The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In closing, let us note one paradox shared by neoclassical comedy, Chulkov’s picaresque novel, and Karamzin’s Sentimentalism. The high-minded, virtuous heroes in all three categories become, to later audiences, dismally boring. Starodum and Pravdin, Milon and Sofya, Erast and Liza, even Martona’s lovers when they begin to behave, are one-liners with a one-dimensional afterlife. In contrast, the Brigadier, Prostakova, Skotinin, Mitrofan, Martona, Knyazhnin’s Jester are unforgettably vital - and ubiquitous. This dilemma took its toll on many writers, most tragically Nikolai Gogol. Gogol’s inability to portray a positive character was one factor contributing to his creative, and then physical, death. But Pushkin, Russia’s other Romantic-era genius, will find several ways out. His true heroes are known not by their virtue, but by the more complex concept of honor. A personal friend of Karamzin and much indebted to him, Pushkin nevertheless undertook to roughen up Karamzin’s prose, re-masculinize it, reclaim it from the salon and take it into the real outdoors. In the process, Pushkin the poet, prose writer, and dramatist became for Russia what Shakespeare is for the English-speaking world, an unsurpassed standard. To his astonishing century we now turn.

Sculpture of Aleksandr Pushkin by M. K. Anikushin, installed on Arts Square in Leningrad in 1957. Photograph by Michael Julius.

Chapter 5

The astonishing nineteenth century: Romanticisms

1801–25:Reign of Emperor Alexander I

1812:Napoleon invades Russia and occupies Moscow

1814:Tsar Alexander I enters Paris in triumph

1820:Aleksandr Pushkin, age twenty-one, exiled to the south of Russia for

subversive poems

1825:Decembrist Revolt in Petersburg

1825–55:Reign of Emperor Nicholas I

1828:Nikolai Gogol moves from Ukraine to Petersburg at age nineteen

1836:Gogol leaves Russia for Italy; lives mostly in Rome until 1848

1837:Death of Pushkin in a duel at age thirty-seven

1841:Death of Lermontov in a duel at age twenty-seven

1852:Death of Gogol at age forty-three from self-induced starvation

In the early nineteenth century, 5 percent of Russia’s people could read. The fate of literature was in the hands of several dozen gifted, well-born, multilingual innovators, concentrated in the two capital cities and writing for one another. No literary “profession” existed, nor a “public opinion”; criticism of new poems or dramas took place in salons, theatre foyers, private correspondence. But this tiny community of cultured readers and writers, although cut off from the mass of their countrymen, never doubted that it was part of mainstream European culture. It passionately followed shifts in literary taste on the continent and, as neoclassicism gave way to cults of sentiment, furiously debated each step.

Like Romantics throughout Europe, Russian writers reacted against overly rationalisticviewsof human nature andthe universalizingclaims of theEnlight-enment. The gothic and grotesque came into fashion. E. T. A. Hoffmann popularized cults of the poet, of creative madness and the fantastic; the early Dickens opened up the urban slum as an exotic locale with an ethnography of its own. Folklore, the unique spirit of one’s native language, and national history began to compete with the neoclassical convention of borrowed plots and stock characters. Russia rapidly absorbed the major Romantic prose genres from Europe: society tale, novel-in-letters, “travel notes,” “southern” (or orientalist) tale, diary and memoir, historical romance. But for all this cosmopolitanism, the

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