The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 51

alluring skills. This should not surprise us. Key to Dostoevsky’s extraordinary popularity in hisown timewas hisgenius at devising solutionsto socialailments that were hopelessly cliche´d in Europe (concubinage, libertinage, unjust inheritance, urban crime) through the righteous and foolish heroes of the Russian tradition.

The villains of Russian literature – those heroes or anti-heroes who attack a readership’s most precious values – are to some extent continuous with the rogues, especially, as we saw, in the economic sphere. From the Baron in Pushkin’s “Little Tragedy” The Miserly Knight (1830) through Gogol’s miser Plyushkin to Dostoevsky’s despicable Luzhin, healthy lives are polluted and destroyed by hoarders. If these hoarders hurt strangers or obstruct tax-collectors sent by an impersonal state bureaucracy, their sin is not so heinous. They can become attractive rogues and sometimes even positive heroes. But if their hoarding destroys their family, it is unforgivable. Albert, the miserly Baron’s neglected son, complains bitterly that money, for his father, is neither servant nor friend but a master whom the Baron serves “like an Egyptian slave,” like “a dog on a chain”: the gold quietly glistens in its chests while his father sustains himself on “water and dry crusts, never sleeps, runs about and barks.” Albert’s first impulse is to spend, which is a form of giving. Money, like love, only has value if it circulates. Pin it to yourself and you will lose everything.

The nadir of such greed and money-driven villainy is reached with the darkest nineteenth-century novel, The Golovlyovs (1870s), by the civil servant and satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–89). The tone is set by its grasping matriarch Arina, successful businesswoman. She doles out pittances to her eldest and youngest sons (depraved, resentful, drunken) while the hypocritical middle son, Porfir y Yudushka [Little Judas], sweet-talks his way into the entire inheritance after his brothers’ deaths. The second generation slips into prostitution, Siberian exile, suicide. On the final pages Porfiry is found frozen to death en route to his mother’s grave, in an attempt to ask forgiveness. But of whom? As with Gogol’s Plyushkin, the money vice leaves no values behind. Thus the practitioners deserve no mercy and can be rubbed out. Villains at Golovlyov levels of greed were revived officially in the early Stalinist period as kulaks (“fists”: well-off peasants) and as cartoon-strip Western capitalists. Popular support for their extermination was easy to incite. From the perspective of the terrorized economics that governed Russia’s modernizing – but at the same time re-medievalized – Soviet 1930s, it is sobering to recall a seventeenth-century didactic verse written by the court poet Simeon Polotsky (1629–80), on the theme of the cheating, profiteering, speculating “Merchant Class”: