Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

In a sense, then, one could see Russian literature as at once colonial and post-colonial, speaking simultaneously from the viewpoint of conqueror and conquered. Nikolay Trubetskoy, the most original thinker in the Eurasian group, took a militantly relativist attitude to European culture – ‘European culture is obligatory only for the group of nations that created it’ – which was very much in the spirit of négritude, the self-assertion movement among Francophone African and West Indian intellectuals in the 1940s, and of African-American philosophy as well. For Trubetskoy, the diversity of Russian culture was a source of pride, as was the racial mixture in the Russian Empire. So far as landscape was concerned, though, the Eurasian sensibility was attracted to the familiar rather than the exotic. It was the steppe, rather than the impassable mountain ranges of the Caucasus, that had become the preferred imaginative space. Rivers, the only borders in the steppe, were seen not only as ‘infrangible boundaries’ between battle-lines, but also as frontiers that might be crossed by stealth, or used as trading routes. Exactly so was the Russian language, the primary symbol of national difference for a Westernized Russian such as Turgenev, now seen as permeable to the East, distinguished from other Slavonic languages by its capacity for absorbing Turkic loan-words and phonetics.

Ten years after writing ‘On Kulikovo Field’, Blok himself moved from seeing tragedy in the binary inheritance of Russian culture, ‘Tatar’ and ‘Russian’, to seeing this as a source of strength. His 1918 poem ‘Scythians’ (quoted here in Robin Kemball’s translation) celebrated a tribe that had been seen since classical Greek times as the epitome of vigorous barbarism. The Scythians stood for the resurgent life of Russia, traditionally the bulwark against incursions from the East, but now threatening to overwhelm enfeebled Western civilization with its hybrid vitality:

So, Russia – Sphinx – triumphant, sorrowed too –

With black blood flows, in fearful wildness,

Her eyes glare deep, glare deep, glare deep at you,

With hatred and – with loving-kindness!

Yes, so to love, as lies within our blood,

Not one of you has loved in ages!

You have forgotten that there is such love

That burns and burning, lays in ashes!

The ‘Scythian’ side of Russia was implicitly associated, in Blok’s representation, with the creation myth of the Russian Revolution, understood by the poet in his first and enthuasistic response to it as a coming to power of the formerly oppressed, ‘barbarous’ underclasses. The association was not peculiar to Blok. The history of representation of the East was intimately intertwined with that of representation of ‘the people’ (narod, a noun signifying both ‘people’ and ‘nation’). In a culture where, as late as 1897, only 21 per cent of the population was literate, the divide between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ had sometimes been understood to map on to the division between ‘Westernized’ and ‘native Russian’. With the rise of the Slavophile movement in the 1830s, the idea that cultivated Russians were foreigners in their own country became a cliché in literature and in journalism. There was a realization that the discovery of uncorrupted exoticism did not always require a visit to the Caucasus: it could also be found in the Russian countryside. In the 1820s, some Russian Romantic writers, like their counterparts in other European countries, began to see folk tales and folk songs as a source of inspiration for literary endeavour. At first, it was the motifs and plots, rather than the language and structure, of folkloric texts that provided the inspiration. Some of Pushkin’s tales on folklore subjects (skazki), such as ‘The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda’ (1830), paraphrased subjects from oral tradition (the poet had himself noted material from informants when staying on his estate at Mikhailovskoe in the late 1820s) and were composed in a genteel approximation of popular speech. But others, such as The Golden Cockerel

(1834), were taken from Western European sources, were written in verse rather than prose, and used the vocabulary and inflections of educated conversation. Like his fairy-tale narrative poem Ruslan and Ludmilla (1820), and like verse tales by his contemporaries and successors (for example, Pyotr Ershov’s Little Hunchback Horse, 1834), Pushkin’s skazki had the charming artificiality of Charles Perrault or Jeanne L’Héritier’s reworkings of French folklore, such as The Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast.