The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Secular reasons for Russia’s word-centeredness echo these sacral concerns. A magically potent Word was a word worthy of being closely watched. From the mid-eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century, state censorship could reach a degree of suspiciousness and capriciousness hard for us to fathom in terms of the labor-hours required to impose it. Of course, there was always freedom by default: bureaucratic carelessness, networks of protection and politeness, regal arbitrariness, mercy, and the sheer vastness of the administrative task – but all the same, noteven a rudimentary system of safeguards for individualexpression in thepublic realm ever existed. In principle,every scrap of newsprint, every line of verse could be scrutinized, by secular and church authorities, with separate, successively more severe filters for in-print genres and theatrical performance. This quest to root out unapproved ideological content was made even more virulent by a worship of the shape and sound of the specifically Russian word. When Pushkin was exiled to the south of Russia in 1820 for penning some revolutionary verse, Russia’s sophisticated bilingual elite must have noticed that the sentiments in his offending poems did little more than repeat the abstract cliche´s of French liberationist rhetoric on which the reigning Tsar Alexander I had himself been raised two decades earlier. But when Pushkin addressed local realities and applied his glorious Russian to those banally familiar turns of phrase, they became startlingly new, authoritative, and impermissible.

Russian space: never-ending, absorptive, unfree

It is a truism that vis-a`-vis the Western nations, Russia has always lost in time and triumphed in space. Space saved Russia from Napoleon and Hitler. The broad expanse of Siberia saved Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (and Dostoevsky himself) from crimes against body and spirit committed in crowded, stifling cities. The “bird-troika” invoked by Gogol to save his trickster Chichikov at

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the end of Dead Souls thrills us precisely because it rises up out of the dust so unexpectedly, terrifying all who witness it, and then soars away into the distance while, in the final phrase of the novel, “all other peoples and nations stand aside and grant it right of way.” Russian land never runs out. The need to control this potent surplus of space and tie its wandering population down to the tax rolls justified the centralized autocracy. In the opinion of Marshall Poe, writing a decade after the 1991 collapse, if the Russian state looks like a failure it is probably because we stubbornly insist on classifying her as a borderline European power, in which context she is indeed always “behind.” But in fact the Russia of the tsars and Soviets was a remarkable geopolitical enterprise, the modern world’s most successful West Eurasian empire.14

Space is forever forward, but time is an embarrassment. “Backward” for Russia has conventionally meant “not yet caught up with the progress made by France, Britain, America.” In part because of such invidious comparisons, novelists as diverse as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Olesha, and Solzhenitsyn have been united in their contempt for European “progress” – acquisitive, morally stupefying – and eager to discredit it. But the humiliationand vulnerability remained, and communism attempted to alter both. Time, too, would be forced to move to Russia’s advantage. When Valentin Kataev wrote his Modernist industrial novel Time, Forward! (1932), which chronicles the construction of a huge metallurgical plant in the Urals city of Magnitogorsk, his choice of title resonated. We learn in Chapter 2 of that novel that Kataev’s engineer hero, David Lvovich Margulies, always awakes before his alarm clock rings. There is no Chapter 1. It was, we read, “omitted for the time being.” Life is moving too fast; no time for it!

All the same, that abundant and reliable parameter, Russian space, could be deceptive. Just as a reverence for the Russian word can lead paradoxically to its obsessive monitoring and even enslavement, so triumphant Russian space has been accompanied by a sense of being trapped, tied down, crowded together in tiny communal apartments in cities with permanent housing shortages or herded into prison cells scattered over an open plain. Since so many literary narratives, from fairy tales to epic poems to postmodernist science fiction, are built on this paradox of vast but constricting Russian space, let us consider some of its dimensions.