The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

There is a final intriguing paradox. Michael Wachtel is surely correct that Russian poets cultivate a highly formal communal identity out of aural and rhythmic reminiscence. But prose writers seem to have cultivated the opposite, a form-breaking impulse. Several high-profile Russian writers celebrated their resistance to, if not downright defiance of, all the received forms or genres out of which Western literary canons were built. To cite only the most famous, Leo Tolstoy, writing in 1868 upon the conclusion of War and Peace: “the history of Russian literature since the time of Pushkin not merely affords many examples of deviation from European forms, but does not offer a single example of the contrary . . . In the recent period of Russian literature not a single artistic prose work rising at all above mediocrity quite fits into the form of a novel, epic, or story.”6 Because Ivan Turgenev wrote trim little novellas that resembled

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French and Italian prose classics, he was viewed with suspicion as a renegade, insufficiently disobedient and exotic to be truly Russian. The same charge was later leveled against his well-trained, formally disciplined, Western-friendly compatriot in music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Russian spokespersons for the canon have long been protective of its eccentric, high-risk, rebellious profile. The greatest writers seemed always to be in trouble with their regimes, and the worst regimes in turn felt threatened by writers. But a persecuted or martyred writer could be posthumously cleansed of ideological impurities and elevated to approved, even to cultic, status in a series of state-sponsored Jubilees. This happened massively with Pushkin (d. 1837) at the end of the nineteenth century, with Tolstoy (d. 1910) beginning with the centenary of his birth in 1928, and with the great Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (d. 1930), glorified by Stalin’s decree five years after he had committed suicide. A writer privileged to be part of this pantheon could be alternately repressed and sponsored, shoved into the limelight and just as suddenly yanked back into the shadows. One can only wonder, looking back at the process from a freer time, how much of that heroic story of literature’s cen-trality to Russian culture was itself manipulated. How might Russian identity have developed without these violent enthusiasms and constraints?

Such thought experiments are sobering. For of the three major forces that disseminated literature and compensated writers – the ruling court (tsarist or communist), the aristocratic salon, and the bookseller’s market – “royal patronage,” with its hectoring censorship and selective sponsorings, has probably done the most to foster the high-minded texts that we associate with the immortal Russian classics. But did the average Russian citizen in times of distress really recite poetry like a mantra? How many readers actually desired to change their lives, as those great novels (and novelists, and literary critics) constantly urged them to do? The story of the two-hundred-year rise of Russian literature became its own bestselling novel – although, some now suggest, largely among the elite groups invested in the story.

This hazard is inherent in discussions of any canon, but of the Russian more than most. Among the virtues of Jeffrey Brooks’s path-breaking study When Russia Learned to Read (1985) is its conclusion that the majority of ordinary Russian consumers of literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century resembled our own sensation-seeking, escapist Western readerships far more closely than the morally saturated, often mournful high canon would lead us to believe.7 When, for example, adventure, crime, and detective fiction began to attract a mass Russian market in the 1890s and again in the 1920s, the cultural intelligentsia took fright: escape and thrills were not compatible with the mission of the Great Tradition. For all that this turf war raged over

8The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature