The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 21

a grave. In no way are these inversions or syntheses assumed to be superior to the benchmark authors who flank them. They are simply complex in a different way, for the intelligence of a literary tradition is not linear or progressive. It constantly grows in all directions without invalidating its earlier truths. For that reason there is no single optimal place from which to view it. But some students of the Russian tradition have seen in it a darker and more severe pattern than the binaries and triads offered here.

One such skeptic is the cultural historian Steven Marks, in his 2002 book titled How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. By what criteria, he asks, does the cosmopolitan common reader sense a work as “Russian”? Not by its length, setting, characters, spirituality, moral demands – in other words, not by a stable list of traits or revealed truths. “Russianness,” Marks argues, is a special attitude toward the outside world, one that is dismissive or condemnatory. When nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian ideas caught on around the world – and catch on they did – it was not because they “worked” or were “true” in any practical (or even moral) sense, but because they were designed to startle, destabilize, and negate. This nay-saying was practiced at a very sophisticated level. From Napoleon’s defeat to the defeat of Gorbachev, in Marks’s reading, the refrain was the same: resent the bourgeois, consumer-oriented, progress-bewitched West. Out of such restlessness and resentment came Russian maximalism, irrationalism, messianism, mysticism, utopianism. On censored Russian soil, these unruly ideas were either promptly banned, or else co-opted by the state and turned to sinister purpose. But they were a source of inspiration to revolutionaries and dispossessed people everywhere else around the globe. This ecstatically nihilistic edge to so many Russian achievements in art is key to their enduring success.

Marks has been praised as well as censured for this thesis. His book has been taken as a tribute to the dynamic creativity of Russian culture, to its infectious pan-humanism, and also as a slanderous insult to it. One negotiation of his hostile binary might be offered. Contempt for what the “civilized West” considers normal, healthy, or prosperous need not be the sole (nor even the primary) motivating force of Russian artists and thinkers. Russian nay-saying might more fairly be seen as a protest against any fixed idea of normalcy, against the belief that “normalcy” is or must be the norm or the ideal, and that sufferings and exceptional passions are painful diversions from the balanced, healthy condition that everyone would choose if given the option. In Russia’s more nonconformist tradition, from the earliest Orthodox saints to the most celebrated Dostoevskian novels, pain and passion have been considered necessary to both wisdom and consciousness. But Marks has nevertheless grasped a