However, the compromised standing of moral disquisitions on the one hand, and the novel on the other, was not well understood in the West during the post-Stalin years. Here, many readers looked to Russian writers for the direct and unironic discussion of ethical matters that had become unfashionable in the West after the Second World War. To many commentators in the late 1950s, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) seemed a much weightier novel than any recent publication in the English language, while Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich spoke with an authority recalling Dostoevsky’s memoir of prison-camp life House of the Dead (1861–2). If Nabokov wished that Tolstoy had exercised his concentration entirely on the free-floating curl hanging down at the back of Anna Karenina’s head, many readers, since Anna Karenina was published, have been more absorbed by the novel’s governing moral themes: whether personal happiness is legitimate at the cost of imposing suffering on others, or whether there may be such a thing as inescapable or deserved suffering. And they have expected that Tolstoy’s successors will provide them with ethical stimulation of just this kind. It was no accident that the first literary award to be supported by Western investors in Russia should have been the Booker Prize for the Russian novel, inspired by the quixotic notion of reviving the genre in the country that many still considered its natural homeland.
14. Cartoon of two writers by Yu. Gorokhov.
Chapter 6
‘And don’t dispute
with fools’
Men, women, and society
For you, my enchantresses,
Only for you, my beauties . . .
(Pushkin, dedication to
Ruslan and Ludmilla
, 1820)
It would be hard to choose a better example of the difficulties raised by translating Pushkin than the final phrase of ‘Monument’. In English, it sounds perfectly banal, like a phrase from a guide to ‘making friends and influencing people’. Once again, register plays a part: the Russian word glupets has a folksy resonance that would make ‘And do not squabble with the daft’ in some ways a more adequate rendering. Even so, modern readers are likely to wonder at the combination of apparently incompatible themes in these last two lines. What connection could there be between a dignified command to a poet’s muse to ‘be obedient to the command of God’ and an apparently trivial piece of savoir vivre? (To be sure, the phrase bears some relation to a supposed quotation from the Koran jotted down in a draft of Evgeny Onegin, ‘Don’t quarrel with a fool’, but since the person citing the quotation was Evgeny himself, and it was preceded with a bare-faced piece of flippancy, ‘There’s plenty of common sense in the Koran’, the sacred text was reduced here to nothing more than a conduct book.)
Yet the rough draft of ‘Monument’ indicates that ‘And don’t dispute with fools’ was firmly in Pushkin’s head from the start of composition. It is the only line in the final three stanzas that was set down straight away in the form that it has in the final text. And the view of the poet as associated not only with the transcendent world of religious and mystical appearance, but also with the banalities of high society, comes up again and again in Pushkin’s later poetry. ‘The Poet’ (1827), for example, is structured round an opposition between ‘the concerns of the empty-headed monde’ (that is, of high society) and ‘the divine word’ (that is, of poetic inspiration), an opposition spanned by the poet himself, who lives alternately in each domain. Appealing to the Romantic myth of artists as socially isolated, Pushkin also invokes another and contradictory myth of the artist as honnête homme, well-spoken man of the world. This myth had been introduced to Russian culture in the late eighteenth century by Nikolay Karamzin, who had asserted, in a famous article, ‘Why Russia Has So Few Literary Talents’ (1802), that without proper access to polite society it was hard for a writer to educate his taste, however learned he might be.
In late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Russia, the reading of literature was an obligatory polite accomplishment for both men and women; indeed, writing itself was perceived as an agreeable social skill. Large numbers of women in the aristocracy and gentry kept an al’bom, a mixture of a scrap-book and a commonplace book, in which friends inscribed flattering verses (madrigaly), metrical tokens of love and friendship, and comic rhymes, next to sketched portraits and water-colour landscapes. Magazines and manuals gave models of appropriate pieces for albums (not having something ready to contribute when asked would have looked gauche). In such circumstances, the writing of poetry became an extension of polite conversation, a kind of refined game. Social convention demanded that verse offerings should in the main come from men and be addressed to women, and that the former should offer the latter flowery recognition of their beauty, intelligence, wit, and taste. For Karamzin, who had eulogized women’s percipience and spiritual profundity in his Epistle to Women (1796), the language of upper-class women should have been the model for Russian culture: in ‘Why Russia Has So Few Literary Talents’, he referred to ‘those charming women [ . . . ] on whose conversation we might hope to eavesdrop in order to embellish a novel with genteel and felicitous expressions’.
Women, then, were perceived as ideal readers – at least of certain kinds of literary material – and as exponents of the brilliant conversation which prose writers sought to imitate in their novels. The particular place in which this perception was enacted was the zala or the gostinaya, the saloon or drawing-room in a private house or apartment. Throughout the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, it was customary for prominent figures in society, many of them women, to keep open house on one day a week. Writers and musicians would be invited to perform their works in front of the visitors, who might include other artists and distinguished foreigners as well as members of the Russian social elite. One of the most famous such ‘salons’ (as they came to be known in the late nineteenth century) took place in the Moscow house of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya during the early 1820s: Pushkin was among the writers who attended, and who penned respectful tributes in the hostess’s album.
It is important, though, not to exaggerate the significance of the salon as a literary institution (as opposed to an instrument of polite culture more broadly, a place where men might acquire ‘that particular tenderness of spirit and taste that many hold to be the especial gift of women’, in the phrase used by a conduct book translated into Russian in 1765). In early nineteenth-century Russia, as opposed to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century France, mixed company was not the place for heavyweight literary discussion (such as might take place between men when on their own), but rather for light-hearted banter and flirtatious verbal fencing. Artists would perform pieces likely to be successful in such a setting (witty and brilliant, rather than profound). Though salon hostesses themselves sometimes treated the company to their own compositions (as in the case of Volkonskaya), for the most part the female contribution consisted of marriageable young women showing off their accomplishments as singers or players on the pianoforte (as in Jane Austen’s fictional drawing-rooms). Once Romanticism had brought to Russia the idea of art as a sacred activity that should be received in reverence and mute sympathy by readers, viewers, or listeners, participation in the salon became increasingly irksome to artists. When irritated by persistent requests to perform a party piece in Volkonskaya’s salon, Pushkin is alleged to have responded with a recitation of ‘The Poet and the Mob’, his assault on the stupidity of readerly expectation. (The accuracy of this story is questionable, since Volkonskaya left Russia in 1828, and the poem also dates from that year, but the fact that the anecdote had currency is an indicator of prevailing attitudes.) And in A Double Life (1846), a novella by mid-nineteenth-century Russia’s most talented female Romantic poet, Karolina Pavlova, poets give recitals in the heroine’s mother’s drawing-room to an artistically ignorant public who consider art a distraction from the main business of the day – contriving a lucrative match.
15. Pushkin declaiming his verses to the ‘Green Lamp’ literary society. This kind of all-male gathering was the preferred forum for serious new work throughout the salon era.
As Pavlova’s story indicates, by the 1840s polite culture and literary culture were seen as more or less completely incompatible, a shift in taste to which the rise of the heavyweight literary journal (or ‘fat journal’, as it was affectionately known in Russian) made a significant contribution. The editorial boards of such journals were invariably made up of individuals with strong political views, whether radical or conservative; literary texts appeared alongside political commentary (or were themselves a form of disguised political commentary). Genres such as the ‘madrigal’, or the ‘society tale’, representing the difficulties of expressing feeling while observing propriety, did not suit the new era. Tastes ran more to ballads of working-class Russian life, stirring tales of women’s liberation, and depictions of peasant suffering. Poetry of emotional attachment became a marginal genre. Both Aleksey Tolstoy and Karolina Pavlova composed fine poems dedicated to the theme of ‘forbidden love’, but from the 1850s such material was generally the prerogative of the drawing-room romance, a genre whose cultural authority, such as it was, came from its musical setting rather than its literary connections. By the early twentieth century, those whose verses made their way into romance tradition were minor figures, such as ‘G. Galina’ (pen-name of Glafira Mamoshina), or ‘K. R.’ (pen-name of Grand Duke K. K. Romanov). Though their work was very popular, the standing of such individuals with the literary establishment was low. In 1915, Marietta Shaginyan (later a Socialist Realist novelist, but then a minor Modernist poet) rebuked her friend, the composer Rachmaninov, for his dreadful taste in poems (his early song-cycles had set work by, for instance, Galina), and persuaded him to use material of more literary ambition in his next cycle of songs.
To be sure, the Russian Modernists did have salons of their own. But these were not remotely like the upper-class gatherings of the past, or like the grand St Petersburg and Moscow drawing-rooms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the household of Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, talk turned to spiritualism, the occult, and mystical religion; at the Wednesday assemblies held in the top-floor apartment of Vyacheslav Ivanov, known as ‘The Tower’, guests sprawled on velvet cushions in rooms draped with exotic fabrics. Extravagance of this kind did not long survive the Russian Revolution, but even in the Soviet Union there were some prominent writers who presided over gatherings not unlike alternative salons. Anna Akhmatova, for instance, bestowed on favoured visitors her aphoristic comments about literature, art, and the literary personalities of her day; the Socialist Realist writer Vera Panova, who held high office in the Union of Writers, was beset by guests wanting not only good sense and racy talk, but also – if they could get them – letters of introduction to publishing houses.
In the Modernist circles and artistic cabarets that proliferated in Moscow and St Petersburg during the 1910s, though, unconventionality was the main cultural value. Their very names – ‘The Wandering Dog’, ‘The Players’ Tavern’ – underlined the fashion for bohemian marginality. Like high society in the early nineteenth century, this was a culture where ‘all the world was a stage’, where people valued assured performance more than they did sincerity; but the roles enacted by artists were now considerably more extravagant than they had been in the 1820s and 1830s, when writers had been less cut off from the world of the court and the civil service, and when the standing of actual actors had been much lower. (The late nineteenth and early twentieth century had seen a number of players, notably the ‘Russian Eleonara Duse’ Vera Komissarzhevskaya, attain a considerable cultural authority in the literary world.) But above all, in a world where life was supposed to imitate art, it had become vital to express creativity through eccentric behaviour as well as through a contempt for artistic and linguistic formulae, for the ‘clichés’ that Russian Modernists despised as much as the French Modernists from whom many of their theoretical appreciations ultimately derived. In other words, it was idiosyncratic conduct that was now required, rather than the subordination to universally recognized ethical and aesthetic constraints that had been the central demand of participants in mixed literary gatherings during the early nineteenth century.
Pushkin, though, was writing in an era when the relationship between literature and polite culture was still taken for granted, even if it was beginning to break down. He was one of the last major Russian writers to participate in aristocratic salons of the kind organized by Zinaida Volkonskaya (just as she was one of the last female aristocrats who was at any level a serious artist). Several of Pushkin’s writings – Egyptian Nights, Evgeny Onegin, the novel fragment ‘The Guests Assembled at the Dacha’ (1828–30) – use the aristocratic salon as a setting for central scenes. The urbane tone cultivated in polite society was one of the registers routinely employed by the poet (as is shown by ‘And don’t dispute with fools’). Some of his most famous poems have the brilliant conventionality required by the salon (an example is the famous love poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment:/You appeared before me/ Like a fleeting vision’, which was to have a long drawing-room afterlife as a romance set to music by Glinka). Pushkin followed Karamzin, too, in his intensive interest in the psychology and language of women: this can be seen not only in the prominence of female protagonists in his work, but also in the fact that some of his ‘costumed confessions’ were made in female dress (as with the last line of ‘Monument’, where the advice to avoid demeaning squabbles fits with contemporary expectations that ladies remain calm under all circumstances).
16. Pushkin, doodled self-portrait in female dress. The poet made no attempt to flatter his unladylike profile: the effect of seeing it emerge from the bun and ringlets is amusingly incongruous.
At the same time, though, the inspiration that the salon offered Pushkin was often fused with unease, or even irritation, at the limits of polite language, and particularly at the demand that strong emotion be voiced in a safely conventional way. This unease can be sensed in another very famous love poem, ‘I loved you’ (1829):
I loved you; love as yet, perhaps
Has not burned out in my heart;
But may it trouble you no longer,
I do not wish to sadden you with anything.
I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,
Tormented now by timidity, now by jealousy;
I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,
As God grant you be loved by another.
This poem is quintessentially ‘Pushkinian’ in its dignified plainness and apparently self-explanatory directness; it is sometimes used (not wholly accurately) as an instance of the poet’s distaste for metaphor. But in fact, there is a good deal more here than first meets the eye or the ear. Among many buried associations is the point that the opening lines of the poem evoke ‘feminine language’ – the new language of the emotions that Sentimentalism had seen as women’s particular domain. Great rhythmic emphasis is placed on verbs such as ‘to trouble’ and ‘to sadden’, as well as on the metaphor of love as flame (this hackneyed image is delicately suggested through the verb ‘to burn out’, usually used of lamps or candles). The second half of the poem opposes to these conventional verbs and figures of speech a hyperbolic evocation of unutterable love, emotionally inarticulate, yet also the gift of a (masculine) Deity. The use of religious language in the final line is far from incidental, since this language stands both for sincerity and for ‘Russianness’ in the later Pushkin (as, for example, in one of his last poems, ‘Desert fathers and immaculate women’ (1836)). The effect is that ‘masculine’ sincerity displaces what can be seen, once the poem’s narrative is complete, as charming, ‘feminine’ artifice. The ‘feminine’ vocabulary of affect becomes the starting point rather than the end of inspiration. Its particularity is opposed to the universality of the ‘masculine’ religious text. Evoking feminine language, Pushkin at the same time refuses to be limited by it: ‘I loved you’ moves from ventriloquism of the beloved’s speech to assertion of another and very different set of linguistic values.
Pushkin was no misogynist. The writer would have been shocked to hear such a suggestion: in his day, the typical misogynist was a surly country squire or boorish merchant who thought that education would turn girls into bad wives, and believed it ‘unchristian for any grown man to sit at the feet of a female’. Traces of this attitude can be found in the work of some early nineteenth-century writers, including talents as brilliant as Gogol, but not in Pushkin’s own poetry or fiction, which is notable for its finely drawn and sympathetic portraits of women (the inspiration to women writers as well as men). But it is hard to argue with a historian who, after sifting through all the writer’s essays, reviews, and jottings, concluded that Pushkin (like many of his contemporaries) unreservedly admired only one woman author, Madame de Staël. There is a striking contrast, too, between the roles played by male and female addressees in his letters, verse epistles, and dedications to published works (the latter are the subjects of gallantry sometimes tinged with eroticism, while the former cover a far wider range, from confidants to debating partners, from rivals to confederates in debauchery).
To argue along these lines does not mean placing Pushkin on a list of writers deserving critical annihilation, summoning him before what one senior American Slavist, writing in 1994, sarcastically termed ‘the stern tribunal of assistant professors’. Gender-aware criticism does not have to amount to ideologized proscription. Nor – to rebut another hostile argument occasionally used against it – does it require the imposition of modern views on texts from different eras. ‘Feminism’ refers to a geographically and historically limited phenomenon (a European movement, or series of movements, beginning in the sixteenth century). But sexual difference and sexual acts are an abiding obsession in all human societies. There is no evidence whatever that Pushkin was interested in, or even aware of, the feminism of his day (it is most unlikely that he had read, say, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women). He could not have anticipated the theories of Gayatri Spivak or Hélène Cixous, any more than he could those of Marx and Lenin. But he was without doubt passionately interested in issues of sex and gender, in what he, along with most educated people of his day, considered an obvious but fascinating and awkward truth, that men and women were immutably different.
This opinion, and its corollary, the belief that feminine language and experience had particular significance, masculine language and experience universal significance, were also held by many female contemporaries of Pushkin’s. Evdokiya Rostopchina, for example, in her poem ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ (1839), described the book not in order to suggest a sort of equivalence between Pushkin’s unpublished texts and the reluctance of women writers to enter print, but in order to underline the inferiority of feminine writing: ‘I am a woman! My intellect and inspiration/Should be bound by humble modesty.’ The poem ended with an apology that Rostopchina had dared to offer her ‘timid song’ in place of ‘Pushkin’s wondrous verse’: the two alternative paraphrases of the word ‘poetry’, ‘song’ and ‘verse’, emphasized the distance between the masculine and the feminine text.
The assumption that ‘masculine’ expression or experience was universal, and ‘feminine’ expression or experience restricted in import, was a persistent force in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian culture. Women writers were associated first and foremost with certain well-defined cultural roles, above all the expression of emotion and the provision of guidance in personal ethics. To put it schematically, male writers were believed to offer enlightenment (prosveshchenie), women writers moral indoctrination (vospitanie). This belief could provide women writers with a strong sense of personal mission (as expressed, for instance, in Akhmatova’s resolute opposition to state-sanctioned murder, or in determination of memoirists such as Nadezhda Mandelstam or Evgeniya Ginzburg to act as witnesses to their times). A rather less considerable benefit was that it allowed women to become the voice of ‘Communist morality’ in the Socialist Realist novel. But although women writers could gain stature from conventional ideas about feminine identity, at the same time, if their writings were too concerned with the private sphere, which was perceived as women’s particular area of power, they were certain to attract criticism – as happened in the case even of orthodox Socialist Realist writers, such as Vera Panova. Long before Soviet censorship made producing work for the ‘desk drawer’ routine for all writers, women writers made a habit of this; they were also much more likely to publish anonymously or to adopt pseudonyms than men, and to present their writings as ‘found texts’ (publishing what was actually an original piece of fiction as though this were the diary of a tragically deceased young woman lately discovered in the secret drawer of her desk).
But all this did not stop some women writers from asserting themselves as independent artists, particularly in the early twentieth century, an era when women’s liberation was openly debated, and when critics sympathetic to feminism (for example, Elena Koltonovskaya and Zinaida Vengerova) took an explicit interest in women’s creativity. Women writers were also helped by the Russian Symbolists’ conviction that the human personality was androgynous in nature: now they could openly identify themselves with male predecessors, as well as female ones. ‘Monument’, interpreted as the testament of a beleaguered writer drawing comfort from the certainty of posthumous vindication, was a particular landmark for women poets who fiercely believed in their own unrecognized genius. (One such was Anna Akhmatova, as is shown by the passage from Requiem evoking her possible future monument that I quoted in Chapter 2.)
For all their aspirations to be treated as equals of their male contemporaries, however, it was still difficult for women writers to achieve elevation to the pantheon of literary greats, at any rate in critical commentaries with ambitions to evaluate the past rather than simply catalogue it. So, while women were well represented in bibliographies, and in the compilatory publications of positivist critics, such as V. V. Sipovsky’s two-volume History of the Russian Novel (1909), they (unlike minor male writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) were largely excluded from the writings of the most brilliant group of early twentieth-century theorists, the Russian Formalists. The reasons for this lay in some of the Formalists’ governing assumptions about literary evolution, which they saw as driven by the efforts of a talented writer or writers. A gifted writer was sensitive to ‘automatization’, or the slide of literary techniques into cliché, at the very moment when it began happening; he (to use the appropriate pronoun) could raise what Tynyanov called ‘paraliterature’ (literaturnyi byt) to the level of real literature. Despite the Formalists’ own preferred term for their work, ‘descriptive poetics’, what they produced was really an interpretive poetics. Thus they were able to combine a detestation of biographical criticism (‘laundry list scholarship’) with reverence for the achievements of selected individuals – Derzhavin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Evgeny Baratynsky, and Konstantin Batyushkov (their main alteration to the canon of their own days at university was the admission of writers close to Pushkin, such as these last two). Women’s writing was not explicitly accounted for in any of the evolutionary models, but in practice it was usually assigned to the status of ‘paraliterature’. For example, Lidiya Ginzburg’s authoritative study of nineteenth-century Realism, On Psychological Prose (1971), contrasted the talented writing of the political thinker and memoirist Aleksandr Herzen with the talented personality of his wife Natalya (also the author of autobiographical writings, but ones, Ginzburg apparently considered, of documentary rather than literary value).
The assumption of a hard-and-fast distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘everyday language’, ‘literature’ and ‘paraliterature’, effaced from view, in Formalist and post-Formalist criticism, the importance of mixed-genre texts in the work of women writers, such as the diary in verse (to be found in Rostopchina’s work as well as that of Akhmatova), and the significance in women writers’ work of paraliterary citations, such as references to everyday speech (for instance, the mundane comments of an unfaithful lover in Akhmatova’s early poetry). And, while Formalist critics’ disdain for biography was helpful to the study of women’s writing in some ways (Eikhenbaum’s brilliant 1923 study of Akhmatova, for instance, eschewed clichés about ‘feminine poetry’ in favour of a close reading of literary devices in her work), it meant that women writers could not be studied as women. Therefore, questions about whether literary devices had a different resonance when located in a text that was linguistically marked as feminine (by the use of feminine adjectives and verbal forms, say) remained unasked. Equally, the importance of biographical realia for many women writers (and indeed for male writers such as Blok and Mayakovsky, for whom the tortured masculine self was a major theme) was ignored. Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, her great retrospective narrative poem about the ‘start of the twentieth century’ in 1913, is quite incomprehensible without some knowledge of the personalities in the poet’s circle, and the poet’s own experience, just as is Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the End; both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva maintained personal cults of Pushkin not only as artist, but also as man, producing vehemently subjective and partisan accounts of his marriage to Natalya Goncharova. It is interesting to note as well that Tsvetaeva, in her essay ‘The Poet and the Critic’, mounted an open attack on Formalism, claiming that all her work was an attempt to represent the world and had nothing to do with ‘formal tasks’ in the abstract.
The ‘Big Four’ of Russian Poetry
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) were four of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. All four suffered persecution under the Soviet regime. Mandelstam died in a prison camp in 1938; Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed in 1921, and her son and third husband were imprisoned during the Great Purges, as were Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter; Pasternak was subjected to vilification after the publication of
Dr Zhivago
, and the award to him of the Nobel Prize. At the same time, because all four (unlike, say, Nabokov) died in Russia, they could be discussed in public and republished during the post-Stalin era. In Western writings about Russian literature, the four are often grouped together as though they were members of a kind of informal but exclusive circle, something along the lines of the Bloomsbury group. Yet no group photograph or portrait of the four exists (in fact, there was never an occasion when all were in the same place at once). And while Akhmatova and Mandelstam were linked by lasting friendship, the same cannot be said about any of the others (Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam had a short-term affair, but lost contact after Tsvetaeva’s emigration; Tsvetaeva and Pasternak’s relationship was intense, but carried on by letter, and most of the emotion was on Tsvetaeva’s side; Akhmatova and Pasternak felt at most wary respect for one another; Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva’s relations were decidedly strained). On the other hand, there were several other figures who were close in one way or another to at least one of the group – for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a major influence on Tsvetaeva and the addressee of a tribute by Akhmatova. The association, then, is as much a matter of myth as fact, helped along by a line of Akhmatova’s, ‘There aren’t many of us, three or four, maybe’, and also, perhaps, by the musical parallels in this combination of two male and two female voices, all with their own distinct timbres – like a four-part ensemble in one of Mozart’s operas, with Akhmatova playing mezzo to Tsvetaeva’s soprano, and Mandelstam tenor to Pasternak’s bass-baritone.
Women writers, then, did not necessarily fit any better into the analytical paradigms of Formalism than they did into politically engaged perceptions of writers as ‘masters of minds’. Since Formalism was, from the early 1960s, once again to be the single most dominant trend in the serious study of Russian literature, among Western critics as well as Russian ones, the rise of gender-oriented criticism in Britain, America, France, and Scandinavia during the 1970s at first had little impact on critical practices or on university courses, even in the West. However, in the mid-1980s, a few Western Slavists, mostly in America, started to make a systematic attempt to recover work by women writers. Barbara Heldt’s Terrible Perfection (1987) contrasted male writers’ suffocating view of women’s innate moral superiority with women writers’ own struggle to represent a richer and more challenging understanding of female identity. The Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994), edited by Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, brought hundreds of forgotten authors back to scholarly attention. By the late 1990s, the work of these and other writers had managed to create something approaching an alternative canon of Russian literature, one made up of women writers and shaped by a strongly individualist stress on self-assertion and self-examination (that is, on various forms of autobiography or fictionalized autobiography). Newly discovered or rediscovered writers included Karolina Pavlova, the early nineteenth-century poet Anna Bunina, the twentieth-century lesbian poet Sofiya Parnok, and the nineteenth-century prose writer Nadezhda Durova, author of the transvestite memoir The Memoirs of a Cavalry Maid. The priorities of gender criticism also inspired important re-readings of established writers, especially Tsvetaeva, who emerged as a pioneer of writing by Russian women about the female body.
At times, to be sure, a new kind of critical elision took place, this time of writers who could not easily be presented as proto-feminist rebels. A case in point was Rostopchina: one American feminist critic, for example, wrote of her ‘inordinate preoccupation [with] parties and dancing’ and her frivolous attitude to literature (‘writing for her [ . . . ] had the appeal of an agreeable hobby’). Yet there are grounds for arguing that Rostopchina’s pose of female dilettantism and modesty was in fact a way of facilitating entry to the potentially ‘immodest’ world of writing. In circumstances where the publication by women of literary work (as opposed to the production of poems, stories, and memoirs for circulation among close family and friends) was seen as tantamount to sexual exhibitionism if not prostitution, the adoption of a modest mask (a mask that was sometimes misleading in terms of a writer’s actual character) was a form of social insurance, and one that could sometimes allow women to write with impunity on ‘unfeminine’ subjects.
At the same time, the historicist argument should perhaps not be pressed too far: a critical reading that limits itself to working within the intellectual universe of a given literary text as consciously expressed, rather than attempting to explore deeper shades of meaning and nuance, can turn into a tautologous paraphrase and runs the risk also of smoothing out aberrant or dissonant elements. If one sees Rostopchina’s ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ as nothing more than a docile recognition of feminine inferiority (albeit one that was expedient, because it allowed Rostopchina to speak in the first place), one might miss the fact that, in describing women as ‘bound’ (skovany) by modesty, Rostopchina uses an adjective that was customarily applied to Prometheus, whose rebellion against patriarchal control had made him a model for pre-Romantic and Romantic young men, from Goethe to Shelley. It is perhaps unlikely that Rostopchina intended to compare herself to Prometheus; however, it is possible that her choice of vocabulary unconsciously took issue with the prevailing view of tortured genius as necessarily masculine. Obviously, it would be foolish to base an entire interpretation of the poem on this one word, but the example illustrates that even a studiedly conventional text may on occasion ‘deautomatize’ language. Wrenched from its customary context, a cliché is not necessarily a cliché.
It is this variety of feminist criticism, one sensitive to linguistic nuance in Formalist tradition but also to historical and biographical context, that began to be practised among some Russian and Western critics in the late twentieth century. By the late 1990s, too, there were beginning to be signs of a shift in the standing of women writers in their homeland. They still might not (with the exception of Akhmatova) have their monuments, or (with the exception of Tsvetaeva, or again Akhmatova), their museums, but writers were beginning to be republished in Russia, as well as outside: Sofiya Parnok, Adelaida Gertsyk, Alla Golovina, and Zinaida Gippius were only four of the writers who now had book-length editions to themselves. To be sure, suspicion of feminizm remained widespread, a hangover from the Soviet Union’s cultural isolation (Russian writers and critics, unlike some of their counterparts in Poland, Yugoslavia, or the German Democratic Republic, had little direct access to Western cultural theory of any kind before the late 1980s), but also a result of ingrained suspicion of psychobiography; the feeling that feminizm was alien was not helped by the crudity of some early Russian attempts to propagandize it (blundering attacks on Lolita as pornography and the like). But as increasing familiarity with new kinds of cultural theory began to enliven and enrich the study of Russian literature inside Russia, which had endured something of a conceptual stasis for the last two decades of the twentieth century, and as the spread of post-Modernist ideas made the expression of a particular and partial, eccentric and individual, perspective a reputable choice for all writers, not just biographically female ones, a greater tolerance for women’s ‘marginal’ explorations of the self became possible. Symptomatic was the appearance of a serious and careful discussion of Western scholarship on women’s writing in the liveliest Russian literary-critical journal, New Literary Review, in 1997. All in all, the posthumous monument for which generations of Russian women writers had longed, an intellectual rather than a stone one, was beginning to seem, for at least some of them, a real possibility. Unlike some of the critical approaches discussed in this book, gender-aware criticism had never pretended to be the only proper or legitimate approach to literary texts, to offer final answers. It did not rank writers in terms of their ‘progressivity’ in feminist terms. But it could reasonably claim to have raised a new and interesting set of questions, and to have demonstrated (something that writers themselves had always known) that masculine and feminine identity was no more obvious or easy to understand than any other aspect of the human self as reflected in literature.
Chapter 7
‘Every tribe and every
tongue will name me’
Russian literature and ‘primitive culture’
The ‘Russians’ are no more than a group of specialists in the Russian language.
(M. L. Gasparov, 2000)
‘Monument’ envisaged that Pushkin’s name would be known not only in Europe, but in Asia. The poet predicted a readership from among Russia’s subject tribes: the Poles (‘proud descendants of the Slavs’), the Finns (the Grand Duchy of Finland had been added to Russia in 1800), the Tungus (now known as the Evenki, an indigenous people of Siberia), and the Kalmyks (from the area north of the Caucasus, on the shores of the Caspian Sea). Had Pushkin been gifted with the powers of geopolitical prophecy, he might have added the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, and the Kyrgyz, since during the Soviet period compulsory Russian teaching in schools throughout the Soviet Union meant that the vast majority of citizens, whatever their ethnic affiliation, had heard the name of Pushkin.
The fact that the peoples of Central Asia are not included in Pushkin’s list of ‘tribes’ is easy to explain: the first Russian conquests there took place only in the mid-nineteenth century, and the region was not fully subjugated until the 1880s. But the list was not exhaustive even in terms of the Russian Empire of Pushkin’s day. ‘The Finns’ stand also for the Balts (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians), and the Georgians and Armenians are not mentioned. This selection of ethnic groups is not at all accidental. Reference to the Georgians and the Armenians, literate peoples with a long history of Christianity, would have unsettled Pushkin’s representation of his poetry as a means of transmitting civilized values to savage peoples (the adjective ‘savage’ is in fact applied to the Tungus in ‘Monument’). Entertaining a Byronic fascination with Oriental exoticism in his early twenties, Pushkin had, from the point at which he wrote The Gypsies (1824), taken an ironical view of this, seeking to play down picturesque differences of ethnicity. The conclusion of The Gypsies stresses the universality of moral problems:
And everywhere are fatal passions,
And there is no salvation from destiny.
An elder Gypsy proves an Enlightenment raisonneur who, quaintly, has even heard of Ovid (though not by name: he knows him only as a political exile banished from the Roman South to the Caucasian ‘North’). Still more striking is the muting of local colour through detail chosen for its relative mundanity. The Gypsy retinue includes a shackled dancing-bear such as might have been seen in many Russian villages; it is Aleko, the outsider, who is a wide-eyed idealist, his Gypsy wife Zemfira who acts out of practical self-interest. Similarly, in his travelogue Journey to Erzerum (1829), Pushkin wearily recorded the tedious difficulties of passing through the Caucasus: the unreliable transport and rapacious drivers; the dirty hotels and unattractive women; the sustained hostility of the Turks and the Caucasian tribesmen. The heroism and uprightness of the invading Russian forces can only emerge to advantage by comparison; the emphasis on the prospect of salvation through military intervention is the major difference between this text and Alexander William Kingslake’s Eothen (1841), the jaded tone being common to both. In the words of the linguist and scholar Peter France, Journey to Erzerum ‘pulls the carpet from under the Romantic primitivism of much Caucasian writing [ . . . ] meant as a parody of Châteaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem, it mocks the clichés of such travel literature’. At the same time, the text was in tune with the official ideologies of expanding Russian imperialism, according to which, in the geographer Mark Bassin’s words, the ‘stagnation’ with which Asia was credited ‘appeared to offer a suitably backward contrast to the creative and progressive dynamism of the West, a dynamism which Russia now claimed as its own’.
Yet so far as the imaginative world of Empire went, Journey to Erzerum was aberrant (as Pushkin himself seemed to sense: the text was published only in part before his death). Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in the ‘noble savage’ still seduced many in the 1830s and 1840s; and the search for the exotic that characterized Romantic literature everywhere was, in Russia turned inward and applied to those parts of the Empire that had been colonized recently enough to have maintained a strong and sometimes threatening local identity. Of these, the most attractive were the Crimea, and especially the Caucasus, which had the virtue of combining an ‘Oriental’ flavour with the spectacular scenery that had attracted Western searchers for the picturesque to the Alps. Pushkin himself, in Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822) and Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1823), had relocated Byronic dramas of erotic fascination and cultural entanglement from the Ottoman Empire to the Crimea and the Caucasus. Of the two texts, the more seductive for many modern readers is The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. The central conflict (a jealous intrigue in the harem) is not only more fully developed in psychological terms, but lays bare powerful myths about women as the symbols of national identity (a fiery and dusky Georgian is pitted against a virtuous blonde Pole, as symbol of Western Europe). Moreover, the verse is not only beautifully lush but free of the Byronic cliché (mountains as ‘kings of the wilds’, and so on) that is calqued in Prisoner of the Caucasus. But it was the latter poem that was the more significant for Pushkin’s contemporaries: indeed, the poem can be said to have initiated the literary ‘discovery of the Caucasus’. Readers were enraptured by the lengthy descriptions of customs, dress, and manners (borrowed from printed sources, but interpreted at the time as first-hand ethnography), and the mysterious, impassive hero whose strange malaise is healed by his stretch in picturesque capitivity. The poem, in the words of Susan Layton, author of a pioneering book on Russian colonial texts, encouraged a ‘restorative tourism focused on the self’, setting out a ‘romantic imaginative geography’ of Russia’s South that was to be drawn upon by countless other writers during the next three decades. Undoubtedly, Pushkin’s own exotic origins on his mother’s side (his great-grandfather Hannibal, ‘the Moor of Peter the Great’, was an African) helped establish his credibility as the portrayer of this ‘imaginative geography’: the publishers of the first edition of A Prisoner of the Caucasus used a swarthy, ‘Moorish’ picture of Pushkin as a child to illustrate the book. (Ill. 17.)
As this case shows, publishers, critics, and readers were apt to confuse authors and heroes, a confusion against which the author’s preface to Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (1841) issued an irritable and timely warning. Partly this was because the myth of ‘restorative tourism’ itself tended to play on disguise motifs. John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot (Scottish gentleman, ‘Greenmantle’, and dervish prophet) and Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli, brought up by animals, had a quaint precursor in the eponymous hero of Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s Ammalat-Bek (1832), the perfect tribesman who was in fact Russian by descent. The ultimate figure of Russian Orientalist fantasy was the Circassian, a mountain man and daredevil rider of astonishing bravery, leading a life of frugal pastoralism enlivened with bandit raids. This alternative world was not at all like the dangerously effeminate sphere of the bathhouse and the harem that was evoked in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, enclosed and self-indulgent, or like the Russian Orientalism of the eighteenth century, lambasted by Derzhavin in his masterpiece of irony Felitsa, which showed the grandees of Catherine’s court lolling on velvet sofas in their silk robes, puffing at hookahs. The appeal of ‘manly’ and incorruptible Circassians to nineteenth-century Russian travel writers closely resembled the cult of the Bedouin among British visitors to Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century (for example, T. H. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger). The characteristic Romantic fascination with what could not be obtained applied itself here to the relationship between cultures as well as that between men and women: the ultimate object of desire perpetually defied possession. At the same time, tribes who resisted the project of colonization in which writers were themselves embroiled lent especial lustre to the process of subjugation: the valour of the invaders enhanced in proportion to the dangers associated with invasion. In the words of Susan Layton, the Caucasus was not only a ‘redemptive space’, but also a ‘killing field’, the ultimate testing ground for the Russian officer’s sword of honour.
17. Igor Geitman, engraving after anonymous drawing of Pushkin as a small boy. Heavy cross-hatching gives Pushkin a dark-skinned, ‘African’ appearance.
At the same time, the more thoughtful Russian writers sensed subtleties and contradictions in Russia’s relationship with ‘subject peoples’ that made them eschew costume-dramatic representations of the confrontation between ‘civilization’ and ‘savage’. A case in point was the representation of the Cossacks, the traditional defenders of Russia’s borderlands (in Gogol’s fervently nationalist novel Taras Bulba they were shown holding the frontiers of Russia and Orthodoxy against the perfidious Poles). Contrary to nationalist myth, Cossack settlers in the Caucasus, rather than defending the front line between Russians and other ethnic groups, demonstrated how permeable it was. As a recent historian, Thomas Barrett, has wondered, ‘How “Cossack”, for example, was Iakov Alpatov of the Cossack village of Naur who twice fled for the mountains, converted to Islam, and formed a thieving band of Chechens and Cossacks in the 1850s that robbed farmsteads, stole cattle, and took captives, not only from Cossacks but also from Kalmyks and Nogais well into the steppe?’. These tensions of identity figure also in Tolstoy’s novella The Cossacks, in which the protagonist, Alpatov, finds himself confronted with a culture that is just as ‘Oriental’ and insusceptible to the gaze of the outsider as a community in Turkey or Egypt might have been. And if here the boundary between ‘Orient’ and ‘West’ had simply moved slightly further eastwards (separating Alpatov, the city-dweller, from tribal culture as represented by local settlers, rather than local settlers from tribal culture), other texts called the very existence of such a boundary into question. The most original and touching character in Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time is not the splenetic Pechorin, a close descendant of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but the inarticulate and intellectually commonplace Maksim Maksimych, a low-ranking army officer whose knowledge of local conditions has given him not only a brusque intolerance of ‘lazy natives’, but also an exquisitely tactful sensitivity to local beliefs. On the death of Pechorin’s short-term Circassian mistress Bela, it is Maksim Maksimych who not only makes the practical arrangements for the burial, but who offers a moving epitaph to Bela herself:
18. A Circassian warrior: here the manly hero is portrayed by a nineteenth-century British artist.
We buried her behind the fortress, by a stream and near the place where she was sitting that last time. Now the bushes have grown up round her grave, white acacia and elder. I wanted to put a cross up, but, well, you know, I felt a bit uncomfortable about it; after all, she wasn’t a Christian . . .
There is a grating contrast between this passage and Pechorin’s formulaically cynical verdict on Bela when he has tired of her: ‘The love of a female savage is scarcely more appealing than that of a young lady of high society: the ignorance and simplicity of the one grow as boring as the coquetry of the other.’ Even Pechorin’s response to Bela’s death is stereotypical: in the words of Maksim Maksimych, ‘He raised his head and laughed . . . That laugh raised goosepimples all over me.’ For all Pechorin’s tribal play-acting, he remains as distant from the spirit of the mountains and from that of their inhabitants as does the dilettante ‘travel writer’ narrator who discovers Pechorin’s journals and decides to make a literary sensation by publishing these, and who provides the second layer of commentary in Lermontov’s multi-perspective novel.
Lermontov’s novel, then, juxtaposed the Romantic dandy’s pose of assimilation with the mundane man of action’s respect for difference, and the metropolitan gentleman’s mourning of the supposedly impassable barrier between ethnic groups with the lower-class settler’s conviction that such a barrier was an illusion. At the same time, Pechorin’s own confrontation with the Caucasus and the world of the Orient was not straightforward: it ended with his death in Persia, and before that he was repeatedly threatened with physical and mental disintegration. As Susan Layton has pointed out, Russian writers found it more difficult to believe in the ‘alterity of Orient’ than did their counterparts in Western Europe (with the exception of Spain, one might add), because of their country’s absorption of waves of invaders (the Pechenegs, the Tartars) and the assimilation of ‘Orientals’ into their own culture.
19. A Cossack soldier. Note the ‘orientalized’ appearance of this man and his wife, portrayed by a minor nineteenth-century Russian artist.
The labile, fluid character of Russian national feeling was never more clearly indicated than in the publication of the merchant Afanasy Nikitin’s remarkable fifteenth-century account of his visit to India, Voyage Beyond Three Seas, in Karamzin’s epoch-making History of the Russian State (1818). At the heart of a history that celebrated the creation of a puissant Russia stood a text ending with an almost exact transcription of the prayer spoken by converts to Islam. The publication of Nikitin’s narrative in Karamzin’s showed the uncertainty at the centre of Russian national identity and illustrated how the result of contact with ‘the other’ could be a sense of Russia’s closeness to the East, rather than of the gulf between Russia as part of Europe and the further territories.
This sense of closeness had resonance not only in the foundation, during the 1820s, of an outstanding tradition of scholarly investigation directed at the languages and cultures of the Eastern Empire, but also in philosophy and in artistic representations, culminating in the ‘Eurasianism’ of the early twentieth century. Blok’s important cycle of lyric poems ‘At Kulikovo Field’ (1908) was a highly original interpretation of a famous victory over the Tartars in 1380, a battle as crucial to triumphalist national history as Borodino (or, in English tradition, Agincourt). The imagery of Blok’s cycle recalled not only the Zadonshchina, a late fourteenth-century text celebrating the victory at Kulikovo, but also The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a still more famous twelfth-century text eulogizing a glorious Russian defeat. This intertextual double-exposure was only one of many layers of ambiguity in a text whose perspective slipped between the fourteenth century and the time of its composition, and which – as was revealed by Blok’s contemporaneous essay ‘The People and the Intelligentsia’ – was also intended as a lament for the ‘infrangible boundary’ between the ‘Tatar’ intelligentsia and the ‘true Russian’ lower classes.
In a sense, then, one could see Russian literature as at once colonial and post-colonial, speaking simultaneously from the viewpoint of conqueror and conquered. Nikolay Trubetskoy, the most original thinker in the Eurasian group, took a militantly relativist attitude to European culture – ‘European culture is obligatory only for the group of nations that created it’ – which was very much in the spirit of négritude, the self-assertion movement among Francophone African and West Indian intellectuals in the 1940s, and of African-American philosophy as well. For Trubetskoy, the diversity of Russian culture was a source of pride, as was the racial mixture in the Russian Empire. So far as landscape was concerned, though, the Eurasian sensibility was attracted to the familiar rather than the exotic. It was the steppe, rather than the impassable mountain ranges of the Caucasus, that had become the preferred imaginative space. Rivers, the only borders in the steppe, were seen not only as ‘infrangible boundaries’ between battle-lines, but also as frontiers that might be crossed by stealth, or used as trading routes. Exactly so was the Russian language, the primary symbol of national difference for a Westernized Russian such as Turgenev, now seen as permeable to the East, distinguished from other Slavonic languages by its capacity for absorbing Turkic loan-words and phonetics.
Ten years after writing ‘On Kulikovo Field’, Blok himself moved from seeing tragedy in the binary inheritance of Russian culture, ‘Tatar’ and ‘Russian’, to seeing this as a source of strength. His 1918 poem ‘Scythians’ (quoted here in Robin Kemball’s translation) celebrated a tribe that had been seen since classical Greek times as the epitome of vigorous barbarism. The Scythians stood for the resurgent life of Russia, traditionally the bulwark against incursions from the East, but now threatening to overwhelm enfeebled Western civilization with its hybrid vitality:
So, Russia – Sphinx – triumphant, sorrowed too –
With black blood flows, in fearful wildness,
Her eyes glare deep, glare deep, glare deep at you,
With hatred and – with loving-kindness!
Yes, so to love, as lies within our blood,
Not one of you has loved in ages!
You have forgotten that there is such love
That burns and burning, lays in ashes!
The ‘Scythian’ side of Russia was implicitly associated, in Blok’s representation, with the creation myth of the Russian Revolution, understood by the poet in his first and enthuasistic response to it as a coming to power of the formerly oppressed, ‘barbarous’ underclasses. The association was not peculiar to Blok. The history of representation of the East was intimately intertwined with that of representation of ‘the people’ (narod, a noun signifying both ‘people’ and ‘nation’). In a culture where, as late as 1897, only 21 per cent of the population was literate, the divide between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ had sometimes been understood to map on to the division between ‘Westernized’ and ‘native Russian’. With the rise of the Slavophile movement in the 1830s, the idea that cultivated Russians were foreigners in their own country became a cliché in literature and in journalism. There was a realization that the discovery of uncorrupted exoticism did not always require a visit to the Caucasus: it could also be found in the Russian countryside. In the 1820s, some Russian Romantic writers, like their counterparts in other European countries, began to see folk tales and folk songs as a source of inspiration for literary endeavour. At first, it was the motifs and plots, rather than the language and structure, of folkloric texts that provided the inspiration. Some of Pushkin’s tales on folklore subjects (skazki), such as ‘The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda’ (1830), paraphrased subjects from oral tradition (the poet had himself noted material from informants when staying on his estate at Mikhailovskoe in the late 1820s) and were composed in a genteel approximation of popular speech. But others, such as The Golden Cockerel (1834), were taken from Western European sources, were written in verse rather than prose, and used the vocabulary and inflections of educated conversation. Like his fairy-tale narrative poem Ruslan and Ludmilla (1820), and like verse tales by his contemporaries and successors (for example, Pyotr Ershov’s Little Hunchback Horse, 1834), Pushkin’s skazki had the charming artificiality of Charles Perrault or Jeanne L’Héritier’s reworkings of French folklore, such as The Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast.
But the actual daily life of the Russian peasantry – beset by disease, poverty, poor to non-existent education, and (before 1861) enserfment – did not incline writers to witty brilliance. On the contrary, from the late eighteenth century, Russian literature had a sentimental preoccupation with the sufferings of the Russian peasantry at the hands of cruel or callous landowners. The customary symbol of the dashing Russian officer as the romantic pioneer of civilization in the Caucasus had its antipode in the figure of the exploited lower-class woman, as evoked in, say, Karamzin’s story Poor Liza (1792), showing a peasant girl betrayed by a selfish young man from the upper classes. To be sure, Pushkin’s story ‘The Station-Master’ in his Tales of Belkin (1829) suggested that the relationship between an upper-class man and his mistress from ‘the people’ might be based on affect and mutual contentment rather than one-sided exploitation. But this was, from the point of view of the Russian radicals who began to dominate Russian literary production in the 1840s, not a tenable suggestion. Indeed, in the 1840s and 1850s serfdom was seen even by some conservatives as an institution that was intrinsically wrong. And in 1851, the radical poet Nikolai Nekrasov, the most talented among politically committed authors of verse, made a degraded and beaten peasant woman the symbol of his verse and emblem of his social sympathy:
But early lay heavy upon me the shackles
Of another, untender and unloved Muse,
Of the sad travelling-companion of sad beggars,
Beggars born for struggle, suffering, and labour –
Of a weeping, lamenting and hurting Muse,
Perpetually hungry, pleading in degradation,
Whose only idol was gold.
The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 did not mitigate the emphasis on rural misery but rather enhanced it. To be sure, some writers, such as Tolstoy, took a Utopian view of the new relationship between landowners and peasants. The scenes on Lyovin’s estate in Anna Karenina (1876–8) show the patriarchal peasant household as a model for a successful family in which husband and wife have complementary and fulfilled lives. Two decades before, in his ‘Landowner’s Morning’ (1851), Tolstoy had shown an enthusiastic young Russian gentleman trying to introduce rational work methods to his serfs: now Lyovin learned from his freed peasants not only how to mow, but also how to look at life. Having been unable to allay his suicidal frustration by studying philosophy and theology in books, Lyovin was finally set on the path to equilibrium by hearing of the attitude to life of an old peasant who ‘lived for his soul and remembered God’.
But eulogization of rural life was possible only in conditions where peasants’ land-holdings afforded them a tolerable existence. The chaotic process of land reform not only bankrupted many landowners who had lived on estate incomes before 1861, but also subjected peasants to economic uncertainty, leaving some worse off than they had been before the reforms. A single bad season could spell destitution and famine. All of this was observed at close quarters by the educated employees of the new post-Emancipation institutions of rural administration, the zemstva, such as doctors and teachers, many of whom were sympathetic to Populism (Narodnichestvo), a movement aimed at bringing education and political enlightenment to ‘the people’ but also (and paradoxically) at preserving the traditional practices and values of peasant life. A flowering of ethnography (the systematic collection of folklore and recording of material culture and daily life) was accompanied by a burgeoning of fiction rich in ethnographical detail, but also in social pessimism. The critical-realist stories of writers such as Gleb Uspensky, Nikolay Uspensky, Valentina Dmitrieva, and later Vsevolod Garshin, Vladimir Korolenko, and Ekaterina Letkova, painted an unremittingly bleak portrait of the Russian village. The degradation represented was so extreme that it raised questions about how this could possibly be mitigated by social reforms. A later and particularly grim example of this tradition was Chekhov’s story ‘The Peasants’, which went down extremely badly with populists of a more idealistic colouration, such as Tolstoy. In Chekhov’s imaginary village, with its rubbish-strewn stream, squalid huts, and brutal human relationships, the only event distracting from the daily grind was an annual religious procession, received with a pious and hysterical fervour that had absolutely no relevance to the tenor of life for the remainder of the year. Significantly, the only ‘human’ characters in the story were a waiter and his family who had returned from years of life in the city.
The sense of rural devastation, of what was often termed the ‘bestialization of the people’, prompted a search for the picturesque in the far North of Russia, which had remained relatively untouched by serfdom and which was saved by its remoteness from the seasonal migration to cities that had (in the eyes of many Populists) tainted the regions nearer to Moscow and St Petersburg with urban ways. It was here above all that folklore collectors searched for the rituals, celebrations, spells, songs, and tales that they believed preserved traditions stretching back to pre-Christian times. But the region from which material emanated was in the end less important than its character. Writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, who sometimes collected ethnographical material themselves as well as turning to published anthologies of such material, were attracted above all by texts that underlined the difference between town and countryside. In the Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov’s vivid story-monologue ‘Masha’, for example, the narrator was a peasant girl for whom traditional folkloric figures such as the house spirit were absolutely real physical presences:
Oh, Ma’am, you can’t imagine how good it is living in Yaroslavl, the only thing that worries you here is the conmen, but in the village there’s so much to be afraid of: courtyard spirits, and house spirits, and demons, and arch-demons. Outside in the courtyard there’s a spirit, and inside the house there’s one too; the spirit in the courtyard has a face on him like the master’s, and the one in the house is all hairy. If anyone goes out to feed the horses after nine, then the courtyard spirit, he spies it straight away. You can’t just go out like that, you have to cough first . . .
As this example indicates, the language of narration was now as important as the material cited. The vitality of much early twentieth-century Russian prose was derived directly from popular speech (prostorech’e). The favoured genre was a first-person narrative that eschewed the norms of educated speech (this type of narrative was to be retrospectively named skaz by Russian Formalist critics: see for instance Boris Eikhenbaum’s 1918 essay ‘The Illusion of skaz’). Before the Revolution, the most outstanding exponent of skaz was Aleksey Remizov, whose more successful imitators included Evgeny Zamyatin and Olga Forsh. After the Revolution, though, the Remizovian school, whose procedures might be described as ‘dialect ornamentalism’, went into something of a decline, the causes of which lay not only in Remizov’s emigration (he left for Berlin in 1921 and later settled in Paris), but also in the determinedly pro-urban standpoint of the early Soviet regime. However, skaz persisted in transmuted form. The working-class narrators of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories, such as ‘The Bathhouse’, spoke in a patchwork of mangled clichés taken from political discourse of the day (‘This isn’t the Tsarist regime, you know!’) and popular language of quite a different kind (grekh odin, literally ‘nothing but sin’, but approximately equivalent to ‘no peace for the wicked’). And their structure drew on traditional folk narrative patterns, such as triple repetition (the narrator of ‘The Bathhouse’ tries three times to get hold of a wash-tub for himself) and the use of a rhetorical formula to begin and end the narrative and mark it off from surrounding speech (‘The Bathhouse’ starts with the wonderfully surreal sentence, ‘They say, lads, that in America the bathhouses are ever so excellent’). At the same time, Zoshchenko’s characters were more than sociological studies: they were also masks for the writer himself. As the literary critic Alexander Zholkovsky has argued, the constant social and sexual failures of the writer’s fictional protagonists played on obsessive motifs in Zoshchenko’s psychoanalytically inspired autobiography, Before Sunrise; rather than laughing at the inarticulacy and inadequacy of those he had invented, Zoshchenko was using their helplessness to render decent the exploration of his own self. One could add that his stories were quintessentially Modernist not only because they ‘made the world strange’ (to adopt the term used by the Formalist literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky), but also because they expressed a profound philosophical pessimism about the communicative function of language. The fact that Zoshchenko’s main characters are so often not understood, so frequently baffled (in all senses) by the responses of others, reflects not only the petty tyrannies of early Soviet life, but the urban isolation that gripped those living in the world of Daniil Kharms, or indeed Samuel Beckett.
Just so in poetry, the sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical functions of skaz intertwined: folklore was no longer kept at one remove but used in order to assault old concepts of appropriate behaviour and expression. Tsvetaeva’s verse tale The Tsar-Maiden, for instance, was a transexual narrative representing the love of an aggressive, manly princess for a mild-mannered young princely aesthete; The Swain showed the union of a peasant girl and vampire-lover as a sublime erotic experience. For Tsvetaeva, as for several other Symbolist and post-Symbolist women poets, appropriation of folklore was a means of breaking away from the constraints of ‘women’s poetry’ in a traditional sense – poetry of unhappy love, elegant narcissism, and self-effacing creativity. Her poem ‘The Muse’ represented a woman at the borders even of rural society, a vagrant, perhaps even a drab and an outlaw:
No birth, no marriage certificates,
No forefathers, no ‘bright falcon’ [i.e. young man].
She goes tearing along,
Such a distance away!
Under the dusky eyelids
[Glows] gold-winged fire.
With a wind-beaten hand
She snatched – and forgot.
Her hem trails in the dirt,
Her shoes gape apart.
Not wicked, not kind,
But far-off: her own woman.
Without ‘certificates’ (of birth, of marriage), without a man to ensure her respectability, and with her hem trailing in the dirt (a proverbial image of sluttishness in the sexual sense too), Tsvetaeva’s Muse could not have been more different from the decorous muses, with impeccable literary credentials, that figured in Akhmatova’s poetry. What is more, here, as in Tsvetaeva’s work as a whole, the polarization between ‘acceptable’ rural folklore and ‘vulgar’ urban folklore that ran through much work by other nineteenth-and early twentieth-century writers broke down. (Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s imitations of the ‘vulgar’ genre of street ballad in her poetry of the early 1920s were considerably more refined than her poems drawing on rural folklore.) However, the poem is marked by the stylistic features that characterized Modernist pieces in the folkloric style: fixed epithets (‘gold-winged fire’); negative constructions (‘not wicked, not kind’); and the use of parallelism (see particularly the ‘hem’ and ‘shoes’ of lines 9–10). At the same time, the poem was a self-portrait, a statement of the poet’s right to defy convention, to exist beyond the official scripts of ‘birth and marriage certificates’.
The fact that Modernists’ work in the folk style was much closer to authentic rural popular culture than the writings of the Russian Romantics was one reason why the early twentieth century also saw poetry by actual members of the Russian lower classes enter the literary mainstream for the first time. Where nineteenth-century ‘peasant poets’, such as Aleksey Koltsov, had been incidental curiosities, their twentieth-century successors, above all Nikolay Klyuev, were formidable aesthetic and intellectual presences. Klyuev fused the dialect and natural phenomena of the far North, his birthplace, with esoteric Eastern philosophy, the theology of sects such as the Flagellants and the Self-Castrators, and citations of epic from Finland to North America. His was an extraordinary and individual artistic vision, where death was ‘a squall/rumbling on foam-filled wagons/to life’s outer shore’, where the classical muse was replaced by a skylark, or a whale breasting the Arctic swell, and where Lenin, a ‘cedar frost in Spring’, was evoked as emotionally as ‘the crystal voice of whooper swans’. For his part, Klyuev’s contemporary and sometime comrade-in-arms Esenin, though a less considerable poet, was, forty years after his death, to become the most popular poet in Russia, with a poem that lamented the loss of youth vanishing ‘like white smoke from the apple trees’ sung to the guitar in millions of hostels and private flats.
By and large, though, it was intellectual writers looking for alternative material, including a significant group of upper-middle-class women (Zinaida Gippius, Adelaida Gertsyk, Marina Tsvetaeva) who immersed themselves in folk lexis and in popular tradition. The proletarian poets of pre-revolutionary worker journals and post-revolutionary Proletcult groups inclined to a stylistically conventional late Romanticism of foundry sparks and burning furnaces. And Socialist Realism made incumbent on writers the use of a style that would be ‘accessible to the mass reader’ rather than based on the putative language of that reader in his or her pre-educated state: this curtailed experiments in skaz in prose and poetry alike. By the time that literary adventurousness resurfaced again, in the 1960s, the majority of the Russian population was living in towns, and rural Russia (transformed by mass literacy, radio, and later television) was no longer the storehouse of ‘folk culture’ it once had been. But skaz of a Zoshchenkian kind (based on urban popular speech) began to enjoy some popularity again, particularly among writers not publishing in Soviet official sources (where prohibitions on use of ‘obscene language’, that is, the swear-words found in just about every sentence of real popular speech, meant that street language could appear only in bowdlerized form). It was employed not only in neo-Realist studies of the Soviet and post-Soviet underworld, but also in texts of greater literary and philosophical ambition, such as Yuz Aleshkovsky’s revenge narrative, The Hand (1980), in which the narrator’s disgust at the official who purged his family during collectivization juxtaposes the miraculous beauty of the man’s possessions to their owner, apostrophized as ‘you heap of shit’.
Much of the discussion in this book has emphasized the centredness of Russian literary tradition, as expressed in the demands made by generations of critics that writing should serve a serious purpose, and in the dominance of an enduring canon of great writers celebrated by memorials, informal commemorations, and by successive educational systems. In Chapter 6, I argued that this centredness placed women writers at the borders of their culture, made them provincials in terms of the literary heritage, as it were. This chapter has shown that centredness had its limits. To be sure, Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inhabited an imperial mindset, one in which non-Russians were often seen as colourful ethnographical exhibits, as examples of quaint or amusing otherness. Yet at the same time, the geographical peripheries of empire, in particular ‘the East’, could serve to unsettle reflective Russians’ conviction of their own identity, leading them to question the nature of distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’. And in the second half of the nineteenth century, a search for the exotic inside Russian culture became common, with folklore now seen as a repository of attractively barbaric themes and language, rather than a store of material that had to be ‘genteelized’ before it could be admitted to polite culture. This transformation of the standing of folklore in turn allowed writers from beyond the educated male elite (peasants, women, ethnic minorities) to profit from their own marginality, to exploit a situation where ‘provincialism’ (in the transferred sense used above) became a mark of distinction, rather than a sign of inferiority.
Chapter 8
‘O Muse, be obedient to the
command of God’
The spiritual and material worlds
Monuments don’t turn out well in Russia (the ones to Nikolay Gogol and so on). That’s because the only tolerable kind of monument we seem to be able to build is a chapel, with an icon lamp perpetually burning for ‘the servant of God Nikolay’.
(Vasily Rozanov, 1913)
In Pushkin’s writing generally, God is not usually as prominent as he is in ‘Monument’. Notable, for example, is the omission of any aspect of Christian belief or practice from Evgeny Onegin, including even the Lenten fasting and Easter feasting that would have been annual events in the household of a real-life Larin family. (In the 1850s, a British visitor to Russia described Holy Week as a time when ‘the only sound that from time to time broke the mournful stillness which reigned throughout the house was the monotonous voice of the priest’.) A carefree Voltairean in his early days, Pushkin was later embarrassed by his youthful godlessness (as is indicated by his attempts to remove his irreverent poem about the Virgin Mary, The Gabrieliad, from circulation). Yet he also belonged to a generation where the eighteenth-century mistrust of religious ‘enthusiasm’ was strong. Unlike his sister Olga, a fervent believer and the author of religious poetry in French, he did not incline to explicit statements of faith. To be sure, the theme of imminent death figured largely in his later poems, some of which, such as ‘Whether I wander along the noisy streets’ (1829), see choosing a resting-place as the only way in which the will may be exercised. And several poems of 1836 juxtapose worldly power and religious feeling, which latter draws in the lyric hero despite his strong sense of personal sin (as the critic Sergey Davydov has argued, there is strong reason to suppose that these poems, including ‘Monument’, may have formed part of a poetic cycle round the theme of Holy Week).
Like most aspects of Pushkin’s creation, the question of the extent to which the writer was an active believer is controversial. It became particularly so once Soviet censorship disintegrated: at this point the patriots who had fulminated against Andrey Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin as a profanation of the writer’s memory began an all-out promotion of Pushkin’s Orthodox connections, using books, articles, pamphlets, and a specialized journal, The Pushkin Era in the Light of Christian Culture. It was above all Pushkin’s late poetry of repentance that was used as evidence here. But the desire for faith that these texts unquestionably did express is not the same thing as religious faith in a direct sense. There seems little to justify even the more moderate claim for Pushkin as an instance of how ‘theology in Russia [ . . . ] expressed itself through poetry’. Rather, he was a crucial figure in the creation of a secular Russian literature. His great poetic predecessors, Lomonosov and Derzhavin, were not only inspired directly by liturgical texts (as in Derzhavin’s remarkable paraphrases of the Psalms), but built their grandest poetic edifices on a foundation of the liturgical language, Church Slavonic (so, for example, in Derzhavin’s ‘The Waterfall’, a profoundly Christian meditation upon the transience of worldly power). Such magnificent sententiousness and theological self-declaration is not to be found in Pushkin’s writings; indeed, the extent to which he was an active believer is neither evident nor, in the end, relevant, except perhaps to those the leftist writer and critic Osip Brik termed ‘maniacs such as those passionately seeking the answer to the question “Did Pushkin smoke?” ’. If Belinsky and his radical colleagues could consider Pushkin an ‘encyclopedia’ of Russian life, this was partly because spiritual matters were as marginal here as they were in the French Encyclopédie. Bypassing Pushkin, the Russian tradition of metaphysical poetry was revived, after Derzhavin, by Pushkin’s contemporaries Evgeny Baratynsky and Fyodor Tyutchev; it then resurfaced again – after decades of dormancy – in the 1890s, most notably in the poetry of the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and his successor Vyacheslav Ivanov.
Pushkin’s prose was still less accommodating to mystical matters than his poetry. His great contemporary, Nikolay Gogol, was far more openly pious, as was reflected, for example, in his moralistic correspondence with his mother and sisters. Yet even Gogol’s beliefs remained curiously marginal to his works. To be sure, some of his stories have an affinity with Christian parable. Both Old-World Landowners (1835) and The Overcoat (1841) are intimately connected with an ascetic Christian critique of self-gratification and the accumulation of material possessions: in both, the ‘mistake’ made by the characters is not to ‘lay up treasure in heaven’, not to prepare for the inevitable day of divine judgement. But both texts, like Gogol’s great novel Dead Souls and his play The Government Inspector, were the product of a talent that found sinfulness easier to imagine than virtue. The main character of The Overcoat, the pathetic Akaky Akakievich, with his scatological name (kakat’ is a childish word for defecation, ‘to cack’) and his haemorrhoidal complexion, was a walking vision of fleshly disgust, someone who, like the characters in Dead Souls, was a corpse in Christian terms long before his death.
The search for an Orthodox revival in literature emerged in theory before it did in practice, then. It was expressed not only in Gogol’s treatise Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, but also in the work of writers associated with the ‘Slavophile’ movement of national conservatives that began to emerge in the late 1830s – Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksey Khomyakov, and Konstantin Aksakov. Where radical writers were rabidly secular in their tastes, the Slavophiles looked back nostalgically to Russia before the time of Peter the Great, when, so they believed, religion had infused every aspect of secular life. The fact that imaginative literature was itself a Western concept (as I mentioned in Chapter 2, textual production in medieval Russia was dominated by ecclesiastical needs) did not worry the Slavophiles, since they believed it was possible to combine the best features of Western and native Russian ‘enlightenment’ (prosveshchenie). The culmination of their ideas, in a literary sense, was the work of Dostoevsky, a socialist sympathizer transformed by the experience of mock execution and incarceration in a labour camp into an Orthodox believer, a conservative, and by far the greatest ‘theological’ writer of the nineteenth century. The memoirs, novels, and stories that Dostoevsky wrote after his return from Siberian exile were not ‘religious’ merely in the sense that they focused upon themes of transgression and repentance, or topical issues such as the reform of the church courts, or because they included characters who were believers. They were also permeated by religious concepts that shaped structure and plot as well as appearing in arguments, most importantly sobornost (a term coined by Khomyakov to describe a social unity modelled upon that of the sobornaya tserkov, the phrase used for ‘Holy Catholic Church’ in the Orthodox Creed) and kenosis (‘emptying out’, a term denominating the striving to commune with others, to the point of self-loss). Both of these concepts were central to Dostoevsky’s final and most obviously Orthodox novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80). They underlay the portraits of Alyosha Karamazov and of his teacher Zosima, whose godly death was a counterbalance to the brutal parricide at the heart of the novel. They were also at the heart of the Fable of the Grand Inquisitor, where the Inquisitor himself spoke for a utilitarian, ‘Western’ view of Church power working in the world to right material injustice, while the silent Christ stood for spiritual probity of a non-interventionist, contemplative kind.
At some levels, then, there could scarcely be a more instructive contrast in styles than between Pushkin and Dostoevsky. On the one hand, there is The Brothers Karamazov, a sprawling, immensely ambitious study of the nature of belief, if also of the nature of doubt (there is passionate conviction in the agnostic Ivan Karamazov’s refusal to acknowledge the goodness of a deity who tolerates suffering on the part of the innocent). On the other, there is The Queen of Spades, a brilliant miniature in which the existence even of the supernatural in a low-level sense, let alone of God, is open to question, and in which the Church figures only in the form of a worldly priest whose lip-service to the moral qualities of the dead Countess in his funeral oration is in ironic contrast to her querulous and egotistical character in life. Dostoevsky’s admiration for Pushkin (even a Pushkin made in his own image) seems at first mysterious. Yet the two tales do have much in common, and not just because Pushkin’s frivolous beau-monde is the world in which Elder Zosima has moved before his conversion. Similar, too, is the matter-of-fact, even homely, attitude to the uncanny in both texts. The dead Countess’s appearance to Hermann in The Queen of Spades (whether as hallucination or ghost is unclear) is preceded by ‘a shuffling of slippers’; the Devil who appears to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov is a disagreeably chirpy middle-aged man whose mediocre brown suit suggests a middle-ranking provincial civil servant, the Evil One as pen-pushing bureaucrat.
The other world as seen here is, in the words of Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov’s sinister double in Crime and Punishment, hell as ‘a bath-house full of spiders’. The chilling sense of a sort of parallel universe of banality and boredom recurs in Daniil Kharms’ absurdist stories of the 1930s, here acting as a counterweight to the synthetic ‘heaven’ of Socialist Realist myth. It is present once more in the figure of Quilty from Lolita, a travesty Doppelgänger whom Humbert Humbert cannot throw off, any more than Ivan can his horribly bonhomous devil. In all these texts, the sense of hellish claustrophobia retains its hold, but in each it is modulated quite differently. It never hardens into stereotype, unlike the view of everyday life as a domain of inescapable banality, an impediment to intellectual activity, which gives many Russian texts, from Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done to the final part of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a strange vacancy at their heart, with specific settings treated as though they were of no more consequence than the standard fittings of a station waiting room before a train is boarded to head off somewhere more interesting. The most vivid evocations of Christ in Russian literature are of failed Christs: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, whose commitment to salvation through love destroys Nastas’ya Filippovna rather than saving her, and Ieshua, the eccentric, holy-fool Jesus of Bulgakov’s debunked Jerusalem in Master and Margarita.
If the canonical Gospel texts have been reflected in Russian literature only obliquely, though, the absorption of writers in eschatology, or the ‘four last things’ of Christian theology (death, judgement, heaven, and hell), has made the Apocalypse a central book for them. This is particularly clear in texts written during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pessimism of the fin de siècle inspired interest not only in the writings of such intellectual nihilists as Nietzsche or Oswald Spengler, but also in the Orthodox tradition of looking forward to the destruction of the wicked secular world and the establishment of religious rule. Successive historical catastrophes – national defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the ‘year of revolutions’ that followed, the First World War, Revolution, and the Russian Civil War – were represented by writers using apocalyptic imagery. A particularly striking example was Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard. The book had some allegiance to the historical fiction of Tolstoy, in that the experience of one family and their connections was used to stand for the experience of historical subjects in general. But Tolstoy’s emphasis upon history as a dialectic between predestination and human will (according to the epilogue of War and Peace, the wise historical subject was one who did not place too high a value upon the import of his or her own actions) had been replaced by a stress on malign destiny. This reinforced the powerlessness of historical subjects, who were left only with the power to regret. In this, Bulgakov echoed the moralism of Russian medieval texts such as The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Baty, where defeat and destruction were visited upon God’s people ‘because of our sins’: ‘A great year but a fearful year was the year of Our Lord 1918’, the novel begins, and the arrival in Kiev of the vicious peasant leader Petlyura, tales of whose atrocities are shown spreading round the city as he approaches, is accompanied by cosmic portents:
Quite suddenly the grey background in the gap between the domes burst open, and an unexpected sun showed in swirling dark dimness. It was vaster than any sun people in the Ukraine had ever seen, and a true scarlet, like pure blood.
(Chapter 16)
In a world where the immanence if not the existence of God had become subject to serious doubt, it was the antichrist, and satanic forces more generally, that could be imagined as physically present in the material world. Just so, when the body – notably absent from Romantic and Symbolist writing – re-asserted itself in the writing of Russian Modernism, this was often as a detested ‘envelope’ for the mind or the spirit. The hatred felt by the narrators of Yury Olesha’s Envy, or Nabokov’s Lolita, for their physical selves is matched in Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘The Year 1972’, which represents the lyric hero’s self as ‘stinking of breath and creaking of joints/a blot on the mirror’ and with ‘enough caries in my teeth/to map out Ancient Greece, at least’.
The emphasis on death and punishment has often drawn (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) on the strong vein of anti-physicality in Russian Orthodox culture. Earlier manifestations of this in Russian literature had included Derzhavin’s ‘On the Death of Prince Meshchersky’ (1779), which stressed the universality of decay (‘The monarch and the captive are alike food for worms’). Later ones included Tolstoy’s Confession (1879–80), with its extraordinary image, borrowed from an Eastern legend, of the living human suspended over the abyss on a tree-trunk gnawed by a serpent. But if Derzhavin’s or Tolstoy’s response to the inevitability of death had been to stress the importance of a virtuous life, twentieth-century texts tended to represent the alternative and better reality as something elusive and insubstantial. It was associated with mysterious, uncommunicable experience, what Aleksandr Blok called, in one of his poems addressed to the Beautiful Lady, ‘the call of dim life/Splashing secretly within me’. It manifested itself in the colours of ‘non-being’, of death and of spiritual life at one and the same time, whiteness and transparency. Though, as David Bethea has pointed out, Utopian writing was the polar opposite of apocalyptic writing, in that it anticipated a paradise in the future (often a technological one) rather than mourning the loss of the ‘original pristine faith’ of the past, in practice the two discourses often exploited similar imagery – as, indeed, did Socialist Realism, whose spotless factories, ever-patient party officials, and peaceful, hard-working labourers made it a form of bastardized Utopianism. Just so did the traditions of pre-Petrine Russian religious literature find themselves preserved in Socialist Realism’s earnest commitment to expressing the ‘elevated belief of human beings in Sublimity’, as a typical Soviet Realist, Vera Panova, put it in 1972.
But not all Russian literature by any means has been driven by a puritanical distaste for quotidian existence, for the material world. Some writers (the early twentieth-century short-story writer Aleksey Remizov, for instance) gave their demons the comforting substance of folk myth, of the malevolent creatures (house spirits and wood demons) that had to be placated with bread and milk. Mandelstam rebelled against the Symbolist emphasis upon esoteric myth by proclaiming the virtues of ‘domestic Hellenism’, of ordinary, though handsome, objects such as jugs and honey-jars. Other writers created a kind of ‘domestic Orthodoxy’, of mundane but fervent spirituality. Olga Sedakova’s limpid poem ‘Old Women’, for example, sees the secular and the spiritual, the sinful and the pious, as inseparably fused:
Patient as an Old Master,
I love to study the faces
of pious, spiteful old women,
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:
The Englishman did not believe me, so I went and explained the whole difference to him: nowadays, I said, worldly artists didn’t make the same kind of art; they used paints made of oil, while the old artists, they used pigments dissolved in egg-yolk. The new art, that means you smear the paint on so it only looks life-like in the distance, while in the old kind the work is smooth, and even close to, you can see it clearly. And a worldly artist, I said, won’t even get things right in the outline of his drawing, because he’s been taught to represent what’s hidden in the body of the earthly and animal man, but in holy Russian icon-painting is represented the face that dwelleth in heaven, which a material person could never see even in his imagination.
Yet this other-worldly art, as the detailed description here makes clear, is also one of exact representation. As evoked by the Red-Haired Man, the angel icon at the centre of the story has an individual and distinct physical presence. His face is not only ‘radiant divine’ (svetlobozhestvennyi) but also ‘kind of ready to help’ (edak skoropomoshchnyi).
‘Domestic Orthodoxy’, then, consists not in a rejection of the material world, but in the notion of a fusion of the material and the spiritual as the ideal. In this it has something in common with another salutary response to the clichés of other-worldliness, the construction of a theology of the body. The origins of this can be traced back to some writers associated with the national-conservative Slavophile movement. In Tolstoy’s eulogies of procreative family life in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the rare moments of perfect happiness are associated with a celebration of physical intimacy – Natasha waving her baby’s nappies in front of friends, or (more decorously) Lyovin watching Kitty bathe his son. To be sure, Tolstoy’s energetic love of the physical was determinedly anti-sexual: it is child-bearing rather than copulation that is a source of true joy (the fact that Lyovin and Kitty find sexual contact embarrassing but child-rearing unambiguously enjoyable makes this perfectly clear). But a later Slavophile writer, the brilliant essayist Vasily 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.
20. ‘Don’t Weep for Me, Mother’: The Saviour not Made by Human Hands with Saints. Icon for Holy Week: a Muscovite version of the Greek
acheiropoietos
, as evoked in the first line of ‘Monument’, showing the triumph of the resurrected Christ over the tomb.
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 Land of Peasant Utopia, written in 1920). But Bakhtin’s book was also related to the writings of Khmoyakov, Ivan Kireevsky, and Konstantin Aksakov in its emphasis upon community ritual, and in its sense of religious experience in the everyday. The various elements can be seen coming together, for instance, in his description of the banquet.
In the act of eating, as we have said, the confines between the body and the world are overstepped by the body. It triumphs over the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world’s expense. This element of victory and triumph is inherent in all banquet images. No meal can be sad. Sadness and food are incompatible (while death and food are perfectly compatible). The banquet always celebrates a victory and this is part of its very nature. Further, the triumphant banquet is always universal. It is the triumph of life over death. In this respect it is equivalent to conception and birth. The victorious body receives the defeated world and is renewed.
(Chapter 4)
Popular feasting and the Christian Eucharist, with its link to resurrection on the one hand and crucifixion on the other, come together in a tour-de-force of neo-Slavophile cultural criticism, which synthesizes rather than analyses and is rooted in a determination to celebrate the wholeness of life, and not to discriminate between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘anti-aesthetic’, acceptable and unacceptable, sensations.
Bakhtin’s book is also a tribute to the vitality of humour in Russian culture, as, too, are Rozanov’s miniatures, not only the vessels of ‘exaggerated profundity’ but of studiedly ridiculous self-portraits – having confiscated his children’s Sherlock Holmes stories as ‘harmful reading’, Rozanov devoured them himself at every possible opportunity, ‘so that the train journey from Siverskaya to St Petersburg flew past like a dream’. A popular Western view of Russia sees the place as grim, dank, and with permanently gloomy inhabitants given to fits of weeping and talking about their souls. No one could maintain this illusion for long when reading Russian literature. In Chekhov’s plays, even characters prone to maudlin fits of self-pity display a talent for flights of black comedy (as when Uncle Vanya responds to a social banality about the nice weather with the words, ‘Nice weather to hang yourself in’). Here, humour is a weapon for exposing artificiality (as it also is in Dostoevsky’s novels, where lapses into absurdity threaten every carefully planned social event). But ridicule is often more universal than this, giving a sense of human existence as necessarily grotesque – as in the scene from Chekhov’s ‘Ward No. 6’ (1892) where one madman boasts of his fantasy service decorations to another invalided out of the civil service when he became wrongly convinced he was making mistakes and developed paranoia.
Black humour of this kind survived at even the darkest eras of history, such as the late 1930s. To be sure, in Socialist Realist texts, humour that was not of the unintentional sort was limited to crude jokes directed at a narrow range of social types (shirkers at work, women who used too much make-up, men who tried to lay down the law to their wives). In unofficial writing, though, a vivid and subtle feeling of the ridiculous survived, and pompous bureaucrats were its main targets (in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, comic vengeance is exacted on a whole crowd of such people). In texts of this kind, humour was a survival strategy, but it was also a manifestation of freedom, a means of transcending oppression, a gesture of indifference towards authority. The exhilirating carnival foolery celebrated by Bakhtin was only one form of challenging official puritanism. The humour of the ‘holy fools’, the popular saints of early modern Russia whose filthy habits and bizarre behaviour assailed ordinary proprieties, and thus called into question conventional ideas about goodness, also worked its way through into some later literary texts. Kostoglotov, the protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, who is saddled with an absurd name (Boneswallower), and is, in every obvious way, decidedly unamiable – surly, brusque, unrepentantly naive – moved like some latterday, secularized version of the holy fool through 1950s Soviet society, saving no one but himself, yet at the same time exposing the illusions upon which the ideals and aspirations of those surrounding him were based.
The uniqueness of Russian literature (and Russian culture more generally) has been held by many Western observers to lie in precisely this ability to embrace spiritual and material worlds. As the classicist and Russophile Jane Harrison declared in 1919, ‘The Russian stands for the complexity and concreteness of life – felt whole, unanalysed, unjudged, lived into . . .’. But as I come to the end of this short tour along pathways suggested by Pushkin’s ‘Monument’, I would not want to leave you with the impression that this chapter has spoken ‘the last word’, that we have reached the heart of the maze. Rather, there is no such heart: we have met the beginning of a path leading backward. For Pushkin, the last word was not ‘O Muse, be obedient to the command of God’, but ‘Don’t dispute with fools’: which leads back to the discussion of savoir faire placed here in Chapter 6. We saw in Chapter 5 that judging life has been a constant preoccupation of Russian writers, while Pushkin himself is an illustration that intelligent Russians have had just as large a talent for, and inclination towards, analysis as their counterparts anywhere in the world. In Russia itself, writers have often been regarded as sages, as moral guides to how life should be lived; but there are many other reasons for reading Russian literature. Like any other literature, it represents the world in new and extraordinary ways, it investigates areas of human experience that we sometimes prefer not to think about (madness, homicidal urges, tyranny); and it offers not only intellectual stimulation but the sensual delight of language stretched to its limits, of laughter, and of flights of imaginative fancy.
Further reading
Preface
N. Cornwell (ed.), A Reference Guide to Russian Literature (London, 1998), and V. Terras (ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1984) (the latter lists more writers, but the bibliographies and articles in the former are fuller). Among single-volume histories are R. Hingley, Russian Writers and Society (London, 1975) and Russian Writers and Soviet Society (London, 1978); D. S. Mirsky, History of Russian Literature (New York, 1949); C. Moser (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge, 1992); V. Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1991); R. Bartlett and A. Benn (eds.), Literary Russia: A Guide (London, 1997) is useful on museums. Fuller reading lists, as well as source notes for the entire book, are available on the OUP website at //http:www.oup.com/
Chapter 1
The Complete Pushkin in English began publication in 1999. Recent single-volume translations include Pushkin’s Notebooks in Facsimile (London, 1995–8); A. D. P. Briggs (ed.), Alexander Pushkin: Selections (London, 1997); E. Feinstein (ed.), Pushkin Translated (Manchester, 1999); A. Kahn (ed.), Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, The Captain’s Daughter, Peter the Great’s Blackamoor (Oxford, 1997). See also ‘A Pushkin Portfolio’, Modern Poetry in Translation 15 (1999), 144–277; Eugene Onegin, Translated with a Commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton, NJ, 1981); T. Shaw (ed.), The Letters of Alexander Pushkin (Bloomington, Ind., 1963).
Chapter 2
D. Bethea, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, Wisconsin, 1998); P. Debreczeny, ‘Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo: Pushkin’s Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture’, South Atlantic Quarterly 90 (1991), 269–302; M. C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, NY, 1989); K. Petrone, Life Has Become Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), chapter 5; A. Siniavsky, Strolls with Pushkin (New Haven, Conn., 1993); S. Vitale, Pushkin’s Button (London, 1999). See also the chapters by M. C. Levitt and S. Sandler in B. Gasparov, R. C. Hughes, and I. Paperno (eds.), Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley, 1992).
Chapter 3
For Pushkin’s own views on the canon, see Tatiana Woolf (ed.), Pushkin on Literature (London, 1971). C. R. S. Cockrell and D. Richards (eds.), Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford, 1976) and S. Hoisington (ed.), Russian Views of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (Bloomington, Ind., 1988) are useful anthologies of critical opinion. More generally, see J. Brooks, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics’, in I. Banac, J. G. Ackerman, and R. Szporluk (eds.), Nation and Ideology (1981), 315–34; M. Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York, 1962); S. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (Basingstoke, 2000). On censorship, see M. T. Choldin and M. Friedberg (eds.), The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR (Boston, 1989); M. Dewhirst and R. Farrell (eds.), The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, NJ, 1973); D. Jones (ed.), Literary Censorship: A Reference Guide (London, 2001); L. Losev, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munich, 1984).
Chapter 4
L. Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose (Princeton, NJ, 1990); G. S. Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace (Berkeley, 1987); A. Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, 1994).
Chapter 5
For nineteenth-century Russian literature and politics, see Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London, 1978); Aileen Kelly, Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (New Haven, 1998) and her Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin (New Haven, 1999); Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times (Oxford, 1978). On the twentieth century, see K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981); G. Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self-Preservation (Berkeley, 1987); J. Garrard and C. Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (London, 1990); T. Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, NY, 1997); R. Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford, 1992); D. Shepherd, Beyond Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in Soviet Literature (Oxford, 1992); G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life (Oxford, 2000), part 3.
Chapter 6
J. Andrew (ed.), Russian Women’s Shorter Fiction: An Anthology 1835–1860 (Oxford, 1996); H. Goscilo and B. Holmgren (eds.), Russia – Women – Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1997); B. Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women in Russian Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1987); B. Holmgren, Women’s Work in Stalin’s Times (Bloomington, Ind., 1993); C. Kelly (ed.), An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777–1992 (Oxford, 1994) and C. Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820–1992 (Oxford, 1994); M. Ledkovsky, C. Rosenthal, and M. Zirin (eds.), A Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (Westport, Conn., 1994); L. Ya. Ginzburg, Yu. M. Lotman, and B. Uspensky, The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca, NY, 1985); I. Reyfman, Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford, 1999); W. M. Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
Chapter 7
J. Andrew, Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature: The Feminine and The Masculine (Basingstoke, 1993); M. Makin, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Poetics of Appropriation (Oxford, 1994), chapter 3; F. J. Oinas, Essays in Russian Folklore and Mythology (Columbus, Ohio, 1975); D. E. Peterson, Up From Bondage: The Literature of Russian and African-American Soul (Durham, NC, 2000); S. Sandler, Distant Pleasures: Aleksandr Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford, 1989); J. West in R. Anderson and Paul Debreczeny, Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing (Gainesville, Florida, 1994).
Chapter 8
S. Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1991); J. Billington, The Icon and the Axe (London, 1966); C. Brandist, Carnival Culture in the Soviet Modernist Novel (Basingstoke, 1996); P. Davidson (ed.), Russian Literature and its Demons (London, 2000); S. Hutchings, Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday (Cambridge, 1997); E. Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1997); R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989).
INDEX
References in bold type are to explanatory text–boxes.
A
Aeschylus 9
Akhmatova, Anna (1889–1966), poet 5, 18, 24, 26–7, 73, 88, 91, 103, 109, 111, 112–13, 115
Alexander I (reigned 1801–25), Emperor of Russia 13
Aksakov, Konstantin (1817–60), Slavophile thinker 150
Aleshkovsky, Yuz (b. 1929), novelist 136
Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr (1862–1938), prose writer 93
Annenkov, Pavel (1812 or 1813–87), critic 77
Annensky, Innokenty (1855 or 1856–1909), poet 62
Antokolsky, Pavel (1896–1978), poet 91
Apollo (literary journal) 37–8, 42
Austen, Jane 43, 102
B
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975), cultural critic 85, 149
Baratynsky, Evgeny (1800–44), poet 110, 140
Barrett, Thomas 122
Batyushkov, Konstantin (1787–1855), poet 110
Beckett, Samuel 133
Belinsky, Vissarion (1811–48), critic 39, 41, 47, 76, 81, 139
Bely, Andrey (1880–1934), novelist and poet 16, 62
Bethea, David 145
Bishop, Elizabeth 28
Blake, William 43
Blok, Aleksandr (1881–1921), poet 59, 111, 126, 128, 145
Boborykin, Petr (1836–1921), prose writer 93
body, theology of 149
Bowen, Elizabeth 6
Boym, Svetlana (b. 1959), critic 92
Brik, Osip (1888–1945), critic 139
Brodsky, Joseph (1940–96), poet v, 5, 8, 71–3, 91, 144
Brontë, Emily 43
Bryusov, Valery (1874–1924), poet 82, 132
Buchan, John 120
Buck, Pearl S. 5
Bulgakov, Mikhail (1891–1940), novelist and dramatist 29, 89, 143–4
Bulgarin, Faddey (1789–1859), novelist, journalist, and spy 80
Bunina, Anna (1774–1829), poet 114
Burlyuk, David (1882–1967), poet 93
Burney, Frances (Fanny) 43
Burns, Robert 43
C
Calvino, Italo 9
canon, the literary v, 32–60, 110
Carver, Raymond 6
Catherine II (reigned 1762–96), Empress of Russia 42
Catullus 38
censorship 33, 51, 73, 74–5, 83
Chateaubriand, François-René de 6, 119
Chayanov, Aleksandr (1888–1937), prose writer 148, 150
Chekhov, Anton (1860–1904), writer and dramatist 4, 6, 41, 64, 69, 79, 94, 131, 151
Chernyshevsky, Nikolay (1828–89), critic 41, 42, 142
Church Slavonic 7, 139
Circassians 122
Cixous, Hélène 108
Clark, Katerina 90
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 57
Constant, Benjamin 6, 124
The Contemporary (literary journal) 36, 45
Cossacks 122, 125
D
Dante 5
Derzhavin, Gavrila (1743–1816), poet 12, 19, 110, 139, 144
Dickens, Charles 5, 43
Dmitrieva, Valentina (1859–1947), prose writer 131
Dobrolyubov, Nikolay (1836–61), critic 41, 81, 84
Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav (1875–1957), painter 55
Dolgorukaya, Natalya (1714–71), memoirist 65
Donne, John 5
Dostoevsky, Fedor (1821–81), novelist 4, 5, 9, 23, 25, 30, 35, 40, 62, 68, 90, 96, 110, 141–2, 143
Dzerzhinsky, Feliks (1877–1926), founder of the Soviet secret police 25, 87
E
Eikhenbaum, Boris (1886–1959), Formalist critic 111, 132
Eisenstein, Sergey (1898–1948), film director 55, 67
Eliot, George 43
Eliot, T. S. 5, 8, 28
emigre literature 45, 83
Erofeev, Venedikt (1938–90), prose writer 75, 96
Erofeev, Viktor (b. 1947), prose writer and critic
Esenin, Sergey (1895–1925), poet 29, 135
ethnography 131
Eurasianism 127
F
Fadeev, Aleksandr (1901–56), prose writer 23, 25
Flaubert, Gustave 5
folklore 129, 134–5
Fonvizin, Denis (1745–92), dramatist 64
Ford, Richard 6
Formalism 52, 58, 110, 132–3
Forsh, Olga (1873–1961), prose writer 132
France, Peter 72, 118
Frost, Robert 28
G
Galina, G. (Glafira Mamoshina) 103
Garshin, Vsevolod (1855–88), prose writer 131
Gasparov, Boris, critic 65
Gasparov, Mikhail (b. 1935), critic v, 117
Gertsyk, Adelaida (1874–1925), poet 115, 135
Ginzburg, Evgeniya (1904–77), memoirist 109
Ginzburg, Lidiya (1902–90), critic 64
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 40, 65, 115
Gogol, Nikolay (1809–52), prose writer and dramatist 23, 41, 50, 64, 68, 81, 85, 122, 140
Golovina, Alla (1909–87), poet 115
Goncharov, Ivan (1812–91), prose writer, author of Oblomov 33, 84
Gorky, Maksim (1868–1936), prose writer 23, 41
graphomania 92–4
Grigoriev, Apollon (1822–64), poet and critic 81
Groys, Boris, critic 89
Gumilyov, Nikolay (1886–1921), poet 112
H
Harris, Jane 152
Haworth 19, 26
Heine, Heinrich 65
Heldt, Barbara 113
Herodotus 38
Herzen, Aleksandr (1812–70), radical thinker 64, 111
Zakharina-Herzen, Natalya (1817–52), memoirist 111
Holmes, Richard 57
Hopkins, Gerald Manley 43
Horace 8, 12
Hughes, Ted 9
Hutchings, Stephen 149
I
Ivanov, Vyacheslav (1866–1949), poet 103, 140
J
Jakobson, Roman (1896–1982), linguist, Formalist critic 7
Johnson, Samuel 43
Joyce, James 5
K
Kalinin, Mikhail (1875–1944), Bolshevik leader 41
Karadžic, Vuk 40
Karavaeva, Anna (1893–1979), Socialist Realist writer 89
Karamzin, Nikolay (1766–1826), prose writer and historian 43, 56, 63, 65, 99, 126, 129
Kharms, Daniil (1905–42), poet and prose writer 53, 89, 133, 142
Kheraskov, Mikhail (1733–1807), poet and dramatist 63
Khodasevich, Vladislav (1886–1939), poet and critic 88
Khomyakov, Aleksey (1804–60), poet and Slavophile 141
Kingslake, Alexander William 118
Kipling, Rudyard 120
Kiprensky, Orest (1782–1836), painter 3
Kireevsky, Ivan (1806–56), Slavophile thinker 150
Klyuev, Nikolay (1884–1937), poet 57, 135
Knyazhnin, Yakov (1742–91), poet and dramatist 64
Koltonovskaya, Elena (1870–1952), critic 109
Koltsov, Aleksey (1809–42), poet 135
Komissarzhevskaya, Vera (1864–1910), actress 104
The Koran 98
Korolenko, Vladimir (1853–1921), prose writer 131
‘K. R.’ (Konstantin Romanov 1858–1916), poet 103
Kruchenykh, Aleksey (1886–1968), poet 93
Krylov, Ivan (1769–1844), poet 36
L
Lamartine, Alphonse-Marie-Louise Prat de 6
laughter 151
Lawrence, T. E. 122
Lay of Igor’s Campaign (twelfth-century epic) 127
Layton, Susan 120, 126
Ledkovsky, Marina 113
Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924), Soviet leader 44, 135
Lermontov, Mikhail (1814–41), poet and novelist 50, 52, 53, 59, 79, 84, 120, 124
Leskov, Nikolay (1831–95), prose writer 146–7
Letkova, Ekaterina (1856–1937) 131
literary journals 36, 37–8, 42
Lomonosov, Mikhailo (1711–65), scientist and poet 36, 41, 43, 52, 89, 139
Lotman, Yury (1922–1993), semiotician 56, 79
M
Mandelstam, Natalya (1899–1980), memoirist 109
Mandelstam, Osip (1891–1938), poet 8, 27–8, 63, 88, 89, 112–13, 145
Mann, Thomas 92
Mansfield, Katherine 6
Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Aleksandr (1797–1837), prose writer 120
Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1893–1930), poet 21, 29, 64, 85–7, 90, 111
metaphysical poetry 140
Mickiewicz, Adam 40
Mirsky, Dmitry Svyatopolk (1890–1939), critic 1, 52
morality, literature and 88–91
Munro, Alice 6
Musorgsky, Modest (1839–81), composer 55, 64
N
Nabokov, Vladimir (1899–1977), novelist v, 18, 21, 35, 45, 91, 92, 112, 115, 142, 144
négritude 127
Nekrasov, Nikolay (1821–77) 41, 45, 81, 130
New Literary Review 116
Nietzsche, Friedrich 4
Nikitin, Afanasy (d. 1472), travel writer 126
O
O’Faolain, Sean 6
Olesha, Yury (1899–1960), prose writer 92, 144
Ostrovsky, Aleksandr (1823–86), dramatist 23, 67
Ovid 13, 38
P
Paine, Thomas (Tom) 43
Panova, Vera (1905–73), prose writer 32, 103, 109, 145
Parnok, Sofiya (1885–1933), poet 114
Parny, Evariste-Désiré de Forges 6
Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960), poet 28, 96, 112–13, 142
Pavlova, Karolina (1807–93), poet 65, 102, 114
peasantry, as represented in literature 130–2
Peter I (reigned 1682–1725), Tsar of Russia 42, 90
Pisarev, Dmitry (1840–68), critic 30, 40, 46
politeness, relationship of with literature 99
Pope, Alexander 43
Prigov, Dmitry (b. 1940), poet 75–6
‘progressiveness’ as merit in Soviet criticism 42–6
Proletcult 136
publishing and printing 32–3
Pushkin, Aleksandr (1799–1837), poet
and authorship
32
–
7
biography of
3
,
13
,
51
,
57
commodification of
19
–
20
cult of
39
–
40
,
42
–
6
,
52
,
59
and French literature
6
manuscripts of
18
,
39
,
75
,
106
monuments to
16
–
17
,
22
museums of
16
–
17
as ‘negro’
120
,
121
and Orientalism
118
–
20
parodies of
70
–
2
and religion
138
–
9
,
142
as salon poet
100
,
104
in schools
48
,
50
as stylist
7
,
14
–
15
,
69
translated
8
–
11
and women’s writing
106
–
8
Works:
Angelo
80
Boris Godunov
64
,
80
The Captain’s Daughter
36
,
48
,
53
Count Nulin
76
‘Desert Fathers’
107
‘The Drowned Man’
61
–
2
Dubrovsky
50
Egyptian Nights
16
,
18
,
65
Evgeny Onegin
3
,
4
,
22
,
35
,
45
,
53
,
67
–
8
,
76
,
79
,
98
,
138
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai
120
The Gabrieliad
74
,
138
The Gypsies
118
‘I loved you’
72
,
106
Journey to Erzerum
118
–
19
Letters
7
,
64
The Little House at Kolomna
76
,
77
–
8
Little Tragedies
63
‘Monument’
10
–
12
,
48
,
62
‘The Poet’
99
‘The Poet and the Mob’
102
The Prisoner of the Caucasus
119
,
121
‘The Prophet’
9
,
62
Queen of Spades
55
,
64
,
68
–
9
,
70
,
71
,
78
Ruslan and Ludmilla
3
,
129
Skazki
(verse tales)
129
Tales of Belkin
129
Goncharova-Pushkina, Natalya (1812–1863), wife of Pushkin 25, 31, 111, 23
R
Rabelais, François 8
Rachmaninov, Sergey (1873–1943), composer 103
Radishchev, Aleksandr 41, 43, 46
Rembrandt van Rijn 146
Remizov, Aleksey (1877–1957), prose writer, artist 44–5, 132, 145
Repin, Ilya (1844–1930), painter 19
Romanticism 16–17, 61–2
Rosenthal, Charlotte 113
Rosetti, Christina 43
Rostopchina, Evdokiya (1811–58), poet 108, 114–15
Rowse, A. L. 51
Rozanov, Vasily (1856–1919), essayist 138, 148
S
salons 100–1
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail (1826–89), satirist 41, 52, 83–4
Sartre, Jean-Paul 4
Scott, Walter 48
Sedakova, Olga (b. 1949), poet 145–6
Sentimentalism 99, 106
serial novels 36, 38
Seth, Vikram 5
Shaginyan, Marietta (1888–1982), prose writer and poet 103
Shakespeare, William vi, 9, 12–13, 15, 51, 62, 80
Shalamov, Varlam (1907–82), prose writer 71, 94–5
Shaw, Thomas Budge 8
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 9, 115
Shepherd, David viii, 91
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 8
Shklovsky, Viktor (1893–1984), Formalist critic 133
Shostakovich, Dmitry (1906–75), composer 73
Shpet, Gustav (1879–1937), neo-Slavophile thinker 6
Shvarts, Elena (b. 1948), poet 18
Sinyavsky, Andrey (1925–97, also wrote as ‘Abram Terts’), prose writer 63, 74, 93, 139
Sipovsky, V. V. (1872–1930), literary historian 110
skaz 132
Slavophile movement 6, 140–1, 147–8
Socialist Realism 87–8, 90, 109, 136, 145
Solovyov, Vladimir (1853–1900), religious philosopher 140
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (b. 1918), prose writer 51, 93, 94, 95–6, 151
Spivak, Gayatri 108
Staël, Germaine de 107
Stalin, Joseph, Soviet leader 44, 52, 87
Stratford 19, 25
Surkov, Aleksandr (1899–1983), poet 88
Swift, Jonathan 43
T
Tchaikovsky, Petr (1840–93), composer 55
‘Thaw’ 93
Thesiger, Wilfred 122
Thomson, James 43
Tolstaya, Tatyana (b. 1951), prose writer
Tolstoy, Aleksey K. (1817–75), poet 64–5
Tolstoy, Aleksey N. (1882–1945), prose writer 23, 25
Tolstoy, Lev N. (Leo 1828–1910), novelist 4, 5, 17, 23, 30, 40, 43, 51, 69–70, 75, 82, 84, 95, 96, 110
Anna Karenina
35
,
42
,
130
War and Peace
42
,
143
tragicomedy 64, 90
Trevor, William 6
Trifonov, Yury (1925–81), prose writer 94
Tropinin, Vasily (1776–1857), painter 3
Trubetskoy, Nikolay (1890–1938), Eurasian thinker 127
Tsvetaeva, Marina (1892–1941), poet 5, 16, 25, 61, 64, 82, 111, 112–13, 115, 133–5
Turgenev, Ivan (1818–83), novelist 4, 35, 40, 50, 53, 127
Tynyanov, Yury (1894–1943), critic and fiction writer v, 26
Tyutchev, Fedor (1803–73), poet 110, 140
U
Urquhart, Thomas 8
Uspensky, Gleb (1843–1902), prose writer 131
Uspensky, Nikolay (1837–89), prose writer 131
Utopianism 145–6
V
Vengerova, Zinaida (1867–1941), critic and translator 109
Veresaev, Vikenty (1867–1945), prose writer 75
Volkonskaya, Zinaida (1789–1862), salon hostess and writer 100, 102
W
West, Rebecca 1, 9
Wollstonecraft, Mary 43
Wordsworth, William 43, 108
writers
biographies of
58
exhumation of
23
and gender
98
–
116
memorials to
23
–
5
museums of
23
,
24
–
5
,
115
Z
Zadonshchina (fourteenth–century prose text) 127
Zamyatin, Evgeny (1884–1937), prose writer 132
Zholkovsky, Aleksandr (b. 1937), critic viii, 58, 133
Zirin, Mary 113
Zoshchenko, Mikhail (1895–1958), short story writer 22, 133
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