Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

But the desire to separate art from moral or political issues remained a marginal phenomenon, as was illustrated when Tolstoy, the towering figure of the late nineteenth century and a commentator respected and feared by figures belonging to every political grouping, lent his immense authority to an attack on the Decadent cult of beauty. What is Art?

(1898) set out a sustained and powerful case against the aesthetic understanding of art, which was to be valued, in Tolstoy’s view, for its sincere expression of feeling and for its commitment to the cause of good. The pervasiveness of populism in the Russian intelligentsia, and of the view that the duty of educated people was to help the so-called ‘grey masses’, meant that attempts to fuse art and politics were more common than attempts to separate the two, even among the ‘Decadents’ whom Tolstoy had attacked. For a while in 1906–7, the short-lived ‘Mystical Anarchist’ movement was the expression of a drive to unite Modernist literature, religious philosophy, and socialism; after 1917, a number of Modernist writers became ardent supporters of Bolshevism and participants in its newly fledged cultural institutions. The Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov, for example, was made responsible for setting up training schemes for Soviet writers; Mayakovsky and other left avant-gardists churned out jingles and posters for the Rosta (Russian Telegraph Agency) windows in Moscow.

But there were also less obvious ways in which art and politics impacted upon each other. Marina Tsvetaeva, whose fierce independence from any party line was to make her deeply unpopular both in post-revolutionary Moscow and after her emigration to Prague and later to Paris, and who was one of the most formidably gifted Modernist poets, became embroiled, after 1917, in one crusade after another. Her magnificent tribute to the ‘White’, anti-Soviet forces in the Russian Civil War, The Swan’s Demesne

(1921), written in Soviet Moscow, was followed by an equally controversial tribute to Mayakovsky, ‘the draught-horse angel’, published in Berlin in 1923, a year after Tsvetaeva’s emigration to the West.

The acceptance among many Russian writers that art and ethics were compatible was in part a result of the ambitions of governments, both before and after the Revolution, to regulate morality and the arts. There was generally an inverse relationship between the severity of censorship and the production of studiedly amoral or self-consciously frivolous works of art: it is a rare writer who will risk his or her life or freedom for the sake of a joke. In any case, the Western liberal construct of a ‘civic sphere’, according to which cultural institutions, along with education and regulation of the urban environment, are assumed to be in signal respects autonomous and ‘above politics’, did not necessarily have a greater hold on the minds of writers hostile to Tsarist and Soviet power than it did upon political leaders themselves. At some periods in nineteenth-century Russian history, ‘democratic censorship’ (that is, the drive of Russian radical critics and editors to coerce authors into political conformity) was, as a recent historian has commented, ‘as much a force to be reckoned with as the official variety’.

All of this means that it is a serious mistake to argue that ‘classic Russian literature [ . . . ] is rarely overtly didactic’ (to quote a Western historian of Russia). On the contrary, ‘overt didacticism’ was one of classic Russian writers’ great strengths. Only a deliberately wayward reader could fail to recognize that Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family

was an eloquent denunciation of the moral bankruptcy of the serf-owning class, or that his History of a Town was a vicious satire on autocratic rule. The point was not that Russian writers avoided sermons and exemplary tales, but that they narrated these with extraordinary rhetorical force.

Yet the creepy Yudushka Golovlyov in the first novel and the stentorian Mayor Ugryum-Burcheev in the second were more than simply vehicles for Saltykov’s ideological points. It was literary critics, rather than authors, who relentlessly classified characters in terms of their supposed expression of contemporary ills, effacing the differences between Evgeny Onegin, Pechorin, and Andrey Bolkonsky so they could be rounded up into a shorn herd of ‘superfluous men’. In similar vein, Nikolay Dobrolyubov’s essay on Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, ‘What is Oblomovitis?’, presented the book as a parable about idleness versus industriousness, ignoring the fact that the superlatively indolent and gluttonous Oblomov had stimulated his creator’s fancy as the book’s positive hero, self-righteous Stolz, had not.