The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

nor condemned. They refused to consider the loss of worldly goods or reputation a bad thing. Somewhat like Charlie Chaplin (a figure much beloved by Russian audiences) but politically far more confused, the mit'ki turned personal bumbling into an art form. Unlike the lucky loafer of the fairy tale, however, in a proper mit'ki epic no one ever wins anything. Theirs was a post-heroic, post-communist ideal, equally alien to sacrificial activity, acquisition for one’s own sake or for others, masculine posturing, and meaningful protest. The mit'ki have been called “a late-Soviet inversion of Ivan the Fool.”14 Even at its most eccentric, however, theirbehavior displayed some didactic and salvational overtones. In 2001 the group gave up drinking altogether and sponsored the first free-of-charge rehabilitation center for alcoholics in post-communist Russia. A series of images of Mitya Shagin has been painted in canonical iconographic style.

The pravednik is innerly whole and single-voiced. He can be apocalyptic or merciful, an irritant to society or the savior of it. Fools, however, are double-voiced and sly. They must be ridiculed, abused, misunderstood by others. At times they present their protest as an alternative to the righteous. But holy fools are also numbered among the righteous, for they elevate moral consciousness in those who witness them. Only those pure instruments of amusement, the shut and skomorokh (jester and minstrel), are pagan enough to serve solely themselves, and for that reason so often blend with the rogue.

Frontiersmen

Between the fifteenth century and 1991, despite devastating invasions, the Russian state expanded steadily. There was always more frontier. As distances increased, however, political power was not dispersed. The highly centralized Russian Empire continued to be run from its two capitals, each of which, by the early nineteenth century, had developed a cultural mythology of its own. Pushkin’s 1833 narrative poem The Bronze Horseman and Gogol’s surreal Petersburg tales of the 1830s-40s represent the apex of the imperial Petersburg Myth, which was launched soon after the city’s founding in 1703. The myth of Moscow, although attaching to a far older city, took longer to consolidate, focusing in 1812 around the city’s occupation and burning by the French. Countering the myths of these two metropolises, the myth of the ever-widening edge became home to all those heroes who, abandoning the center or exiled from it, explored the periphery.

Three peculiarities of this expansion are worth noting.15 First, a continental empire of Russia’s vast and thinly populated sort, bordered by hostile Catholic

44 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

or Protestant peoples to the west and hostile Islamic or pagan cultures to the south and east, gave rise to what might be called the “contiguous exotic.” But unlike the classical overseas empires of Spain, Portugal, or England, it was accessible by land, even by foot, and thus could be made familiar in routine and unspectacular ways. Colonizers could creep into it, could reside comfortably on its edges and spread out in them. Expansion involved violence, of course. But many narratives interwove peace and war. One example with an 800-year pedigree is the twelfth-century Lay [epic song] of Igor’s Campaign.