The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

fatally deficient, perhaps it made better sense to stick with the ideal. Idealist logic was the reverse of Bazarov’s scientific nihilism, which required above all that the material world be made to “work.” But it is characteristic of these utopias that the reader can never be convinced that the scenario is not simply a sly undercutting of the entire idea. Even the most famous of revolutionary utopias, Chernyshevsky’s 1862 What Is To Be Done?, has a gabby, unreliable, digressive narrator who prompts the attentive reader to constant disbelief. And properly so: this romance about a high-minded Petersburg girl who sets up a seamstress cooperative with the help of several devoted, non-possessive men-friends, punctuated with marvelous dreams of an idyllic future life given over to love and leisure in crystal palaces, is governed by no accountable economy at all. The novel is a dream, free of the anxieties of a workable political blueprint, and no wonder Lenin was so fond of it.

Anti-utopias, it turns out, are as double-voiced as utopias. It is both impossible to remain as we are, and impossible to survive in a society where our current vices have been eliminated. Vladimir Mayakovsky (1894–1930) was a Bolshevik poet, committed in word and deed to the futuristic slogans of the new regime. But in the final scene of his dystopian comic drama The Bedbug (1929), when the pre-Revolutionary hero is unfrozen and displayed in the zoo as a relic of ancient times, he cries out to the audience with genuine pathos: “Friends! Brothers! Why am I alone in this cage?” In his 1927 novel Envy, Yury Olesha (1899–1960) ridicules the self-satisfied New Soviet Production Manager Andrei Babichev – a virtuous, well-fed, public-spirited poshlyak – but discredits even more the envious, superfluous sponger and social relic who is telling the tale. And finally there is the most famous Russia anti-utopia, a Modernist forerunner to Orwell’s 1984: Zamyatin’s We (1921). The protagonist and diary writer of We is liberated by his rediscovery of the first-person singular – and simultaneously appalled by it. The prototype for all these threshold dystopias is Dostoevsky’s 1864 Notes from Underground, where the indeterminate narrator is suspended verbally as well as spatially between principled denial and a denial of that denial. It is no surprise that this underground hero has no discernible face.

The heroes we might yet see, and what lies ahead

This gallery of favored Russian heroes has not been strong in certain categories widespread in Western fiction. Virtuous merchants and productive bureaucrats are few, beautiful sinners are rare. Has the twenty-first century already irreversibly changed this repertory? After the collapse of cultural controls, the

58 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

classics ceased to be lavishly subsidized and the boundary between “high” and “low” literature began to erode. Russian literary space openly welcomed persons and themes that had always been on the brink of taboo: detective fiction featuring state security personnel or the ruling dynasty or party; crime where the state is to blame; wars that Russia has lost or is losing (like Afghanistan and Chechnya); attractively snappy capitalists. And also, to be sure, explicit pornography, violence, and misogyny. Whereas the tsarist-era and Soviet canon held women’s rights sacred (and preferred salvational women to superfluous men), that prejudice is now gone. Instead we begin to see a partial return to the bawdy mixed prose of the eighteenth century, to wide-open (not Aesopian) satire, and to the amoral ethics of the folk tale. These and other narratives of the pre-Pushkin era are the subject of our next two chapters.

Chapter 3

Traditional narratives

862:Viking chieftain Ryurik invited to rule Novgorod (Ryurikovich

dynasty lasts until 1598)

988:Kiev: Prince Vladimir converts Rus' to Eastern [Greek] Orthodox

Christianity

1015:Martyrdom of Boris and Gleb

1223:Mongols reach Kiev and destroy it [“Mongol Yoke” lasts until 1480]

1242:Alexander Nevsky defeats Teutonic knights on frozen Lake Chud

1563:First printing press in Moscow authorized by Ivan the Terrible

1580s:Boris Godunov sends eighteen young men abroad to study; none

return, nor do their assigned spies