The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

126 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

and journalists. This new commercial class saw its most lucrative markets not in poetry but in prose – and especially in the long serialized novel, indispensable for retaining and satisfying subscribers with installments stretching (if possible) over years.

Russia’stwo major citiesweredevelopingdifferentculturalmythologies,each of which would prove exceptionally durable. As an alternative to “bureaucratic, cynical, pleasure-seeking” St. Petersburg, the ancient but newly rebuilt city of Moscow came into its own – “young, idealistic, inspired, philosophical,” identified with Russocentric or Slavophile beliefs and influenced by German Romanticism.1 Non-noble background was no longer an obstacle to literary activity, as it had been to the critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48), a doctor’s son and autodidact whose passionate, opinionated, highly influential screeds on the Russian writers of his day unerringly selected the most gifted. Writers and critics now met in “circles” and constituted an intelligentsia, a mixed class based on education and ideological commitment rather than birth or government rank. At last, in the 1860s, the cultural traffic between East and West became two-way. Upper-classRussians still spoke and read West European languages – but not as reliably as before. More important than the fading out of multilingualism at home, however, was the fact that some Western European countries began to consider Russian literary products worthy of translation into their own languages. In part because of the lengthy residence in France of the urbane, highly respected Ivan Turgenev, Russia began to be seen as a place that might contribute to the European literary canon.

This diversification, democratization, andEuropeanizationofRussian literature coincided with the beginning of Russia’s serious revolutionary movement. All great writers took a stand toward it or featured fictional heroes from it. Russia’s first political dissidents were dreamers and closeted debaters. Without practical experience and with no political responsibility, this idealistic and inef-fectualgenerationbecame knownasthe“fathers,”the “peopleofthe[eighteen]-forties.” On the far side of the mid-century divide, their sons and daughters became radical populist activists, the so-called “people of the sixties.” Their goals and tactics varied: some were peaceful educators, others went abroad to Geneva or Paris, still others threw bombs. By century’s end, the number of Marxists and internationalists had grown dramatically. Around these polemics and political sympathies a new literary tradition was constructed. Famous Romantic-era heroes (Onegin, Pechorin, Chichikov, Akaky Akakievich) were reclassified in civiccategories,into “superfluous heroes” for upper-classprotag-onists and “naturalist,” pathetic portraits for the urban poor. Neither Pushkin nor Gogol would have understood literary creativity catalogued in this way.