The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 35

In Bakhtin’s view, the vigorously functioning, free personality (fictive or real) needs open-ended time more than open-ended space. It is no surprise, however, that the most durable parameter in many Russian chronotopic situations is space, with the temporal dimension a secondary, often dysfunctional afterthought. “Growing up” properly can appear difficult or dead-ended. Developmental time simply stops: through early sacrificial death, in capped or arrested adolescence, or on the far side of threshold moments that commit the hero to an unchanging revealed truth. Conversely, space-based trajectories or metaphors remain fertile and attractive options in a variety of secular as well as sacred genres: “setting out in search of something,” being exiled or displaced, waking up after thirty years of immobility and “going on the road” to slay Russia’s enemies (the plot of Ilya Muromets, Russia’s favorite epic hero). Start with the spatial imperative, and time will tag along. Even when the journey is parodiedbeyond repair,asinthe tragicomic alcoholic fantasyMoscowto the End of the Line (1970) by Venedikt Erofeyev (1938–90), the illusion of movement is the indispensable starting point. Leo Tolstoy, Russia’s great demystifier and debunker of all the bad habits we live by, spent decades writing narratives that showed how people are doomed if they try to escape their truth or their fate by running away – from The Cossacks (1863) through Anna Karenina (1873–78) to his late stories “Master and Man” (1895) and “Father Sergius” (1898). And then a week before his death, he himself boarded a train to get out.

In addition to a general preference for changing one’s fate by moving through space, the very concept of evil was scattered and diversified. In traditional Russian folk culture, the devil [chort] was small: omnipresent, petty, devious, often a changeling, miserably ugly and unheroic. Traditional Russian culture had a bigger devil [dyavol] – an abstractly ominous black body – but no humanized, grand Miltonic Satan; native Russian demons were “not tragic or avuncular or nobly doomed free spirits.”1 Such anthropomorphized images of evil, largely Romantic in origin, arrived from the West only in the early nineteenth century. Instead, a myriad of tiny folk devils hovered around your body, eager to crawl down your throat when you yawned, up your birth canal while you were delivering your infant, into your ears during an unguarded moment. Against this onslaught of small exhaustions and seductions one could apply numerous folk charms and incantations. But the best defense against demonic temptation was “righteousness.”

Righteous persons [pravednik (m.) / pravednitsa (f.)]

To be a “righteous person” is more an attitude than a deed. Christian faith often informs this righteousness, but the type was frequently secularized and