The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In Western Europe, Sentimentalism, or Sensibility, had a somewhat different profile.13 Western novels - from Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Sir Charles Grandison (1754) to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelleHelo¨ıse (1761) and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) - were by and large moralizing sagas set among the bourgeois class, or on the border between bourgeois and upper-class values, replete with concrete realistic detail. In Russia, there was not much middle class. The “realistic,” bourgeois, Sentimentalist novel of England and the continent was thus an unusable model for the pioneering Russian Sensibility. But the Russian peasant - largely unknown and thus available for idealization -represented a possible candidate for carrier of pure feelings. In this idyll, all individualizing traits disappear from bodies and words. Everyone speaks in the same emotionally heightened voice, peasant and nobleman alike. The time-space of idylls is severely constrained. Events unfold in a permanent present of emotional arousal or deflation. Liza, who makes a living by selling lilies-of-the-valley on Moscow street corners, is no recognizably Russian peasant and certainly no serf. Her family follows the biological conventions of folkloric and Romantic time, which deletes a generation: Liza is seventeen, but her mother is “in her sixties” - as if Russian women bore their first surviving children only in their late forties.

In the 1830s, Pushkin several times rewrote the Poor Liza plot, with varying degrees of affectionate irony. Dostoevsky, who knew his Karamzin thoroughly and loved all of it, gives us an urban “Poor Liza” as na¨ıve prostitute in his Notes from Underground, a saintly Lizaveta as the pawnbroker’s timid, hardworking half-sister (and co-murder victim) in Crime and Punishment, and an upper-class, sexually willing and sacrificial Liza in Demons. The plot was parodied and then reconstituted in sequential transpositions throughout the century. In Pushkin’s 1833 “Queen of Spades,” for example, the old Countess’s ward [poor] Liza tries, but fails, to seduce Germann, the engineer-officer who is stalking her - for he is really only after the secret of the three cards. Thus Pushkin’s

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Liza survives, gets over her infatuation, and marries someone else. When Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a composer of profound Sentimentalist vision, turned Pushkin’s tale into his opera The Queen of Spades (1890), he restored the heroine to her canonical Karamzinian fate: she drowns herself from love in a Petersburg canal. As we shall see in Chapter 9, the bestselling post-Soviet detective writer Boris Akunin explicitly structured the love subplot of his first novel, AzazeV [1998; in English, The Winter Queen] on Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” - and hideously, she does not escape her canonized fate.

But the most complex commentary on all Russian seduce-and-abandon plots is surely Leo Tolstoy’s final full-length novel, Resurrection (1898). What he dares to attack in this late novel is not only the vices of seduction and abandonment -familiar to the point of cliche - but the device of mutual forgiveness that sits at the core of Sentimentalism. For Tolstoy, it was no longer sufficient for the dishonored heroine to die so that the hero, en route to self-awareness, can repent, be redeemed, and weep together with narrator and reader. Anna Karenina, with its sympathetic portrait of the suffering Aleksei Vronsky in the Epilogue, still displays traces of that earlier dynamic. But by the end of century, letting Eros and Death do all the hard work of moral growth is no longer acceptable to Tolstoy. In his Resurrection, men and women must achieve the brotherhood, or sisterhood, that unites us into one human family by wholly other means.