The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

22 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

basic truth. What returns us to Russian literature again and again is the chance to savor risk-taking at the extreme edges of an idea. And even those writers who parody these extremes (like Chekhov) or who despair at surviving them (like Boris Pilnyak [1894–1937]) are unsympathetic to the goals, behaviors, and humdrum activity that result from a disciplined or calculated pursuit of material prosperity.

What Marks explores in his book is one flamboyant expression of the “Russian Idea.” It too is part of the story of Russian literature. This Idea, born in Moscow in the 1830s among Russian Romantic disciples of Schelling, has had a long gestation. The e´migre´ philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), in a mood shaped equally by nostalgia and despair, codified the Russian Idea for Western consumption in a book of that name published in 1947, on the ruins of World War II.7 In it he emphasized Russia’s divinely inspired mission on behalf of all other peoples through her passivity, apocalypticism, collectivism, distinctly feminine softness (receptivity and forgiveness), indifference to political grandeur and private property alike, and her anarchic preference for the depths of personality over the superficialities of institutional identity. The work of great novelists and poets was recruited selectively as evidence.

Three Russian Ideas

As Russian imperial pretensions were enfeebled and discredited in the final decades of the twentieth century, these cosmic ambitions contracted. In 2004, an anthology of present-day Russian opinion on this time-honored, oft-maligned topic appeared as The Russian Idea: In Search of a New Identity, edited by a Canadian scholar of religion after seven years spent teaching at Moscow State University.8 By that time, of course, political caution was gone, Aesopian language was gone, the centralized management of culture lay in shambles, and Russians were routinely invoking Western cultural theorists to discuss their native experience. Even in this anthology, however, traditional value-categories prove resilient. No literary work can wholly escape their shadow. To complete this chapter on critical models and their readers, then, I sketch out three “Russian Ideas” (cultural invariants) that have recurrently served to distinguish this literature from any other. These are the Russian Word, Russian space, and their meeting ground on the human face.

The socially marked, quasi-sacred Word

In the Beginning was the Russian Word. This word has always been perceived as more than a means to communicate the merely transitory needs or truths of