The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 47

commanded to wander through Russia, the Tatar lands, and the Caucasus, constantly exposing his life to danger before being deemed worthy to become a monk. Maksim Gorky (1868–1936) tapped into the same tradition, when he launched his career as a writer in the 1890s with bestselling stories of itinerant dockworkers and charismatic tramps.

The wanderer or displaced person during war constitutes a terrible and vital subset of Russian heroes, one that remained vigorous in literature and film up through the end of the Soviet era. Its human parameters stretched from helpless children to cold-blooded killing machines (Bolshevik as well as enemy). A rich Soviet literature of the (literally) embattled frontier emerged out of the savagery of the Civil War (1918–21), which was fought simultaneously on dozens of fronts: on the Western frontier among Poles, Cossacks, and Jews, portrayed in the violent miniatures of Isaak Babel (1894–1941) in Red Cavalry (1924–26); throughout Siberia, Mongolia, and along the Chinese border in the brutal war stories (most notably Armored Train 14–69) of Vsevolod Ivanov (1895–1963), himself of mixed Polish, Mongolian, and Russian ancestry. Total war allowed these writers to bring into focus Russia’s huge ethnographic expanse through fierce personal close-ups that were at once lyrical, shockingly naturalistic, and unsentimental. When, in the 1930s, experimental war prose gave way to more conservative and expansive models – exemplary are the Quiet Don epics by MikhailSholokhov(1905–84)–theprototypeagainrevertedtoTolstoy’sclassic, Russocentric War and Peace. But all Russian war literature has tended to be read as a parable on Russia herself, a land in which experience could never be made short, painless, or small.

Rogues and villains

Our previous three hero types – righteous people, fools, frontiersmen of the ever-expanding and never-pacified edge – have noticeably Russian chrono-topes. To an important degree, each is space-and-time-specific to the Russian culture and continent. With the rogues and villains we move into more pan-European territory. The Russian rogue [plut, pronounced ploot] shares much with the Spanish picaro [rascal], his genetic cousin. But the Russian rogue exhibits some unmistakably national traits, which come into focus at those points where a rogue becomes a villain. In the Russian context, certain acts came to be considered villainous that would not be so quickly condemned elsewhere.

Rogues are not virtuous, of course, but neither are they evil. What gets in the way of evil is their buoyancy, self-confidence, sense of humor, high level