The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

60 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

in which an absolute ruler pushes through a modernizing reform against the popular will, resonates throughout Russian history. Although printing made steady gains, until the late seventeenth century, the small number of literate Russians preferred scrolls to printed books.

Traditional texts were performed in connection with specific communal rituals. This sense of the “oneness” of a literary work with its experienced environment remained an ideal for many Russian writers, long after the triumph of the privately authored, privately consumed book. In his final years, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) provocatively declared a wedding song and a well-timed anecdote or joke preferable to a symphony or a novel. At the time of his death, the visionary Symbolist composer Aleksandr Scriabin (1872–1915) was planning a vast choral work of divine revelation, Mysterium, which would synthesize all the arts in a single performance, usher in the apocalypse, and herald the birth of a new world. Tolstoy as a peasant primitivist and Scriabin as a religious ecstatic might be seen as two possible twentieth-century end points for traditional (pre-modern, pre-print) Russian narrative. One is the down-to-earth, profane wisdom of folklore and the folk tale [skazka], rooted in a partially Christianized paganism. Its master plot is survival. The other is the revelatory, didactic, transfigurative saint’s life. Its master plot is intercession and salvation. In between are various hybrids: oral legends, cautionary tales, and the folk epic [bylina] where the epic hero, or bogatyr, is part warrior, part saint, part superman, and at rare moments even partly a folk-tale fool.

All of these narratives – ecclesiastic and folk – could accommodate miracles and the supernatural. Russian medieval genres did not know the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, only between entertainment (profane stories) and edification (sacred stories). As in most pre-modern oral cultures, if a given legend did not seem true for its contemporary audience, this was no proof that it was “made up”; it had been true for grandparents or ancestors, who had witnessed it first hand or heard it from a trusted second party. All events, consciousnesses, and narratives were linked in a single, integrated continuity, told or experienced. Just as no person could stand alone, fully outside a clan or community (for every person at least has parents), so no literary work stood alone.

But integration did not mean homogenization or a dissolving of the one into the many. Just as every individual is born of two discrete parents but does not duplicate either of them, so was every medieval text perceived as indispensable to the integrity of the whole. No body was excluded from a community merely because it happened to be orphaned or deceased. Churches were understood also to be bodies – or more precisely, human faces with eyes, ears, and heads