The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

20 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

narrative shields and comic narrators. For the Symbolist and Modernist period (Chapter 7), our theme is the city and its devils – which yields up the greatest Petersburg novel, the greatest Moscow novel, and a dystopian city-state that distils the myths of both these great Russian capital cities. For the Stalinist era (Chapter 8), we consider the doctrine of socialist realism and how it impressed itself upon three genres: the construction novel, the dramatized fairy tale, and the “suspended” lyric materialism of Andrei Platonov. Beginning with the first post-Stalinist Thaw (Chapter 9), the ideology of the canon relaxes somewhat. Literatureis officially allowed to acknowledge prisonsand laborcamps. Authors rechannel familiar high-canon scenarios through gratingly domestic contexts – our examples include the Dostoevskian underground from a harassed female perspective. Newheroesappear:Asianbusinessmen who arealsomystics, lyrical alcoholics, starched-collar detectives, serial killers, the tsarist secret police as role model, storage sheds that commit suicide. Certain constants survive from chapter to chapter: honor and humiliation as paths to a viable identity, the death of children.

For some periods, the benchmark writers anchoring the edges of literary space are so different from each other that each begins his own literary tradition. This is the case with the Romantic era, where the “Pushkin” and “Gogol” lines are antipathetic. But in other periods, agreatwriter will combine elements of both poles in a conscious quest for new and healthier hybrids. Under such conditions, one can speak almost of a “dialectical” development of characters and themes. The task of the mediating author is to challenge the oversimplification that is endemic to binary thinking and thus to re-complicate the field. To take only one example, the most timeworn binary in all of Russian literature: Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky. Like Pushkin and Gogol from an earlier period, these two were seen as incompatible geniuses. But writers appeared – one thinks of Anton Chekhov – whose gift it was to bridge, test, break down, and transform the most canonical hero types and legacies. Just as Pushkin reworked the cliche´s of European Romanticism in his short stories of the 1830s, so did Chekhov provide explicitly modest, non-melodramatic reworkings of bigger-than-life, tragic Tolstoyan plots in the 1880s and 1890s. Chekhov’s characters (like every other literate person alive in Russia) have read Anna Karenina and envy its profound insights. But they aren’t living in that novel. As creatures of Chekhov’s pen, to react in a Tolstoyan way to their plight can be part of their problem, even if it was part of Tolstoy’s solution. On occasion, a more recent author at the end of the chain can turn prior inherited worlds inside out or upside down. One example is Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), who, in 1930, suspended socialist realist time-space and – dreamily, as if in a trance – inverted a Stalinist-style production novel into a construction pit that eventually became