The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

50 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

else, something more important!” The widespread Western idea that life can be difficult, useful, and morally demanding while also being well ordered and prosperous is not easy to defend against this very Russian fear of becoming a poshlyak. Indeed, the abstract noun from poshlyi - poshlost' - is one of two Russian words that Nabokov insisted had no “Western” equivalent.18 (The other word, toska, refers to a peculiarly targetless Russian melancholy.) Part of the translation difficulty begins with the Eastern Orthodox Christian model of society, which makes no provision for a Protestant elite that justifies its accumulation of wealth (with or without the work ethic) as proof of God’s favor. Quite the opposite: an excess of possessions can lead only to smugness and spiritual inertness. Material security - a morally neutral background texture for many literary plots in post-industrial countries - has aroused far greater irritation and suspicion in Russian culture.

One category of roguishness was not well developed in the Russian context: the professional roue or sexual rogue (Don Juan or Casanova for men, femme fatale for women). This important type entered Russian high literary culture only during the Romantic period, and even then long retained the flavor of a European import. When Pushkin tried his hand at the Don Juan legend (The Stone Guest, 1830, one of his four “Little Tragedies” in verse), it was with the intent of demonstrating that Russian authors, and the Russian language, could deal confidently with the most cosmopolitan European plots. But characteristically, Pushkin awards his Don Juan lofty poetic dimensions that undercut the covetous physical aspect of his pursuit and add aesthetic luster to it. If Pushkin cleanses and poeticizes the purely sensuous, then Tolstoy darkens and coarsens it. When he touched upon the femme fatale type with his own Helen of Troy, Helene Kuragina-Bezukhova in War and Peace, she became perversion incarnate, a one-dimensional woman unworthy of psychological investigation. It can even be argued that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina - whom he most certainly did deem worthy of subtle psychological treatment - is brought to suicide not by the fact of her infidelity and not by the loss of her son, both long familiar facts of her life with Vronsky, but by jealousy nourished, to her horror, by an uncontrollably growing sexual appetite.

Intriguingly, it might have been Dostoevsky, that chronicler of the “accidental family,” who came closest to achieving what we might call carnal dignity. He created several unforgettable portraits of the beautiful, hungry, wounded, and predatory female (Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina in Demons, Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov). The final woman in this sequence, the temptress Grushenka, under pressure of Mitya’s arrest and imminent Siberian exile, evolves before our eyes into a loyal helpmeet, almost a pravednitsa, but - and this is key - without losing any of her earlier, sexually