The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 19

the 1860s (and again in the 1890s); proletarians versus the relics of “bourgeois” art in the 1920s; and official party-minded art versus underground dissidents in the Soviet period. Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque,” the biggest bestseller ever to come out of Russian cultural theory and justly celebrated for its tolerance, openness, and malleability, paradoxically rests on one huge unbridgeable binary: the “official serious classical body” versus the “unofficial laughing grotesque.” In such polarized models, each extreme sustains and defines the other – while reducing the other, unavoidably, to caricature. Only in the last three decades has this for-or-against infrastructure definitively broken down, replaced by a rich assortment of asymmetrical, legally coexisting postmodernist alternatives. Relief as well as confusion has been immense.

My use of the binary model in the present book is intended to bemoresugges-tive than analytically rigorous. Each chapter identifies two major authors, text types, or worldviews that represent fundamentally different forms of literary expression during that period. These anchor the two poles and delimit the field. Sometimes the two poles are mediated and pushed out into a triad. Key episodes in a work (or a small cluster of works) are then discussed chronotopically – that is, with an eye to how time, space, interpersonal relations (author-narrator-hero-reader), and consequently human values are structured within it. Where the story line of a literary text promises to be obscure to non-Russian readers, plot summary is provided (for an Orthodox saint’s life, warrior epic, medieval Faust tale, prose comedy from the eighteenth century, Stalin-era production novel or fairy-tale play). For the “first-bench canon” (name recognition at the level of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky), episodes must suffice.

These literary works or episodes are then linked to one another through parody, taken in the appreciative sense discussed above: a respectful homage and a reworking. Each of the six chronological chapters has its theme. For the eighteenth century (Chapter 4), it is satire and hybridization: how French-style neoclassical prose comedy and the picaresque novel were transposed to “barbaric” Russia, and how one synthesis of Russia and the West took powerful root at the end of the century. The Romantic period (Chapter 5) is organized around two distinctly different poles. The “Pushkin side” is the world of public codes, game-playing, and the duel of honor; the “Gogol side” is governed by the opposite dynamic, a private world of evasion and concealment, abundant in texts of embarrassment and exposure. During the Realist era (Chapter 6), these themes of honor and embarrassment inflate, change shape, and take on a more strident intonation. In Tolstoy, the duel broadens out into the battlefield, where honor is eclipsed by courage and the playful narrator is replaced by stern no-nonsense moral authority. In Dostoevsky, concern for privacy can reach insane, pathological, conspiratorial proportions, cunningly masked by self-defensive