The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

commanded to wander through Russia, the Tatar lands, and the Caucasus, constantly exposing his life to danger before being deemed worthy to become a monk. Maksim Gorky (1868–1936) tapped into the same tradition, when he launched his career as a writer in the 1890s with bestselling stories of itinerant dockworkers and charismatic tramps.

The wanderer or displaced person during war constitutes a terrible and vital subset of Russian heroes, one that remained vigorous in literature and film up through the end of the Soviet era. Its human parameters stretched from helpless children to cold-blooded killing machines (Bolshevik as well as enemy). A rich Soviet literature of the (literally) embattled frontier emerged out of the savagery of the Civil War (1918–21), which was fought simultaneously on dozens of fronts: on the Western frontier among Poles, Cossacks, and Jews, portrayed in the violent miniatures of Isaak Babel (1894–1941) in Red Cavalry (1924–26); throughout Siberia, Mongolia, and along the Chinese border in the brutal war stories (most notably Armored Train 14–69) of Vsevolod Ivanov (1895–1963), himself of mixed Polish, Mongolian, and Russian ancestry. Total war allowed these writers to bring into focus Russia’s huge ethnographic expanse through fierce personal close-ups that were at once lyrical, shockingly naturalistic, and unsentimental. When, in the 1930s, experimental war prose gave way to more conservative and expansive models – exemplary are the Quiet Don epics by MikhailSholokhov(1905–84)–theprototypeagainrevertedtoTolstoy’sclassic, Russocentric War and Peace. But all Russian war literature has tended to be read as a parable on Russia herself, a land in which experience could never be made short, painless, or small.

Rogues and villains

Our previous three hero types – righteous people, fools, frontiersmen of the ever-expanding and never-pacified edge – have noticeably Russian chrono-topes. To an important degree, each is space-and-time-specific to the Russian culture and continent. With the rogues and villains we move into more pan-European territory. The Russian rogue [plut, pronounced ploot] shares much with the Spanish picaro [rascal], his genetic cousin. But the Russian rogue exhibits some unmistakably national traits, which come into focus at those points where a rogue becomes a villain. In the Russian context, certain acts came to be considered villainous that would not be so quickly condemned elsewhere.

Rogues are not virtuous, of course, but neither are they evil. What gets in the way of evil is their buoyancy, self-confidence, sense of humor, high level

48 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

of responsiveness, and the fact that they live off the land. If they prosper, it is because their human surroundings are corrupt, greedy, foolish, selfish – or simply amoral. Rogues are survivors; they live by symbiosis and take on the color of the terrain. There is something of Ivan the Fool in them, rooted in the immediate present, although rogues are far more energetic andentrepreneurial. Often we cannot help feeling gratified at a rogue’s success. A villain, in contrast, creates victims.

Consider the most famous Muscovite exemplar, “Frol Skobeyev the Rogue,” set in the 1680s. Frol is a poor solicitor. He wants to marry Annushka the stolnik’s daughter (a stolnik is a high-ranking court official who served the tsar at table). So he bribes Annushka’s nurse to let him attend her sleepover party dressedas a girl. He ends upin bed with Annushka, who, at first shocked, rapidly develops a liking for her seducer and their mutual sport. By means of various minor blackmails the couple manages to elope. The parents are scandalized; the tsar is alerted; Frol confesses his heinous deed to his in-laws with a shrug. The incensed parents ban their daughter and son-in-law from their house. The daughter fakes illness to win over her parents, at which point the parents send an icontoheal herbecause “apparently God himself haswilled that such arogue be our daughter’s husband”; and Frol, without effort or apology, ends up the heir to all the stolnik’s estates.16 Are we to condemn Frol Skobeyev, or secretly admire him? Both at once, perhaps. Much in our answer depends on context, tone, and the rogue’s own capacity for moral growth. These can vary widely. One study of early Russian rogue tales identifies four career trajectories: the rogue repentant, rewarded, punished, and “unresolved.”17 With their ability both to titillate and to admonish, rogue tales proved immensely popular. In the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol became godfather to the greatest rogues’ gallery on Russian soil.