The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Introduction9

movement (socialist realism) was deliberately designed to debunk, relativize, and humiliate European literary models.

Let me return in closing to the anxiety about “rudderless freedom” raised in the opening pages. Does Russia’s partially “normalized” post-communist literary life, which has greatly diminished the role and status of the creative writer, threaten the integrity of the tradition? Perturbations have been severe, but apocalypse is nowhere in sight. In-print verbal art continues to have splendid survival advantages, regardless of sinister twists in Kremlin politics and even in competition with today’s image-saturated, instantly accessible cybernetic world. To its immense good fortune, literature does not need the big budgets, collective efforts, or approved public spaces required to realize symphonic music, visual art exhibits, cinematic productions or large-scale architectural projects. Its more compact forms can be carried in the pocket, composed (and also carried) in the head. Heroic legends abound concerning this latter mode of survival under the most recent Old Regime. Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the great poet, committed her husband’s entire poetic corpus to memory “for safekeeping” during the Stalinist years, until it was no longer dangerous to write it down. Since literary texts are so very dispersed and so inefficiently, individually, privately processed, inertia tends to be huge. One can blow up an offensive monument but cannot gather up and burn all copies of a published novel. A state bureaucracy can ban a film or mutilate an opera, but it cannot prevent us from memorizing and mentally re-experiencing a poem in all its fullness.

And finally: unlike the progressive, falsifiable sciences or (at the other extreme) the capriciously marketed world of fashion, great literature does not date. It accumulates contexts rather than outgrows them, for literature is designed to speak to the current needs of the person who activates it. Who are these “activators”? Although today’s Russian school curriculum might no longer require War and Peace or Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don – too many other texts compete, and time is in shorter supply – the great Russian novels continue to be read around the world with undiminished fervor.

With that fact in mind it is worth asking, in Milan Kundera’s spirit, whether a literature need belong to its own nation at all. Russian lovers of the word are of two minds on this issue, professing two ideals. In the first, that peculiar chauvinism exemplified by Dostoevsky, Russian literature is a common denominator for the world, yet only Russians are privileged to understand it. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some leading Russian sociologists still see in the Russian national character a “negative identity” driven by self-deprecating exceptionalism, ennui, sentimentality, constant expectation of