The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The speaking, receiving face is the only force competent to bridge great Russian distances. It does so directly, eye to eye - not through intermediaries, representatives, or impersonal “blind” laws, for the idea that “justice is blind” is incomprehensible and counterintuitive to the logic of lik. The desired direct intuition occurs either in close spatial proximity to others or else in a sort of sensually felt collectivity, what Russians have traditionally called sobornost' (conciliarity, togetherness) or tselostnost' (wholeness). Central to this complex of ideas is that wholeness does not mean homogeneity or sameness. Every face is different, every personality is distinct, but each needs the other (or many others) in order to realize the contours of its own self. It is significant that the Russian language has no native word for privacy, and also that Russian culture did not develop the metaphysical image so productive in Western Christendom, that of the soul imprisoned within the body. The body (and especially the face) was not a prison but a vehicle, a responsive mirror, the “soul made flesh.” Light moved through that body and sanctified it. Twentieth-century Bolshevik literature seized upon this sacral collectivist tradition and politicized it, first

32 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

into a cult of the people’s communal heroism and then into a cult of party-mindedness, shearing off the heterogeneity at the core of the Orthodox idea. The success of such a campaign, for all its brutality, betrays its deep organic roots.

As Tolstoy correctly divined, the two master plots in Russian socio-literary history are Wa r and Peace. How they are won is peculiar to this nation. War is won by space, although usually at ghastly human expense. Peace is registered as a victory of face-to-face intimacy, clustering around the kitchen table, samovar, nursery,whispered or outlawed poem.For most of Russianliterature,the battlefield and the hearth have been enduring polar values. Cultural anthropologists at work today on Russian communication patterns note the genres of litany and lament that develop freely only in the space of small (often communal) apartments, bathhouses, and run-down country dachas barricaded against the hostile outside world.23

The same binary might besaid togovern more strictly aesthetic realms.In his 2005 book on the codes of Russian musical culture, Boris Gasparov argues that Russian nineteenth-century creativity in several fields – philosophy, literature, and music – was characterized by a single unified striving: the desire to escape the trappings and obligations of Russia’s external empire, with its spectacles, masquerades, pomp, whims of patronage, and to reconsecrate intimate, non-theatrical, sentimental space.24 Thus the whole world feels at home in the Great Russian Novel, which so often ends as a comedy – that is, as a ritual of fertility and family reconciliation. Successors to that great novel in the twentieth century were pressured to redefine this ritual out of the nuclear family into some larger, equally compelling unit that could serve communist ideology and motherland. When that model failed or proved insufficient, the family became Russian Literature itself, “Pushkin House.”

There are spaces, however, that the Empire and the Hearth do not cover, which Russian literary culture has traditionally not endowed with a sympathetic face. These are the middle spaces: commercial classes such as merchants, bankers, and Jews; professional classes such as lawyers and professors; and bureaucratic classes of every sort. The compromised heroes here range from the local thieving mayor and his cronies in Gogol’s play The Government Inspector to Anna’s unhappy spouse Aleksei Karenin, government minister made ridiculous by his desire, cruelly satirized by Tolstoy, to improve the plight of human beings through an official commission. If the bureaucrat is modest and oppressed, like the clerk Akaky Akakievich in Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” then we might see (after a fashion) a human face. If a learned person is of low enough rank, like a provincial tutor or schoolteacher, then some virtues might be mixed in with the weakness and vice. But let any of these middlemen flourish, and

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they lose all possible positive qualities. One challenge for twentieth-century Russian literature was to devise an acceptable sort of success for the pragmatic and disciplined wage-earner, state servitor, or career bureaucrat in modern civic culture, without losing the enormous energy contained in the sacrificial, spiritually rich hero.