The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 39

bred into peasant life and her own possessive nuclear-family love, becoming a comrade,a pravednitsa,andaradicalactivist for the working class. The Mother’s spiritual transformation also altered the image of the Pieta` – for if Pelegeya Nilovna enacts the Madonna at the Cross, then Christ has become a social revolutionary. Gorky’s novel ends as the son is exiled and the mother is beaten to death while proclaiming the truth of socialism in a May Day demonstration.

Fools

Russian culture produced three types of fool. None coincides precisely with fools further west. In common with Western Europe, Russia has the fool of the folk tale, the durak (in Russian Ivanushka-durak, Ivan the Fool, the youngest, laziest, bumbling yet lucky third son). Old Russia also knew medieval jesters, the trickster or shut (pronounced shoot), and a wandering minstrel-acrobat-actor, the skomorokh. All were associated with pagan magic and the demonic. Finally there is that peculiar Russian variant on a Byzantine saint, which has amazed European visitors ever since the sixteenth century: the yurodivy (fool in Christ, holy fool) or blazhenny (blessed one).

If in Europe the fool tended to be a dunce or a rogue, laughed at and held in low esteem, then Russians displayed both a reverence for folly and a tolerance for the physically grotesque and mentally deranged.6 Under Peter I (r. 1682–1725), moronic or grotesque dwarfs did enjoy a brief vogue, but far more commonly, powers of clairvoyance and prophecy were bestowed upon the eccentric or dim-witted. The tradition of the cleverly spoken fool, the fool as sidekick, confidant, or court buffoon to the king, was weakly developed in Russia, enjoying a brief stage life only in the imitative eighteenth century. For many reasons Leo Tolstoy despised Shakespeare and in particular the tragedy King Lear, but he took special offense at the Bard’s punning, pontificating Fool.

Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–97), Modernist prose writer, dissident, and e´migre´ professor at the Sorbonne, drew an engaging portrait of fools and jesters in his lectures from the late 1970s, published as Ivan Durak [Ivan the Fool].7 Well into adolescence, the Fool lies “on the stove” (the warm sleeping-shelves to either side of the large bricked peasant chimney), doing nothing but blowing his nose or catching flies. If unable to avoid a task set by his older and smarter brothers, he does it stupidly, without forethought, to further his own comfort (not, note, out of kindness or passivity: Ivan the Fool can punch, kill, lie, sew up innocent people in sacks and dump them into the icy river without a second thought). Central to his nature is an openness to many paths, living for his pleasure in