The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

154 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

binary in his writings of the 1930s, between novels and poetry.31 True novels, he argued, strive toward polyphonic fullness, with competing voices that address one another horizontally, and they are “Copernican” to the extent that the author is displaced from the center of the fictive universe (novels are open, translatable, and thrive on alien input). Purely “poetic style,” in contrast, tends toward the single-voiced and unitary, locating its idealized, silent, or solipsistic addressee along a vertical axis (poetry talks to itself in a static utopian language, associated by Bakhtin with a “Ptolemaic” worldview that demands affirmation and identity, not dialogue). Bakhtin’s novel–poetry distinction is striking, but crude and (unless qualified) easily refuted. Our partial refutation of it here will permit us to touch briefly upon the fate and variety of poetry during the age of the great Russian novel (1850s–80s), through an episode in the work of Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky, arch-novelist and polyphonist, remained throughout his life a Romantic realist. Although he did not write poetry himself, he was temperamentally attuned to the vigorous civic verse being practiced by Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78), journalist and leading poet of the “Realist school.” Poetry did not disappear at the end of the Golden Age, with the deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov. But it changed its status and venue. The radical wing of Russia’s fledgling institution of literary criticism declared poetry no longer the voice of the gods but (at best) a rhythmically effective means of communicating social ills. When the aristocratic salon gave way to the bookseller’s market, lower-brow poetic genres began to flourish: satires, street ballads, urban romances, opera libretti, and folk-based narrative poetry (often in authentic dialect, with shocking rhythms and images) describing the lot of the Russian peasant. Nekrasov excelled in the last of these genres, both while a struggling student and later as a publisher. In 1846, Nekrasov acquired the journal The Contemporary, founded by Pushkin ten years earlier, and transformed it into a forum for civic poetry so critical of Russian social reality that the journal was closed by government decree in 1866. Nekrasov promptly purchased another journal and became its editor-in-chief. But startling images in his poems from the 1850s published in The Contemporary had already found their way into Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Nekrasov, like Dostoevsky, was a newspaper man. He was also a pioneer in poetic – and lyrical – expressions of those plotless observations and ruminations that by the 1850s had become a common feature in “news around town” columns of the Russian periodical press. In 1859, Nekrasov published his lengthy narrative poem On the Weather [O pogode], whose first part is subtitled “Street Impressions.” In tone and literary device it resembles the first of