and hybrid forms (take Heine’s ‘verse novel’ Atta Troll, or the use of song to represent Mignon’s imaginative world in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) it is difficult to argue that the intergeneric text in Russian literature derives wholly from Pushkin’s influence.

Even the conventional view of Pushkin’s centrality to the Russian literary language can only be partly endorsed. Much of Pushkin’s streamlining of syntax had been anticipated in the eighteenth century, not only in the writings of Nikolay Karamzin, traditionally seen as the pre-Pushkinian pioneer, but also in humbler sources, such as the memoirs of Princess Natalya Dolgorukaya, produced in 1767 as a private chronicle for her descendants, and in translations from the French of novels and of conduct books. Besides, as the scholar Boris Gasparov, among others, has argued, the Pushkinian/Karamzinian line was only one of many literary orientations in the early nineteenth century; other writers were as likely to react against it as they were to espouse it.

So far as prose fiction went, Pushkin’s heritage was similarly idiosyncratic. A sore point for advocates of Pushkin’s role as the ‘founding father of Russian literature’ has been the writer’s failure, among his many brilliant excursions into diverse genres, to provide models for the enormous psychological novels that have, since the late nineteenth century, been internationally regarded as Russia’s greatest contribution to world literature. Even so determinedly individual a