The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

230 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the Russian prose tradition reaches its natural apex: the monologic pravednik confronting a monologic evil.

Beginning in the 1970s and then at galloping pace since 1991, it became clear to emerging generations of Russian writers that both truth and evil were fragmented far beyond the point where a single psychology or single sinful target could organize them. Focus turned to modes of protest more subtly transgres-sive and imitative, more in the spirit of Pushkin’s ripped-off button at Nicholas I’s imperial court. The Gulag story of the paper-factory director, arrested after being the first to stop clapping for Stalin, was supplemented by other applause scenarios more likely to result in survival. (The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko relates in his memoirs, for example, how Dmitry Shostakovich, obliged to be present at Khrushchev’s pep talks to the “creative intelligentsia” in the early 1960s, grabbed his notebook and assiduously scribbled in it every time the hall burst into applause, creating the impression that he was “writing down all these great thoughts . . . Thank God [the composer confided to the poet], everyone can see that my hands are busy.”13) In communism’s waning years, pretensions to know the shape of history – or even the shape of a single story or a single intent – were impatiently dismissed. Bombastic gestures became ludicrous. There was a thrilling attention to the peripheral dialect, the wandering detail, the eccentric gesture. Where the true-believing center had been, or had pretended to be, there was a void.

In this new climate, the Tolstoyan pole of post-Stalinist writing met its rival in a revived, more dialogic and ironical Dostoevskian pole. What seemed to appeal most was Dostoevsky’s apocalyptically dark side, a cynicism that endorsed neither the spiritual generosity of the positive characters (Sonya, Alyosha, the Elder Zosima) nor Bakhtin’s celebrated polyphony, which detected in Dostoevsky the optimistic unfinalizability of all utterances. The new Dostoevsky was a dead-ended Muse. Solzhenitsyn, in the terms laid down in his 1993 National Arts Club speech, would recognize in this newly fashionable desperate literature the “pessimistic relativism” inseparable, in his view, from postmodernism. These dark intonations pervade the work of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.

The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)

Women in Russian literature, and Russian women as writers of literature, have not been a focus of the present book. A brief sketch of the legacy might therefore be useful. The Swiss author Madame de Stae¨l (1766–1817) and French novelist and feminist George Sand (1804–76) were both avidly read in