The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Eighteenth-century prose dramas mercilessly satirized country bumpkins. Of equal or greater weight to these comic scenes were the tragic or angry variants. The peasant imprisoned on the plain at the mercy of “city meddlers” became the protagonist of a wide number of narratives, from Mikhail Chulkov’s savage 1792 sketch on the bureaucratic cover-up of a mass peasant murder (“A Bitter Fate”) through the conscience-stricken outrage of Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802), the sentimentalismofNikolai Karamzin(1766–1826), Turgenev’s evocative Sportsman’s Sketches, Tolstoy’s “Alyosha the Pot,” and Chekhov’s rural tales (“In the Ravine,” “Peasants”). In his 1885 story “The Culprit,” Chekhov relates the criminal trial of one Denis Grigoriev, peasant, accused of sabotage against the railways and sentenced to prison because he had unscrewed a nut that held the rails to the ties – for how, mutters Denis, can any decent fish be caught without a sinker? Of course he would not have unscrewed all of them. In his 1905 memoir of Chekhov, Maksim Gorky relates how the author of “The Culprit” was cornered one day by a young, freshly uniformed prosecutor who insisted that progressive society had no choice but to imprison the Denis Grigorievs if Russian trains were to run safely – and how mournful Chekhov became, hearing him out. This image of an uncomprehending and trapped peasant (sometimes innocent, sometimes defensively sly), victimized by a callous city dweller with a sheaf of laws in his briefcase and an arrest warrant in his hand, became a painful nineteenth-century genre scene. This geophysical binary – urban seats of power against the countryside – reached its apogee in the collectivization campaigns of the first Stalinist Five-Year Plan (1928–32). By that time, of course, writers were no longer free to describe it. It has been said that only during the war of 1941–45 did enough Russians succeed in suffering together to heal this split between the tiny, rich, exploiting cities and the broad laboring plain. Surely this was one reason why World War II narratives remained a vigorous literary genre in Russia long after the other combatants in that conflict had moved on to other themes.

This abrupt distinction between city life and life everywhere else has proved tenacious. The refrain of Chekhov’s ThreeSisters,toget somehow“ToMoscow!” so that real life can begin, is gently mocked in that play. But significantly we do not know where the Prozorov family estate is: is it four miles from that dreamed-of Moscow, or forty, or four hundred? Despite the telegraph and occasional stretch of train track, the space between habitations remained

28 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

mythical, without gradation. Roads were (and are) a disaster. There is little tradition of the civilized suburb. To this day, surprisingly close to the city limits of Petersburg and Moscow, “the provinces” begin – unmowed, unpaved, out of touch. To leave Moscow or Petersburg has always meant not only to go out in space but also to go back in time. This too reinforces the sense of space being primary and pockets of time negotiable, set down like the cities, as islands in a sea.

Even this excessive, untamable Russian space had its edges. In 1829, Pushkin slipped out from under police surveillance to visit the Russian army skirmishing on the Caucasus–Turkish border. As he later described this episode in his droll travel notes, A Journey to Arzrum (1836), en route to join the Russian troops he happened upon asmallriverwhich, a Cossack informed him, was theboundary. “I had never before seen foreign soil,” Pushkin wrote of this encounter. “The border held something mysterious for me . . . Never before had I broken out from the borders of immense Russia. I rode happily into the sacred river, and my good horse carried me out on the Turkish bank. But this bank had already been conquered: I was still in Russia.”17