Russian Literature (23 page)

The emphasis on death and punishment has often drawn (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) on the strong vein of anti-physicality in Russian Orthodox culture. Earlier manifestations of this in Russian literature had included Derzhavin’s ‘On the Death of Prince Meshchersky’ (1779), which stressed the universality of decay (‘The monarch and the captive are alike food for worms’). Later ones included Tolstoy’s
Confession
(1879–80), with its extraordinary image, borrowed from an Eastern legend, of the living human suspended over the abyss on a tree-trunk gnawed by a serpent. But if Derzhavin’s or Tolstoy’s response to the inevitability of death had been to stress the importance of a virtuous life, twentieth-century texts tended to represent the
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alternative and better reality as something elusive and insubstantial. It was associated with mysterious, uncommunicable experience, what Aleksandr Blok called, in one of his poems addressed to the Beautiful Lady, ‘the call of dim life/Splashing secretly within me’. It manifested itself in the colours of ‘non-being’, of death and of spiritual life at one and the same time, whiteness and transparency. Though, as David Bethea has pointed out, Utopian writing was the polar opposite of apocalyptic writing, in that it anticipated a paradise in the future (often a technological one) rather than mourning the loss of the ‘original pristine faith’ of the past, in practice the two discourses often exploited similar imagery – as, indeed, did Socialist Realism, whose spotless factories, ever-patient party officials, and peaceful, hard-working labourers made it a form of bastardized Utopianism. Just so did the
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traditions of pre-Petrine Russian religious literature find themselves
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preserved in Socialist Realism’s earnest commitment to expressing the
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‘elevated belief of human beings in Sublimity’, as a typical Soviet Realist, Vera Panova, put it in 1972.

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But not all Russian literature by any means has been driven by a
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puritanical distaste for quotidian existence, for the material world.

Some writers (the early twentieth-century short-story writer Aleksey
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Remizov, for instance) gave their demons the comforting substance of
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folk myth, of the malevolent creatures (house spirits and wood demons) that had to be placated with bread and milk. Mandelstam rebelled against the Symbolist emphasis upon esoteric myth by proclaiming the virtues of ‘domestic Hellenism’, of ordinary, though handsome, objects such as jugs and honey-jars. Other writers created a kind of ‘domestic Orthodoxy’, of mundane but fervent spirituality. Olga Sedakova’s limpid poem ‘Old Women’, for example, sees the secular and the spiritual, the sinful and the pious, as inseparably fused: Patient as an Old Master,

I love to study the faces

of pious, spiteful old women,

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the mortality of their lips,

and the immortality of the power

that pressed their lips together,

(like an angel squatting

and stacking coppers in piles,

five copecks, and light copeck pieces . . .

‘Shoo!’ he says to the children,

the birds and the beggars,

‘Shoo, go away,’ he tells them:

can’t you see what I’m doing?) –

I stare, and in my mind I sketch them,

like my own face, in a glass darkly.

The images of a money-counting angel and of ‘spiteful piety’ are contradictory and even shocking. They recall Rembrandt’s late portraits
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of elderly women (hence the phrase ‘Patient as an Old Master’), in which
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supreme artistic beauty is made out of material that is not obviously handsome (unlike the jugs and jars celebrated by Mandelstam). In the
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same way, the nineteenth-century prose writer Nikolay Leskov’s stories turned the early nineteenth-century Russian provinces into an extraordinary retrospective Utopia, a world of small-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, but also of sanity, tolerance, and bodily joy.

His extraordinary and touching tale,
The Sealed Angel
(1873), expressed a vision of art as at once profoundly spiritual and rooted in reality: a combination of inspiration in its most literal sense and of careful craftsmanship. The icon of the title is not only a symbol of faith repressed by bureaucracy (it is confiscated and ‘sealed’ with a layer of wax, in a sublime gesture of secular indifference to the uniqueness of the icon), but also of religious art. As explained by the Red-Haired Man, the story’s main narrator, and a member of the conservative and pious Old Believer sect, to a well-intentioned but sceptical Englishman, the icon stands for a kind of artistic integrity to be found only in traditional practices:
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The Englishman did not believe me, so I went and explained the whole difference to him: nowadays, I said, worldly artists didn’t make the same kind of art; they used paints made of oil, while the old artists, they used pigments dissolved in egg-yolk. The new art, that means you smear the paint on so it only looks life-like in the distance, while in the old kind the work is smooth, and even close to, you can see it clearly. And a worldly artist, I said, won’t even get things right in the outline of his drawing, because he’s been taught to represent what’s hidden in the body of the earthly and animal man, but in holy Russian icon-painting is represented the face that dwelleth in heaven, which a material person could never see even in his imagination.

Yet this other-worldly art, as the detailed description here makes
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clear, is also one of exact representation. As evoked by the Red-Haired
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Man, the angel icon at the centre of the story has an individual
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and distinct physical presence. His face is not only ‘radiant divine’

(
svetlobozhestvennyi
) but also ‘kind of ready to help’ (
edak
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skoropomoshchnyi
).

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‘Domestic Orthodoxy’, then, consists not in a rejection of the material world, but in the notion of a fusion of the material and the spiritual as
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the ideal. In this it has something in common with another salutary
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response to the clichés of other-worldliness, the construction of a theology of the body. The origins of this can be traced back to some writers associated with the national-conservative Slavophile movement.

In Tolstoy’s eulogies of procreative family life in
War and Peace
and
Anna
Karenina
, the rare moments of perfect happiness are associated with a celebration of physical intimacy – Natasha waving her baby’s nappies in front of friends, or (more decorously) Lyovin watching Kitty bathe his son. To be sure, Tolstoy’s energetic love of the physical was determinedly anti-sexual: it is child-bearing rather than copulation that is a source of true joy (the fact that Lyovin and Kitty find sexual contact embarrassing but child-rearing unambiguously enjoyable makes this perfectly clear). But a later Slavophile writer, the brilliant essayist Vasily
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20. ‘Don’t Weep for Me, Mother’: The Saviour not Made by Human Hands with Saints. Icon for Holy Week: a Muscovite version of the Greek
acheiropoietos
, as evoked in the first line of ‘Monument’, showing the triumph of the resurrected Christ over the tomb.

Rozanov, created a world where there was no separation between body and spirit, flesh and intellect. As the scholar Stephen Hutchings has pointed out, Rozanov’s was an existence where ‘the most exaggeratedly profound formulations are arrived at “over a cup of tea” or “in the lavatory” ’. The writer firmly believed that ‘a hole in a sock that never grows larger, and never gets darned’ was a better expression of everlasting life than ‘the dry and abstract term “immortality of the soul” ’, and believed sexuality was an essential, indeed perhaps the essential, form of spiritual expression. In his
People of the Lunar Light
, Rozanov insisted upon the perverted nature of religious celibacy (monasticism was for him a form of displaced, or not so displaced, homo-eroticism); procreative sexuality, preferably ritualized in the way that it was by Jews (who reserved copulation for the eve of the Sabbath)
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was a godly act. Sexuality, too, was the only way of resolving the
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otherwise unresolvable problem of how to produce a dialogue between
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self and other, retaining the identity of each yet allowing free communication between them.

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A similar attempt to embrace the bodily world is evident in one of the
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most enlivening and vivid responses to Socialist Realism, Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of François Rabelais, which celebrated the physicality of
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the ‘carnival’, glorifying the temporary suspension of rational decorum
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and the resurgence of ‘the lower bodily stratum’. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival drew on a great deal more than the actual practices of fairgrounds and folk festivals, though the fashion for circus and vaudeville in 1920s Soviet literature, theatre, and film was definitely part of the background to the book. Rather, the evocation of the medieval carnival was used to create an imaginative space with many kinds of cultural resonance. Among these are the Stalin regime’s own promotion of a decorous and conformist kind of carnival, the Symbolists’

fascination with Dionysiac religion, in which the body of the god was repeatedly destroyed and repeatedly made whole, and popular traditions about lands of plenty and joy beyond the known world (as evoked also in Aleksandr Chayanov’s
Journey of My Brother Aleksei to the
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Land of Peasant Utopia
, written in 1920). But Bakhtin’s book was also related to the writings of Khmoyakov, Ivan Kireevsky, and Konstantin Aksakov in its emphasis upon community ritual, and in its sense of religious experience in the everyday. The various elements can be seen coming together, for instance, in his description of the banquet.

In the act of eating, as we have said, the confines between the body and the world are overstepped by the body. It triumphs over the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world’s expense. This element of victory and triumph is inherent in all banquet images. No meal can be sad. Sadness and food are incompatible (while death and food are perfectly compatible). The banquet always celebrates a victory and this is part of its very nature. Further, the triumphant banquet is always universal. It is the triumph of life over death. In this respect it is equivalent to conception and birth. The victorious body receives the defeated world and is renewed.

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(Chapter 4)

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Popular feasting and the Christian Eucharist, with its link to resurrection
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on the one hand and crucifixion on the other, come together in a tour-de-force of neo-Slavophile cultural criticism, which synthesizes rather than analyses and is rooted in a determination to celebrate the wholeness of life, and not to discriminate between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘anti-aesthetic’, acceptable and unacceptable, sensations.

Bakhtin’s book is also a tribute to the vitality of humour in Russian culture, as, too, are Rozanov’s miniatures, not only the vessels of ‘exaggerated profundity’ but of studiedly ridiculous self-portraits – having confiscated his children’s Sherlock Holmes stories as ‘harmful reading’, Rozanov devoured them himself at every possible opportunity, ‘so that the train journey from Siverskaya to St Petersburg flew past like a dream’. A popular Western view of Russia sees the place as grim, dank, and with permanently gloomy inhabitants given to fits of weeping and talking about their souls. No one could maintain this
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illusion for long when reading Russian literature. In Chekhov’s plays, even characters prone to maudlin fits of self-pity display a talent for flights of black comedy (as when Uncle Vanya responds to a social banality about the nice weather with the words, ‘Nice weather to hang yourself in’). Here, humour is a weapon for exposing artificiality (as it also is in Dostoevsky’s novels, where lapses into absurdity threaten every carefully planned social event). But ridicule is often more universal than this, giving a sense of human existence as necessarily grotesque – as in the scene from Chekhov’s ‘Ward No. 6’ (1892) where one madman boasts of his fantasy service decorations to another invalided out of the civil service when he became wrongly convinced he was making mistakes and developed paranoia.