Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

By and large, though, it was intellectual writers looking for alternative material, including a significant group of upper-middle-class women (Zinaida Gippius, Adelaida Gertsyk, Marina Tsvetaeva) who immersed themselves in folk lexis and in popular tradition. The proletarian poets of pre-revolutionary worker journals and post-revolutionary Proletcult groups inclined to a stylistically conventional late Romanticism of foundry sparks and burning furnaces. And Socialist Realism made incumbent on writers the use of a style that would be ‘accessible to the mass reader’ rather than based on the putative language of that reader in his or her pre-educated state: this curtailed experiments in skaz in prose and poetry alike. By the time that literary adventurousness resurfaced again, in the 1960s, the majority of the Russian population was living in towns, and rural Russia (transformed by mass literacy, radio, and later television) was no longer the storehouse of ‘folk culture’ it once had been. But skaz of a Zoshchenkian kind (based on urban popular speech) began to enjoy some popularity again, particularly among writers not publishing in Soviet official sources (where prohibitions on use of ‘obscene language’, that is, the swear-words found in just about every sentence of real popular speech, meant that street language could appear only in bowdlerized form). It was employed not only in neo-Realist studies of the Soviet and post-Soviet underworld, but also in texts of greater literary and philosophical ambition, such as Yuz Aleshkovsky’s revenge narrative, The Hand

(1980), in which the narrator’s disgust at the official who purged his family during collectivization juxtaposes the miraculous beauty of the man’s possessions to their owner, apostrophized as ‘you heap of shit’.

Much of the discussion in this book has emphasized the centredness of Russian literary tradition, as expressed in the demands made by generations of critics that writing should serve a serious purpose, and in the dominance of an enduring canon of great writers celebrated by memorials, informal commemorations, and by successive educational systems. In Chapter 6, I argued that this centredness placed women writers at the borders of their culture, made them provincials in terms of the literary heritage, as it were. This chapter has shown that centredness had its limits. To be sure, Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inhabited an imperial mindset, one in which non-Russians were often seen as colourful ethnographical exhibits, as examples of quaint or amusing otherness. Yet at the same time, the geographical peripheries of empire, in particular ‘the East’, could serve to unsettle reflective Russians’ conviction of their own identity, leading them to question the nature of distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’. And in the second half of the nineteenth century, a search for the exotic inside Russian culture became common, with folklore now seen as a repository of attractively barbaric themes and language, rather than a store of material that had to be ‘genteelized’ before it could be admitted to polite culture. This transformation of the standing of folklore in turn allowed writers from beyond the educated male elite (peasants, women, ethnic minorities) to profit from their own marginality, to exploit a situation where ‘provincialism’ (in the transferred sense used above) became a mark of distinction, rather than a sign of inferiority.

Chapter 8

‘O Muse, be obedient to the

command of God’

The spiritual and material worlds

Monuments don’t turn out well in Russia (the ones to Nikolay Gogol and so on). That’s because the only tolerable kind of monument we seem to be able to build is a chapel, with an icon lamp perpetually burning for ‘the servant of God Nikolay’.

(Vasily Rozanov, 1913)