The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 33

they lose all possible positive qualities. One challenge for twentieth-century Russian literature was to devise an acceptable sort of success for the pragmatic and disciplined wage-earner, state servitor, or career bureaucrat in modern civic culture, without losing the enormous energy contained in the sacrificial, spiritually rich hero.

If this was a difficult task for the Soviet century, it will be even more daunting for the more fragmentary and less cohesive twenty-first. But full stops, failed apocalypse, and looking out the window at empty space going nowhere are completely familiar to this cultural tradition and easily accommodated by it. This Introduction opened on the assertion that the Russian literary canon is “always about to forget that it is merely made up out of words.” Assuming that is true, surely Russia’s literature will talk itself out of this trap too.