The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Neoclassical comedy and the picaresque novel, enriched in the early nineteenth century by an explosion of interest in vaudeville, provide an essential backdrop to Pushkin’s short stories, the dramas and narrative epics of Gogol, and Dos-toevsky’s great novels. These masterworks are most comic precisely at those points where stock characters or scenarios from eighteenth-century satire are recycled in the context of contemporary (and often more frightening) Russian reality. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petro-vich Belkin (1830) are still cast in the neoclassical comedic mold of harmony, balance, wit, and good will. In Gogol’s 1836 Government Inspector, the darker side of comedy comes to the surface. An unknown fop arrives at a provincial town and, faking every step of the way, terrifies the local bureaucracy into revealing and even intensifying its own corruption. (If the exposure of venality was Pravdin’s straightforward mission in The Minor, Gogol’s nineteenth-century “inspector” Khlestakov is now himself a fake.) In Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), a traveling salesman-rogue on the road must keep moving if he is to avoid exposure and disgrace – for clients and lovers with something to conceal must not meet one another, as Martona ruefully knows. In Dostoevsky’s Demons, a young and pernicious dandy with a smattering of foreign education courts a silly self-important governor’s wife in full view of her browbeaten spouse (a situation straight out of Fonvizin). Had she been alive to watch these

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stock-in-trade episodes on stage, the Empress Catherine II would have laughed heartily. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, however, fops and fakes are not only foolish. They are also lethal. Virtue no longertriumphs at the end. Manners are not corrected by mockery. Bouts of madness are not due to some magic potion slipped into an unsuspecting body from the outside. The madman has become shrewd, sly, multidimensional, manipulative, and this complicates our sympathy. Comic scenes in Gogol and Dostoevsky easily became demonic without the reassuring envelope of the Enlightenment.

Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”

Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), prosewriter, literary reformer, essayist, and Russia’s first major historian, almost single-handedly moved Russian literature across the century’s divide. His prose fiction has not stood the test of time. But Pushkin and his generation could not have begun to write without him, and the plots, characters, and scenarios made famous by Karamzin surface uninterruptedly in all forms (poetry, short story, drama, opera) throughout the nineteenth century. Several factors contribute to his pivotal role.

Karamzin experimented with a wide number of genres. Uncommonly for the time, he favored English and German literature over the ubiquitous French, thus broadening the traditions on which Russian writers could draw (and also lessening the merciless heat focused on Gallomania). Among these pioneering works were his Letters of a Russian Traveler, based on his tour of Europe in 1789–90, his historical romances, sentimentalist love stories, Gothic horror tales, and hortative (but not treatise-like) critical essays. Each was a popular success, and for each he created a smooth, literary-colloquial intonation that came to be known as the “novyi slog,” the “new style” – “new” in its elegance, emotionality, and politeness. Drawing creatively on French constructions, studiously avoiding both the piously inflected high style as well as the jarringly colloquial low style, Karamzin’s prose strove to reflect “how people actually talked.” Or more correctly, he created a model for the way Russian speech in the 1790s should sound among high-born, cultivated men and women in the upper-class salon – if they could be dissuaded from conversing in French.

Why was this task so timely? Fonvizin, we recall, wrote neoclassical comedies in the 1760s and 1770s remarkable for their racy dialogue and rudeness. These dramas were an enormous step forward from the stilted tragedies penned by his colleagues at Catherine’s court. But Fonvizin’s language-masks, for all their responsiveness, were brittle. The spectator’s pleasure increased to the extent that the characters on stage did not understand one another, or made fools of themselves, or were indecorously exposed in public. Such negative types, which

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