The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

24 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Newness was suspect. For this reason, the qualities of visuality, palpability, and fixedness were compatible with a Russian cult of the word. In fact, they served it. As Kathleen Parthe´ reminds us, the sacred, immutably “thing-like” qualities of the Old Russian word – the importance placed on the design of its alphabet and proper spelling; its incantational potential – imbued it with magic or miracle-working powers.13 On Old Russian soil, then, word and image tended not to compete but to collaborate in a tight moral alliance. The great nineteenth-century Realist writers inherited this tradition. Once uttered, words were not mere means to an end but already, in some sense, ends – deeds in themselves. These traditions fed richly into the revival of Russian poetry in the early twentieth century, and, ominously, into an equally rich cult of forced or fanciful political denunciations in the Stalinist 1930s.

Secular reasons for Russia’s word-centeredness echo these sacral concerns. A magically potent Word was a word worthy of being closely watched. From the mid-eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century, state censorship could reach a degree of suspiciousness and capriciousness hard for us to fathom in terms of the labor-hours required to impose it. Of course, there was always freedom by default: bureaucratic carelessness, networks of protection and politeness, regal arbitrariness, mercy, and the sheer vastness of the administrative task – but all the same, noteven a rudimentary system of safeguards for individualexpression in thepublic realm ever existed. In principle,every scrap of newsprint, every line of verse could be scrutinized, by secular and church authorities, with separate, successively more severe filters for in-print genres and theatrical performance. This quest to root out unapproved ideological content was made even more virulent by a worship of the shape and sound of the specifically Russian word. When Pushkin was exiled to the south of Russia in 1820 for penning some revolutionary verse, Russia’s sophisticated bilingual elite must have noticed that the sentiments in his offending poems did little more than repeat the abstract cliche´s of French liberationist rhetoric on which the reigning Tsar Alexander I had himself been raised two decades earlier. But when Pushkin addressed local realities and applied his glorious Russian to those banally familiar turns of phrase, they became startlingly new, authoritative, and impermissible.

Russian space: never-ending, absorptive, unfree

It is a truism that vis-a`-vis the Western nations, Russia has always lost in time and triumphed in space. Space saved Russia from Napoleon and Hitler. The broad expanse of Siberia saved Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (and Dostoevsky himself) from crimes against body and spirit committed in crowded, stifling cities. The “bird-troika” invoked by Gogol to save his trickster Chichikov at