Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Whichever way, the view of the writer as ‘master of minds’ was a constant of Russian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even so studiedly ironic a Modernist as Vladimir Nabokov was happy to assert that he was no ‘frivolous firebird’, but ‘a moralist kicking sin, scoffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride’. Dissent crystallized round the manner in which ethical or aesthetic edification was to be imparted, and the material that it should impart, rather than the question of whether such edification might be tolerated in the first place. The author’s right and duty to give such edification was a central plank of Soviet literary culture, in which officially approved authors not only enjoyed material privileges, but were also treated as experts on topical issues of the day. (A typically grotesque example of this was the participation of the prominent Soviet poet Pavel Antokolsky, then in his sixties, in a debate about ‘the youth of today’ that ran in the Young Communist League newspaper Komsomol’skaya pravda

during late 1963 and early 1964.) The official view of writers as ‘tutors to the masses’ did not mean that this role was eschewed by those opposed to the regime. As memoirs and letters make clear, marginal or persecuted writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky were credited with peculiar insight into psychological, moral, and aesthetic problems. They were appealed to by intelligent fellow citizens not only as patrons and authoritative readers of literary texts, but as experts on everything from painting, music, architecture, right down to manners, dress, and household decoration.

The fact that regard for writers was so high was one reason why, during the Soviet period, large numbers of Russians became sufferers from ‘graphomania’, the compulsive desire to spew out writing, and if possible get this into print, irrespective of its merits. Stirred up by 1920s propaganda, which exhorted the Soviet masses to express themselves (‘anyone can write!’), graphomania was ubiquitous until the end of Soviet power. It encompassed lyric poems and fiction as well as letters to the press, and avant-garde work as well as official literature. As the émigré writer Svetlana Boym has pointed out, graphomania was ‘an embarrassment to literary institutions’ of all kinds, unofficial as well as official, since it raised uncomfortable questions about the grounds upon which it was possible to discriminate between the talented and the talentless. Some of the most inventive and interesting novels and stories created under Soviet power were tragi-comic examinations of the fatal affinities between good and bad art. If the genius of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in ‘Death in Venice’ has to be taken as a given, and the sensibility of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert at least mimics that of the true artist (though he makes the fatal mistake of confusing fantasy and life), the talents of many Soviet writer-heroes were of a more questionable kind. For example, in Yury Olesha’s Envy

(1927), two different but equally ambiguous writer figures combine genius in perception and invention with social parasitism and paralysis of the will. The pathological fantasist, self-styled inventor, and scribbler of verses-to-order, Ivan Babichev, stands alongside Nikolay Kavalerov, capable of wonderful artistic insights (he sees a bird as a hair-clipper, a scar as a cicatrice from a missing tree-branch) but reduced at the end of the novel to drunken inanition upon the vast, bug-infested, curlicued bedstead of widow Anechka Prokopovich.