Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

These scruples had a powerful institutional weight during the first years after the Russian Revolution, when literary-historical scholarship was dominated by the official ideology of ‘class war’. For those committed to fighting that war, Pushkin was no more than a supremely gifted member of a reactionary cultural elite. Most so-called ‘leftists’, too, were admirers of fiction (especially Realist fiction), not of ‘rhyming blether’. Significantly, the first writers whose biographies appeared in The Lives of Famous People, an uplifting series for the mass market that began publication at the instigation of Gorky in 1933, were Chekhov, Gogol, the eighteenth-century radical dissident Aleksandr Radishchev, and the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, scourge of the privileged classes, rather than Pushkin. Similarly, the keynote speeches at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers emphasized the pre-eminence, alongside the Realist fiction of Gorky and of Tolstoy, of ‘progressive’ critics such as Belinsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and Nikolay Dobrolyubov. As late as 1949, a list of required reading for the Soviet masses put forward by the Party leader, Old Bolshevik, and former worker Mikhail Kalinin consisted of Lomonosov (as an example of the supreme auto-didact and scientific genius), the ‘revolutionary moralist’ Radishchev, Belinsky, and Dobrolyubov, with the radical poet Nikolay Nekrasov the sole example of an imaginative writer.

Right until the end of the Soviet era, ‘progressiveness’ – which is to say, the holding of views that could be represented as foreshadowing Soviet ones – was the primary criterion by which work by dead writers was judged as fitting, or not, for acknowledgement as ‘classic literature’. ‘Progressiveness’ was to be found in Chernyshevsky’s plodding, formulaic novel of women’s liberation, What is to be Done? (1863), but not in Dostoevsky’s The Devils

(1871–2), which the second edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia labelled a ‘virulent slur upon the Russian movement for political liberation’. It was to be found in Tolstoy’s

War and Peace, but only to a much more limited degree in Anna Karenina

(decidedly a novel of the second rank, from an official Soviet point of view, because of the unfortunate prominence in it of adulterous passion). It was evident in Nekrasov’s socially critical poetry, but most definitely not in the ‘idealist’ works of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism. It was evident in radical periodicals of high principle but decidedly modest literary merit, such as The Spark, but not in the artistically ambitious (and politically liberal) Modernist journals of the early twentieth century, such as Apollo or The Scales. Accordingly, it was selections from the former journal, and not the latter two, that appeared in the ‘Poet’s Library’, the most prestigious series of retrospective editions of poetry, published by the leading house ‘The Soviet Writer’.