Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The emphasis on death and punishment has often drawn (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) on the strong vein of anti-physicality in Russian Orthodox culture. Earlier manifestations of this in Russian literature had included Derzhavin’s ‘On the Death of Prince Meshchersky’ (1779), which stressed the universality of decay (‘The monarch and the captive are alike food for worms’). Later ones included Tolstoy’s Confession (1879–80), with its extraordinary image, borrowed from an Eastern legend, of the living human suspended over the abyss on a tree-trunk gnawed by a serpent. But if Derzhavin’s or Tolstoy’s response to the inevitability of death had been to stress the importance of a virtuous life, twentieth-century texts tended to represent the alternative and better reality as something elusive and insubstantial. It was associated with mysterious, uncommunicable experience, what Aleksandr Blok called, in one of his poems addressed to the Beautiful Lady, ‘the call of dim life/Splashing secretly within me’. It manifested itself in the colours of ‘non-being’, of death and of spiritual life at one and the same time, whiteness and transparency. Though, as David Bethea has pointed out, Utopian writing was the polar opposite of apocalyptic writing, in that it anticipated a paradise in the future (often a technological one) rather than mourning the loss of the ‘original pristine faith’ of the past, in practice the two discourses often exploited similar imagery – as, indeed, did Socialist Realism, whose spotless factories, ever-patient party officials, and peaceful, hard-working labourers made it a form of bastardized Utopianism. Just so did the traditions of pre-Petrine Russian religious literature find themselves preserved in Socialist Realism’s earnest commitment to expressing the ‘elevated belief of human beings in Sublimity’, as a typical Soviet Realist, Vera Panova, put it in 1972.

But not all Russian literature by any means has been driven by a puritanical distaste for quotidian existence, for the material world. Some writers (the early twentieth-century short-story writer Aleksey Remizov, for instance) gave their demons the comforting substance of folk myth, of the malevolent creatures (house spirits and wood demons) that had to be placated with bread and milk. Mandelstam rebelled against the Symbolist emphasis upon esoteric myth by proclaiming the virtues of ‘domestic Hellenism’, of ordinary, though handsome, objects such as jugs and honey-jars. Other writers created a kind of ‘domestic Orthodoxy’, of mundane but fervent spirituality. Olga Sedakova’s limpid poem ‘Old Women’, for example, sees the secular and the spiritual, the sinful and the pious, as inseparably fused:

Patient as an Old Master,

I love to study the faces

of pious, spiteful old women,

the mortality of their lips,

and the immortality of the power

that pressed their lips together,

(like an angel squatting

and stacking coppers in piles,

five copecks, and light copeck pieces . . .

‘Shoo!’ he says to the children,

the birds and the beggars,

‘Shoo, go away,’ he tells them:

can’t you see what I’m doing?) –

I stare, and in my mind I sketch them,

like my own face, in a glass darkly.

The images of a money-counting angel and of ‘spiteful piety’ are contradictory and even shocking. They recall Rembrandt’s late portraits of elderly women (hence the phrase ‘Patient as an Old Master’), in which supreme artistic beauty is made out of material that is not obviously handsome (unlike the jugs and jars celebrated by Mandelstam). In the same way, the nineteenth-century prose writer Nikolay Leskov’s stories turned the early nineteenth-century Russian provinces into an extraordinary retrospective Utopia, a world of small-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, but also of sanity, tolerance, and bodily joy. His extraordinary and touching tale, The Sealed Angel (1873), expressed a vision of art as at once profoundly spiritual and rooted in reality: a combination of inspiration in its most literal sense and of careful craftsmanship. The icon of the title is not only a symbol of faith repressed by bureaucracy (it is confiscated and ‘sealed’ with a layer of wax, in a sublime gesture of secular indifference to the uniqueness of the icon), but also of religious art. As explained by the Red-Haired Man, the story’s main narrator, and a member of the conservative and pious Old Believer sect, to a well-intentioned but sceptical Englishman, the icon stands for a kind of artistic integrity to be found only in traditional practices: