Cambridge Companion to Classic Russian novel

5

LESLEY MILNE

Satire

The first two great satirical novelists in Russian literature are Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) and Mikhail Saltykov (1826-89), who wrote under the pen-name of Shchedrin. Many major Russian writers, from Aleksandr Pushkin through Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii to Aleksandr Sol-zhenitsyn, have used satirical depiction in their novels, but it could never be said that satire is characteristic of their work as a whole. It is Gogol and Shchedrin who between them set the points of reference for the Russia satirical novel.

Of course satire existed in Russian literature before Gogol, but not in the form of a novel of European stature.¹ An important element in the development of the Russian satirical novel was the picaresque tradition. In its classic form, which originated in Spain in the mid sixteenth century and in the following centuries spread throughout Europe, the picaresque novel is the retrospective autobiography of a rogue, the picaro.²In Russia, a elsewhere, the picaresque was disseminated chiefly through its French model, Alain Lesage's Gil Bias (1715-35). Its popularity is demonstrated by two Russian imitations, A Russian Gil Bias, by Vasilii Narezhnyi (1814 and Ivan Vyzbigin by Faddei Bulgarin (1829), which was subtitled A Russian Gil Bias on its first appearance. Where Bulgarin's novel defends the existing social order, Narezhnyi uses the same literary model to opposite political effect, and the last three parts of his six-part novel were in fact banned by the censor. Narezhnyi constructs a classic picaresque tale, in that the hero tells the story of his own past life, spent traveling around the country in the service of various masters; he becomes corrupted by the debauchery of the world, until the moment of his repentance when his integrity is restored, thus providing the moral basis for his retrospective account. The story-line is packed with adventures, but also with robustly satirical episodes exposing abuse of power in high places. Narezhnyi's Russian Gil Bias shows how the picaresque novel, plotted around the travels of an anti-heroic or unheroic central character, develops into a

satirical panorama. The first Russian novel of this type to achieve a universal reputation was Gogol's Dead Souls.

Dead Souls, part 1 of which was published in 1842, is not classically picaresque in that it is not the first-person narrative of the rogue himself. It is, however, picaresque in that it recounts the travels of its scoundrelly central hero, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. The idea of Dead Souls started off with an anecdote which Gogol said was provided by Pushkin. In Russia of the 1830s there was a census once every ten years and landlords were required to pay poll taxes for any male serfs, even if they died between censuses. The serfs, or "souls" (as they were termed in both official and customary parlance) were dead, but on lists they were still alive; a swindler could therefore buy them cheaply. Given that financial status was determined by the number of "souls" owned, he could thus become a man of property; he could use his "souls" to obtain a piece of land on which to settle them, acquire a mortgage on them and thus begin to build a real fortune on a non-existent commodity. It has been argued that Chichikov's enterprise is implausible, because serfs could only be sold with their families.³ Be that as it may, there is something definitely shady about the whole business.

Chichikov's reason for wanting to purchase dead souls is not explained in the novel until the end of part 1, and it is never understood by the inhabitants of the provincial town of NN, into which Chichikov rides in his britzka in the novel's opening paragraph. The town is a collective image of mediocrity, venality, triviality, affectation and complacency, all portrayed with festive comic exuberance. Round Chichikov's activities the townspeople generate absurd spirals of rumor, and then when they seek to know the truth, whom do they ask? They turn, of course, to Nozdrev, who is a frivolous and reckless liar.

The town of NN, concerned only with externals, took Chichikov to its heart and, externally, Chichikov offers nothing to which anyone could take exception. He is neither handsome nor ugly, neither too fat nor too thin, not old but not too young either. His chameleon ability to flatter and please is constantly on display. Externally, he is very fastidious, with smoothly-shaven cheeks and a chubby body that is very well cared for: it is rubbed with a special soap that adds whiteness to the skin, then sponged and eau-de-cologned. We too would have been taken in by Chichikov, as the author tells us towards the end of chapter 11 in an admonitory address to the reader.

In his travels round the town of NN trying to purchase dead souls, Chichikov encounters various local landowners. All are characterized according to a set formula. One feature is isolated and exaggerated to the

exclusion of all others and it is expressed in every aspect of that landowner: name, physique, clothes, house, furniture, food and drink, serfs, wife and children (if any), reaction to the proposed sale of the dead souls. Where the cloyingly sentimental Manilov gives Chichikov the souls for nothing, the bear-like Sobakevich drives a hard bargain and Nozdrev makes them the wager in a game of draughts; Pliushkin, the hyperbolized embodiment of miserliness, sells Chichikov his runaway serfs as well, and Korobochka, the manic housekeeper, becomes obsessed with the market price for "dead souls." As for Chichikov, in chapter II, the final, summarizing chapter of part I, we at last discover the character trait which he embodies: it is the vice of "acquisitiveness," which turns all his positive qualities, such as intelligence and fortitude, to naught. The denseness of detail in these characterizations produces an illusion of life while at the same time evoking a spiritual darkness. All the characters are dead souls in a moral sense.

Despite the fact that Chichikov in part I travels only about thirty miles round the town of NN, the text of Dead Souls conjures up a sense of vastness. This is evoked by the lyrical digressions of the third-person narrator, which from chapter 7 onwards articulate the author's vision. The soaring rhetoric of these digressions is counterbalanced by the constant need to return to Chichikov, and this alternation between the lofty and the comic was to create a productive model for Russian satirists in the future. One of the most famous passages in all of Russian literature, often cited and even more frequently parodied, is the finale to part I of Dead Souls, where Chichikov's britzka spawns an image of the troika that then becomes a "bird-troika," which in turn symbolizes Russia in headlong, divinely-inspired flight while other nations step aside to make way for her. This last chapter of part I reveals to the reader the pathos behind the author's comic inspiration: Chichikov's adventures have in fact been about Russia, ramshackle, drowsy and straggling, but also full of great potential when viewed "from the beautiful distance" of Rome, where Gogol wrote most of part I. There is mention of "the laughter visible to the world and the tears which it neither knows nor sees," tears of sublime anticipation which hint at a prodigious apotheosis in part II, for Gogol cherished an artistic plan whereby Chichikov would undergo a moral regeneration. When the conversion of Chichikov refused to happen as the writing of part II progressed, Gogol interpreted this as meaning that he himself was unredeemable. All great satirists hope by their writings to change the world for the better. In Gogol this sense of vocation was so strong that he hounded himself to death by his perceived failure to live up to it.

The writer's moral obligation to society was an idea shared and

propagated by Russian literary criticism in the nineteenth century. In the tradition set by Gogol's great contemporary, Vissarion Belinskii (1811-48), the critic was also bound by this same duty to guide and instruct society. When Gogol depicted stagnation and corruption, radicals like Belinskii assumed that this was a protest against Russia's political structures. Gogol's Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, published in 1847, came as a shock: in this collection of writings (very few of which were passages from actual "letters to friends") Gogol affirmed the entire social, legal, ecclesiastical and political status quo. Belinskii responded as to an act of personal betrayal, writing Gogol a famous letter which, although not published until 1872, circulated in manuscript and became one of the great radical texts of the Russian nineteenth century.⁴

For Saltykov-Shchedrin, as for Belinskii, it was an article of faith that the writer should lead society on the road of reason, self-awareness, development and progress. It was not from the "beautiful distance" that Shchedrin viewed his contemporary Russia. He served as a government official from 1844 to 1862, when his contentious views forced him to take early retirement, and again from 1865 to 1868, when the government retired him once and for all. He was vice-governor of Riazan and later of Tver, and by 1868 he had reached a civilian rank equivalent to that of general in the army. In government service he tried honourably to practice liberalism in what he saw as a very temple to anti-liberalism. As a satirist he vented his civic rage in the open contempt of his mockery. His two major satirical novels are The History of a Town (1869-79) and The Golovlev Family (1875-80).

Mikhail Bakhtin identified two different types of laughter in his book Rabelais and His World, published in Moscow in 1965: the festive, life-affirming laughter of the carnival and a mocking, negating, rationalist "laughter that does not laugh."⁵ Shchedrin's laughter is of the latter type. In The Golovlev Family the comic element is almost entirely absent. The Golovlevs represent the decline and decay of the Russian landowning gentry, with all the author's revulsion against this way of life (which he saw in his childhood on the family estate) concentrated on these characters. A particular distillation of loathing is reserved for the portrayal of the last member of the family, Porfirii. The Golovlev Family describes a life of limited horizons and monumental idleness. These features are evoked by Goncharov in Oblomov through the mock-idyll of "Oblomov's dream" (1849), but on the Golovlev estate they have turned viciously destructive. One by one the members of the family die from drink or despair, choked to death by the suffocating atmosphere that is embodied in Porfirii Golovlev. His character can be encapsulated in two words: hypocritical bloodsucker.

Having thus defined him once and for all, the author then adds layer upon layer of confirmation. The only comic touch in the novel is Porfirii's mode of speech, whiningly unctuous, larded with diminutives, a greasy little escape route from all moral responsibility; but constant repetition of examples eventually provokes in the reader that reaction of nauseated horror experienced in the novel by Porfirii's victims. The world of The Golovlev Family is a complete anti-idyll. It is the most unmitigatedly cheerless work in all of Russian literature, but, paradoxically, the vigorous contempt with which Shchedrin pursues these characters of his own mocking and grotesque creation produces an exhilarating effect.

The History of a Town is an allegory, presented in the form of a parody of Russian history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Actual historical events and characters are parodied, for example the tour of southern Russia on which Potemkin conducted Catherine the Great in 1787, and the reactionary policies of Count Aleksei Arakcheev in the last years of Alexander Ps reign. The "history," full of deliberate anachronisms, is written in a pastiche of both the twelfth-century historical chronicles and the officialese of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian empire. Beneath this level of parody, however, the satire is didactically savage. The town represents Russia and its name, Glupov, is derived from the adjective glupyi, meaning "stupid." This is not "wisdom in reverse," nor a comically endearing Sillytown, but just plain downright Stupidsville. The myths of Rus, Russia and autocracy are demolished by a rationalist laughter that denies them any legitimacy. The governors of Stupidsville are at best frivolous incompetents and at worst lunatic tyrants. Shchedrin's satirical devices here include grotesque fantasy, for example in the chapter "The music box" where the town governor instead of a head has a music box that can play only two tunes: "I'll ruin you" and "I won't stand for it." This fantastic element is one means by which the satire in The History of a Town transcends the parody of a particular historical empire to achieve a more universal reference to despotism in general. The view of "the people" is likewise refracted through grotesque exaggeration. Here Shchedrin creates a darkly comic effect through the contrast between the matter-of-fact tone of the narrative and the brutal events described. In the "Tale of the six town governesses" the townspeople turn into a lynch mob whose violence escalates to the point where the only sound in the town is the "splat-splat-splat" of bodies hitting the ground after being thrown from the belfry. The positive ideal of the people as embodiment of the idea of democracy is revealed through its opposite: these inhabitants of Stupidsville, who continue to welcome each new governor with ever the same delight and awe. The novel ends on an ambiguous note, which used

sometimes to be interpreted as heralding a revolution but in view of the clues embedded in the text must be seen as announcing a reign of political reaction so extreme that the chronicler falls silent. A tradition of satire is its use of "Aesopian" language, the expression of a fundamental truth in the form of a fable. In The History of a Town the historical parody is an Aesopian language in which to discuss Russia's historical legacy and political mentality.

Satire continued to flourish in the sketch, the drama, and short prose forms through to the first decades of the twentieth century and in the 1920s Mikhail Zoshchenko created a new point of reference for Russian satirists with his use of the first-person narrator in his very short stories, typically two to three pages in length. But satire itself presented a problem for the Soviet regime. There was a line of argument which held that satire -whether the author wishes it or not - automatically attacks the state system (Belinskii's misunderstanding of Gogol's political intent in Dead Souls providing a potent historical example). The arguments against satire gained ground from the late 1920s onwards, and to employ satire as a mode of discourse became increasingly dangerous.⁶ Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin had been able to reach their readers through the normal processes of publication. Among the major satirical novelists of the 1920s and 1930s only the partnership of Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov reached a contemporary Soviet readership. The novels of Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs ('1928) and The Golden Calf ('1931) were published in the Soviet Union as soon as they had been written. The two other major satirical novels of the period, Evgenii Zamiatin's We and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, have a different publishing history. Bulgakov's novel, written 1928-1940, was not published until 1966-67. Zamiatin's We was written 1920-21 but was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Ilia Ilf (1897-1937) and Evgenii Petrov (1903-1942) occupy a special place in Russian literature. They both died young (Ilf of tuberculosis, Petrov in a plane crash during the war) but during their short literary life they wrote two of the funniest novels in the Russian language and created a character of mythic proportions: Ostap Bender, whose turns of phrase are part of the national stock of quotations. The authors killed him off at the end of The Twelve Chairs, but, like Sherlock Holmes, he proved resurrect-able and they were able to continue his career in The Golden Calf. In the new collective society Ostap is an arch-individualist. Uninterested in building socialism, he is in search of a fortune: the diamonds hidden in one of a set of twelve chairs in the first novel; the money of a secret millionaire in the second. Like Chichikov, Ostap Bender is a traveling rogue, but there the resemblance ends. Where Chichikov is unsavory, Ostap is splendid:

when we meet him again at the beginning of The Golden Calf he is described as young, athletically-built and handsome, with chiselled features like those of the head on a coin. Ostap Bender has a well-developed sense of irony and the authors gave him their own wit and style. His stature is matched by his area of operation: he roams over the vast geographical spaces of Soviet Russia, deploying ingenious ways of relieving people of money. Some of these are masterpieces of comic inspiration, as in chapter 36 of The Twelve Chairs when Ostap notices that there is only one place in the tourist resort of Piatigorsk that does not charge an entrance fee: the cliff path with a view of the spot where Mikhail Lermontov fought his fatal duel, now marked by an evil-smelling puddle. Ostap promptly remedies this omission, taking money for the view of the puddle. All the tourists pay the charge - including a party of policemen on a guided tour. The Twelve Chairs reflects the period in which it is set: the New Economic Policy (NEP), with its scope for a measure of private enterprise. But by 1928 when the book was published NEP was in its last throes. The Soviet Union was entering the period of the "Great Leap Forward" which precipitated the country into industrialization, collectivization and, as eventually became apparent, the lethal grip of Stalinism. The Golden Calf reflects the onset of this new era. Ostap in his pursuit of the Soviet "underground millionaire" (who has to keep his riches a secret because they are illegal in this new society) in chapter 15 sets up a fictitious bureau to which he gives the name Horns and Hoofs, for the office ostensibly handles the distribution of these items. The implied whiff of diablerie here is one of Ostap's ironic jokes, but when he returns to the town in chapter 3 5 he finds that the office has taken on a real existence and has been incorporated, name and all, into the local bureaucratic structures.

The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, in the tradition of the picaresque, use the rogue and his travels in order to focus the satirical exposure of society. But in the context of the debates at the time, the satire had to have an ideologically sound target. The finale of both novels established a firmly "Soviet" moral and thus provided a measure of protection; the target of the mockery could be readily labelled as "relics of the past." Emigré critics, sympathetic to Ostap Bender's anarchic individualism, were equally confident that the novels were in fact mocking the absurdities of the Soviet regime. Both interpretations are correct. Ilf and Petrov believed in socialism but saw no reason to suppress their youthful merriment. Fortunately for the authors - and for the Russian reading public over the subsequent decades - the Soviet literary establishment proved able to accommodate them as licensed jesters. There was a period at the end of the 1940s when the novels came under attack and were not

reprinted. One of the manifestations of the post-Stalinist "Thaw" in literature, however, was the republication in 1956 of The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf.

For the generation that came of age in the Thaw, the irrepressible, irreverent comic spirit of these two novels was part of the new freedom of that period. Ilf and Petrov parodied everything. The plots themselves are parodies: of the quest novel in The Twelve Chairs and the detective novel in The Golden Calf. Parody can also, of course, be a potent weapon for mocking and challenging authority. Clichés of post-revolutionary literature, theatre and cinema are joyously sent up by Ilf and Petrov, along with the Soviet habit of making interminable speeches about the international situation. The authors showed no more respect for the giants of Russian literature: the Tolstoian rejection of earthly values was travestied in The Twelve Chairs in the tale of the hussar-monk Aleksei Bulanov, and Dostoevskii's letters to his wife were wickedly parodied in the novel's subplot, in the letters that Father Fedor sends home. The parody extends even into the socialist holy of holies, the works of Marx and Lenin. Marx, echoed by Lenin, had said that the liberation of the proletariat must be achieved by the proletariat itself.⁷ On the walls of a provincial club in chapter 34 of The Twelve Chairs this has been creatively deformed: a poster left over from a lecture on life-saving proclaims "Assistance to the drowning lies in the hands of the drowning themselves." In the late 1920s and 1930s most readers would have encountered the original before they met the parody. It is safe to say that since the 1950s most readers of The Twelve Chairs have met the parody first, which has the effect of comically alienating the original and undermining its authority. The laughter of Ilf and Petrov, tolerated by the establishment, was a force for intellectual liberation.

The laughter of Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) proved less easy for Soviet literature to assimilate. In a letter of 28 March 1930 to the Soviet government he declared his deep skepticism with regard to the revolutionary process taking place in Russia.⁸ This is reflected in his satirical story Heart of a Dog, which describes a surgical experiment that goes wrong and can be read as a parody of the great socio-political "experiment" of the Russian Revolution. Heart of a Dog was written in early 1925 but was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. The Master and Margarita, after lying unpublished since its author's death, had reached the Soviet reader two decades earlier. The impact of The Master and Margarita upon literary Russia was liberating to the point of revelation.

The novel's list of characters was unusual for a start: the devil, in the guise of Professor Woland, paying a visit to Moscow; Pontius Pilate,

governor of Judea in the time of Jesus Christ; and the figure of Jesus himself, here named Ieshua. One of the most haunting narratives in Western culture, the tale of the Passion of Christ, was retold in this novel. For half a century militant atheism had been part of official Soviet ideology and for most Soviet readers this was their first encounter with the cultural heritage of the Bible. Small wonder, then, that The Master and Margarita created a literary sensation, which was further enhanced by its use of the fantastic. Here were the familiar streets of Moscow, and here was the devil, walking down them, accompanied by a retinue which included a cat that paid for itself on trams and was a crack shot with a revolver. In the 1960s Bakhtin's literary theories, suppressed during the years of Stalinism, were re-entering Russian intellectual life. Bulgakov's novel was an exciting example of Bakhtin's theory of carnival laughter which, by breaking away from everything that is humdrum and generally accepted, allows the possibility of a completely new order of things.⁹

The activities of Woland and his suite generate the novel's satirical energy. Woland as a character can be compared to Ostap Bender, with the latter's sardonic magnificence here raised to a higher power. As an agent through which to organize a satirical exposure of society, the devil has the advantage of being both omnipotent and fantastic, traveling freely through space and time. Bulgakov's Woland cannot be equated with evil, for to do so makes nonsense of the novel, where he works for good. It is because of him that the Master and Margarita are reunited and the Master's novel, which is the Pilate chapters of The Master and Margarita itself, is preserved from destruction. In this sense Bulgakov's novel is a story about itself: the story of how a text, written against the spirit of the time in which it is composed, survives against all the odds in a fantastic realm that exists in parallel to the "real" world. One of the reasons why the novel could be published in the Soviet Union in 1966-67 in a censored form, and why the full text could be published in Moscow in 1973, is that the activities of Woland and the antics of his retinue create a screen - a dust cloud of diablerie, a noisy, carnival diversion - while the "novel about Pontius Pilate" is being smuggled through.

Analysis of the novel's satirical "hit-list" reveals that many of the targets are members of the literary and theatrical world. Of the two, it is the theatre people who escape most lightly: their sins are in the main venial ones of drunkenness, inefficiency and telling lies on the telephone. The irresponsibility of selling stale fish sandwiches in the theatre buffet is, however, serious enough to warrant a refined psychological punishment: prediction of the buffet manager's death from cancer. (Bulgakov trained and practiced as a doctor before turning to literature as a career.) Bulgakov

was a dramatist as well as being a prose writer, and satirized his relationship with the Moscow Art Theatre in the unfinished novel Teatral'nyi roman (1936-37), translated under the title Black Snow. In The Master and Margarita the theatrical satire is in a slapstick mode, with the occasional sinister undertone. The literary satire is altogether more vengeful, as shown by a comparison of the two severed heads in the novel. When the theatre compère Bengalskii has his head torn off by Woland's cat during the performance at the Variety Theatre in chapter 12, this is reversible: Bengalskii's head is restored to its proper place on his shoulders. When the literary critic and journal editor Mikhail Berlioz is decapitated (by a tram) in chapter 3, he dies a gruesome death and his head is turned into a skull-goblet from which Woland in chapter 23 can drink a toast. Berlioz is being punished for an intellectual crime. He misused his considerable erudition to lead the young poet Bezdomnyi astray. He thus represents those members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia who turned into timeserving beneficiaries of the Soviet literary establishment. This new establishment buys ideological loyalty through the distribution of privileges. By the time that Woland and his henchmen leave Moscow, such centers of privilege as the Writers' Club and the special currency shop are charred and smoking ruins.

The Master and Margarita satirizes a society that has abandoned individual responsibility and conscience. This same theme is treated in non-satirical mode in the five chapters of the novel (chapters 2, 16, 25, 26 and 32) which tell the story of that encounter in ancient Jerusalem between the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and the young Jewish philosopher, Ieshua. Pilate, under the historical and ideological pressures of the moment, commits an act of moral cowardice, for which he atones throughout the millennia until, at the end of the novel, he is granted release. Pilate's sin was to condemn to death a perfectly innocent man. This was one of the "mass sins" of the epoch in which the novel was written, an age of ideological extremes, in which Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany acted as mirror images of one another. The Pilate story in The Master and Margarita dramatizes the conflict between individual conscience and political expediency and, in its conclusion, demonstrates the possibility of forgiveness. The Master and Margarita is a great comic novel in which the satirical element is only one part of a larger whole.

The name of Mikhail Bulgakov re-entered the mainstream of Soviet culture from the Thaw onwards. The name of Evgenii Zamiatin (1884-1937) took longer to return. Zamiatin emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1931 and died in Paris. We was first published in English, French and Czech translations between 1924 and 1929; the first complete Russian

text appeared in New York in 1952. The centenary of Zamiatin's birth provided a wonderful opportunity for comparison of We with George Orwell's 1984, but both novels were unmentionable in print in a Soviet book or journal except in glancing references to them as "malicious pamphlets on the Soviet regime."

We is an anti-Utopia which uses science-fiction as a vehicle for social and political satire. Zamiatin was inspired by H. G. Wells, whose science-fiction he saw as providing an example of "mathematics and myths, physics and fantasy, blueprints and miracles, parody and prophecy."¹⁰ This description is a statement of his own artistic method in We. Zamiatin was at home in the world of physics and mathematics for he was a marine architect who lectured on marine engineering at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic and spent 1916-17 in Britain supervising the construction of Russian icebreakers in shipyards on the Clyde and the Tyne. When in We he evokes both the religious zeal for compulsory salvation and the human desire for comfortable conformity, Zamiatin is parodying what he saw in Britain as well as prophesying on the basis of experience in post-revolutionary Russia. The plot outlines structures of control which correspond to a particular type of human mind-set. This is intellectual satire in the Shchedrinian mode, but where Shchedrin wields the Russian knout of sarcasm Zamiatin prefers a weapon that in an essay on "The New Russian Prose" he described as altogether more "European": the sword of irony.¹¹

We is a novel of ideas which takes up the Dostoevskian debate on the nature of freedom, happiness and humanity. Its style is deliberately "modern," with recurring images that bring the ideas into swift and sharp focus, and it is full of ironic devices stemming from its use of the first-person narrator. A Utopia describes an ideal state or commonwealth; a dystopia depicts an ugly state system. The first irony is that our narrator thinks he is writing a Utopia, while we readers fast realize that this is a dystopia. On the very first page the narrator waxes lyrical about "ideal unfreedom"; he clearly enjoys obeying the rules of collectivity which the state imposes. Even his diary, that most personal of records, is written with the intention that it should be used as state propaganda. But he finds himself drawn into a rebellion against the state and here another level of irony enters: a discrepancy between what our narrator believes to be true and what is really the case. He offers us his own perspective on his circumstances, but we can deduce that the situation is very different from what he thinks. Other characters are concealing from him their true selves and purposes and he, meanwhile, is struggling with a new ironic twist to the meaning of "we": not the harmonious collective acting in unison but the two halves of a divided self, one of which now longs for the delirium of

love and freedom, while the other wants to return to the original comfortable certainties in which there were no questions, just exclamations of praise for the system.

The satirical thrust of We is anti-Utopian, in that it is against the very idea of Utopia. Utopia leaves no room for questions: how can it, if it is ideal? Utopia is static, unchanging. But that is counter to the whole spirit of intellectual enquiry which should characterize the human race. This central idea of the novel is expressed in Entry 30 of the narrator's diary, where he is challenged to name the final number. When he protests that the number of numbers is infinite and it is therefore impossible to name the last one, he is told that the same is true of revolutions. The state ideology in which he had been educated had a myth of the "last revolution," but there is no "last revolution" just as there is no "last number." Zamiatin's novel expresses a warning that the Russian Revolution with its Utopian dreams could, by regarding itself as the "last revolution," ossify into a static system intolerant of enquiry, incapable of self-renewal and sustainable only through oppression.

The major satirists of the 1920s and 1930s were born before the Revolution and, with the exception of Petrov, had all their schooling in the pre-revolutionary period. The next generation of satirists was entirely "home-grown." Fazil Iskander (born 1929) and Vladimir Voinovich (born 1932) started their literary careers in the Khrushchev era, that time of optimism in which it seemed that the Stalinist legacy could be overcome.

Iskander, an Abkhaz who lives in Moscow and writes in Russian, is both a poet and a prose writer. His prose, which on the surface appears very casual, in fact reveals the close affinity between poetic cadence and comic timing, an effect achieved by the author's presence in the text either as first-person narrator or as raconteur. He moves the plot along through a series of digressions, mostly comic but sometimes lyrical and, on occasions, openly moralistic. All these features are evident in the short novel The Goatibex Constellation (Sozvezdie kozlotury), a favorite with Russian readers ever since its first publication in 1966. The creature of the title, a cross between goat (kozel) and ibex (tur), becomes a symbol of Khrushchev's agricultural policies, which combined reform with a tendency to push particular initiatives too far. In popular wit these became identifed with the one word kukuruza ("maize or Indian corn"), widely sown as a result of a propaganda campaign but often in defiance of local climatic conditions. Of course by the time Iskander's novel was published Khrushchev had been ousted and his schemes officially derided as hair-brained, but the phrase kozloturizatsiia zhivotnovodstva ("the goatibexation of animal-breeding") goes beyond Khrushchev's corn and sounds suspiciously like a

parody of kollektivizatsiia sel'skogo khoziaistva ( 'the collectivization of agriculture"), that cornerstone of Soviet ideology since the end of the 1920s. The preposterous word kozloturizatsiia casts a shimmer of doubt on the wisdom of kollektivizatsiia. Iskander's mockery is, however, always genial. The Goatibex Constellation belongs to a rare category: books that are both written and read with a smile.

Iskander managed to balance on an ideological tightrope, as shown by his novel Sandro from Chegem. The novel is composed of a series of self-contained stories and was published in the Soviet Union in 1973, but in abridged form; the complete edition appeared first in the West in 1979. In the introduction to the novel the author states that it was conceived as a parody of the picaresque. Sandro, the hero, is clearly a rogue; but his cunning is part of the cultural tradition he represents, the patriarchal society of Iskander's native Abkhazia. This, depicted with humor and admiration, stands as a kind of touchstone against which the Soviet era is measured. The novel is a mock epic, with Sandro maneuvring his way through the historical events of his time and adjusting to various types of regime. One of the story-chapters which was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988 is "Belshazzar's Feast," describing a banquet at which Sandro encounters Stalin. Sandro, though initially caught up in the universal awe of Stalin, retains his faculties of sharp-eyed observer. He thus offers a focus through which Iskander can depict this banquet as an anti-carnival, a travesty of the traditional Caucasian rites of hospitality. The form chosen by Iskander for Sandro from Chegem, individual stories linked by character and setting, enabled him to publish some in the West and some in Russia according to the possibilities of the moment. It also enabled him to continue adding new stories to the Sandro epos, although events in Abkhazia since the break-up of the Soviet Union have cast a retrospective shadow. After the former Soviet republic of Georgia was recognized as an independent state in 1992, Abkhazia fought a war of independence from Georgia, declaring itself a nation state in 1993. Today's war-ravaged zone presents a bleak contrast to the well-tended landscape of Iskander's fictional Abkhazia in Sandro from Chegem.

Iskander's short novel Rabbits and Boa-Constrictors was published in the West in 1982 and in the Soviet Union in 1987. It is Shchedrinian in its concern with the relationship between "the authorities" and "the people" in the two separate kingdoms of the title. The kingdom of the boa-constrictors represents the Soviet regime, with parodie speeches, slogans and songs. The boa-constrictors keep the rabbit population in a state of terror by the device of "hypnosis." One of the rabbits (a figure whose distant human prototype is Solzhenitsyn) proves that the "hypnosis" does not in fact exist

and is simply a product of the rabbits' own fear. This discovery should bring liberation to the rabbits, but it does not. It has by now become clear that the rabbit kingdom is also a parody of the Soviet regime, with the populace kept in a state of subjugation by the constant promise of Cauliflower, a comically inspired metaphor for Communism. Because no one has ever seen cauliflower, it is depicted on the state banners in wonderful rainbow hues. Meanwhile in the kingdom of the boa-constrictors another discovery has been made: hypnosis is not needed; the snake simply has to wrap its body around the rabbit and suffocate it. At this point the jungle turns into a parody gymnasium as the snakes go into training to develop the stomach muscles they now need in order to kill their prey. Thus new methods of control evolve and the law of the power-jungle prevails. Rabbits and Boa-Constrictors is a sombre fable embroidered with brilliant comic detail.

Vladimir Voinovich is the creator of Ivan Chonkin, a character to rank in European literature with Jaroslav Hasek's good soldier Sveik. The first two parts of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin were written 1963-70 and published in the West in 1975. Volume 11 (parts 3 and 4), entitled Pretender to the Throne, was published in Paris in 1979. In 1980 Voinovich emigrated to Germany and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. It was only in 1988-89 that Chonkin reached the Soviet reader in a Soviet publication. Volume 11 followed in 1990.

Chonkin has two lines of literary genealogy. He is a refutation of the "positive hero" of Socialist Realism and a reincarnation of one of the best-loved characters of Russian folklore, Ivan the Fool. Where the "positive hero" is a very paragon of ideological soundness, Chonkin is a simpleton who never understands the language of ideology. This device of the character's "not understanding" is a means by which the satirist can expose the gap between official rhetoric and plain reality. In the traditional tales, Ivan the Fool starts off life in the most underprivileged of situations: ugly, dirty and of low birth, he is the character whom everyone else pushes around. This is exactly the position of Chonkin at the beginning of the novel. But in the course of the tale Ivan the Fool accomplishes heroic feats and emerges at the end, handsome and triumphant, to win the hand of the princess in marriage. He is an anti-hero who is in fact a cleverly masked ideal hero. The same is true of Chonkin, who in a series of hilarious plot-twists, comes to display not only a native Russian ingenuity but also the ideal Soviet virtues of loyalty, labor and valor, exposing the absence of these qualities in the society around him.

The satirical panorama in Chonkin is achieved not by making the hero mobile but, on the contrary, by fixing him to the spot. In volume 1 Chonkin

is sent to guard a plane with instructions (which he fulfils almost to the letter) not to stray a step from it; throughout volume ? Chonkin is in prison. He is, however, the hub around which the whole plot wheels, gathering sweep and momentum and generating multiple misunderstandings. By the end of volume 1 a Soviet general and a regiment have been diverted from the war to deal with Chonkin, but by the end of volume ? he has invaded the dreams of both Stalin and Hitler and, unbeknown to all historians of the Second World War apart from the narrator, Chonkin has saved Moscow.

Voinovich in an interview with The Literary Gazette {Literaturnaia gazeta) of 20 June 1990 (p. 8) revealed his plans for the last part of the novel, in which Chonkin at the end of the war is to find himself in the West, where he stays, becoming owner of a large American farm (the modern equivalent of marrying the princess), and even flying his own plane. He returns to Russia with a trade delegation in the Gorbachev era and seeks out Niura, who in volume ? was pregnant with his baby. Their meeting is a sad one. He has a smile of porcelain-crowned teeth while she has no teeth at all. Thus Voinovich confronts his comic hero of Russian folklore with Russia's historical tragedy, embodied by Niura. It is possible that Voinovich will complete his Chonkin story not in a separate volume but as part of his autobiographical testament, The Grand Design, the first installment of which was published in 1994. This reflects the fact that the writing of Chonkin changed the course of its author's life by causing him to be ejected from his native land.

In 1982 in Germany, looking back at Russia from the painful distance of exile, Voinovich started his novel Moscow 2042. It was published in the West in 1986 and in Russia in 1990. Moscow 2042 is in the Zamiatin line of satirical science-fiction, while the title acknowledges the debt to Orwell's 1984. Moscow in 2042 is a parody of the Moscow that Voinovich left in 1980, with its characteristics exaggerated to grotesque absurdity. The humor is provided by the first-person narrator, an exiled writer who time-travels sixty years ahead from 1982 and finds his native land celebrating the centenary of his birth (Voinovich here making his alter-ego a decade younger than himself). In the novel there is another writer-figure who participates in both centuries and whose prototype is Solzhenitsyn. Voinovich subjects this contemporary giant to the same methods of parodic portrayal as he employs in his depiction of Moscow: grotesque extrapolation. The resulting caricature of course gave great offense but it raises a fundamental point about the Russian tradition in which a writer has moral authority greater than that of the State. Voinovich's satire of Solzhenitsyn subjects this idea to critical examination: just because a major writer is in

opposition to the State does not necessarily mean that his ideas should be uncritically embraced. The narrator leaves a Moscow of 2042 which has overnight changed all its ideological signs and emblems while remaining fundamentally the same in its mentality of worshipful acquiescence. To this extent, although with a different emphasis, Voinovich's novel concurs with the gloomy model proposed in Iskander's Rabbits and Boa-Constrictors. But Voinovich has the eternal optimism of the satirist who hopes that his fiction will operate as a kind of "prophecy in reverse" and, by predicting things, prevent them.

Intellectual life in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s was characterized by a mood that can with hindsight be identified as fin-de-régime. A work that expresses this most clearly is Yawning Heights (Ziiainshchie vysoty) by Aleksandr Zinovev (born 1922). Written in 1974-75 and published in the West in 1976, it is a novel that recalls the original meaning of the word satire: a mixture or mish-mash. Six hundred separate fragments of text each with its own title and composed in different styles are linked by recurring topics of conversation between and about the characters, generically labelled as "Writer," "Artist," "Dauber," "Bawler." The prototypes of some can be identified, "Truth-Teller," for example, being Solzhenitsyn (whose importance in Russian culture of this period is demonstrated by the appearance yet again of a "Solzhenitsyn-character"). Zinovev was a distinguished academic philosopher before he turned fiction-writer, and the satire is Shchedrinian in its intellectual ferocity. Stupidsville here is the town of Ibansk, a name which is a pun on the most common Russian forename combined with the Russian verb ebat' ("to fuck"). The title too is a pun, achieved by altering the first letter in the word "shining" (siiaiusbchii) to transform it into "yawning" (ziiaiushchii). Yawning Heights evokes a towering fraud and an abyss of boredom. The fragments of text with their mercilessly aphoristic formulations reflect the circularity, frustration, and despair of the arguments conducted during this period by the Russian intelligentsia, cramped and isolated for want of an open forum for public debate. In 1978 Zinovev was forced into emigration, where he has continued to write, using the same fragmentary form. Sheer volume has weakened the effect, but the impact made in its time by Yawning Heights has to be recognized.

The circularity of despair is enacted in another mode by Venedikt Erofeev (193 8-1990) in Moskva-Petushki, variously translated as Moscow Circles, Moscow Stations and Moscow to the End of the Line. This short novel was written in 1969 and first published abroad in 1973. Intensely funny and full of literary allusions, it is composed in a style which achieves lyrical pathos while simultaneously imitating the inebriated state of its first-

person narrator named, like the author, Venedikt Erofeev. It is his monologue during a journey from Moscow to Petushki, which he never reaches because he is too drunk to get off the train, and it carries him back to his starting point. He is both traveling rogue and drunken innocent. With all the refinement of a connoisseur he introduces us to cocktail recipes that have poetic names like "The tear of a young Communist girl" but contain throat-searing ingredients like varnish and anti-perspirant for the feet. This is Russian intellectual jokery stripped to its living soul and laughing through all too visibly drunken tears. The drunkenness is both real and metaphorical, representing a refusal to participate in any of the requirements of official society. The book's poignancy lies in the way that this deliberate self-destruction is transformed through the work of art into an act of self-creation.

Erofeev's book was first published in the Soviet Union in 1988-89; Yawning Heights appeared in a Soviet publication in 1990. With the partial exception of Bulgakov, the Soviet publication dates of previously banned satirical works thus all fall within the period 1987-90, when novels written sixty years apart were being published virtually simultaneously. The satirical novel here simply exemplifies the "catching up" that occurred in every area of culture during the first period of glasnost''. Of course copies of banned literature had been in secret circulation long before then, but this was patchy and risky, particularly for youngsters or those without position or patronage. Now these books could be not only read but also discussed openly and in print. Intellectual Russia plunged into an orgy of reading from which it emerged, giddy and blinking, into the new post-Soviet era.

The first question now must be whether Soviet satire can retain its relevance in post-Soviet conditions. That begs the further question of how different the conditions are going to be. Dead Souls has, after all, outlived serfdom. In terms of the satirists themselves, they fall into two categories: those like Shchedrin, Zamiatin and Zinovev, who deal with structures and whose work will appeal primarily to intellectual circles; and those writers whose books can reach a mass readership. It is easier for the novel with a strong central hero to capture the popular imagination, and certainly the initial post-Soviet period offers plenty of scope for roguery, with numerous enterprises that resemble Chichikov's "dead souls" or Bender's "Horns and Hoofs." The present situation in Russia can in turn be expected to produce a crop of satirical works, for times of sudden transition with their attendant incongruities have generally been fruitful for the writing of satire. How the post-Soviet Russian state will tolerate its satire remains to be seen, which leads back into the question of how different the new society will be, and in what ways.

NOTES

1. Charles A. Moser (éd.), The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. edn (Cambridge University Press, 1992), see index for: Kantemir; Sumarokov; Krylov; Novikov; Griboedov; The Tale of Frol Skobeev (p. 36); and Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman (pp. 69-70).

2. Christine J. Whitbourn (ed.), Knaves and Swindlers: Essays on the Picaresque Novel in Europe (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press,

1974)-

3. T. E. Little, "Dead Souls," in Whitbourn (éd.), Knaves and Swindlers, p. 115.

4. Vissarion Belinsky, "Letter to N. V. Gogol," in W. J. Leatherbarrow and D. C. Offord (trans, and éd.), A Documentary History of Russian Thought (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987), pp. 130-35.

5. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his "World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1968), p. 45.

6. Robert Russell, "Satire and socialism: the Russian debates," Forum for Modern Language Studies, 30, 4 (1994), 341-52.

7. Karl Marx, Inaugural address to the International Workingmen's Association (1864): "the emancipation of the working class must be won by the working class itself." V. I. Lenin, Speech at the Fourth Conference of Trade Unions and Factory Committees, Moscow (27 June-2 July 1918): "the emancipation of the workers must be done by the workers themselves."

8. J. A. E. Curtis, Manuscripts Don't Burn. A Life in Diaries and Letters: Mikhail Bulgakov (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 107.

9. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p. 34.

10. E. Zamiatin, "H. G. Wells," in Zamiatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans, and ed. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 270.

11. Zamiatin, "The New Russian Prose," in Zamiatin, A Soviet Heretic, p. 103.

6

JOSTEIN B0RTNES

Religion

Speaking of the "Russian novel," we often refer to the classical canon of highly individual works by the great nineteenth-century Russian authors. It is, however, also possible to define the "Russian novel" somewhat differently, as an open adaptive system in which the individual works are parts of a continuous development. In this system, characters and events are represented according to a set of patterns, or schemata, that are subject to constant variation when applied to the social world around us and to the processes that take place in people's minds. These are the two basic aspects of narrative - the "landscape of action" and the "landscape of consciousness" - the two landscapes that according to Jerome Bruner characterize this mode of thought as opposed to the logico-scientific, or "paradigmatic" mode.¹

The outer landscape of action unfolds according to an action pattern, or plot. But in this landscape of action changes occur because of changes taking place in the inner landscapes of the characters involved. To understand a narrative is therefore to have an understanding of the changes both in the characters' inner landscape of thought and in the outer landscape of events. The two are aspects of the same, since, as Michael Carrithers puts it, "the metamorphosis of thought entails the metamorphosis of social relations and vice versa."² In the following, our attention will be centered on the function of art and religion in the "dual landscape" of the Russian novel, understood as an open adaptive system.

The idea of a "dual landscape" - the interaction between characters and plots - is particularly appropriate in the study of the Russian novel. The characters, the plight into which they have fallen, and their consciousness, are here so closely interwoven that we understand the characters only as they are revealed to us in the sequence of events, in constant interaction with their surroundings and with one another. In this sense, it is the imaginative application of the narrative mode to novel-writing that enables us as readers to move so easily from literature to the extra-literary spheres

of self-knowledge, social theory, religion and politics. Each novel is a possible world, its protagonists potential characters that come to life through the reader's imaginative understanding.

By the middle of the last century, the problem of selfhood had become acute in Russia. The ideal of self in Orthodox anthropology, based on the story of man being created in God's image and likeness, was no longer universally accepted. In Orthodox anthropology, to be created in the image of God is to have the possibility of restoring the divine likeness that was lost through the Fall. This task assigned to every Christian was made possible by the Incarnation. In the human figure of Christ, divine likeness is realized to a perfect degree, and all Christians may consciously, by an act of their own free will and to the extent of their possibilities, enter upon the task of creating in themselves the likeness of God in imitation of Christ's archetype.

The idea of Christian self-realization in imitation of Christ is deeply embedded in the divine service of the Orthodox Church, and its visual expression is found in the art of the icon. It is part of a religious heritage of all Russians brought up in the Orthodox faith. Towards the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the validity of Orthodox anthropology was increasingly questioned as Russian intellectuals came under the spell of the Enlightenment and were deeply stirred by Rousseau's idea of the inborn goodness of "natural man," his idea of an uncorrupted natural self hidden by layers of repression caused by socialization and acculturation.

Rousseau's ideas are at the center of Russian debate about society and the nature of man during the 1780s and 1790s, when people like Fonvizin and Radishchev often developed their views of human nature and society in polemical opposition to the Genevan philosopher. According to the Tartu semiotician Yurii Lotman, Fonvizin, in particular, attacked Rousseau's idea of the natural goodness of man, arguing that man is born with the rudiments of vice and inclined towards evil from childhood on. To Fonvizin, therefore, the child acquires a self not by being set free from social constraints, but by integration into the ethical and religious whole of a just society, not to be confounded with the selfish and fragmented Russian society of the day.³

A different reaction to Rousseau is found in the writings of the Russian freemasons. In their rejection of Rousseau's anthropology, they come closer to Montesquieu's thesis of an inborn evil from which a person can free himself only through moral rebirth as a precondition of a just organization of society. Yurii Lotman locates the beginning of the "great argument with Rousseau" in late eighteenth-century Russian freemasonry, "the essence of

which was formulated by Dostoevskii in his drafts for A Raw Youth, when he says about his hero: 'He hates the Geneva ideas (i.e. philanthropy, i.e. virtue without Christ) and does not recognize anything natural in virtue'." (Lotman, "Russo i russkaia kul'tura," p. 87).

The dichotomy of "man is evil by nature" and "man is good by nature" became a constant feature in nineteenth-century Russian thought. It is symptomatic of the fate of Rousseau's natural man in Russia that Pushkin in his poem The Gypsies (1824) represents the whole idea of innocent nature as a myth and in his hero demonstrates the impossibility of becoming "natural" by casting aside the vestments of civilization.

The dilemma was deepened with the arrival of the Romantic cult of the genius. In Russia, as in the rest of Europe, this cult found striking expression in the adoration of Napoleon, in whose genius Hegel saw an incarnation of the "spirit of history." In his philosophy, history is moved forward through the actions of "world-historical individuals," whose mission sets them apart from the rest of humanity and exempts them from the ethical laws of ordinary people.

There is an early allusion to the Russian cult of Napoleon in Evgenii Onegin, in stanza XIV of the second chapter:

To us all others are just zeros

And we ourselves the chosen few.

We all aim at becoming Napoleons;

The many millions of two-legged creatures

Are only tools for us[.]

To Pushkin, in contrast to Hegel, Napoleon more and more stood out as the supreme symbol of individual egoism in post-Enlightenment European philosophy. Yurii Lotman has argued that the "We" of these lines, from whom the poet distances himself through his irony, refers to a whole generation of Russian Romantic egoists, including many of the Decembrists, whose ideas Pushkin did not share and of which he became increasingly critical. To Pushkin, Napoleon's achievements were a manifestation of political amoralism and readiness to sacrifice everything in order to satisfy his own personal ambitions, qualities that in Pushkin's view were the ethical equivalents of political despotism.⁴

Ten years later, Pushkin embodied this Napoleonic mentality in the figure of Hermann in The Queen of Spades, a hero with "at least three crimes" upon his conscience, whose comrades are repeatedly struck by his resemblance to Napoleon.

But Hermann's individual egoism manifests itself in the private, not in the public sphere. His amoralism is much more akin to Julien Sorel's in Stendhal's novel, The Red and the Black (Le rouge et le noir, 1830),

another of Napoleon's emulators in the nineteenth-century novel, and to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1866) whose admiration for Napoleon has taken complete possession of the "inner landscape" of his mind. Like Raskolnikov, Hermann seeks to rob an old woman of her treasure in order to satisfy his personal ambitions, bringing suffering upon himself by killing her, just as Raskolnikov must suffer when he murders the old pawnbroker and her sister.

It is more difficult to see a Napoleonic hero in Chichikov, the adventurous rogue who dominates the scene in the first part of Gogol's unfinished novel, Dead Souls, published in 1842. But when the provincial authorities try to identify this unknown buyer of "dead souls," "among a number of shrewd suggestions there was, strange to say, one to the effect that Chichikov might be Napoleon in disguise":

thinking it over each for himself, they found that Chichikov's face, when he turned round and stood sideways, was very much like a portrait of Napoleon.

(Dead Souls, chapter 9)

As Lotman has pointed out, however, there is a functional resemblance between the three. All three are tempters, incarnations of evil; Hermann and Raskolnikov as manifestations of Romantic egoism, Chichikov as their comic counterpart.⁵

In Gogol, as well as in Pushkin, the optimistic and revolutionary ideologies underlying the philosophical anthropology of the Enlightenment and Romanticism were reinterpreted in the light of their own tragic vision of the moral universe. Gogol's Dead Souls was intended as Christian epic in the form of a novel. In its unfinished part 11, Chichikov should have continued to buy dead souls, but also should have gotten involved in other illegal activities, been caught, thrown into prison, and deported to Siberia. Here, he should have undergone a spiritual resurrection and begun a new life. The same fate awaited Tentetnikov, the ne'er-do-well hero of part 11. Deported to Siberia for his participation in subversive political activity, he should have "woken up" and begun a new life together with Ulenka, the general's daughter. But to Gogol and his contemporaries Ulenka's heroic behavior would have been associated with the wives of the Decembrists who had chosen a life in Siberian exile together with their husbands.⁶

In the unfinished part 11 of Dead Souls, Gogol's narrative imagination has outlined a pattern of events which in the outer "landscape of action" may be divided into the three phases of a transitional rite as summarized by Victor and Edith Turner in their article "Religious Celebrations": first a phase of transgression, culminating in the separation of the hero as a criminal from the rest of society and his spiritual "death." This phase of

separation is followed by the liminal phase (from limen meaning "threshold" in Latin), a kind of social limbo. The liminal phase may be broken down into three major events: (I) the communication of sacra, i.e. of symbolic things and actions representing society's religious mysteries, (2) ludic recombination (from Latin ludus, "play," "jest," etc.) - the free and playful rearrangement of traditional cultural factors in new and unexpected configurations, however bizarre and outrageous, and (3) the fostering of communitas, defined as "a bond uniting people over and above any formal social bonds." The Turners compare communitas to Martin Buber's "flowing from I to Thou": it "does not merge identities; instead it liberates them from conformity to general norms, so that they experience one another concretely and not in terms of social structural . . . abstractions." The third phase, the phase of reaggregation, or reincorporation, marks the triumph over death, and resurrection to a new life.⁷ In the Russian novel, the patterns of archaic rites de passage are "individualized" in the sense that the authors not only experience the traditional liminoid phenomena of Russian culture, but create their own variations on the cultural heritage.⁸

What is missing from the action pattern of Gogol's novel when seen in the light of this scheme, is the factor by which the reversal of events and the hero's spiritual metamorphosis are brought about. To judge from Aleksandr Bukharev's conversations with Gogol, however, it looks as if he had intended Chichikov's "resurrection" to come as a result of the tsar's direct intervention. But the idea was never realized, and it is easy to see why. Bringing the tsar into the phase of liminality would have resulted in a carnivalization of his figure and everything he symbolized. It is only when we come to the classical novels of the 1860s and 1870s that this problem is solved. And it is solved by bringing art and religion into play in the process of transforming the hero's self.

The first of the great novelists to apply this method is Turgenev in Fathers and Children (1862). Bazarov, the hero of the novel, has been alienated from the world of his parents and the traditional values of Russian society. They have been replaced by a set of ideas acquired through the study of modern Western materialism. The journey back from university to spend the summer holiday with his parents takes him through the ambiguous chronotope which from our present point of view we recognize as liminal. It is a time-space in which the sacra of the "fathers" are ridiculed and distorted in the most absurd ways when seen with the eyes of the "children." But the reversal of traditional values is only one aspect of the action pattern. Bazarov's savage criticism of contemporary Russian society and the idealism of the older generation demonstrates their inability to live up to their own high standards. At the same time, however, Bazarov in the

course of the novel embraces every position he has denounced: he defends his honor by fighting a ridiculous duel, falls in love, and when rejected realizes that love is much more than the purely physiological phenomenon of his theories. When, eventually, he returns to his parents and begins to share his father's practice as a country doctor, he is finally reintegrated into the fabric of daily life and responds to its prosaic needs.

Bazarov's journey is a process of reintegration. But it is also a communication of the sacred, represented in the words, images, and actions from the Christian sphere that Turgenev has mounted into Bazarov's story, often in an ironic way that conceals the deeper meaning of the novel's religious symbolism.

The image of the sacred appears in the fresco of the Resurrection of Christ that Bazarov drives past on his way to Anna Sergeevna, the woman with whom he falls in love. But it is typical of liminality that the sacred image has been distorted and all attention is drawn to the marginal figure of a dark-complexioned warrior "lying outstretched in the foreground" (chapter xvi), whereas the central motif of the angel of the Lord who, according to St. Matthew 28:2-4, "descended from heaven," is passed over in silence. The motif of the angel has been detached from the Resurrection image and appears in "ludic recombination" with Anna Sergeevna, the "angel from heaven" whose arrival at Bazarov's deathbed inspires his father with new hope that this son will be saved (chapter xxvii).

Through an ironic recombination of the sacred and the profane, Anna Sergeevna is transformed into a symbol of love as the cosmic force by which Bazarov is reborn to a new life beyond death. During their last encounter, when he knows that he is already dying, Bazarov points at his powerless body, lying "outstretched" before him, just like the body described in the fresco painting. The repetition is all the more remarkable since the word is not a common one, and it occurs only twice in the whole novel, establishing a correspondence between Bazarov and the warrior in St. Matthew, who, for fear of the angel, "became as dead."

At this point of the story, Bazarov has reached the stage of reaggregation, when he will be reunited with the sacred power of the holy rituals:

Father Alexis performed the last rites of religion over him. When he was anointed, when the holy oil touched his breast, one of his eyes opened, and it seemed that at the sight of the priest in his robes, the smoke from the censers, the candles before the icon, something like a shudder of horror was reflected in his lifeless face. (chapter XXVli)

The story of Bazarov's new life begins in the epilogue, where he is resurrected in the loving memory of his parents, and the flowers on his

grave "tell us not only of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of 'indifferent' nature; they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation, and of life without end." (chapter xxviii).

Modern readers do not immediately recognize these last lines of Fathers and Children as quotations - the phrase "indifferent nature" is taken from Pushkin's poem, "When I wander along noisy streets," the other "life without end" from the Orthodox funeral hymn "With the holy, ? Lord, give Thy servant peace." To contemporary readers, however, the allusions hidden in the final paragraph were quite clear. Herzen even found it necessary to warn Turgenev in a letter that his "requiem at the end with its distant approach to the immortality of the soul is fine, but dangerous."⁹ Today, we have to rediscover this "distant approach to the immortality of the soul" in order to understand the meaning of Bazarov's death as part of his life story.

In Russian literary criticism of the time, Bazarov was seen as the first literary depiction of the "new man" of the 1860s. Dostoevskii's Rodion Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment (1866), is another. And the close affinity between them was immediately recognized. Bazarov and Raskolnikov were both regarded as serious attempts to understand the "nihilist" mentality of the new young people, not as a wild and preposterous aberration, but as a tragic distortion of the mind, leading to severe suffering. From a literary point of view, both are descendants of the Napoleonic hero of Russian Romanticism. In Bazarov, this is implicit in his role as an outsider, his scorn for humanity, and his idea of himself as a giant. In Raskolnikov, on the other hand, the idea of becoming like Napoleon has become an obsession.

Crime and Punishment begins by representing the hero in the phase of separation. He withdraws from the rest of the world in order to plan the murder of the old pawnbroker, the acid test by which he is going to prove to himself that he is one of the "extraordinary" men, the movers of history, who, like Napoleon, are all natural criminals who never hesitate to shed blood, provided that the blood is shed to their own advantage.

It is not difficult to recognize in Raskolnikov's theory the same distinction as in Evgenii Onegin between the "chosen few" and the "millions of two-legged creatures." What is new in Raskolnikov's version is his extension of exceptional people to comprise all "new people", including himself. By internalizing the theory of Romantic egoism, Raskolnikov becomes a "foreign translation" (part 11, chapter 6), an expression used about him and his likes by his friend Razumikhin. From the moment he conceives his crime to the moment of his confession, Raskolnikov lives in a kind of social limbo, representing the first stage in the second, central phase

in his story, the phase of liminality. In this liminal phase, Raskolnikov enters a chronotope that no longer coincides with the time-space perception of normal experience. When he falls ill and suffers a mental breakdown, time closes in on him in a way that corresponds to the way his disease confines him to his lodgings, which to his mother give the impression of a "tomb" (in, 3). From this liminal state he is to emerge only gradually, in a process that will eventually lead to his reintegration, his return as a resurrected person to the prosaic world of everyday life that opens up as a potential future towards the end of his story.

This process begins when Raskolnikov meets Sonia Marmeladova, the prostitute with whom he, the murderer, develops a relationship based on their common status as social outcasts. Initially he sees in her a possible ally against society. But her love, sprung from her Christian faith, gives her a sacred power, the power of the weak and powerless, which in their encounters penetrates his consciousness, enabling Raskolnikov to see his plight in the light of the symbolic message of the New Testament. When Sonia, at his "strange request" (iv, 4), reads out to him the story from St. John about the Raising of Lazarus, the possibility of a resurrection and new life begins to take form in his mind.

The whole atmosphere of this scene is one of ludic recombination: the sacred message of the Gospel is quoted verbatim in Sonia's words and communicated to the murderer by her, the prostitute. At the same time, the Christian sacra, the cross and the New Testament, are displayed in the very room where she receives her clients. And in this room Raskolnikov realizes that by killing the old woman he killed his own self: "There and then I did myself in, at one blow, forever! . . . But it was the devil who killed the old woman, not I . . ." (v, 4). But it is in this room, too, that Raskolnikov accepts the cypress-wood cross from Sonia, clearly recognizing the significance of his act: "This, then, is the symbol of my taking up the cross" (vi, 8).

From this point onwards, the Gospel accounts of Lazarus' resurrection, and of Christ's death and Resurrection, form a pattern underlying the representation of Raskolnikov's descent into the hell of the Siberian prison, where in his dream about the plague Raskolnikov finally conquers the forces of evil that have transformed his mind into an inferno.

Siberia is above all the landscape of liminality in the Russian novel. From his confinement Raskolnikov views the land of freedom across the river that divides the world of the convicts from the free world outside. And here, on the bank of the river, Raskolnikov's regeneration begins one early morning in the second week after Easter - the feast celebrating Christ's descent into hell, his victory over death, and Resurrection - it begins at the

moment when for the first time in their life together Sonia understands that he loves her, and when he knows "with what infinite love he will now expiate all her sufferings" (Epilogue, z). This is the moment of pure communitas, when "love has resurrected them, and the heart of each held endless springs of life for the heart of the other" (Epilogue, 2).

By juxtaposing his own story with the New-Testament narrative about the resurrection of Lazarus and the Easter celebration of Christ's Resurrection, Dostoevskii has brought together two different registers, one sacred, the other profane, establishing a complex relationship of equivalence and difference between Christ's archetype and Raskolnikov's process of restoring his own self in the image of the archetype. The fundamental pattern underlying this juxtaposition is that of thematic variation, a movement from the theme to the discovery of a new variation, a "slippage," to use Douglas Hofstadter's term.¹⁰

In Crime and Punishment, the slippage from archetype to variation represents Dostoevskii's radical understanding of the Gospel. Every human being, even a murderer, is a potential image of Christ.

The slippability of archetypal patterns depends on their underdeter-mining character, allowing for both approximate predictability and innovation, for repetition with constant variation. They are not like fixed schemes that can only be reproduced over and over again, but flexible and adaptable to constant contextual change and reinterpretation.

In Dostoevskii's œuvre, the adaptivity of the regeneration pattern is most evident in his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). The theme of death and resurrection is anticipated already in the epigraph to the novel, the words from John 12:24 about the corn of wheat that "if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." After the murder of their father, the central characters of the novel - the brothers Ivan, Alesha, their elder half-brother Dmitrii and the bastard Smerdiakov - go through a crisis that in the lives of each of them can be described as a variation of the same theme as that underlying Raskolnikov's story.

The pattern is most easily recognizable in the novice Alesha's return to the world after the death of his spiritual father, the elder Zosima. The account of Alesha's transition reaches a climax when in a state of drowsiness at the elder's coffin he hears Father Paisii read about the wedding in Cana and the words of the Gospel merge with his own in a vision of the dead Zosima among the wedding guests, inviting him to come into the presence of Christ in the image of "our Sun": "And you see our Sun, do you see Him?. . . Do not fear Him. He is terrible in His Majesty before us, awful in His sublimity, but infinitely merciful. He has made Himself like unto us

from love and rejoices with us" (book vii, chapter 4). With a last glance at his spiritual father, lying in the coffin "with the icon on his breast and the peaked hood with the octangular cross, on his head" (book vu, chapter 4), Alesha leaves the cell and walks out into the night. "The silence of the earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of the earth was one with the mystery of the stars …" Overcome, he falls onto the earth, embraces it and kisses it; "with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that something firm and unshakeable as that vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind. He had fallen on the earth a weak youth, but he stood up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. 'Someone visited my soul at that moment,' he used to say afterwards" (book vii, chapter 4).

Alesha has passed from one stage to another through the internalization of Zosima, his spiritual father figure, and his ideas. Now he is ready to follow the elder's last command: "Within three days he left the monastery in accordance with the words of the elder, who had bidden him to 'sojourn in the world'" (book vii, chapter 4). And when at the very end of the novel, after Iliushechka's funeral, he gathers around him a group of boys - about twelve of them - at the stone where Iliushechka's father had wanted to bury his son, the whole scene suggests the archetypal image of Christ surrounded by his apostles. With his farewell speech in remembrance of the dead boy, Alesha establishes a new community, or communitas, in which the dead boy is transfigured into a living presence in each of them. This experience of eternal memory - the Vecbnaia pamiat' of the funeral hymn - creates an awareness of immortality that culminates in an enraptured confession of faith in the Resurrection. Alesha has become the founder of a new, alternative Christian community outside the monastery and outside the official Russian Church. From this point of view, Alesha's return to the world is no less radical than Raskolnikov's.

As variations of the same pattern, the process of liminality in the lives of Alesha's brothers is less complete. And the degree of completeness depends on each brother's involvement in the murder of their father. Dmitrii comes next to Alesha in degree of innocence. As the innocent suspect he faces deportation to Siberia if found guilty. In his prison cell, he undergoes a metamorphosis not unlike Alesha's:

A new man has risen up in me. He was hidden in me, but would not have come to surface, if it hadn't been for this blow from heaven . . . And what do I care if I spend twenty years in the mines … It is something else that terrifies me now: that the resurrected man may leave me! … we shall be in chains

and there will be no freedom, but then, in our great sorrow, we shall rise again to joy, without which man cannot live nor God exist. . .

(book xi, chapter 4)

Ivan, Alesha's full brother, is the last manifestation of the Romantic rebel in Dostoevskii's world. Ivan rejects the idea of a natural goodness in man, maintaining that there is no virtue if there is no belief in God and immortality, and that without this belief everything is permitted. But he finds himself in a dilemma, unable to decide whether or not he himself believes in the immortality of his own soul.

Like his brothers, Ivan is on the road to rebirth. In his case, the process of liminality takes the form of a personality split and mental derangement. His mind is turned into an intellectual limbo where the universal questions of God's existence and immortality are "turned inside out" (book v, chapter 3). "Ivan is a tomb" says Dmitrii. To Alesha, "Ivan is an enigma" (book v, chapter 3), until, finally, he begins to understand what his brother is going through: "God, in whom he did not believe, and God's truth were conquering a heart which did not want to submit" (book XI, chapter 10).

Ivan's personality split leads to an internalized dialogue in which different voices strive to gain control over his mind in a struggle objectified in his dystopian prose poem, "The Grand Inquisitor," and in his interview with the devil, in whose words he recognizes "everything that is stupid in his own nature, outgrown, thrashed out in my mind long ago" (book xi, chapter 9).

Ivan's dialogue with the devil makes it clear, as Victor Terras has observed, that "behind his Grand Inquisitor's professed compassion for suffering humanity, there is hidden a deep hatred of human freedom and of the image of God in man."¹¹ From a generic point of view, Ivan's poem is a travesty of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, or, in anthropological terms, a ludic recombination of Christian elements into a grotesque and melodramatic encounter between Christ, returned to earth, and his satan-ized vicar. But not only the Grand Inquisitor is a projection of Ivan's mind. The silent figure of Christ listening to the Inquisitor's nocturnal diatribes is another, or, more precisely, the figure symbolizes another Ivan, formed in the image of Christ's divine archetype.

In Ivan's abstractions, as well as in the reasoning of his Grand Inquisitor, logic has replaced the dynamic indeterminancy of life that we find in Dmitrii and Alesha. In Ivan's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," the moral and political totalitarianism of the Roman Church is seen as a product of Western European civilization and its identification of truth with right reasoning and positive concepts. In contrast, Alesha's account of the Life of

Father Zosima - Dostoevskii's answer to the Legend - represents truth as part of the common experience of life, inexhaustible as life itself. In Orthodox theology, this refusal to exhaust knowledge of the truth in rational terms and definitions is called the "apophaticism" of knowledge. -This apophatic attitude leads Christian theology to use the language of poetry and images for the interpretation of dogmas much more than the language of conventional logic and schematic concepts," according to the Greek philosopher Christos Yannaras, to whom apophaticism is the great contribution of Greek Orthodoxy to modern Christian thought.¹²

In nineteenth-century Russia, the revival of the theology of the Greek Church Fathers led to a revival of Orthodox apophaticism. To lay theologians like Dostoevskii, the apophatic, or negative way of knowing God through "dissimilar similarities" became an important means of breaking away from the petrified dogmas and eternal truths of the official Russian Church. In the lives of his characters truth is never something given, but something to be found and verified in common experience and in communion with others.

Ivan's road to ethical rebirth begins when he accepts responsibility for the murder of his father. Realizing that Smerdiakov has acted as his "double," deciding to take his guilt upon himself and confess to the crime, Ivan is overcome by a feeling of joyful happiness that his mental anguish has come to an end. He has reached a new stage in the process of liminality, symbolized by his rescue of the half-frozen peasant. By this act of compassion Ivan is following the hagiographic pattern of his namesake, St. John the Merciful, whose rescue of a frozen beggar he was unable to understand in his dialogue with Alesha earlier in the novel.

The confession is not the end of Ivan's liminality, however. It only marks his transition to a new stage, not to the nether world of the Siberian mines - which is Dmitrii's lot - but to an eclipse of his self in the darkness of the unconscious, an internal hell in the landscape of his mind and the beginning of a rebirth.

Smerdiakov, the perpetrator of the crime, hangs himself. But before this act of self-condemnation, he, too, has gone through a kind of transition rite, symbolized by the long white stocking that so terrifies Ivan at their last meeting. As Richard Peace has pointed out, white had a particular significance for the Russian religious sect of the Castrates. They referred to themselves as "The White Doves," dressed in white, and referred to the actual act of castration as "whitening." His Castrate-like features have been underlined earlier in the novel, but now a number of details seem to indicate that he has gone through the final rite of initiation to the sect.¹³

The relationship between Ivan and Smerdiakov, his double, is a variation

of the pattern underlying the relationships between Stavrogin and his satellites in The Devils (1872). In a process we might call "demonic kenosis," Stavrogin empties his own ideas and ideologies into the minds of his followers, who, in their turn, project his teachings back onto Stavrogin in an attempt to transform him into a living symbol of the ideas they have made their own, only to discover that Stavrogin is but an empty impostor, symbolizing nothing but nothingness.

In Russian literature the problem of idolization, of men creating gods in their own image, may be traced back to Gogol. To Dead Souls, where the officials project their ideas of Napoleon and even of Antichrist onto Chichikov, but above all to his comedy The Inspector General (1836), where the provincial civil servants project their collective fears onto the figure of Khlestakov, transforming him into a living image of their own ideas of what a government inspector must be like.

In Dostoevskii's The Idiot (1868), the idolization theme is combined with the impostor theme in a way that not only anticipates The Devils, but in a way that turns the impostor comedy into a religious tragedy.

Prince Myshkin, the central character, arrives back after several years in Switzerland, an enigmatic figure, whom his new acquaintances try to define by projecting onto him their own ideals. The debauchee and non-believer Rogozhin regards him as a iurodivyi, or "holy fool," simply because of his sexual inadequacy. To the young girl Aglaia he is an incarnation of her literary hero, the Poor Knight of Pushkin's ballad, whereas to Nastasia Filippovna, the "fallen woman," he comes as a potential redeemer. All these different interpretations are made possible by Dostoevskii's narrative technique in the first part of the novel. As Robin Feuer Miller has observed, the Prince is here characterized through his parables and stories after a model provided by the portrayal of Christ in the Gospels, thereby making his figure even more enigmatic and sphinxlike.¹⁴

But Myshkin is not the redeemer Nastasia Filippovna and the readers are led to believe. His initial role as a savior changes in the course of events, until he becomes an agent of perdition, incapable of preventing Rogozhin's murder of Nastasia Filippovna and the terrible blood wedding at the end of his sojourn in Russia.

To understand this development, we have to study the symbolism underlying the novel's action and represented in a series of execution stories told by Myshkin and his interlocutors throughout the four books of the novel: Legros's death by guillotine in Lyons and the firing squad execution; Dubarry's beheading; Ippolit's potential execution, were he to commit murder; the impalement of Stepan Glebov under Peter the Great; and the beheading of Sir Thomas More. These executions are all variations on the

archetypal execution of Christ, symbolized in the novel by Hans Holbein's Basel painting of Jesus in the tomb - Der Leichnam Christi im Grabe - that so fascinated Dostoevskii when he saw it in 1867.

Holbein's painting is referred to in passing by the Prince in one of the opening chapters, and later, when Rogozhin shows him a reproduction of it in his father's house, Myshkin comments that "some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture" (II, 4).

The symbolic meaning of the painting, however, is only explained towards the end, when the dying Ippolit gives an extended description, or ekphrasis of the picture. According to Ippolit, there is in Holbein's picture no trace of the extraordinary beauty that painters usually try to preserve even in representations of the crucified Christ. What we see is the dead body of a man who has undergone unbearable suffering, a naturalistic rendering of how any man's corpse would look after such suffering. Looking at the picture:

you are involuntarily struck by the idea that if death is so horrible and the laws of nature are so powerful, then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He has not conquered them now? . . . The picture seems to give expression exactly to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea comes to you involuntarily. (III, 6)

In Ippolit's interpretation, the Holbein painting becomes a representation of the "demythologized," unresurrected Christ of nineteenth-century radical theology, epitomized in David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus, 1835) and Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus (1863). Jesus is represented by Renan as a person "in whom was condensed all that is good and elevated in our nature." But with his historian's eye Renan sees Jesus as a human being whose life "finishes with the last sigh." As for the legends about the Resurrection, their main source is supposed to be the "strong imagination" of Mary Magdalene.¹⁵

The story of Prince Myshkin demonstrates the impossibility of an imitatio Christi based on the particular image of Christ posited by nineteenth-century liberal theology. In the figure of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevskii has created a mock-Christ, not an Abbild, but a Gegenbild of Christ. Myshkin is more like an Anti-Christ in the Nietzschean sense. In the German philosopher's work, The Anti-Christ (1888), Jesus is characterized as an "idiot": "Aus Jesus einen Helden machen! . . . Mit der Strenge des Physiologen gesprochen, wäre hier ein ganz andres Wort am Platz: das Wort Idiot." ("To make Jesus into a herol From a strictly physiological point of view a completely different word would seem more appropriate:

the word idiot.") Moreover, Nietzsche makes an explicit reference to Dostoevskii in this connection: "Man hätte zu bedauern, daß nicht ein Dostojewskij in der Nähe dieses interessantesten décadent gelebt hat, ich meine jemand, der gerade den ergreifenden Reiz einer solchen Mischung von Sublimem, Krankem und Kindlichem zu empfinden wußte." ("It is regrettable that there was no Dostoevskii around during the lifetime of this interesting Decadent, by which I mean someone who was capable of feeling the attraction of this particular mixture of the sublime, the sick and the childlike.")

In nineteenth-century radical Christology we see a variant of the phenomenon Sergei Bulgakov has described as "Arian monophysitism," by which he has in mind a doctrine maintaining that there is only one, human nature in Christ. This "immanentism," as he also calls it, is typical of Protestantism and socialism, in which Bulgakov sees its Western, diurnal manifestations, whereas in Russia this immanentism is represented in its nocturnal aspect by the sectarian Castrates and Flagellants.¹⁶ Applied to The Idiot, Bulgakov's distinction would correspond to the contrast between Prince Myshkin and his Swiss ideas on the one hand, and on the other Rogozhin with his close affinity with the Castrates.

In this perspective, The Idiot may be understood as an experiment in Christology, demonstrating the consequences of a theology in which the risen Christ of the Gospels has been replaced by the all too human Christ of post-Hegelian biblical criticism, as well as by the "christs" the Russian sectarians are known to create among themselves (Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii, pp. 5 and 366, n. 12). In this world without Resurrection the dead Christ has become a symbol of the dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power Ippolit describes in his ekphrasis, a power to which everything in the dual landscape of the novel's central characters is finally subordinated.

The Idiot is not the only novel in which Dostoevskii introduces a central symbol in the form of an ekphrasis. In A Raw Youth (1875), we find a similar ekphrastic representation, this time of Claude Lorrain's "Acis and Galatea," one of Dostoevskii's favorite paintings in the Dresden Gallery. The painting had first been used in Stavrogin's "Confession," the so-called "banned" chapter of The Devils, and later it made an anonymous reappearance in The Dream of the Ridiculous Man, first published in The Writer's Diary in 1877.

Yet, what attracted Dostoevskii and his characters in Claude's painting was not his Ovidian subject. In Dostoevskii's interpretation, the symbolic value of the painting is to be found in the idealized beauty of the antique landscape, transfigured by the slanting rays of the setting sun into a

representation of man's dream of a Golden Age. "Here, preserved in its memory, is the cradle of European humanity … its paradise on earth," according to Versilov's melancholy vision in A Raw Youth (hi, 7). In Versilov's idea of the painting, however, the sun setting on the first day of European humanity turns into the sun setting on its last day, when people have lost their faith in God and immortality. "All the great surplus of their previous love of Him, He who was immortality, has been turned towards nature, the world, people, every single blade of grass" (III, 7).

But Versilov's dream vision has a third stage, in which just as in Heine's poem "Christ on the Baltic Sea" ("Frieden," from the cycle Die Nordsee), Christ appears to the people, reaching out his hands to an orphaned humanity, asking "How could you forget Him?" And the scales fall from everyone's eyes as they join in an "enraptured hymn of the new and final resurrection" (III, 7).

As Malcolm Jones has pointed out, Versilov's vision is the most interesting manifestation of his Romantic idealism, his Schillerism as Jones prefers to call it, using one of Dostoevskii's own terms.¹⁷ But like Heine's verse, Versilov's dithyrambic composition has acquired an additional, post-Romantic dimension. In both works, the figure of Christ has been taken out of its biblical context and brought together with non-Christian elements in a way made possible by the mythological understanding of the Gospel in nineteenth-century liberal theology (Strauss), and of Christianity as a projection of man's deepest desire (Feuerbach).

Versilov's opposite in A Raw Youth is Makar Dolgorukii. Versilov is the Russian European, a nostalgic wanderer tormented by a split Faustian mind. Makar Dolgorukii, on the other hand, comes forward as a single-hearted Russian pilgrim in whose words we can already perceive the essence of Father Zosima's teachings about the presence of God's mystery in all.

In Makar's exemplary story about the repentant merchant, life's divine meaning is revealed by the words of Christ from the Gospel, and through the symbolic presence of Christ in the transfiguring ray of light descending over the boy about to drown himself in the painting described by Makar, a painting commissioned by the merchant in memory of the boy he has tormented to death.

In A Raw Youth, the symbolic representation of Christ as the light of the world is not confined to Versilov's and Makar's ekphrasis. It is the central symbol of the whole novel. The slanting rays of the setting sun are a recurring motif in the raw youth's account of his own life story. They illuminate the classroom when his mother comes to see him at the boarding school, and later, during his illness, they shine into his "tomb" of a room at

the moment when for the first time he hears Makar praying in the neighboring room. It is his mother, however, who gives us the key to the novel's light symbolism, when she tells her son that "Christ is the father. . . Christ will shine even in deepest darkness" (iii, 3). Christ is the light of the world. But he is also father. Thus, Sofiia Andreevna, the mother, suggests another main theme in the novel: the raw youth's quest for his father's identity.

A Raw Youth is a fictitious autobiography. Its narrator and central character is the young Arkadii Dolgorukii, Versilov's natural son, whose legitimate father is Makar Dolgorukii, his mother's much older husband. Arkadii's autobiography is the story of his transition from adolescence to manhood. In this process, the contrast between biological and social father is first replaced by an ambiguous constellation in which both father and son, Arkadii and Versilov, relate to Makar as their spiritual father. This is a situation that is only resolved after Makar's death, when Versilov emerges in the role of both husband and father, and the opposition between biological and social father is neutralized. But at this point, Arkadii has freed himself from his father-fixation by internalizing the image of Makar as his Christ-like spiritual father, whose words and ideas he has made his own. "The old life has gone for ever, while the new has only just begun" (iii, 10).

From Crime and Punishment to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevskii's novels are experimenting with the possibility of a Christocentric anthropology in the modern world. The church as a social institution, and the relationship between church and state are also reduced to anthropology: a just organization of society depends on the moral rebirth of its individual members.

Dostoevskii's younger contemporary, Nikolai Leskov, saw this differently. Leskov was not primarily a novelist. His favorite genre is the short story, and religion and art are the main themes of some of his most remarkable works, such as "The Sealed Angel" and "The Enchanted Wanderer," both from 1873, and "At the End of the World," published in 1875. But since these works are stories and not novels, they fall outside the scope of our present discussion.

However, one of Leskov's most famous works is a novel, or "Romantic chronicle" as he liked to call it. Published in 1872 under the title Cathedral Folk it describes the relationship between church and state in contemporary Russia from the point of view of a provincial archpriest, Savelii Tuberozov, a representative of those members of the Russian clergy who in the last century hoped to bring about a reform of the church from within.

Originally, Tuberozov was modelled after Archpriest Avvakum, the

martyred leader of the Old Believers who broke with the official church in the middle of the sixteenth century and whose autobiographical vita had created a sensation in Russian literature when it was published for the first time a few years earlier, in 1861. But in the final version, the idea of patterning Tuberozov on Avvakum was rejected and Leskov chose instead to relate the religious zeal of his hero directly to Christ's cleansing of the Temple. Tuberozov sees a parallel between the story in John 2:12-22 and his own castigation of the civil servants. He compares their prayer to the trading in the temple, at the sight of which "not only was our Lord, Jesus Christ, troubled in his divine spirit, but also he took a scourge and drove them out of the temple. Following his divine example, I accuse and condemn this trading with conscience that I see before me in the temple" (iii, 21).

On the surface, the story about Jesus driving those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money out of the temple has nothing to do with Tuberozov's situation. But deep down in the landscape of his consciousness, Tuberozov makes a connection between the two, so that the one "slips" into the other, transforming his landscape of action into a variation on the theme developed in the Gospel story. In his act of defiance, his subsequent arrest and imprisonment, Leskov's hero detects the archetypal pattern of Christ's life and suffering. "Our old life" - he says to his wife - "has come to an end; from now on, life will be a vita" (iii, 23).

At the time when in his Cathedral Folk Leskov openly criticized the official church and its clergy, trying in Tuberozov to represent a true follower of Christ, Tolstoi, too, turned to the Gospels for an answer to the religious questions that had begun to occupy him after the completion of War and Peace in 1869.

In order to study the New Testament at first hand he decided to take up ancient Greek, and soon he was passionately trying to read the great classical authors in the original. His religious problems temporarily receded into the background. According to his wife's diary, he now wanted to write something pure and elegant, like the works of ancient Greek literature and art. This idea took the form of the novel Anna Karenina, begun in 1873 and finished in 1877.

There is, however, in Anna Karenina, a reflection of Tolstoi's religious preoccupations in the 1870s. Traveling in Italy together, Anna and Vronskii are taken by Golenishchev, an old friend of Vronskii's, to see the Russian artist Mikhailov and his painting, "Christ before Pilate." According to Golenishchev, Mikhailov is "not without talent, but his tendency is quite a false one. He has that Ivanov-Strauss-Renan attitude towards Christ and religious painting" (part v, chapter 9). The reference is here to Aleksandr

Ivanov's famous painting, "Christ before the People," completed after the artist had come to understand Christ as a historical person in conformity with David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, a book that Ivanov knew almost by heart.¹⁸ To someone like Golenishchev, once known for his "brainy liberal activity," but now complaining that the Russians "do not wish to understand that we are the inheritors of Byzantium" (part v, chapter 7), Mikhailov's representation of Christ as an historical person with pronounced Jewish features is quite unacceptable. Discussing Mikhailov's painting with the artist, Golenishchev again stresses the ideological links between "Christ before Pilate" and Ivanov's art:

"you have made Him a man-god and not a God-man …"

"I could not paint a Christ whom I haven't got in my soul," Mikhailov said

gloomily.

". . . Yours is different. The motif itself is different. But still, let us take

Ivanov. I consider that if Christ is reduced to the level of an historical person,

it would be better to choose another historical theme, fresh, untouched."

"But if it is the highest theme open to art?"

"If one looks, there will be others. But the fact is that art won't suffer debate

and discussions. Yet in front of Ivanov's picture the question arises to the

believer and the unbeliever alike: Is this God or not God? and destroys the

unity of impression." (part v, chapter n)

Golenishchev's reaction to Ivanov's art is reminiscent of Prince Myshkin's response to the Holbein picture in The Idiot: "some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture" (11, 4). Although Tolstoi clearly sympathizes with Mikhailov's genuine artistic empathy, he reacted not unlike Golenishchev to the Ivanov-Strauss-Renan attitude towards Christ and religious painting. As Hugh McLean has pointed out, Tolstoi made several statements about Ivanov's art that show that he found it personally unacceptable.¹⁹ One reason for this may be found in his description of the painter Ge's version of "Christ before Pilate," the very subject of Mikhailov's picture in Anna Karenina. What Tolstoi finds so praiseworthy in Ge's painting is its unambiguous opposition between Christ and the representatives of this world:

Christ and his teaching not only in words, but in words and action in conflict with the teaching of the world, i.e. the motif that now as then forms the central meaning of the manifestation of Christ, a meaning that is unquestionable, which has to be accepted by the representatives of the Church, recognising him as God, by the historians, recognising him as an important figure in history, and by the Christians who recognise as the most important in him his practical teaching.²⁰

Anna Karenina is Tolstoi's last great work of fiction before his religious conversion. In the 1880s he formulated his own conception of Christianity, based on his Rousseauesque idea of man's natural goodness and on what he now saw as the true teachings of Christ in the Gospel. He accused the official church of perverting the message of the Gospel and rejected everything in Orthodox theology that went beyond his immediate understanding. The church like other social institutions is part of "civilization," and like Rousseau Tolstoi believed that all people were born innocent and that their natural innocence was later ruined by the institutions of civilized society. In order to regain his or her natural goodness and be able to live a true life - not the life of one's animal instincts - every individual must transcend the barriers between self and other and be reborn through love -love not as an emotional impulse, but as a total submission to what Tolstoi in his treatise On Life (1887) calls "reasonable consciousness," that enjoins men to renounce their individual welfare. This inborn "reasonable consciousness" or natural ethical law is what according to Tolstoi makes up the quintessence of Christ's teachings. In this sense, Christianity does not occupy a privileged place among the world's religions. Its basic ethical principle, most clearly expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, is common to all the great faiths. They are different expressions of the same "reasonable consciousness" that is part of the natural make-up of every single human being, but which has been obscured and suppressed by modern civilization and can thus only be found in children and simple people.

In Tolstoi's fiction, this natural ethos is already present in the figure of Platon Karataev, the peasant soldier in War and Peace, a man without any feeling of an individual selfhood. In him, Pierre Bezukhov sees a possible way out of his own isolation. "To be a soldier" - he thinks as he falls asleep - "To enter with all one's being into that communal life, to be permeated by what makes them what they are. But how to throw off everything superfluous, demonic, the whole burden of the other man?" (3, iii, 9).

Pierre's imprisonment by the French, the execution of his fellow prisoners by the enemy, his friendship with Platon Karataev, and his final rescue after Karataev's death, are stages in a process of liminality that eventually leads to Pierre's spiritual regeneration.

Lying next to Karataev in the darkness of the prison shed "he felt that the world that had been shattered was beginning to move again with a new beauty, and on some new unshakeable foundations in his soul" (4, I, 12). And later in life, Platon Karataev "always remained in Pierre's mind the strongest and most precious of all his memories, the personification of everything Russian, good and perfect" (4,1, 13).

In War and Peace, Pierre's spiritual death and rebirth is only one of many strains in the novel's thematic texture. In Resurrection on the other hand, the theme of spiritual death and rebirth has become the central story line underlying the novel's whole flow of action.

When Resurrection was finally published in 1899, Tolstoi had been working at it intermittently for more than ten years. The story begins when as a jury member, Nekhliudov, the novel's central male character, recognizes in Katiusha Mazlova, a prostitute tried for theft, the young girl he has seduced in his youth. Convinced of her innocence and overcome by remorse, he abandons his former way of life and after her conviction decides to follow her to Siberia, where they are both spiritually reborn in a process of conquering their animal instincts and rediscovering their natural, uncorrupted moral selves, which had been obliterated by socialization and acculturation.

This process of change and regeneration in the inner landscape of consciousness in the two protagonists is paralleled in the outer landscape of action by a chain of events that takes them through the life of the Russian gentry, the squalor of the peasants, the courts, the prisons, the deportation of the convicts, and their life in the prison colony. The State and its institutions, the church in particular, are exposed to Tolstoi's ruthless irony and satire, as, for instance, in the chapter describing the prisoners' communion, where we find the following passage:

the priest lifted the napkin covering the plate, cut the central piece of bread into four parts, dipped it in the wine and then put it into his mouth. He was supposed to be eating a piece of the body of God and drinking a mouthful of his blood. (1, 39).

After distributing "this bread" and "this wine" among the prisoners in front of him,

he carried the goblet behind the partition where he proceeded to eat up all the little pieces of God's body and drink the remaining blood; then he carefully sucked on his moustache, wiped his mouth, cleaned the cup, and in the best possible mood, the thin soles of his calfskin boots creaking smartly, came out from behind the partition. (I, 39)

In this chapter, which was one of many banned from publication under the old regime, Tolstoi uses his favorite device of "defamiliarization," representing the Eucharist from the point of view of someone uninitiated into its symbolism. The prisoners' mass was the ideal liminal chronotope for such a ludic recombination of the sacra of the Orthodox church in order to render them completely meaningless. At the end of the novel, the

Christian message is reinterpreted by Nekhliudov as an extension of his own spiritual resurrection to the whole of human society:

When he had read the Sermon on the Mount, which never failed to move him, he discovered today for the first time in this sermon not abstract beautiful thoughts . . . but simple, clear and practically realizable laws that if they were implemented (which was perfectly possible), would establish a completely new organization of human society … If only people realize this doctrine, the Kingdom of God will be established also on earth. (III, 29)

What we have here is the possibility of a new communitas, a resacralization of society according to Tolstoi's own extreme form of rationalistic, ethical evangelism. In the world outside the novel it found a close parallel in Tolstoiism as a particular form of millenarian religious movement.

In his Rousseauesque condemnation of civilization, Tolstoi in Resurrection arrived at a radical Christian anarchism that brought him close to the ethical ideals of the radical intelligentsia, described with such sympathy and understanding in the novel. This Christian anarchism was incompatible with the teachings of the Orthodox church. Its leaders were unable to respond adequately to the call for a social renewal expressed in Tolstoi's last novel. After its publication the church denounced its author as a false prophet who "led astray by pride has boldly and insolently dared to oppose God, Christ and his holy heirs." On 22 February 1901 Tolstoi was excommunicated.

Around the turn of the century, Russian intellectual life was charged with millenarian movements and apocalyptic expectations. Sergei Bulgakov spoke of "the apocalypse as the sociology of our time." It was in this atmosphere that Andrei Belyi wrote his apocalyptic novel Petersburg (1916) in the years following the revolutionary events of 1905. Belyi brings together characters and plots from nineteenth-century Russian literature -Gogol's Petersburg stories, Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, The Queen of Spades and Dostoevskii's The Devils - in an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of evil, symbolized by the Bronze Horseman - the incarnation of Peter's city - and his antagonist, the lonely figure of Christ, symbolizing life, love and compassion, on the threshold between good and evil, old and new, death and new life. Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, the novel's main hero, first emerges as a representation of evil, dressed in a red domino and hidden behind the mask of a harlequin, in striking contrast to the figure of Christ in his white domino. But in the course of the action Nikolai undergoes a process of change and regeneration that follows the classical pattern of the Russian novel. In the epilogue, the revolutionary hero has shed his Western rationalism and revolutionary ideas. After a pilgrimage to

the Holy Land, he withdraws from the world into the Russian countryside in order to live the life of a hermit, replacing the works of Kant and the neo-Kantians with the writings of the eighteenth-century Greek-Orthodox thinker Grigorii Skovoroda.

Belyi's Petersburg was to become the first in series of apocalyptic novels in twentieth-century Russian literature. Other masterpieces of the genre are Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, both written in the 1920s but only published in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, with the rewriting of the literary canon in post-Soviet Russia, these novels will receive their due attention as the real masterpieces of modern Russian literature.

When the Revolution came, it was hailed as a universal regeneration, and a feeling of communitas cut right across the traditional divisions of Russian society. But with the Bolshevik assumption of power and the beginning of the Civil War in 1918, it soon became clear that Victor Turner's general characterization of such situations also holds good for communist Russia: the "movement" becomes itself an institution among other institutions, "more fanatical and militant than the rest, for the reason that it feels itself to be the unique bearer of universal-human truths." ²¹

The emergence of the victorious Communists out of the large-scale process of the Civil War is one of the main themes in Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957). As Russian society is being restructured, the veterans of the Revolution are elevated to a new status: "Numbered amongst the gods at whose feet the Revolution has laid its gift and its burnt offerings, they sat silent and grim as idols; they were men in whom everything alive and human had been driven out by political conceit" (part x, section 7).

In order to understand this description of the new rulers as idols, we have to remember Vedeniapin's opposition between, on the one hand, the "sanguinary mess [svinstvo] of cruel, pockmarked Caligulas" of the classical world with its "boastful dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns" and, on the other, life after Christ, with whom history as we know it today began. Christ gave us, according to Pasternak's novel, "firstly, the love of one's neighbor," and "secondly, the two main components in the make-up of modern man, without which he is inconceivable, the ideas of a free personality and life regarded as sacrifice" (part I, section 5).

Vedeniapin's conception of human life as a life in history founded by Christ and lived according to his example serves as a generative model for the unfolding of Iurii Zhivago's character in a process that in the end transforms him into a traditional Russian pilgrim, returning to Moscow

from Siberia in the spring of 1922, accompanied by a handsome peasant youth:

Accompanied by his young friend, the tall, gaunt doctor in his unprepossessing clothes looked like a truth-seeker from the people, and his constant companion like an obedient, blindly devoted disciple and acolyte.

(part XV, section 1)