The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 23

the current day. Russia understood herself as having come to consciousness (as a mute infant comes to consciousness) through language. This Romantic-era conviction has had enormous staying power, and to some extent explains the charismatic grip of the Poet on Russian culture. Writers frequently attributed to the Russian Word “such values as self-consciousness, self-reflection, perception, intentionality” - as if the word itself and by itself were a person.9 In one’s native language, the wandering self could find its abiding home. Kathleen Parthe opens her book Russia’s Dangerous Texts (2004) with “ten common beliefs” about the relationship between literature and politics in pre-1991 Russia.10 These include the truisms that Russians read more than any other people; that in Russia all serious “politics, prophecy and identity” took place through literature; that a single literary text (licit or illicit) would galvanize the attention of all reading Russians at a given time, providing an electrical current of common language; and that the great writer, by definition, must avoid cooperating with “power” [vlast']. The flip side of a country that exiles and shoots its poets is a culture that nurtures an image of the writer as prophet, philosopher, a person with the status of (in Solzhenitsyn’s words from his novel The First Circle) a “second government.” Even when the word fails in its mission -as many post-communist writers now feel it did, and perhaps should have - that failure is predicated on immensely high expectations. In his retrospective book on writers and readerspost-1995, Remaining Relevant after Communism (2006), Andrew Wachtel opens his chapter on “The Writer as National Hero” with the reminder that “a good definition of Eastern Europe would be the part of the world where serious literature and those who produce it have traditionally been overvalued.”11 Two broad explanations have been suggested for this word-centeredness in Russian culture: one spiritual, the other secular.

At first glance the spiritual primacy of the word might seem paradoxical, for in Russian high medieval culture up through the late seventeenth century, literacy was low. The visual image and the miracle-bearing relic had far more potency than the written word. Eastern Christendom - first Byzantine, then Russian - revered icons even more intensely than did Roman Catholicism, especially after the Eastern Church decisively refuted the iconoclast movement (triggered by the charge that icon worship was akin to idolatry) in the eighth century CE. What is more, signed, authored literature was undervalued and at times even demonized. “Authorship was not one of the recognized activities of Old Russia,” D. S. Mirsky writes in his History of Russian Literature. “There were no ‘writers,’ but only bookmen [knizhniki].”12 Books were valued, but as artifacts to be inherited, copied, memorized, not created anew. Although Western medieval culture shared many of these values, Russia - which experienced no Renaissance or Reformation - upheld for much longer the idea of the divinely received Word as the measure of all things, as a sort of Absolute.