The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

100 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

two Russian Romantic-era writers who are the focus of this chapter – Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) and Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) – are difficult to place on the European map. Although each endorsed the Romantic view of “poet as national prophet,” neither embraced Romantic rebellion, or even Romantic individualism, as usually defined. With his impeccable taste, implied audience of insiders, and unquestioning faith in the power (and responsibility) of the poet to elucidate rather than mystify with words, Pushkin remained in many respects a neoclassicist, an eighteenth-century writer.1 And as regards Gogol, no ready-made genre conventions apply. His Ukrainian folk and terror-tales, his humanoid caricatures and unclassifiable, out-of-control plots can pass from irrepressible laughter to unspeakable dread in the space of a phrase. Among the canonical Russian writers, the brief life of Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) probably comes closest to reflecting the pan-European Romantic spirit.

During the reign of Alexander I, literary patronage came to an end.2 Writers were obliged to seek other means of material support. Under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), the publicist Nikolai Novikov had stoutly refused to serve solely the interests of the empress – and to finance his publishing activities, he sold off inherited estates. Nineteenth-century writers were rarely so fortunate. They owned and managed (that is, mortgaged) serfs, served as military officers, worked as government bureaucrats. A commercially viable press began to function in the 1830s, but the best writing was not always the most marketable. Pushkin insisted on a decent price for his work, but he did not successfully make the transition from aristocratic to middlebrow readerships and was saddled with debts his entire life. Gogol scraped by on loans, subsidies from his mother’s estate, and publishers’ contracts. Occasionally a writer succeeded at a spectacular, high-profile imperial career. Karamzin, for example, was appointed to the salaried post of Historian Laureate in 1803, and until his death in 1826 he labored full time over his highly acclaimed History of the Russian State. The gifted poet Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner and a captive Turkish woman, rose in court to become tutor to the heir apparent. Aleksandr Griboyedov (1795–1829), author of Russia’s finest neoclassical verse comedy Woe from Wit (1825) and a well-educated man of modest means, became a prominent diplomat; he was slaughtered together with the Russian delegation during a riot in Tehran following a peace treaty humiliating to the Persians.

Although the era of patronage was over, what remained, as a fact of life and a theme of literature, was Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks. In 1722, Peter replaced promotion based on birth by a merit system with fourteen ranks, which provided the infrastructure to his decree on obligatory state service.3 Mandatory service had never been popular and in 1762 it was rescinded by Catherine the Great’s spouse, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762). But the basic