Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

No English translation can imitate the grammar of the original, which employs the flexibility of Russian syntax in order to place the adjective in a different position in each of the first sentences, so that the cadence rises to a pitch of hysterical triumph on ‘unattractive’. But the nature of the rhetorical stategies comes across. As a statement is presented, it is immediately contradicted; just as contradictory is the Underground Man’s combination of insistent solitariness and inability to do without his listener, the antagonist who ‘probably won’t want to understand’. The Underground Man’s confession is presented without any of the devices customarily used to establish a memoir as ‘real’. There is no diary discovered after his death, his listener remains anonymous, and there is no motivating occasion (in contrast, the murderer in Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata makes his confession in a train carriage, a propos a discussion of marriage). Notes from Underground breached the literary etiquette of Pushkin’s prose as energetically as its monstrously paranoid, intolerant, and rude narrator poured contempt on the behaviour conventions of polite society.

To be sure, aspects of Pushkin’s prose were to be treated as exemplary by some later writers. For Chekhov, it was Pushkin’s sparing use of figurative language, his preference for metonyms over metaphors, that was particularly attractive. For Tolstoy, it was above all the directness and immediacy of Pushkin’s opening paragraphs that had weight. The second sentence of Anna Karenina – ‘Everything had got mixed up in the Oblonsky household’ – has the deliberate flatness of the first line of

The Queen of Spades, ‘A game of cards was going on one day in the residence of Narumov, an officer in the horse guards.’

Yet Tolstoy, the most ‘Pushkinian’ of writers in terms of his way of beginning a narrative, was decidedly anti-Pushkinian in other respects. The caricatured Napoleon in War and Peace is at the far end of the representational spectrum from Pushkin’s ambivalent, but fervent, tributes to the leader’s Romantic grandeur. ‘Napoleon’ (1822) opens with lines that employ the cosmic imagery of the eighteenth-century formal ode to evoke the French emperor’s transcendent greatness:

The fateful destiny is played out:

The great man has flickered into darkness.

In gloomy unfreedom has rolled to an end

The thunderous age of Napoleon.

For Tolstoy in War and Peace, ‘providence’ replaced ‘destiny’, and characters achieved greatness in the sight of their God and of their literary creator because of their lack of aspiration to the ‘greatness’ represented here. In Pushkin’s writings, for instance The Bronze Horseman

, the word ‘idol’ occupied a vital place, capturing an ambiguous configuration of greatness and moral transgression. In Tolstoy’s mind, all idols, by definition, could only deceive, and in attempting to escape their common humanity were certain to reveal their tawdry and hollow true selves. The fact that Tolstoy’s father, a member of Pushkin’s own generation, had made him learn ‘Napoleon’ by heart in the nursery did everything other than ensure piety towards Pushkin and his hero.

Compared with Pushkin’s sense that prose should be ‘modest’ and ‘lucid’, too, the expansiveness of Tolstoy’s vast ‘baggy monsters’ was provocative to the point of impertinence. The epilogue of The Queen of Spades ties up the ends with exaggerated neatness, underlining the fact that this is a piece of fiction. Tolstoy’s endings, on the other hand, are made fuzzy by their epilogues and afterwords. There is the sense of the writer returning again and again to subjects he could not bear to abandon. And the intimations of fate that play an ambiguous role in The Queen of Spades were, for Tolstoy, always escapable. If there is some sense that Hermann may really have been taken to the Countess’s house by an ‘unknown power’, a malign supernatural force, albeit one within him, a character’s belief that his or her fate was ‘foreshadowed’ was, for Tolstoy, an indication of psychic morbidity, of a bent to self-destruction.

Tolstoy, then, was an example of a reader who read Pushkin ‘like a poet’ – a term which Pushkin himself understood to mean a creative personality in a broad sense, someone who might be inspired tangentially, rather than literally, by what he or she read.