Russian Literature (24 page)

‘O

M

Black humour of this kind survived at even the darkest eras of history,
use

,

such as the late 1930s. To be sure, in Socialist Realist texts, humour that
be

obedient

was not of the unintentional sort was limited to crude jokes directed at a narrow range of social types (shirkers at work, women who used too
t

much make-up, men who tried to lay down the law to their wives). In
o th

e

unofficial writing, though, a vivid and subtle feeling of the ridiculous
comman

survived, and pompous bureaucrats were its main targets (in Bulgakov’s
Master and Margarita
, comic vengeance is exacted on a whole crowd of
d of

such people). In texts of this kind, humour was a survival strategy, but it
God’

was also a manifestation of freedom, a means of transcending oppression, a gesture of indifference towards authority. The exhilirating carnival foolery celebrated by Bakhtin was only one form of challenging official puritanism. The humour of the ‘holy fools’, the popular saints of early modern Russia whose filthy habits and bizarre behaviour assailed ordinary proprieties, and thus called into question conventional ideas about goodness, also worked its way through into some later literary texts. Kostoglotov, the protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s
Cancer Ward
, who is saddled with an absurd name (Boneswallower), and is, in every obvious way, decidedly unamiable – surly, brusque, unrepentantly naive – moved like some latterday, secularized version of the holy fool through 1950s Soviet society, saving no one but himself, yet at the same
151

time exposing the illusions upon which the ideals and aspirations of those surrounding him were based.

The uniqueness of Russian literature (and Russian culture more generally) has been held by many Western observers to lie in precisely this ability to embrace spiritual and material worlds. As the classicist and Russophile Jane Harrison declared in 1919, ‘The Russian stands for the complexity and concreteness of life – felt whole, unanalysed, unjudged, lived into . . .’. But as I come to the end of this short tour along pathways suggested by Pushkin’s ‘Monument’, I would not want to leave you with the impression that this chapter has spoken ‘the last word’, that we have reached the heart of the maze. Rather, there is no such heart: we have met the beginning of a path leading backward. For Pushkin, the last word was not ‘O Muse, be obedient to the command of God’, but ‘Don’t dispute with fools’: which leads back to the discussion of
savoir faire
placed here in Chapter 6. We saw in Chapter 5 that
judging
ture

life has been a constant preoccupation of Russian writers, while Pushkin
rae

Lit

himself is an illustration that intelligent Russians have had just as large a talent for, and inclination towards,
analysis
as their counterparts
ssian
Ru

anywhere in the world. In Russia itself, writers have often been regarded as sages, as moral guides to how life should be lived; but there are many other reasons for reading Russian literature. Like any other literature, it represents the world in new and extraordinary ways, it investigates areas of human experience that we sometimes prefer not to think about (madness, homicidal urges, tyranny); and it offers not only intellectual stimulation but the sensual delight of language stretched to its limits, of laughter, and of flights of imaginative fancy.

152

Further reading

N. Cornwell (ed.),
A Reference Guide to Russian Literature
(London, 1998), and V. Terras (ed.),
Handbook of Russian Literature
(New Haven, Conn., 1984) (the latter lists more writers, but the bibliographies and articles in the former are fuller). Among single-volume histories are R. Hingley,
Russian Writers and Society
(London, 1975) and
Russian Writers and Soviet
Society
(London, 1978); D. S. Mirsky,
History of Russian Literature
(New York, 1949); C. Moser (ed.),
The Cambridge History of Russian Literature
(Cambridge, 1992); V. Terras,
A History of Russian Literature
(New Haven, Conn., 1991); R. Bartlett and A. Benn (eds.),
Literary Russia: A Guide
(London, 1997) is useful on museums. Fuller reading lists, as well as source notes for the entire book, are available on the OUP website at //http.www.oup.com/

The
Complete Pushkin in English
began publication in 1999. Recent single-volume translations include
Pushkin’s Notebooks in Facsimile
(London, 1995–8); A. D. P. Briggs (ed.),
Alexander Pushkin: Selections
(London, 1997); E. Feinstein (ed.),
Pushkin Translated
(Manchester, 1999); A. Kahn (ed.),
Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin
,
The Queen of Spades
,
The Captain’s Daughter
,
Peter the Great’s Blackamoor
(Oxford, 1997).

See also ‘A Pushkin Portfolio’,
Modern Poetry in Translation
15 (1999), 144–277;
Eugene Onegin, Translated with a Commentary by Vladimir
153

Nabokov
(Princeton, NJ, 1981); T. Shaw (ed.),
The Letters of Alexander
Pushkin
(Bloomington, Ind., 1963).

D. Bethea,
Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet
(Madison, Wisconsin, 1998); P. Debreczeny, ‘Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo: Pushkin’s Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture’,
South
Atlantic Quarterly
90 (1991), 269–302; M. C. Levitt,
Russian Literary
Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880
(Ithaca, NY, 1989); K. Petrone,
Life Has Become Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of
Stalin
(Bloomington, Ind., 2000), chapter 5; A. Siniavsky,
Strolls with
Pushkin
(New Haven, Conn., 1993); S. Vitale,
Pushkin’s Button
(London, 1999). See also the chapters by M. C. Levitt and S. Sandler in B. Gasparov, R. C. Hughes, and I. Paperno (eds.),
Cultural Mythologies
of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age
(Berkeley, 1992).

ture

rae

Lit

For Pushkin’s own views on the canon, see Tatiana Woolf (ed.),
Pushkin
ssian

Ru

on Literature
(London, 1971). C. R. S. Cockrell and D. Richards (eds.),
Russian Views of Pushkin
(Oxford, 1976) and S. Hoisington (ed.),
Russian
Views of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin
(Bloomington, Ind., 1988) are useful anthologies of critical opinion. More generally, see J. Brooks, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics’, in I. Banac, J. G. Ackerman, and R. Szporluk (eds.),
Nation and Ideology
(1981), 315–34; M. Friedberg,
Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets
(New York, 1962); S. Lovell,
The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in
the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras
(Basingstoke, 2000). On censorship, see M. T. Choldin and M. Friedberg (eds.),
The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and
Censors in the USSR
(Boston, 1989); M. Dewhirst and R. Farrell (eds.),
The
Soviet Censorship
(Metuchen, NJ, 1973); D. Jones (ed.),
Literary Censorship:
A Reference Guide
(London, 2001); L. Losev,
On the Beneficence of
Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature
(Munich, 1984).

154

L. Ginzburg,
On Psychological Prose
(Princeton, NJ, 1990); G. S. Morson,
Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace
(Berkeley, 1987); A. Wachtel,
An Obsession with History: Russian Writers
Confront the Past
(Stanford, 1994).

For nineteenth-century Russian literature and politics, see Isaiah Berlin,
Russian Thinkers
(London, 1978); Aileen Kelly,
Toward Another Shore:
Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance
(New Haven, 1998) and her
Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin
(New Haven, 1999); Leonard Schapiro,
Turgenev: His Life and Times
(Oxford, 1978). On the twentieth century, see K. Clark,
The Soviet Novel:
History as Ritual
(Chicago, 1981); G. Freidin,
A Coat of Many Colors: Osip
Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self-Preservation
(Berkeley, 1987); J. Garrard and C. Garrard,
Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union
(London, 1990);
Fur
T. Lahusen,
How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism
ther

in Stalin’s Russia
(Ithaca, NY, 1997); R. Robin,
Socialist Realism: An
rea

d

Impossible Aesthetic
(Stanford, 1992); D. Shepherd,
Beyond Metafiction:
ing

Self-Consciousness in Soviet Literature
(Oxford, 1992); G. S. Smith,
D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life
(Oxford, 2000), part 3.

J. Andrew (ed.),
Russian Women’s Shorter Fiction: An Anthology 1835–1860

(Oxford, 1996); H. Goscilo and B. Holmgren (eds.),
Russia – Women –
Culture
(Bloomington, Ind., 1997); B. Heldt,
Terrible Perfection: Women in
Russian Literature
(Bloomington, Ind., 1987); B. Holmgren,
Women’s
Work in Stalin’s Times
(Bloomington, Ind., 1993); C. Kelly (ed.),
An
Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777–1992
(Oxford, 1994) and C. Kelly,
A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820–1992
(Oxford, 1994); M. Ledkovsky, C. Rosenthal, and M. Zirin (eds.),
A Dictionary of Russian
Women Writers
(Westport, Conn., 1994); L. Ya. Ginzburg, Yu. M. Lotman, and B. Uspensky,
The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History
(Ithaca, NY, 1985); I. Reyfman,
Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian
155

Culture and Literature
(Stanford, 1999); W. M. Todd III,
Fiction and Society
in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

J. Andrew,
Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature: The Feminine and The
Masculine
(Basingstoke, 1993); M. Makin,
Marina Tsvetaeva: The Poetics
of Appropriation
(Oxford, 1994), chapter 3; F. J. Oinas,
Essays in Russian
Folklore and Mythology
(Columbus, Ohio, 1975); D. E. Peterson,
Up From
Bondage: The Literature of Russian and African-American Soul
(Durham, NC, 2000); S. Sandler,
Distant Pleasures: Aleksandr Pushkin and the
Writing of Exile
(Stanford, 1989); J. West in R. Anderson and Paul Debreczeny,
Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing
(Gainesville, Florida, 1994).

S. Baehr,
The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia
(Stanford, 1991);
rae

Lit

J. Billington,
The Icon and the Axe
(London, 1966); C. Brandist,
Carnival
Culture in the Soviet Modernist Novel
(Basingstoke, 1996); P. Davidson
ssian

Ru

(ed.),
Russian Literature and its Demons
(London, 2000); S. Hutchings,
Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday
(Cambridge, 1997); E. Naiman,
Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Literature
(Ithaca, NY, 1997); R. Stites,
Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and
Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution
(Oxford, 1989).

156

INDEX

Barrett, Thomas 122

Batyushkov, Konstantin

(1787–1855), poet 110

Beckett, Samuel 133

References in
bold type
are to Belinsky, Vissarion

explanatory text–boxes.

(1811–48), critic 39, 41, 47,

76, 81, 139

A

Bely, Andrey (1880–1934),

novelist and poet 16, 62

Aeschylus 9

Bethea, David 145

Akhmatova, Anna

Bishop, Elizabeth 28

(1889–1966), poet 5, 18, 24,

Blake, William 43

26–7, 73, 88, 91, 103, 109, 111,

Blok, Aleksandr (1881–1921), poet

112–13
, 115

59, 111, 126, 128, 145

Alexander I (reigned 1801–25),

Boborykin, Petr (1836–1921),

Emperor of Russia 13

prose writer 93

Aksakov, Konstantin (1817–60),

body, theology of 149

Slavophile thinker 150

Bowen, Elizabeth 6

Aleshkovsky, Yuz (b. 1929),

Boym, Svetlana (b. 1959), critic

novelist 136

92

Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr

Brik, Osip (1888–1945), critic

(1862–1938), prose writer

139

93

Brodsky, Joseph (1940–96),