The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

If this was a difficult task for the Soviet century, it will be even more daunting for the more fragmentary and less cohesive twenty-first. But full stops, failed apocalypse, and looking out the window at empty space going nowhere are completely familiar to this cultural tradition and easily accommodated by it. This Introduction opened on the assertion that the Russian literary canon is “always about to forget that it is merely made up out of words.” Assuming that is true, surely Russia’s literature will talk itself out of this trap too.

Chapter 2

Heroes and their plots

In the preceding chapter we introduced Bakhtin’s chronotope. It might be helpful in this chapter, before discussing some favored Russian character types, to review the services it can provide.

Bakhtin devised the chronotope as an aid for “walking into” and co-experiencing the time-space of a fictional world. Prose fiction is a field. Usually it is populated by more than one consciousness and designed to be experienced over time. In all but the most disorienting fictional environments – the absolute absurd, for example, or literature of terror and trauma devised to frustrate all attempts at communication – readers will seek to talk, interact, or empathize with characters inhabiting this field. The character can be a talking frog if we’re inside a beast fable, personified Vice or Virtue if inside a medieval mystery play, an alien from outer space if inside a science fiction, or a recognizably human being: the physical wrappings of consciousness are incidental. Both the type of creature and the rules for relating to it depend upon the conventions of the literary genre. What feels strange in one environment can be wholly unmarked in another. In all cases, however, time and space in the chronotope are fused. Some sorts of time – say, in old-fashioned comic strips and soap-opera serials – never add up. Hours, days, years pass, but people do not age; characters might not even remember from one episode to the next. Accordingly, the space that accompanies such time is abstract and non-historical.

Somesorts of time permit the hero tochange, but only atmiraculous, isolated moments (say, tales of metamorphosis or religious conversion). The qualities of the surrounding space may or may not change to accord with the abruptly altered hero. In other chronotopes, the outside world changes in a variety of ways, but the people residing in that time-space are “ready-made” from the start. Their potential is predetermined. They may be tested by events, but they do not learn or mature as a result of such testing; they merely unfold as a pre-formed bud unfolds into a given leaf. Fully novelistic heroes (Bakhtin’s favorites, such as he sees in Goethe, Dickens, and Dostoevsky) both change themselves and presume that they live in a changing environment, which will present them with unexpected challenges to which they must respond.

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Heroes and their plots 35

In Bakhtin’s view, the vigorously functioning, free personality (fictive or real) needs open-ended time more than open-ended space. It is no surprise, however, that the most durable parameter in many Russian chronotopic situations is space, with the temporal dimension a secondary, often dysfunctional afterthought. “Growing up” properly can appear difficult or dead-ended. Developmental time simply stops: through early sacrificial death, in capped or arrested adolescence, or on the far side of threshold moments that commit the hero to an unchanging revealed truth. Conversely, space-based trajectories or metaphors remain fertile and attractive options in a variety of secular as well as sacred genres: “setting out in search of something,” being exiled or displaced, waking up after thirty years of immobility and “going on the road” to slay Russia’s enemies (the plot of Ilya Muromets, Russia’s favorite epic hero). Start with the spatial imperative, and time will tag along. Even when the journey is parodiedbeyond repair,asinthe tragicomic alcoholic fantasyMoscowto the End of the Line (1970) by Venedikt Erofeyev (1938–90), the illusion of movement is the indispensable starting point. Leo Tolstoy, Russia’s great demystifier and debunker of all the bad habits we live by, spent decades writing narratives that showed how people are doomed if they try to escape their truth or their fate by running away – from The Cossacks (1863) through Anna Karenina (1873–78) to his late stories “Master and Man” (1895) and “Father Sergius” (1898). And then a week before his death, he himself boarded a train to get out.