The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Traditional narratives 79

But miracle itself has no logic. Nor is it dialogic. It is an unconditional gift, an orientation of myself to the world regardless of how the world treats me back.

Lotman’s two essays suggest a final lesson to be learned from model biography, useful for the watershed of the eighteenth century: that moral guidance can be provided by a culture in two valid but fundamentally opposed ways. Each aspires to a different ideal. The first way is guidance through a relatively fixed and impersonal system of law. This law is codified, “blind,” and legitimized to the extent that it applies to all, precedes the individual case, and follows its own rules. The second way is guidance through an integrated human personality. This personality – or face, lik – is assumed to be swayable by the needs, vagaries, and intonations of the petitioner. Compassion and mercy are essential to it and cost it nothing, since it does not worry about setting precedents. Mentors in this mode function face-to-face and one-on-one. Without question the second model is mainstream for the nineteenth-century literary canon, and for much of the great dissident literature of the twentieth. But the first, more severely juridical option is also present in Russian literary culture – although not always in forms immediately familiar to a Western reader. It expresses itself through comedy and satire, but of a stern sort, contained inside a neoclassical frame. The eighteenth century is its birthplace.