The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The virulent campaign directed against Boris Pasternak over the Nobel Prize in Literatureis oneindex ofthe tension and confusion.When Pasternakreceived the prize in 1958 for his novel Doctor Zhivago (an Italian edition had appeared the previous year, followed soon by the English), he was vilified in the press and at official meetings nationwide as a traitor, philistine, and “decadent formalist” – even though very few Soviets had read the novel, which was still unpublished in Russian. The Bolshevik Revolution is portrayed in that novel for what it was, a political coup rather than a mass uprising, and Strelnikov (the husband of Zhivago’s beloved, Lara) destroys peasant villages out of mili-tarynecessity.But arguably more serious than these political indiscretionsis the novel’s literary texture, its unapologetic alliance of poetry, medical healing, and erotic love. Russia’s suffering becomes background to a personal love story – actually, several love stories – whose resolution always seemed more pressing than any social or moral task. The ease with which this complex philosophical novel was reduced to a sultry, silly, but tuneful and picturesque Hollywood box-office hit (David Lean’s 1965 Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie) is confirmation of its “Western”-friendly plot, if judged by the perspective of party-minded Russian literature at mid-century. Even today, Russians despise the American film as unworthy of their great novelist-poet. In 2006, a Russian television serial based on the novel was produced that polemically targeted that Hollywood bowdlerization.

Pasternak was compelled to renounce the Nobel Prize. If he had left the country to receive it, he would not have been allowed back in. Other international prizes (Venice Film Festival, Cannes) were tolerated, but Soviet authorities bristled about Stockholm. The uneasy relationship between Russian writers and that coveted prize has helped shape the foreign footprint of the Russian canon. Since the founding of the Nobel prizes in 1901, five Russians have won the award for Literature, three of them while on Russian soil. (That Leo Tolstoy, the world’s most famous writer, was still alive during the first nine years of the

224 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

award and not selected for it was a scandal – although the bard of Yasnaya Polyana would surely not have accepted: he craved repression, not one more award, and the idea of literary honor linked to, and financed by, the discoverer of dynamite could only have struck the pacifist Tolstoy as obscene.) The three “Soviet-based” laureates are Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965, for his war epic The Quiet Don written a quarter-century earlier, 1928–40), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970). All awards were political. Even Sholokhov, who had served the Stalinist literary establishment impeccably, was known for his intercessions on behalf of writers. In a spectacular speech at the 1956 Twentieth PartyCongress,SholokhovshamedtheUnionthathadnourishedhim,remark-ing on the “huge piles of gray trash” that buried the handful of intelligent books produced over the past several decades – and noting that the Union contained almost four thousand members but this size was deceptive, because among them were so many “dead souls.”

Of Russian Nobel laureates, the most heroic in productivity, longevity, and resistance has been Solzhenitsyn. He will be this chapter’s first, “Tolstoyan” anchor for its survey of the post-Stalinist literary field. Our second and contrasting anchor will be the most “Dostoevskian” of the women prose writers of the next generation, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938). The third section of this chapter, devoted to three younger prose writers of the post-communist period already well established in English translation, makes no attempt at anchoring or synthesis – only at sampling the rich variety out of which a twenty-first-century literary canon will emerge.

The intelligentsia and the camps (Solzhenitsyn)