Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The sense of rural devastation, of what was often termed the ‘bestialization of the people’, prompted a search for the picturesque in the far North of Russia, which had remained relatively untouched by serfdom and which was saved by its remoteness from the seasonal migration to cities that had (in the eyes of many Populists) tainted the regions nearer to Moscow and St Petersburg with urban ways. It was here above all that folklore collectors searched for the rituals, celebrations, spells, songs, and tales that they believed preserved traditions stretching back to pre-Christian times. But the region from which material emanated was in the end less important than its character. Writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, who sometimes collected ethnographical material themselves as well as turning to published anthologies of such material, were attracted above all by texts that underlined the difference between town and countryside. In the Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov’s vivid story-monologue ‘Masha’, for example, the narrator was a peasant girl for whom traditional folkloric figures such as the house spirit were absolutely real physical presences:

Oh, Ma’am, you can’t imagine how good it is living in Yaroslavl, the only thing that worries you here is the conmen, but in the village there’s so much to be afraid of: courtyard spirits, and house spirits, and demons, and arch-demons. Outside in the courtyard there’s a spirit, and inside the house there’s one too; the spirit in the courtyard has a face on him like the master’s, and the one in the house is all hairy. If anyone goes out to feed the horses after nine, then the courtyard spirit, he spies it straight away. You can’t just go out like that, you have to cough first . . .

As this example indicates, the language of narration was now as important as the material cited. The vitality of much early twentieth-century Russian prose was derived directly from popular speech (prostorech’e). The favoured genre was a first-person narrative that eschewed the norms of educated speech (this type of narrative was to be retrospectively named skaz

by Russian Formalist critics: see for instance Boris Eikhenbaum’s 1918 essay ‘The Illusion of skaz’). Before the Revolution, the most outstanding exponent of skaz

was Aleksey Remizov, whose more successful imitators included Evgeny Zamyatin and Olga Forsh. After the Revolution, though, the Remizovian school, whose procedures might be described as ‘dialect ornamentalism’, went into something of a decline, the causes of which lay not only in Remizov’s emigration (he left for Berlin in 1921 and later settled in Paris), but also in the determinedly pro-urban standpoint of the early Soviet regime. However, skaz persisted in transmuted form. The working-class narrators of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories, such as ‘The Bathhouse’, spoke in a patchwork of mangled clichés taken from political discourse of the day (‘This isn’t the Tsarist regime, you know!’) and popular language of quite a different kind (grekh odin

, literally ‘nothing but sin’, but approximately equivalent to ‘no peace for the wicked’). And their structure drew on traditional folk narrative patterns, such as triple repetition (the narrator of ‘The Bathhouse’ tries three times to get hold of a wash-tub for himself) and the use of a rhetorical formula to begin and end the narrative and mark it off from surrounding speech (‘The Bathhouse’ starts with the wonderfully surreal sentence, ‘They say, lads, that in America the bathhouses are ever so excellent’). At the same time, Zoshchenko’s characters were more than sociological studies: they were also masks for the writer himself. As the literary critic Alexander Zholkovsky has argued, the constant social and sexual failures of the writer’s fictional protagonists played on obsessive motifs in Zoshchenko’s psychoanalytically inspired autobiography, Before Sunrise; rather than laughing at the inarticulacy and inadequacy of those he had invented, Zoshchenko was using their helplessness to render decent the exploration of his own self. One could add that his stories were quintessentially Modernist not only because they ‘made the world strange’ (to adopt the term used by the Formalist literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky), but also because they expressed a profound philosophical pessimism about the communicative function of language. The fact that Zoshchenko’s main characters are so often not understood, so frequently baffled (in all senses) by the responses of others, reflects not only the petty tyrannies of early Soviet life, but the urban isolation that gripped those living in the world of Daniil Kharms, or indeed Samuel Beckett.