Russian Literature (21 page)

from which material emanated was in the end less important than its character. Writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, who sometimes collected ethnographical material themselves as well as turning to published anthologies of such material, were attracted above all by texts that underlined the difference between town and countryside. In the Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov’s vivid story-monologue ‘Masha’, for example, the narrator was a peasant girl for whom traditional folkloric figures such as the house spirit were absolutely real physical presences: Oh, Ma’am, you can’t imagine how good it is living in Yaroslavl, the only thing that worries you here is the conmen, but in the village there’s so much to be afraid of: courtyard spirits, and house spirits, and demons, and arch-demons. Outside in the courtyard there’s a spirit, and inside the house there’s one too; the spirit in the courtyard has a face on him like the master’s, and the one in the house is all hairy. If anyone goes out to
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feed the horses after nine, then the courtyard spirit, he spies it straight
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away. You can’t just go out like that, you have to cough first . . .

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Ru

As this example indicates, the language of narration was now as important as the material cited. The vitality of much early twentieth-century Russian prose was derived directly from popular speech (
prostorech’e
). The favoured genre was a first-person narrative that eschewed the norms of educated speech (this type of narrative was to be retrospectively named
skaz
by Russian Formalist critics: see for instance Boris Eikhenbaum’s 1918 essay ‘The Illusion of
skaz
’). Before the Revolution, the most outstanding exponent of
skaz
was Aleksey Remizov, whose more successful imitators included Evgeny Zamyatin and Olga Forsh. After the Revolution, though, the Remizovian school, whose procedures might be described as ‘dialect ornamentalism’, went into something of a decline, the causes of which lay not only in Remizov’s emigration (he left for Berlin in 1921 and later settled in Paris), but also in the determinedly pro-urban standpoint of the early Soviet regime. However,
skaz
persisted in transmuted form. The working-class
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narrators of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories, such as ‘The Bathhouse’, spoke in a patchwork of mangled clichés taken from political discourse of the day (‘This isn’t the Tsarist regime, you know!’) and popular language of quite a different kind (
grekh odin
, literally ‘nothing but sin’, but approximately equivalent to ‘no peace for the wicked’). And their structure drew on traditional folk narrative patterns, such as triple repetition (the narrator of ‘The Bathhouse’ tries three times to get hold of a wash-tub for himself) and the use of a rhetorical formula to begin and end the narrative and mark it off from surrounding speech (‘The Bathhouse’ starts with the wonderfully surreal sentence, ‘They say, lads, that in America the bathhouses are ever so excellent’). At the same time, Zoshchenko’s characters were more than sociological studies: they were also masks for the writer himself. As the literary critic
‘Ever
Alexander Zholkovsky has argued, the constant social and sexual
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failures of the writer’s fictional protagonists played on obsessive motifs
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in Zoshchenko’s psychoanalytically inspired autobiography,
Before
d e

Sunrise
; rather than laughing at the inarticulacy and inadequacy of
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those he had invented, Zoshchenko was using their helplessness to
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render decent the exploration of his own self. One could add that his
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stories were quintessentially Modernist not only because they ‘made
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the world strange’ (to adopt the term used by the Formalist literary
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theorist Viktor Shklovsky), but also because they expressed a profound
me’

philosophical pessimism about the communicative function of language. The fact that Zoshchenko’s main characters are so often not understood, so frequently
baffled
(in all senses) by the responses of others, reflects not only the petty tyrannies of early Soviet life, but the urban isolation that gripped those living in the world of Daniil Kharms, or indeed Samuel Beckett.

Just so in poetry, the sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical functions of
skaz
intertwined: folklore was no longer kept at one remove but used in order to assault old concepts of appropriate behaviour and expression. Tsvetaeva’s verse tale
The Tsar-Maiden
, for instance, was a transexual narrative representing the love of an aggressive, manly
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princess for a mild-mannered young princely aesthete;
The Swain
showed the union of a peasant girl and vampire-lover as a sublime erotic experience. For Tsvetaeva, as for several other Symbolist and post-Symbolist women poets, appropriation of folklore was a means of breaking away from the constraints of ‘women’s poetry’ in a traditional sense – poetry of unhappy love, elegant narcissism, and self-effacing creativity. Her poem ‘The Muse’ represented a woman at the borders even of rural society, a vagrant, perhaps even a drab and an outlaw: No birth, no marriage certificates, No forefathers, no ‘bright falcon’ [i.e. young man].

She goes tearing along,

Such a distance away!

Under the dusky eyelids

[Glows] gold-winged fire.

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With a wind-beaten hand

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She snatched – and forgot.

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Ru

Her hem trails in the dirt,

Her shoes gape apart.

Not wicked, not kind,

But far-off: her own woman.

Without ‘certificates’ (of birth, of marriage), without a man to ensure her respectability, and with her hem trailing in the dirt (a proverbial image of sluttishness in the sexual sense too), Tsvetaeva’s Muse could not have been more different from the decorous muses, with impeccable literary credentials, that figured in Akhmatova’s poetry.

What is more, here, as in Tsvetaeva’s work as a whole, the polarization between ‘acceptable’ rural folklore and ‘vulgar’ urban folklore that ran through much work by other nineteenth-and early twentieth-century writers broke down. (Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s imitations of the ‘vulgar’

genre of street ballad in her poetry of the early 1920s were considerably
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more refined than her poems drawing on rural folklore.) However, the poem is marked by the stylistic features that characterized Modernist pieces in the folkloric style: fixed epithets (‘gold-winged fire’); negative constructions (‘not wicked, not kind’); and the use of parallelism (see particularly the ‘hem’ and ‘shoes’ of lines 9–10). At the same time, the poem was a self-portrait, a statement of the poet’s right to defy convention, to exist beyond the official scripts of ‘birth and marriage certificates’.

The fact that Modernists’ work in the folk style was much closer to authentic rural popular culture than the writings of the Russian Romantics was one reason why the early twentieth century also saw poetry by actual members of the Russian lower classes enter the literary
‘Ever
mainstream for the first time. Where nineteenth-century ‘peasant
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poets’, such as Aleksey Koltsov, had been incidental curiosities, their
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twentieth-century successors, above all Nikolay Klyuev, were
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formidable aesthetic and intellectual presences. Klyuev fused the
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dialect and natural phenomena of the far North, his birthplace, with
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esoteric Eastern philosophy, the theology of sects such as the
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Flagellants and the Self-Castrators, and citations of epic from Finland to
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North America. His was an extraordinary and individual artistic vision,
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where death was ‘a squall/rumbling on foam-filled wagons/to life’s
me’

outer shore’, where the classical muse was replaced by a skylark, or a whale breasting the Arctic swell, and where Lenin, a ‘cedar frost in Spring’, was evoked as emotionally as ‘the crystal voice of whooper swans’. For his part, Klyuev’s contemporary and sometime comrade-in-arms Esenin, though a less considerable poet, was, forty years after his death, to become the most popular poet in Russia, with a poem that lamented the loss of youth vanishing ‘like white smoke from the apple trees’ sung to the guitar in millions of hostels and private flats.

By and large, though, it was intellectual writers looking for alternative material, including a significant group of upper-middle-class women (Zinaida Gippius, Adelaida Gertsyk, Marina Tsvetaeva) who immersed
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themselves in folk lexis and in popular tradition. The proletarian poets of pre-revolutionary worker journals and post-revolutionary Proletcult groups inclined to a stylistically conventional late Romanticism of foundry sparks and burning furnaces. And Socialist Realism made incumbent on writers the use of a style that would be ‘accessible to the mass reader’ rather than based on the putative language of that reader in his or her pre-educated state: this curtailed experiments in
skaz
in prose and poetry alike. By the time that literary adventurousness resurfaced again, in the 1960s, the majority of the Russian population was living in towns, and rural Russia (transformed by mass literacy, radio, and later television) was no longer the storehouse of ‘folk culture’

it once had been. But
skaz
of a Zoshchenkian kind (based on urban popular speech) began to enjoy some popularity again, particularly among writers not publishing in Soviet official sources (where prohibitions on use of ‘obscene language’, that is, the swear-words found in just about every sentence of real popular speech, meant that
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street language could appear only in bowdlerized form). It was
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employed not only in neo-Realist studies of the Soviet and post-Soviet underworld, but also in texts of greater literary and philosophical
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ambition, such as Yuz Aleshkovsky’s revenge narrative,
The Hand
(1980), in which the narrator’s disgust at the official who purged his family during collectivization juxtaposes the miraculous beauty of the man’s possessions to their owner, apostrophized as ‘you heap of shit’.

Much of the discussion in this book has emphasized the centredness of Russian literary tradition, as expressed in the demands made by generations of critics that writing should serve a serious purpose, and in the dominance of an enduring canon of great writers celebrated by memorials, informal commemorations, and by successive educational systems. In Chapter 6, I argued that this centredness placed women writers at the borders of their culture, made them provincials in terms of the literary heritage, as it were. This chapter has shown that centredness had its limits. To be sure, Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inhabited an imperial mindset, one in which
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non-Russians were often seen as colourful ethnographical exhibits, as examples of quaint or amusing otherness. Yet at the same time, the geographical peripheries of empire, in particular ‘the East’, could serve to unsettle reflective Russians’ conviction of their own identity, leading them to question the nature of distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’.

And in the second half of the nineteenth century, a search for the exotic
inside
Russian culture became common, with folklore now seen as a repository of attractively barbaric themes and language, rather than a store of material that had to be ‘genteelized’ before it could be admitted to polite culture. This transformation of the standing of folklore in turn allowed writers from beyond the educated male elite (peasants, women, ethnic minorities) to profit from their own marginality, to exploit a situation where ‘provincialism’ (in the
‘Ever
transferred sense used above) became a mark of distinction, rather than
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a sign of inferiority.

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will nam

e me’

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‘O Muse, be obedient to the
command of God’

The spiritual and material worlds
Monuments don’t turn out well in Russia (the ones to Nikolay Gogol and so on). That’s because the only tolerable kind of monument we seem to be able to build is a chapel, with an icon lamp perpetually burning for ‘the servant of God Nikolay’.

(Vasily Rozanov, 1913)

In Pushkin’s writing generally, God is not usually as prominent as he is in ‘Monument’. Notable, for example, is the omission of any aspect of Christian belief or practice from
Evgeny Onegin
, including even the Lenten fasting and Easter feasting that would have been annual events in the household of a real-life Larin family. (In the 1850s, a British visitor to Russia described Holy Week as a time when ‘the only sound that from time to time broke the mournful stillness which reigned throughout the house was the monotonous voice of the priest’.) A carefree Voltairean in his early days, Pushkin was later embarrassed by his youthful godlessness (as is indicated by his attempts to remove his irreverent poem about the Virgin Mary,
The Gabrieliad
, from circulation). Yet he also belonged to a generation where the eighteenth-century mistrust of religious ‘enthusiasm’ was strong. Unlike his sister Olga, a fervent believer and the author of religious poetry in French, he did not incline to explicit statements of faith. To be sure, the theme of imminent death figured largely in his later poems, some of which, such as ‘Whether I wander along the noisy streets’ (1829), see choosing a resting-place as
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