The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 49

unappealing. But his flaws pale in comparison with Plyushkin, the miser in that novel, whose hoarded wealth turns to rot and whose person becomes paranoid and beggarly. Plyushkin is beyond rogue or villain, a black hole that sucks in every material thing and immobilizes it. He is absolutely unredeemable. Greed of this paralyzing scope is so disrespected that rogues who redistribute wealth by any means, on any pretext, can easily become noble outlaws, or cease to be outlaws at all.

This Russian discomfort with material accumulation provokes our second co mment. Acco rding to Vladimir Nabokov, Russian ro guery - at least in Gogol’s fictional gallery - boasts a special sub-type, the poshlyak (from the adjective poshlyi: vulgar, trivial, banal), designating a self-satisfied materialist, a mediocrity, the ultimate consumer mentality. This mediocrity knows neither heights nor depths; he is cautious, acquisitive, narrow-minded. To bolster his weight in the world, he would always prefer to buy than to spend. In Crime and Punishment, Pyotr Luzhin (his name derives from luzha, “mud puddle,” and also suggests the German l u¨gen/Russian l'gat', to tell a lie) is one such figure, whose economic pragmatism degenerates rapidly into moral villainy. In War and Peace, Tolstoy forgives the extravagant, impulsively generous and financially bankrupt Rostov family, even when their fiscal irresponsibility causes a great deal of grief. He marries the profligate survivors, Natasha and herbrother Nikolai, to wealthy heirs and heiresses. But Tolstoy does not forgive the elder Rostov daughter Vera and her shallow, calculating husband Berg for decorating their apartment out of the spoils of war. He does not even forgive Sonya -the loyal, thrifty, morally astute ward of the Rostovs - for caring about the family’s expensive carpets when their carts are being unloaded to make room for wounded officers during the evacuation of Moscow. No capital value can accrue to a thing, only to a life.

Following Dostoevsky’s lead, twentieth-century Russian satire of Western societies tended to target one aspect especially: bourgeois prosperity. Such satirists routinely ignored (or discredited as sham) whatever civil liberties or political freedoms they saw, emphasizing only the triviality, conformity, and tedium of a comfortably provisioned life. One good example is The Islanders, a novel of British life written in 1918 by Evgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937), by profession an engineer who supervised the construction of Russian icebreakers in England during World War I and later authored the anti-utopia We. In a celebrated moment near the end of Solzhenitsyn’s great novel The Cancer Ward (1968), the camp (and cancer) survivor Gleb Kostoglotov, just released from the hospital ward, overhears in a department store a man ask for a shirt with a size fifteen collar. He is staggered. “Why return to this life?” he asks himself. “If you have to remember your collar size, you’d have to forget something