The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Chapter 5

The astonishing nineteenth century: Romanticisms

1801–25:Reign of Emperor Alexander I

1812:Napoleon invades Russia and occupies Moscow

1814:Tsar Alexander I enters Paris in triumph

1820:Aleksandr Pushkin, age twenty-one, exiled to the south of Russia for

subversive poems

1825:Decembrist Revolt in Petersburg

1825–55:Reign of Emperor Nicholas I

1828:Nikolai Gogol moves from Ukraine to Petersburg at age nineteen

1836:Gogol leaves Russia for Italy; lives mostly in Rome until 1848

1837:Death of Pushkin in a duel at age thirty-seven

1841:Death of Lermontov in a duel at age twenty-seven

1852:Death of Gogol at age forty-three from self-induced starvation

In the early nineteenth century, 5 percent of Russia’s people could read. The fate of literature was in the hands of several dozen gifted, well-born, multilingual innovators, concentrated in the two capital cities and writing for one another. No literary “profession” existed, nor a “public opinion”; criticism of new poems or dramas took place in salons, theatre foyers, private correspondence. But this tiny community of cultured readers and writers, although cut off from the mass of their countrymen, never doubted that it was part of mainstream European culture. It passionately followed shifts in literary taste on the continent and, as neoclassicism gave way to cults of sentiment, furiously debated each step.

Like Romantics throughout Europe, Russian writers reacted against overly rationalisticviewsof human nature andthe universalizingclaims of theEnlight-enment. The gothic and grotesque came into fashion. E. T. A. Hoffmann popularized cults of the poet, of creative madness and the fantastic; the early Dickens opened up the urban slum as an exotic locale with an ethnography of its own. Folklore, the unique spirit of one’s native language, and national history began to compete with the neoclassical convention of borrowed plots and stock characters. Russia rapidly absorbed the major Romantic prose genres from Europe: society tale, novel-in-letters, “travel notes,” “southern” (or orientalist) tale, diary and memoir, historical romance. But for all this cosmopolitanism, the

99