Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Pushkin wrote no large novels, and he does not even seem particularly ‘Russian’ in other ways, not even as ‘Russian’ as Turgenev. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) has a main character, Bazarov, whose obsession with social utility (he insists that the dissecting of frogs is superior to water-colour painting) seems satisfactorily strange because it is so hyperbolic. And the novel’s country estate setting is at once charming and exotic, with its serf mistress, its ribboned dogs, and its duel fought over an imagined matter of honour. It is easy to trace a line between Fathers and Sons and Chekhov’s plays, but far less easy to see how Evgeny Onegin – with its wayward digressions, its urbane and ironic tone, and its curious air of repressed emotion – might be a forerunner of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–7) or of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868). The combination of wit with the melancholy appreciation that happiness may be most elusive when easiest to realize makes the book seem more like a successor to Jane Austen’s Persuasion. To be sure, it has some impressive English-language descendants – they include Nabokov’s Lolita and Vikram Seth’s verse novel about San Francisco, The Golden Gate – but these arch and self-conscious texts simply enhance Western readers’ conviction that Pushkin is peculiar in terms of his own, supposedly immediate and spontaneous, culture.

Yet all the major Russian writers were avid readers of European literature; if they reacted against it, they also learned from it. Anna Karenina may be at some level a riposte to Madame Bovary, but there is a direct connection between an image in the opening pages of Flaubert’s novel – Charles Bovary’s hideous hat standing for the inconsequential life remarked by the author alone – and the insignificant stubborn burdock that Tolstoy’s narrator notices at the beginning of Hadji Murat. During the eighteenth century, Russians had been haunted by fears that their literature was too imitative, too dominated by translations. Such fears were replaced during the nineteenth century by pride in native achievements, but receptivity to French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian literature continued. Even writers who had only a poor knowledge of Western languages absorbed foreign material avidly. Dostoevsky’s novels were as indebted to Dickens as they were to Gogol. Though the writer detested the real England when he visited in 1862, that only confirmed his adulation for Dickens. After 1917, love of foreign literature survived not only the bitterness of exile, but the cultural isolation endured by writers who stayed behind in the Soviet Union. Anna Akhmatova’s admiration for T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, and Joseph Brodsky’s for John Donne, are only two of the better-known relationships with Western literature; a more unexpected instance is Marina Tsvetaeva’s enthusiasm for the best-selling American novelist Pearl S. Buck.

By no means all the commentators who shaped Anglophone readers’ views of Russian literature were unaware of the artistic affinity of ‘Russian’ and ‘Western’ traditions. Many were authors themselves – indeed, the most impressive English-language interpretations of Russian literature have tended to be literary rather than critical. The short stories of Chekhov, in particular, left marks on the work of writers in English such as Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and William Trevor. Chekhov’s stories were models of how to contrive small-scale narratives that almost evaded the onward drive of plot, and captured a character’s entire world in a few moments that were both exemplary and elusive. Chekhov’s writing accorded well with Anglophone admiration for unnoticeable virtuosity (it is not for nothing that the term ‘craft’ also means ‘stealth’). But if greatness in prose involves hardly seeming to write literature at all, then some of Pushkin’s narratives – The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Dubrovsky (1832–3), or The Captain’s Daughter (1836) – are likely to disappoint. Here, plot matters a great deal, and the need to provide a resolute ending seems uppermost. In addition, Pushkin’s closeness to French models (Chateaubriand’s René or Constant’s Adolphe, the poetry of Parny and Lamartine) does him no service in Anglophone culture, which has traditionally equated ‘French’ with ‘trite, superficial, and pretentious’.