Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

At some levels, then, there could scarcely be a more instructive contrast in styles than between Pushkin and Dostoevsky. On the one hand, there is The Brothers Karamazov, a sprawling, immensely ambitious study of the nature of belief, if also of the nature of doubt (there is passionate conviction in the agnostic Ivan Karamazov’s refusal to acknowledge the goodness of a deity who tolerates suffering on the part of the innocent). On the other, there is The Queen of Spades

, a brilliant miniature in which the existence even of the supernatural in a low-level sense, let alone of God, is open to question, and in which the Church figures only in the form of a worldly priest whose lip-service to the moral qualities of the dead Countess in his funeral oration is in ironic contrast to her querulous and egotistical character in life. Dostoevsky’s admiration for Pushkin (even a Pushkin made in his own image) seems at first mysterious. Yet the two tales do have much in common, and not just because Pushkin’s frivolous beau-monde is the world in which Elder Zosima has moved before his conversion. Similar, too, is the matter-of-fact, even homely, attitude to the uncanny in both texts. The dead Countess’s appearance to Hermann in The Queen of Spades

(whether as hallucination or ghost is unclear) is preceded by ‘a shuffling of slippers’; the Devil who appears to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov is a disagreeably chirpy middle-aged man whose mediocre brown suit suggests a middle-ranking provincial civil servant, the Evil One as pen-pushing bureaucrat.

The other world as seen here is, in the words of Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov’s sinister double in Crime and Punishment

, hell as ‘a bath-house full of spiders’. The chilling sense of a sort of parallel universe of banality and boredom recurs in Daniil Kharms’ absurdist stories of the 1930s, here acting as a counterweight to the synthetic ‘heaven’ of Socialist Realist myth. It is present once more in the figure of Quilty from Lolita, a travesty Doppelgänger whom Humbert Humbert cannot throw off, any more than Ivan can his horribly bonhomous devil. In all these texts, the sense of hellish claustrophobia retains its hold, but in each it is modulated quite differently. It never hardens into stereotype, unlike the view of everyday life as a domain of inescapable banality, an impediment to intellectual activity, which gives many Russian texts, from Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done

to the final part of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a strange vacancy at their heart, with specific settings treated as though they were of no more consequence than the standard fittings of a station waiting room before a train is boarded to head off somewhere more interesting. The most vivid evocations of Christ in Russian literature are of failed Christs: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, whose commitment to salvation through love destroys Nastas’ya Filippovna rather than saving her, and Ieshua, the eccentric, holy-fool Jesus of Bulgakov’s debunked Jerusalem in Master and Margarita.