Russian Literature (13 page)

It’s risky to hire a cook for free;

For a person born a man to dress up

In skirts, is curious and has no point;

After all, sooner or later he will be forced To give himself a shave, which doesn’t quite agree With a lady’s nature . . . But that’s the very most That you’ll squeeze out of this slight tale.

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But frivolity of this kind is not the key to Pushkin’s entire output.

Equally characteristic of him was the didactic view of literature expressed in ‘Monument’ – that a writer was responsible for ‘awakening the noble feelings’ of an entire nation. Even the ending of
The Little House at Kolomna
had a lesson to teach – that literature did not have to be taken seriously. It sprang from Pushkin’s frustration with Russian readers’ obsession with morals and messages, as powerfully expressed in ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828), a rebuke to those who, on hearing a ‘song’, were capable only of responding with stupid questions: What is he strumming about? what is he teaching us?

Why is he exciting and tormenting hearts

Like a capricious wizard?

His song is free as the wind,

But also fruitless as the wind:

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What is the use of it to us?

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And in
The Queen of Spades
(1834), any moralizing ambitions that might
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have been expected in a tale of compulsive gambling are undercut because story-telling and writing are shown within the story itself as frivolous, unreliable, deceptive, no more than ‘chatter to spin out a mazurka’.

But moral commentary is not avoided altogether. When Hermann appears in Liza’s room to undeceive her about the reasons behind his long-distance courtship (he has in fact been writing her passionate letters so he can inveigle himself inside the house to confront her guardian, the Countess), the narrator observes: ‘She wept bitterly, seized by belated and painful repentance.’ Had Pushkin opted for moral neutrality, he could have used a different phrase (for example, ‘seized by sudden, painful understanding’). But the narrator is made to espouse Christian moral vocabulary (‘repentance’), and the adjective ‘belated’

passes explicit judgement (Liza’s feelings are appropriate, but she has
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ignored the voice of conscience too long). Equally, there is no doubt that the duel between Evgeny Onegin and Lensky is to be understood as a form of homicide licensed by civilization, though this point is conveyed indirectly, through a comically embittered disquisition upon the joys of revenge: It is pleasant to enrage an obtuse enemy

With an impudent epigram [ . . . ]

Pleasanter if he, my friends,

Bawls out in stupid rage: ‘That’s me!’

Still pleasanter to prepare in silence

An honourable grave for him,

And to shoot silently at his pale forehead
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From a well-bred distance;

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But sending him to the land of his fathers
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Is unlikely to be a pleasant experience.

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It would be absurd to interpret the final proposition here as a stylistic
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mannerism, introduced merely in order to puncture the overblown
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rhetoric of revenge with plain speaking. But wry humour pushes just
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out of reach an obvious truth – that killing even one’s enemies is
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not nice.

Delicate irony of this kind, though, rests on a fragile pyramid of assumptions about the way that readers are likely to react. As Yury Lotman has pointed out, in Pushkin’s generation the duel was well on its way to being regarded as ‘ritual murder’ (and less melodramatically, as a form of posturing that was fatuous in adult males, an interpretation that hovers at the fringes of Pechorin’s duel with his charlatan-double Grushnitsky in Lermontov’s
The Hero of Our Time
(1841), and came fully into its own in Chekhov’s representations of duelling half a century later). In a society where the duel was universally accepted as the central means of settling affairs of honour, an assault upon the practice of duelling as immoral would have needed to be expressed more
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explicitly. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian writers had a strong sense that readers of serious literature (as opposed to fortune-telling books or church calendars) belonged to a unified group, even if some had a less sophisticated understanding of literature than others, and needed to be reminded of certain elementary critical truths – that literature was not the same thing as life, and that a narrator should not necessarily be identified with the author. This sense of integration resulted, in the main, from the fact that the educated population was so small.

In the 1830s and 1840s, as intellectual life expanded to include a much broader range of social groups, in particular ambitious male provincials from the middle ranks of Russian society, the notion of educated consensus began to break down. The first symptom was factionalism within the literary world, particularly squabbling between patrician writers such as Pushkin, and literary journalists, most notorious among
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whom was the arch-conservative, police spy, editor of
The Northern Bee
,
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and popular novelist Faddey Bulgarin. Once the sense that all educated people belonged to the same circle had disintegrated, so too did the
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expectation that moral values were shared and could be taken for granted. This created a pressure for the expression of consensus within a text by means of overt commentary and explication; for the frank didacticism that had been the source of irony in literary texts since the end of the eighteenth century.

Hence, of many possible Pushkins that Pushkin himself had created, it was the writer as ‘master of minds’, and teacher to his nation, that carried most weight among his contemporaries and immediate successors. In 1834, Belinsky sought to prescribe to Pushkin the ways in which he should work, complaining that the writer had moved from
Poltava
and
Boris Godunov
(shorthand for ‘works of unassailable seriousness and national importance’) to ‘empty, lifeless fairy-tales’ (it is a shock to realize that Belinsky had in mind Pushkin’s brilliant condensation of Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
,
Angelo
). And the
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transition from a view of the writer as metatextual ironist to an emphasis upon responsibility to society can clearly be seen in the case of Nikolay Gogol. Gogol’s story
The Nose
(1836) had poked fun at the idea of morally improving literature: the tale ended not with a moral, but with the narrator sputtering into silence as he tried to explain what meaning there could possibly be in an anecdote about Major Kovalyov’s lost nose reincarnated as a senior civil servant. But a decade later, Gogol had developed a very different notion of the writer’s vocation. In his notorious treatise,
Selected Passages From Correspondence with Friends
(1847), he claimed that Pushkin had been the only reader of
Dead Souls
to understand the high moral purpose of the novel, and asserted: ‘A writer’s duty is not only to provide pleasant amusement for the mind and the taste; he will pay dearly if his works do not disseminate
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something of use to the soul and if they convey no moral instruction
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to their readers.’ While a great many of Gogol’s opinions in
Selected
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Passages
were attacked by both radicals and conservatives (not many
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people were impressed by Gogol’s suggestion that the landowner
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should burn banknotes in front of his peasants in order to teach them
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indifference to money), his emphasis on the writer’s duty to convey
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‘moral instruction’ was not challenged. Rather, the central point in
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criticism of
Selected Passages
, as voiced, for example, in a famous open
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letter written by Belinsky to Gogol in 1847, was that Gogol had betrayed the writer’s duty to be a moral instructor by imparting the wrong sort of message. Radicals and conservatives alike now valued literature on the grounds of its
ideinost’
, or confrontation of important topical issues.

To be sure,
ideinost’
did not reign unchallenged after 1840. The conviction among politically committed critics that realist fiction, or indeed journalistic reportage, were superior to lyric poetry provoked the authors of verse into questioning utilitarian theories of literature. (A notable case in point was Apollon Grigoriev, a Moscow critic, author of ‘gypsy romances’, and vehement enemy of Belinsky, Nekrasov, and Dobrolyubov, as well as one of many Russian writers to have been a drinker on an epic scale.) In the late nineteenth century, the Russian
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Decadents followed their French counterparts in insisting upon the autonomy of art, and in maintaining a cult of self-interest (the ideal Decadent hero or heroine, rather than committing him-or herself to the improvement of society, was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and sensual gratification alone).

But the desire to separate art from moral or political issues remained a marginal phenomenon, as was illustrated when Tolstoy, the towering figure of the late nineteenth century and a commentator respected and feared by figures belonging to every political grouping, lent his immense authority to an attack on the Decadent cult of beauty.
What
is Art?
(1898) set out a sustained and powerful case against the aesthetic understanding of art, which was to be valued, in Tolstoy’s view, for its sincere expression of feeling and for its commitment to the cause of good. The pervasiveness of populism in the Russian intelligentsia, and of the view that the duty of educated people was
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to help the so-called ‘grey masses’, meant that attempts to fuse art
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and politics were more common than attempts to separate the two, even among the ‘Decadents’ whom Tolstoy had attacked. For a while
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in 1906–7, the short-lived ‘Mystical Anarchist’ movement was the expression of a drive to unite Modernist literature, religious philosophy, and socialism; after 1917, a number of Modernist writers became ardent supporters of Bolshevism and participants in its newly fledged cultural institutions. The Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov, for example, was made responsible for setting up training schemes for Soviet writers; Mayakovsky and other left avant-gardists churned out jingles and posters for the Rosta (Russian Telegraph Agency) windows in Moscow.

But there were also less obvious ways in which art and politics impacted upon each other. Marina Tsvetaeva, whose fierce independence from any party line was to make her deeply unpopular both in post-revolutionary Moscow and after her emigration to Prague and later to Paris, and who was one of the most formidably gifted
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Modernist poets, became embroiled, after 1917, in one crusade after another. Her magnificent tribute to the ‘White’, anti-Soviet forces in the Russian Civil War,
The Swan’s Demesne
(1921), written in Soviet Moscow, was followed by an equally controversial tribute to Mayakovsky, ‘the draught-horse angel’, published in Berlin in 1923, a year after Tsvetaeva’s emigration to the West.

The acceptance among many Russian writers that art and ethics were compatible was in part a result of the ambitions of governments, both before and after the Revolution, to regulate morality and the arts. There was generally an inverse relationship between the severity of censorship and the production of studiedly amoral or self-consciously frivolous works of art: it is a rare writer who will risk his or her life or freedom for
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the sake of a joke. In any case, the Western liberal construct of a ‘civic
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sphere’, according to which cultural institutions, along with education
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and regulation of the urban environment, are assumed to be in signal
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respects autonomous and ‘above politics’, did not necessarily have a
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greater hold on the minds of writers hostile to Tsarist and Soviet power
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than it did upon political leaders themselves. At some periods in
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nineteenth-century Russian history, ‘democratic censorship’ (that is, the
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drive of Russian radical critics and editors to coerce authors into political
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conformity) was, as a recent historian has commented, ‘as much a force to be reckoned with as the official variety’.

All of this means that it is a serious mistake to argue that ‘classic Russian literature [ . . . ] is rarely overtly didactic’ (to quote a Western historian of Russia). On the contrary, ‘overt didacticism’ was one of classic Russian writers’ great strengths. Only a deliberately wayward reader could fail to recognize that Saltykov-Shchedrin’s
The Golovlyov Family
was an eloquent denunciation of the moral bankruptcy of the serf-owning class, or that his
History of a Town
was a vicious satire on autocratic rule. The point was not that Russian writers avoided sermons and exemplary tales, but that they narrated these with extraordinary rhetorical force.

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Yet the creepy Yudushka Golovlyov in the first novel and the stentorian Mayor Ugryum-Burcheev in the second were more than simply vehicles for Saltykov’s ideological points. It was literary critics, rather than authors, who relentlessly classified characters in terms of their supposed expression of contemporary ills, effacing the differences between Evgeny Onegin, Pechorin, and Andrey Bolkonsky so they could be rounded up into a shorn herd of ‘superfluous men’. In similar vein, Nikolay Dobrolyubov’s essay on Goncharov’s novel
Oblomov
, ‘What is Oblomovitis?’, presented the book as a parable about idleness versus industriousness, ignoring the fact that the superlatively indolent and gluttonous Oblomov had stimulated his creator’s fancy as the book’s positive hero, self-righteous Stolz, had not.