The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

46 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

This paradox of happiness achieved through unfreedom in wide open space, of salvation through imprisonment on Russia’s vast frontier, has proved spiritually very fertile for Russian literature. Raskolnikov confesses his murder in Petersburg – but only repents of it in Siberia, in prison, gazing out over the empty steppe. A story with similar geographical shape was so dear to Tolstoy that he wrote it twice, once as the peasant Platon Karatayev relates it to Pierre Bezukhov, prisoner of the French, in War and Peace (1863–68), and then later, in 1872, in the free-standing parable “God Sees the Truth, But Waits.” A man unjustly accused of murder serves twenty-six years as a convict in Siberia, meets the real murderer there, refuses to betray him when the latter tries to escape, and both men die spiritually content. In such narratives, the unfree Siberian exile is Everyman, by birthright a sinner, for whom release into true freedom is release from life itself.

Other organizing binaries for the frontier might include civilian versus military, or the scientific explorer (cartographer, naturalist, cosmonaut at the edge of the known mapped world) versus the supernaturally assisted traveler “beyond seven seas” in the magical folk tale. Let us consider only one final contrast:settlers versus wanderers.Heretherelevant distinctionisbetweenthose who set out with the goal of arriving somewhere, of putting down roots in a new home, and those for whom space itself is their destined and undifferentiated home, their ultimate residence.

Wanderers can be secular or religious. The secular wanderers in Russian literature were largely borrowed from European Romanticism: restless, alienated Byronic heroes, who kept “travel notes” and died beyond the boundaries of the story line. The religious variant of wanderer, the strannik, was a figure of some spiritual stature. In Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), the foolish buffoon-father Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, having sired a demonically destructive son, decides, after decades of posing and sponging, to take to the open road with backpack and staff. He ends his life as a strannik in the company of a Bible-vendor, which casts a faint but authentic aura of wisdom over his otherwise parodied and indulgent person. And at the spiritual center of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Princess Marya reveres the wandering God’s folk who visit the Bolkonsky estate at Bald Hills. Her brother Andrei and her stern industrious father must ridicule these visitors, but Tolstoy’s central hero and seeker, Pierre Bezukhov, is sympathetic and curious about Marya’s guests. Seekers are drawn to wanderers.

Wanderers are not obliged to arrive anywhere, but their natural end is a monastery. In a strange mock epic written in 1873 titled The Enchanted Wanderer, Nikolai Leskov tells the story of a vigorous young man, born a serf, who carelessly commits several murders, suffers remorse, and in a vision is