The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 45

aesthetic texts had been the southern tier. The Caucasus mountain range, Russia’s domestic Alps, was the birthplace of her native tradition of the Sublime. The discovery of awe-inspiring natural beauty on home territory raised Russian literature in its own eyes vis-a`-vis the West, which helped to compensate for other perceived backwardness.

“Frontier heroes” lend themselves to exemplary binaries, of which probably the most robust are the categories of free versus unfree. On the free side we find the monastic frontier communities, homesteaders, pilgrims, adventurers, commercial travelers, heroes of Romantic Wanderlust, and – after the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1725 – scientific expeditions. The classic Russian homesteading text, Sergei Aksakov’s Family Chronicle (1846), describes the travails of a patriarchal household that emigrated eastward into the Ufa region in the Urals, bordering the Bashkir steppe. To this same “free” line belong all Soviet-era narratives of virgin-soil settlers, Trans-Siberian railway workers, and founders of new industrial centers in the Ural mountains. On the unfree side belong the exiles and prisoners.

Two astonishing early autobiographies by pravedniki (one religious, the other political) anchor the punitive Russian frontier narrative. The first, “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself” (1670s), was composed in a vigorous vernacular Russian appropriate to its message of hunger, pain, mud, resignation, compassion, and spiritual courage. Avvakum’s “Life” is the self-accounting of a charismatic religious conservative or “Old Believer” who was persecuted, together with his family, by the official church. His travail through Siberia and then the Far North ended in martyrdom in 1682, when he was burned at the stake. The second autobiography is the 1767 memoir of Princess Natalya Dolgorukaya, who was exiled by order of Empress Anna in 1730 four days after marrying into a disgraced family. It details their 2000-mile deportation to a central Siberian settlement north of Tobolsk on the Ob River. In 1739, after her husband was broken on the wheel and beheaded for treason, Dolgorukaya’s discipline and courage held together the wrecked lives of their large clan. In such punitive narratives as Avvakum’s and Dolgorukaya’s, the scaffolding of evil events is imposed exclusively from without. Under such conditions, to sustain oneself and survive without doing harm to others is the maximum that can be asked of the victim by way of a moral goal. A hero or heroine need take no other initiative. Solzhenitsyn’s prison-camp laborer Shukhov, hero of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), speaks for the optimal plot expectations of this type of hero on the book’s final pages: because so many potentially awful things did not happen to him in his Siberian work gang during that stretch of hours, it was an “unclouded day, almost a happy one.”