The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Introduction5

is somehow wide open, serving raw experience more than form. This binary view, unfair to the resources of both poetry and prose, leaves out rich stretches of artistic writing in between – ornamentalist prose, rhythmic speech, and “prose poems,” for example. But it nevertheless touches on an important truth. Prose is deficient in criteria and tools for precise measurement, whereas poetry has an agreed-on descriptive and critical vocabulary, beginning with rules of versification. In his Introduction to Russian Poetry and elsewhere, Wachtel argues that poets cite, converse, and bond with one another (that is, come together in a tradition) most intensely at the level of what is lost in translation. The reality of the work, its substance, is this complex of rhythmic patternings and specific aural cues. Only later does that technically identifiable mass come to be associated with certain themes (feelings, images, narrative experiences).3

How do prose writers bond and cite? Shared themes and images are important for both poetry and prose, but unlike the lyric poem, fused to the language and rhythms of its birth, prose and dramatic genres are presumed to be more resilient – orphaned without trauma and adopted with gratitude into new families. Novels, stories, and plays are routinely “realized” outside their original languages, garnering international fame in all manner of translations, to audiences that have no idea of the context or sound of the source. (Occasionally one even hears the comment that a translation can, and should, improve on the original. A variant on this position was voiced by the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera in 2007, when he argued that the aesthetic value of a given novel could be appreciated fully only in the “large context of world literature,” which for him meant by those “without a knowledge of the original language.”4) Confounded by the success of their product and uncertain about the specificity of their tools, professional prose analysts frequently default to plot summaries, the work’s “message,” the perspectives of its narrators, its reflection of real-life events, and how its fictive personalities do or do not cohere as people who resemble us, their readers, and their friends. These are all valid categories and inquiries. But they apply as readily to philosophy, sociology, politics, cultural anthropology, psychology, and simply getting through the day as they do to verbal art.

This profligate applicability of stories to life was one reason why the Russian Formalists, attempting to professionalize literary study in the 1920s, took up the challenge of narrative prose with such missionary fervor. They devisedtechnical categories for its analysis that were deliberately, polemically blind to personality and to ethics: objective terminology and procedures that would qualify artistic prose as aself-consciously “literary” (or “poetical”) construct.Itisofenormous significance that the most aggressive and fertile of these Russian prose theorists,