The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

66 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

in the 1220s. The steppe frontier was endless and could not be defended. Thus the Church blessed Prince Alexander in his journeys of taxpaying tribute to the Mongol capital on the Volga River. Two centuries later, when internal rivalries fractured the Horde, Muscovite tsars pitted one khanate against another and reunited the Russian lands.

In the Stalinist period, Saint Alexander Nevsky was rehabilitated. Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film Alexander Nevsky, released in 1938 with Prokofiev’s stirring score, became propaganda art in the Party’s campaign to replace proletarian internationalism with Russo-centric heroes in the shadow of Hitler’s growing might. As Eisenstein had intended, enthusiastic moviegoers saw in the “Germanic” Teutonic knights close relatives of the contemporary fascists. When Stalin and Hitler concluded their non-aggression pact in August 1939, Alexander Nevsky was immediately withdrawn from the movie houses, to be just as rapidly reinstated in June 1941 after the Nazi surprise attack.

In times of national trauma, it is common for governmentsto turn to military heroes as patriotic rallying points. For this purpose Russia’s warrior saints have proved surprisingly durable, even during officially atheistic periods. Throughout the post-communist 1990s, a reinvigorated Russian Orthodox Church won enthusiastic new converts among Russia’s armed forces, humiliated and impoverished by the loss of the Soviet empire.9 In 2004, the Air Force and the Patriarch (with the full approval of President Putin) jointly celebrated the ninetieth anniversary of the world’s first heavy bomber unit (the fighter plane Ilya Muromets of 1914), a ceremony that included a blessing of the troops and, in 2005, the consecration of 160 new bombers in Russia’s Long Range Aviation Forces. The emergence of a faith-based army in this once officially atheistic country will most certainly affect the plots of Russian war literature and its prototypical heroes.

Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the Deathless)

The Russian folk tale [skazka] obeys a different logic than does the saint’s life. In his study of the European folk tale, Max Lu¨thi notes a cardinal difference between it and more didactic narrative such as legendry. “The saint’s legend wantstoexplain,it wantstocomfort,”Lu¨thi notes.“Itdemandsfaithinthetruth of the story and in the correctness of its interpretation. The folktale, however, demands nothing. It does not interpret or explain; it merely observes and portrays . . . It is precisely this relinquishment of explanations that engages our trust.”10 This insight helps us to see why the greatest of Russian psychological novelists, Leo Tolstoy, exhausted by writing War and Peace and temporarily sick of his own hyper-hortative literary voice, turned to folk-tale speech in several