The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

12 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

clustering heroes is usually unfair to the fictive personalities involved. As proof it is sufficient to consider the innocent, by now pedestrian label “superfluous man,” routinely applied to a certain style of Russian nineteenth-century male protagonist.The epithet wouldhave beenincomprehensible to themostfamous heroeswho bore it(Pushkin’s EugeneOnegin, Lermontov’sGrigoryPechorin) – unhappy men, perhaps, but surely not willing to be classified as unnecessary or redundant to the only life they knew. The phrase was devised decades later and applied to them only retroactively, by writers and critics who decided that a more socially responsible, productive (that is, “positive”) hero was morally preferable for Russia’s social development. Thinking by type is always crude, but historical context can help us avoid the worst abuses. One good illustration of the necessity to read Russian types historically might be the myth of a “salvation-bearing peasantry.”

Early Russian images of the rural underclass were raw and satirical. In the 1790s, in imitation of the European vogue for pastoral idylls, Russia’s first pre-Romantic writers began to sentimentalize the peasant. This myth took on weight in the 1830s–40s after the appearance in Moscow of a Slavophile movement glorifying the archaic Russian past, and thereafter was kept alive by a conscience-stricken, serfowning “repentant gentry” up to and beyond 1861, the year Tsar Alexander II emancipated the peasantry from personal bondage. One writer’s long life could encompass several stages of this evolving image. Leo Tolstoy, for example, portrays a shrewd, ethnographically diverse, ethically neutral peasantry in War and Peace (1860s), an idealized peasant in his didactic fiction of the 1880s (such as “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man”), and brutally naturalistic village life in his peasant plays, especially in The Power of Darkness (1887), written in folk dialect. Dostoevsky, whose imagination was overall an urban one, idealized the common people for reasons related largely to his own prison term in Siberia (1850–54), spent among murderers and thievesof peasantorigin.The high-bornandwealthy Turgenevwashaunted throughout his life by his tyrannical mother’s violent, capricious treatment of the family’s serfs, and his sympathetic portraits of peasants in A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) reflect this agony and painful memory. It fell to Anton Chekhov, grandson of a serf, to demythologize Russia’s commoners thoroughly, both urban and rural – before the working class was re-mythologized in the Marxist-Leninist state.

For most writers of the Soviet period, the factory worker and front-line soldier were the commoners of choice. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, when official ideology began to fray, did “Village Prose” writers offer an alternative to those two ideologically sanctioned groups in a stoic, heroic peasant who had survived modernization, collectivization, and total war to become the moral