The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

62The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the anthropomorphized antics of Mount Olympus, fueled by rage, jealousy, revenge, rape, and meanness of spirit, either natural or normal - and certainly no model for human behavior. Kindness, fidelity, and the capacity to nurture were valued over freedom or valor.

The center of human life, the peasant house, was embedded in four elements, the same four known to the medieval West. Two were mythical-metaphysical, masculine in gender, intangible, and behaved “vertically” (that is, they “rose”): air [vozdukh] and fire [ogon']. Two were more material-physical, female in gender, solid, and behaved “horizontally” (they fell, filled up or flowed): land [zemlya] and water [voda]. Both pairs were obligatory, but their energies did not mix. Nor did they fundamentally change. The idea of progress was not part of the peasant worldview; the very word for “time,” vremya, is derived from the verb vertet'sya, “to revolve,” spin or spiral around. Since time was not progressive but cyclical, whatever change we see can only be superficial - the work of wizards, masks, or shape-shifters.

Since native Russian paganism had no established priesthood and Russian villages no temples, it was easily “conquered” by Christianity. But the pagan cosmos was pragmatic and overall tolerant. It made room for the officially new and then re-coalesced around the well, the barn, the hearth. Up through the eighteenth century, Church and state authorities in the cities attempted to stamp out pagan “survivals” in Russian rural culture - much as the Bolsheviks attempted to stamp out Christian “survivals” in the first half of the twentieth. But in the nineteenth century, the authorities gave up trying. Precisely that century witnessed the phenomenal flowering of a Russian literature that freely integrated motifs of paganism, Christian monotheism, and modernization. All of Dostoevsky’s great novels must be read in these three dimensions at once.

Saints’ lives: sacrificial, holy-foolish, administrative, warrior

The first type of Russian Orthodox vita or saint’s life [in Russian, zhitie] is that of the “passion-sufferer” [strastoterpets], an innocent martyr, often a child. In imitation of Christ, this innocent sacrifices its life - but for the sake of national unity or domestic peace, not for the salvation of all humanity. The concept of original sin is not central to Russian Orthodoxy; its punitive aspects are not obsessively dwelt upon. The Fall is less a story of sexual guilt than of prideful autonomy. The founding text for this meek type of Christian biography -doubled in two siblings, focused on family loyalty - was recorded in the