The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Lotman’s two essays suggest a final lesson to be learned from model biography, useful for the watershed of the eighteenth century: that moral guidance can be provided by a culture in two valid but fundamentally opposed ways. Each aspires to a different ideal. The first way is guidance through a relatively fixed and impersonal system of law. This law is codified, “blind,” and legitimized to the extent that it applies to all, precedes the individual case, and follows its own rules. The second way is guidance through an integrated human personality. This personality – or face, lik – is assumed to be swayable by the needs, vagaries, and intonations of the petitioner. Compassion and mercy are essential to it and cost it nothing, since it does not worry about setting precedents. Mentors in this mode function face-to-face and one-on-one. Without question the second model is mainstream for the nineteenth-century literary canon, and for much of the great dissident literature of the twentieth. But the first, more severely juridical option is also present in Russian literary culture – although not always in forms immediately familiar to a Western reader. It expresses itself through comedy and satire, but of a stern sort, contained inside a neoclassical frame. The eighteenth century is its birthplace.

Chapter 4

Western eyes on Russian realities: the eighteenth century

1682–1725:Reign of Peter I, the Great

1701:First theatre troupe (German) invited to Muscovite Russian court by

Peter I

1703:Peter I founds city of St. Petersburg

1708:Reform of Slavonic lettering system into a civic alphabet

1714:Education made compulsory for all sons of nobility and gentry

1722:Peter establishes a Table of Ranks

1725:Founding of Russian Academy of Sciences

1755:Founding of University of Moscow

1757:First Russian theatre company established at imperial court

1762–96:Reign of Catherine II, the Great

1769:Catherine II permits publication of satirical journals

1773–75:Peasant/Cossack uprising under Emelyan Pugachov

1789:Outbreak of revolution in France and political crackdown in Russia

The Russian eighteenth century left little trace on any literary canon beyond Russia’s borders. It is remembered as a century that borrowed its forms, themes, and expertisefrom the West, first from Protestant Europeand then from France. To borrow, translate, codify or imitate an alien cultural canon was not considered inappropriate, however; quite the contrary. “Originality” was neither a value nor a virtue. Reason and human nature were presumed to be universals. The poetics of neoclassicism, which ruled the European continent, relied on an idealized imitation of ancient models. What was self-consciously emerging as a value in Russian upper-class culture by mid-century were quests for national identity. Russia, an outlying border state, lagged some 200 years behind Western Europe, at least when measured by such “progressive” historical markers as a Renaissance, a Reformation, and a Counter-Reformation, epochal events for Europe in which Russia did not participate. If universality was a prerequisite for entering civilized history, Russia would have to show that she reflected it in her own way.

Russia’s special path began in religious history. The Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe shared a lingua franca in Latin. “Underneath” that largely

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