The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 31

beauty is always impersonal, a lichina. Such is Helene’s static “marble beauty” and complacent self-absorption; like the terrible beauty of Dostoevsky’s Stavro-gin, it will degenerate into active debauchery and evil. Tolstoy awards to his beloved Princess Marya a third type of female face: an ugliness so severe that men turn away in embarrassment and she herself despairs before the mirror. But again and again Marya’s radiant eyes, the eyes of the Mother of God on a holy icon, have the capacity to transform her plainness - never to make it formally beautiful, which in Tolstoy is never a virtue, but to express love toward others, forgiveness, compassion, and access to a higher spiritual sphere. When, during Prince Andrei’s final days and death, Natasha and Marya at last overcome their mutual antipathy, their two positive variants of a receptive human face (immediate joy and contemplative depth) supplement one another in a passionate friendship. Only a mix of the two families can produce the fertility of the novel’s Epilogue.

Nikolai Gogol, our final exemplar in this Russian family of human faces, adds a third variant: neither the radiant iconic lik nor the hollowly deceptive lichina, but something more monstrous and comic at the dynamic peripheries of this sacred/demonic binary. Gogol specializes in the face that is still being assembled (its parts not yet fixed in place: a floating nose, an unfinished chin, even a face like an egg with a certain phosphorescence but no distinct features) or the face that is already spoiled and rotting (Plyushkin’s from Dead Souls). At times Gogol even gives us “a hole in place of a face.”22 The astonishing elasticity of Gogolian faces is his contribution to overcoming the separation of body and spirit, always so uncongenial to Russian Orthodox thinking.

The speaking, receiving face is the only force competent to bridge great Russian distances. It does so directly, eye to eye - not through intermediaries, representatives, or impersonal “blind” laws, for the idea that “justice is blind” is incomprehensible and counterintuitive to the logic of lik. The desired direct intuition occurs either in close spatial proximity to others or else in a sort of sensually felt collectivity, what Russians have traditionally called sobornost' (conciliarity, togetherness) or tselostnost' (wholeness). Central to this complex of ideas is that wholeness does not mean homogeneity or sameness. Every face is different, every personality is distinct, but each needs the other (or many others) in order to realize the contours of its own self. It is significant that the Russian language has no native word for privacy, and also that Russian culture did not develop the metaphysical image so productive in Western Christendom, that of the soul imprisoned within the body. The body (and especially the face) was not a prison but a vehicle, a responsive mirror, the “soul made flesh.” Light moved through that body and sanctified it. Twentieth-century Bolshevik literature seized upon this sacral collectivist tradition and politicized it, first