The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

constitute the major delight of this sort of comedy, move without mediation from comic buffoon to violent bully to abject vanquished villain. Decency did not have its own voice. Karamzin sought to fill in the missing “decent” layers with a style that was appropriate for empathetic communication. Only then, he believed, could Russian prose become polite, witty, nuanced, playful, and thus a part of belles-lettres.

Some men-of-letters resisted these reforms. The so-called “archaists,” or Russian-language patriots, preferred to develop the potentials of this eighteenth-century rawness rather than bleach it out. They feared, not without cause, that such prettified Gallicized Russian would become a linguistic “blandscape,” even though the “old style” was an unspeakable amalgam of bookishness (at the upper end) and crudeness (at the lower). But even to these conservatives, Karamzin was indispensable. To him Russia owes the very concept of a “reading public.”12 Karamzin advocated universal literacy, for women and children as well as for “minors.” He encouraged reading – any reading on any topic – as a dignified and honorable pastime. Unlike preceding playwrights or writers of odes, whose diction was public (either performative or rhetorical), Karamzin cultivated an intimate voice, one that sought out its readers privately and face to face. In their time, these priorities were considered quite provocative, even revolutionary. We consider only one example of the “Karamzinian revolution”: his famous 1792 Sentimentalist short story “Poor Liza.”

A peasant girl, Liza, living with her widowed mother on the outskirts of Moscow, is seduced by Erast, a young nobleman from the city. The seduction is roundabout. What first attracts the hero is Liza’s virginal innocence, so unlike his carnal relations with women in town. But after some time spent on chaste kisses under the ancient oak, the two consummate their love (during the obligatory thunderstorm). Erast begins to lose interest once his ideal shepherdess becomes merely his mistress. Eventually he leaves her on pretext of going to war, gambles away his wealth, and arranges to marry a rich noblewoman. When Liza comes across his carriage on a Moscow street, Erast cannot avoid explaining matters – and then shows her the door with a hundred rubles and a farewell kiss. In despair, Liza drowns herself in the pond near the ancient oak. Her mother dies immediately of grief. Erast, the inconstant lover, cannot be consoled. The narrator hears this story from the miserable man a year before his death.

Such seduce-and-abandon plots are found in every culture. In the West today they survive robustly in serial soap operas, teenage romances, comic strips. When they were new, however, as they were for the Russian 1790s, they shocked and mesmerized the upper classes. Russian heroines might have behaved like this, but they had not been revered for it. A cult developed around the pond where Liza met her end. Still, “Sentimentalism” is inadequate to Karamzin’s achievement. A better word would be “Sensibility,” as in Jane

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Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility (1811)- because the lachrymose suicide at the end is quite incidental. The story exists not in its events but in the tone given to those events by the narrator, a man of “sentiment.” Like Rousseau, this narrator insists on the basic goodness of human nature (Erast, we read, has “a decent mind and good heart, only he is weak and frivolous”); in this sort of world, there are no truly evil villains. The “writer of sentiment” believes in the virtuousness of spontaneous feelings, which connect us to one another more readily and influence us more profoundly than can words, ideas, or our sense of duty. The successful Sentimentalist text, whatever its central event, must unite the author, narrator, hero, and reader in a mesh of co-sympathy, co-experiencing, and co-remembering of that event.