The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Russian literature is compact, intensely self-reflexive, and always about to forget that it is merely made up out of words. Imagined characters walk out of fiction into real life, while real-life writers are raised to the status of myth. Myths consolidated first around saints, then around cities (St. Petersburg and Moscow), then around biographies of writers, finally around ethical and ideological systems. When measured against the subcontinents – Europe and Asia proper – that flank Russia to the west, south, and east, this tradition is remarkable in two respects: its extreme brevity, and its lateness. Chinese literature is calibrated in millennia. Masterpieces in Arabic date from the fifth century. Dante wrote his Commedia in the early fourteenth century and Shakespeare his unparalleled English works at the end of the sixteenth. But Russia as a literary nation entered into consciousness (her own, and the world’s) only two hundred years ago.

From that point on, the rise was unprecedentedly swift. Within two decades, from 1815 to the end of the 1820s, two paradigm-shifting events came to pass that provided prime binding material for national myth: Russia’s most perfect military victory (the expulsion of Napoleon, from 1812–15) and the maturity of her most perfect poet, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837). These achievements were not the crowning peaks of a national history but its beginning, and they shaped the public face of modern Russia and of Russian literature. It was a two-faced Janus. Pushkin came to represent a style of creativity so cosmopolitan that a Russian man (or woman) of letters was presumed to be at home, linguistically and culturally, anywhere in Europe. During those same years, however, Napoleon’s defeat and its aftermath led to a chauvinistic closing-down of Russia as a sociopolitical entity, and to a pattern of suspicious confrontation with the West that has continued, with small windows of relief, into the twenty-first century.

Such was the visible point of origin. A scant fifty years after Pushkin’s birth, Russians were producing works of prose fiction that not only were translated into every major world language, but whose authors, most spectacularly Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), became internationalcelebrities and media stars, asmuch for their lives and philosophies as for their art. The self-consciousness of this

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tradition was furthered by a steadily rising literacy rate, the emergence of a mass press, and also by recurring national trauma, censorship, and an edgy, often defensive “exceptionalism” – that is, by the insistence that Russia was so special that she could not be judged by normal (which is to say, Western European) standards of progress, health, or success. “Normalization” at some non-catastrophic level became a possibility only for post-communist Russia. But many Russians – and Russia-watchers as well – have feared that rudderless freedom and the abrupt dethroning of literature’s role as arbiter of national identity might spell the end of the Russian literary tradition.

This book is predicated on the assumption that such fears are unfounded. A literary tradition can crack, interbreed with alien elements, be subject to massive purging and parodies of itself, incessantly predict its own demise, and still remain robust. Indeed, purgings and parodies need not discredit the corpus but can become identifying traits and even load-bearing structures within the tradition. The enduring core of this tradition is called the “literary canon.” The phrase requires some explanation. The canon of a nation’s literature – its best-known texts, plots, fictional characters, plus the mythically enhanced biographies of its writers – does not have the force of a religious doctrine or a legal code. It changes constantly, but slowly, more by accretion and decay than by fiat. A given canon looks different, of course, to native speakers raised inside the culture that gave birth to it, than it does to outsiders who speak another language and depend upon translations. The literary canon of any national culture works in approximations. Ask any dozen interested readers to identify “canonic works” from a given culture, and each will come up with a different list. But chances are excellent that all lists will contain some works in common. Our goal is to stick close to that common core.