The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 17

almostacontemporary)ofboth Gogol and Dostoevsky. The best Decadent and Symbolist-era novels, such as Fyodor Sologub’s Petty Demon (1904) or Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916/1922), are saturated with the nineteenth-century classics, in dense networks of allusion recombined and often distorted so that tragic motifs become comic and comic motifs tragic. Pushkin House (1971) by Andrei Bitov (b. 1937) portrays the Russian intelligentsia, betrayers of culture who are themselves betrayed by communism, through the affectionately garbled lens of masterworks by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky: the real and enduring Russia of the literary imagination. One trademark device of the postmodernist poet and performance artist Dmitry Prigov (1940–2007), author of over 35,000 poems, is to swallow up and re-accent other poets’ words: his spectacular recitation of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin as a Buddhist mantra always brought down the house. For such indefatigable inventiveness with cultural artifacts of the past, Prigov won a Pushkin prize in 1993. Such parody does not discredit or overthrow its predecessors, but addresses and confirms them. The point of this address is not to displace the writers who came before, a futile and impoverishing exercise, but to become worthy of joining them.

The Dialogic school is represented by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Bakhtin was a profound student of parody, in which he heard a rich “double-voicedness” and thus the potential for achieving that most difficult human virtue: responsible, or answerable, freedom. His readings of Dostoevsky from this perspective are highly provocative. Respectful parody also permeates the Bakhtinian idea of carnival as open-ended, two-way or reciprocal laughter. More central than freedom or carnival to our discussions, however, will be Bakhtin’s less flashy, more workmanlike notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin adapted this neologism (“time-space”) from Einstein’s insights in physics and then applied it to the life sciences – where, in Bakhtin’s capacious view, literature should probably be classified. Verbal narrative resembles a living organism of a highly advanced type. It regulates itself internally on the basis of responsive feedback (from its author, its readers, and the fictive characters within itself). It respects laws of causality and plausibility. It can manipulate categories of time and is capable of producing surprise, that is, the unpredictably new. The major difference between a work of creative literature and organic life is that literature, although meticulously individualized as an organism, does not die. Its life is sustained by its chronotope.

Bakhtin was a Kantian. He assumed that before any world could be repre-sentedor structured, the structuring mind makes assumptions about the workings of time and space. That matrix then determines, or conditions, the kinds of