The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 13

standard of thenation. The1976 novel Farewell to Matyora byValentin Rasputin (b. 1937), tells the story of a 300-year-old peasant village on a remote island on theAngaraRiverinsouthernSiberia, doomedtodisappearwhena hydroelectric project floods the area. The final seasons of the Island are related from the dual perspective of an old woman grieving over the fate of the ancestral dead in the village cemetery, and of the Master, the Island’s guardian folk spirit. The peasant had been reinvented as an archaic hero, although no longer prettified or pastoral.

Another sensitive cultural marker is the battlefield. Types of heroes and heroism have been closely tied to Russia’s major (and minor) wars – aggressive and defensive, nation-threatening as well as the routine border conflict. Distinct lit-eraturesdevelopedaroundtheyears1812(Napoleon’sinvasion, calledthe “First Fatherland War”), 1854–55 (Crimean War), 1878 (Russo-Turkish War), 1904– 05 (Russo-Japanese War), 1914–18 (The Great War), 1918–21 (Civil War), 1941–45 (World War II or “Second Fatherland War”), and, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the interminable bloodletting in Chechnya. The close integration of the military class (officers and soldiers) with civilian society throughout the imperial period (1725–1917) not only permeated literature with the martial values of sacrifice, courage, obedience, duty, and patriotic death, but also fostered a tradition of literary plots built around crises in the public domain. In the Russian context, a great writer like Marcel Proust would find no readymade place.

The Russian literary canon developed as a dialogue in time. Here I use that overworked word “dialogue” literally, not in its more metaphorical meaning that would apply, say, to the dispersed English or Italian literary traditions, each with a leisurely thousand years of distantly spaced texts. Russian literature since 1820 was a real person-to-person dialogue taking place almost entirely in two cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, the cultural capitals of a vast but highly centralized empire. All the main publishing houses were there, the reading public was there, and the rest of the country was still imperfectly mapped and largely mute. Writers knew, responded to, revered and parodied each other within their own lifetimes and the living memory of their readers. Succession rites were often overt. As an old man in 1815, the eighteenth-century court poet Gavril Derzhavin formally consecrated the teenager Pushkin to poetry. Mikhail Lermontov stepped out to fame in 1837, in the aftermath of an outraged poem he composed on the occasion of Pushkin’s death in a duel that same year. Dostoevsky in the 1840s fashioned his first literary heroes out of prototypes created by Nikolai Gogol a decade earlier – and to underscore the debt, he obliged his own heroes to read, react to, and measure themselves against fictive characters created by Gogol and Pushkin. Maksim Gorky (real