The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The eighteenth century 97

Liza survives, gets over her infatuation, and marries someone else. When Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a composer of profound Sentimentalist vision, turned Pushkin’s tale into his opera The Queen of Spades (1890), he restored the heroine to her canonical Karamzinian fate: she drowns herself from love in a Petersburg canal. As we shall see in Chapter 9, the bestselling post-Soviet detective writer Boris Akunin explicitly structured the love subplot of his first novel, AzazeV [1998; in English, The Winter Queen] on Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” - and hideously, she does not escape her canonized fate.

But the most complex commentary on all Russian seduce-and-abandon plots is surely Leo Tolstoy’s final full-length novel, Resurrection (1898). What he dares to attack in this late novel is not only the vices of seduction and abandonment -familiar to the point of cliche - but the device of mutual forgiveness that sits at the core of Sentimentalism. For Tolstoy, it was no longer sufficient for the dishonored heroine to die so that the hero, en route to self-awareness, can repent, be redeemed, and weep together with narrator and reader. Anna Karenina, with its sympathetic portrait of the suffering Aleksei Vronsky in the Epilogue, still displays traces of that earlier dynamic. But by the end of century, letting Eros and Death do all the hard work of moral growth is no longer acceptable to Tolstoy. In his Resurrection, men and women must achieve the brotherhood, or sisterhood, that unites us into one human family by wholly other means.

In closing, let us note one paradox shared by neoclassical comedy, Chulkov’s picaresque novel, and Karamzin’s Sentimentalism. The high-minded, virtuous heroes in all three categories become, to later audiences, dismally boring. Starodum and Pravdin, Milon and Sofya, Erast and Liza, even Martona’s lovers when they begin to behave, are one-liners with a one-dimensional afterlife. In contrast, the Brigadier, Prostakova, Skotinin, Mitrofan, Martona, Knyazhnin’s Jester are unforgettably vital - and ubiquitous. This dilemma took its toll on many writers, most tragically Nikolai Gogol. Gogol’s inability to portray a positive character was one factor contributing to his creative, and then physical, death. But Pushkin, Russia’s other Romantic-era genius, will find several ways out. His true heroes are known not by their virtue, but by the more complex concept of honor. A personal friend of Karamzin and much indebted to him, Pushkin nevertheless undertook to roughen up Karamzin’s prose, re-masculinize it, reclaim it from the salon and take it into the real outdoors. In the process, Pushkin the poet, prose writer, and dramatist became for Russia what Shakespeare is for the English-speaking world, an unsurpassed standard. To his astonishing century we now turn.