The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 53

executions to a red berry squashed against his savage chest. Six months later the poet was arrested, exiled, given a reprieve, and required to produce an “Ode to Stalin.” Then in 1937 Mandelstam was re-arrested, to meet his end near Vladivostok in winter 1938. The tyrant in Russia has always been threatened by acts of straightforward outrage and feats of more private loyalty. But tyranny has also been successfully undone by more double-voiced means – through parable, satire, the fantastic, the absurd, and perhaps with greater effectiveness.

Chekhov delivers one such parable of despotism in his “Ward Number Six” (1892), a provincial hospital ward-turned-madhouse-turned-prison. Its fulcrum is the doorman Nikita, an impenetrable bully with the power to lock in or lock out as commanded by his superiors. It is Nikita who redefines a slothful, recalcitrant doctor first into a patient and then into an inmate. This story was one of a handful of tales that turned Lenin into an implacable enemy of the tsarist state. Laughter can be equally terrible, especially with its demonic undercurrent. When the evil is off to the edge of the action, behind a closed door, seen imperfectly by some na¨ıve folksy narrator, the story becomes all the more truthful and terrifying for being only partly understood by its teller. In Leskov’s 1881 yarn Levsha [The Left-handed Craftsman], a provincial’s hilariously misspoken account of competition between the Russian and British empires unfolds blandly against the brutal, violent, wasteful Russia of Nicholas I. In the comic masterpiece Sandro from Chegem (1979) by the Abkhazian-Russian writer Fazil Iskander (b. 1929), we glimpse Stalin and his NKVD henchman Beria at a drunken feast through the eyes of a member of a Georgian dance troupe brought north to entertain their former fellow mountaineers in the Kremlin. And finally: avant-garde drama is well acquainted with political villainy. In the Kafkaesque playscript Elizabeth Bam (1927) by the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms (1905–42), two men behind a closed door accuse a woman of murder “in the name of the law” – and until the last moment it seems as if she will be saved from these thugs outside by the impossibly fantastical room in which she is trapped. But that room turns out to be reality.

Society’s misfits in the European style

Our final category of heroes is more familiar to a Western readership. These are the “European-style misfits” of the Sentimentalist and Romantic eras: the “man of nature” escaping the city, the “hero of sensibility” oppressed by society, the noble outlaw, the figures of Faust, Hamlet or Don Quixote. Many