The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In addition to a general preference for changing one’s fate by moving through space, the very concept of evil was scattered and diversified. In traditional Russian folk culture, the devil [chort] was small: omnipresent, petty, devious, often a changeling, miserably ugly and unheroic. Traditional Russian culture had a bigger devil [dyavol] – an abstractly ominous black body – but no humanized, grand Miltonic Satan; native Russian demons were “not tragic or avuncular or nobly doomed free spirits.”1 Such anthropomorphized images of evil, largely Romantic in origin, arrived from the West only in the early nineteenth century. Instead, a myriad of tiny folk devils hovered around your body, eager to crawl down your throat when you yawned, up your birth canal while you were delivering your infant, into your ears during an unguarded moment. Against this onslaught of small exhaustions and seductions one could apply numerous folk charms and incantations. But the best defense against demonic temptation was “righteousness.”

Righteous persons [pravednik (m.) / pravednitsa (f.)]

To be a “righteous person” is more an attitude than a deed. Christian faith often informs this righteousness, but the type was frequently secularized and

36 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

re-sacralized. A righteous person usually requires an enemy to fight against – the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler, capitalists as a class, the Antichrist – but a big, showy Foe is by no means necessary. The enemy as well as the task can be very small. Dostoevsky’s radiant pravedniki (pl.) in The Brothers Karamazov (the Elder Zosima and the youngest brother Alyosha) are of this sturdy everyday sort, fending off doubts with a spiritually healthy mind. Success in the deed is not essential, but steadfastness is.

In her discussion of righteousness in Russia’s Dangerous Texts, Kathleen Parthe´ remarks of this sort of hero that the righteousness is “inflexible but unselfish.”2 A righteous person can stay home and instruct by example, but often, “unable to bear the injustice of the world,” he or she becomes a wanderer [strannik/strannitsa]. Central to the type is always a willingness to suffer – but regardless of torment self-inflicted or imposed, a pravednik does not change his mind or his soul. He cannot, for he is inseparable from his truth. He can become a righteous person after a sinful youth (as does the elder Zosima), but like Saint Augustine, once he has seen or arrived at the truth, he does not develop further. For this reason, Parthe´ remarks, Russians of more liberal or ironic temperament have been wary of this peculiar sort of heroism (pp. 148–49).

The prototypical pravednik is a martyred saint. He may choose to cooperate with the state, rescuing it heroically in its hour of need, but he cannot be owned by any earthly power and often boycotts existing governments altogether. This “hagiographic [saint’s life] type” experienced a minor boom during the reform decade of the 1860s, when dozens of devotional publishing houses were founded.3 In any era, the pravednik tends to adhere to archaic, backward-looking truths, valuing the impulses of the heart over the pride of the intellect or the cleverness of the machine. The righteous almost always prefer the village to the city. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) fashioned himself into the twentieth century’s greatest exemplar of this type, both in his life and his art.

Unsurprisingly, after the 1917 Revolution the Bolshevik government made strenuous attempts to recruit righteous sufferers for the cause of forward-looking communism. Precedent was not difficult to find. Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is To Be Done? (1863), which Lenin called “the greatest and most talented representation of socialism before Marx,” includes in a cameo role one political activist-ascetic, Rakhmetov, who sleeps on nails to harden his resolve. Revolutionaries shared many traits with medieval saints. Among them are the ideal of bodily discipline (fasting and chastity), a transcendence of brute matter (miraculous visions, impossible work quotas), and a biographical progression that begins with a separation from society, is followed by initiation into the divine mystery, and ends with a potential for “return” and reintegration.4 One common sign of a specifically ascetic Russian hero-saint,

Heroes and their plots 37

modern as well as medieval, is that he does not return. He perfects himself and withdraws further, into increasingly remote geographical spaces. Others may follow him into that wilderness, but the hero does not need others to realize his truth. He is complete in himself.