The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

30The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Denikin’s White forces were moving on Moscow during the darkest days of the Civil War; another was composed by Anna Akhmatova in 1940, as Nazi troops were annihilating Poland. In the opening lines of her poem, Akhmatova calls herself a kitezhanka, a resident of that doomed, saved, sunken city. Essential to the myth is that the city indubitably exists - only we who now gaze upon it are insufficiently pure to hear it or see it. In her work on the Kitezh legend, Ksana Blank suggests that the myth of this Invisible City is structured as anti-Petersburg and set in the hidden, apocalyptic, backward-looking space of the seventeenth-century schismatics or Old Believers, where it refutes the very idea of linear, temporal progress in the visible public realm.20

A family of human faces

Kitezh makes itself visible to the face that gazes on it, but only if that face is seeking communion and purification. With this image, we arrive at our final Russian idea, or cultural invariant, that might be said to link the Russian Word and Russian space: the concept of lik. Lik (pronounced leek) is one of several Russian nouns for the human face, and etymologically the most basic. The word signifies visage, countenance, a responsive face that contains eyes that gaze out on other faces, ears that receive others’ words. Eyes on such a face transmit divine light.21 Saints portrayed on icons possess a lik. The noun lik is more spiritually elevated than litso, the generic Russian word for face, and directly gives rise to the word lichnost', the abstract noun palely rendered in English as “personality” but which, in Russian spiritual philosophy, always implies moral and interpersonal responsibility. At any point litso can degenerate into lichina, a mask that refuses to communicate, that looks (and is) lifeless, whose beauty becomes rigid and demonic. Dostoevsky’s Nikolai Stavrogin, the estranged, doomed hero of his novel Demons, possesses precisely such a beautiful and terrible lichina.

Leo Tolstoy felt these distinctions keenly, if intuitively, when creating the characters of War and Peace. Female beauty fascinated him. Eventually he came to fear it, but not before he had analyzed its workings thoroughly in Natasha Rostova, Helene Kuragina-Bezukhova, and Marya Bolkonskaya. Natasha enchants, but she is not beautiful. At moments of crisis her face is described as positively ugly, misshapen, “absurd,” with its large mouth gaping atop her scrawny neck and shoulders. To the highest degree, however, this face is responsive, porous, a lik. Natasha’s mobility, receptivity, and joy in the present become the magnet that draws others in. Everything she does and says has the stamp of her own eccentric face on it (the Russian word for “personal” is lichnoe, “belonging to that face”). In contrast, an unresponsive, lacquered

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 31

beauty is always impersonal, a lichina. Such is Helene’s static “marble beauty” and complacent self-absorption; like the terrible beauty of Dostoevsky’s Stavro-gin, it will degenerate into active debauchery and evil. Tolstoy awards to his beloved Princess Marya a third type of female face: an ugliness so severe that men turn away in embarrassment and she herself despairs before the mirror. But again and again Marya’s radiant eyes, the eyes of the Mother of God on a holy icon, have the capacity to transform her plainness - never to make it formally beautiful, which in Tolstoy is never a virtue, but to express love toward others, forgiveness, compassion, and access to a higher spiritual sphere. When, during Prince Andrei’s final days and death, Natasha and Marya at last overcome their mutual antipathy, their two positive variants of a receptive human face (immediate joy and contemplative depth) supplement one another in a passionate friendship. Only a mix of the two families can produce the fertility of the novel’s Epilogue.

Nikolai Gogol, our final exemplar in this Russian family of human faces, adds a third variant: neither the radiant iconic lik nor the hollowly deceptive lichina, but something more monstrous and comic at the dynamic peripheries of this sacred/demonic binary. Gogol specializes in the face that is still being assembled (its parts not yet fixed in place: a floating nose, an unfinished chin, even a face like an egg with a certain phosphorescence but no distinct features) or the face that is already spoiled and rotting (Plyushkin’s from Dead Souls). At times Gogol even gives us “a hole in place of a face.”22 The astonishing elasticity of Gogolian faces is his contribution to overcoming the separation of body and spirit, always so uncongenial to Russian Orthodox thinking.