Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

So far as prose fiction went, Pushkin’s heritage was similarly idiosyncratic. A sore point for advocates of Pushkin’s role as the ‘founding father of Russian literature’ has been the writer’s failure, among his many brilliant excursions into diverse genres, to provide models for the enormous psychological novels that have, since the late nineteenth century, been internationally regarded as Russia’s greatest contribution to world literature. Even so determinedly individual a Modernist as Nabokov, who held much Russian Realist prose to be as bogus in intention as it was garrulous in expression, and who detested psychological literalism, commented of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin that he is ‘fluid and flaccid as soon as he starts to feel, as soon as he departs from the existence he has acquired from his maker in terms of colorful parody and as a catchall for many irrelevant and immortal matters’. It was above all as a triumph of surface-painting that he admired the novel. To be sure, Evgeny Onegin is stylistically diverse and has a narrator who plays many parts (a friend of the characters, a mouthpiece for them, an ironic commentator upon folly, a sympathizer in time of grief). Yet even Tatiana remains a symbol rather than a counterfeit of lived reality, a creature of idealism rather than representation. She is as much a manifestation of the creative sensibility as a portrait of a provincial young lady. If her letter to Evgeny, written when awake, is a tissue of quotations from books she has read, her dream of Evgeny surrounded by strange creatures is narrated in the language of Pushkin’s own lyric ballads.

13. Ostrovsky,

Too Clever By Half.

Ostrovsky’s

Too Clever By Half

(1868) in an ‘eccentric’ circus staging by the film director Sergey Eisenstein (1923): a dozen or so ginger-haired clowns cavort provocatively on a climbing-frame set. Ostrovsky, the linchpin of the Russian theatre in the mid-nineteenth century, is a clear case of a successful writer whose work bears little or no relation to Pushkin’s (with the possible exception of his fairy-tale drama

The Snow Maiden

). Unlike Pushkin, he was a professional man of the theatre, many of whose plays, so far from being brilliant but theatrically problematic experiments, were competent formulaic comedies lifted above the rut by the author’s extraordinary ear for vulgar speech, vivid sense of the ridiculous, and infectious misanthropy.

The Storm

, on the other hand, was a full-blooded melodrama of merchant life that was quite out of kilter with Pushkin’s emotional delicacy. Which is not to belittle Ostrovsky’s achievements as a dramatist: his plays have a firm place on the international stage (

The Storm

inspired Janááek’s opera

Katerina Kabanova

, for instance), as well as the national one. And in early twentieth-century Russia, their familiarity bred not contempt but daring on the part of directors, including Meyerhold and Stanislavsky, as well as Eisenstein.

None of this has resonance in, say, the writing of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Chekhov. Pushkin’s characters usually do not have their own voices: they are pegs upon which the fabric of authorial brilliance is hung (the same is true of Gogol’s characters, with the exception of the Mayor in the Government Inspector, who, in his final outburst of rage against the trick that has been played on him, achieves a truly personal eloquence unlike anything else in the play). Pushkin’s acidly detached portrayal of Hermann and Liza allows little space to speech from within the characters: Hermann in particular remains enigmatic because he is always seen from outside. The furthest possible point from this was reached in Dostoevsky’s extraordinary, and by both national and international standards revolutionary, story Notes from Underground, in which we have no point of orientation but the voice of the central character himself, tormenting us with his capricious and contradictory statements from the very first sentence of the novel:

I am a sick man. A bitter and spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver has something wrong with it. But actually I don’t give a stuff about being ill and I’m not even sure what’s wrong with me. I’m not going for treatment and I never have gone for treatment, even though I do respect doctors and medicines. And on top of that, I’m superstitious; superstitious enough, even, to respect medicine. (I’m educated enough not to be superstitious, but I still am superstitious.) No, sir, the reason I don’t go for treatment is out of spite. You probably won’t want to understand that. Well, I understand you there. But of course I won’t manage to explain to you precisely whose nose I aim to put out of joint with my spite . . .