An Anthology of Russian Literature from Earliest Writings to Modern Fiction

Introduction to a Culture

Nicholas Rzhevsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317476863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Russia has a rich, huge, unwieldy cultural tradition. How to grasp it? This classroom reader is designed to respond to that problem. The literary works selected for inclusion in this anthology introduce the core cultural and historic themes of Russia's civilisation. Each text has resonance throughout the arts - in Rublev's icons, Meyerhold's theatre, Mousorgsky's operas, Prokofiev's symphonies, Fokine's choreography and Kandinsky's paintings. This material is supported by introductions, helpful annotations and bibliographies of resources in all media. The reader is intended for use in courses in Russian literature, culture and civilisation, as well as comparative literature.

IV
Subversions of Secularization

In the nineteenth century, Russia reached a new stage of political influence and economic development. Formerly a local power, Russia now became a serious competitor for nations like England with their own aspirations to maintain empires. In similar fashion, Russian culture, especially Russian literature, began to exert a strong influence beyond its borders. The reasons for the new strengths in political and economic matters are beyond our scope, but it is appropriate to ask; What contributed to the cultural achievements of the nineteenth century?

One historical process that prodded cultural vitality is perhaps an unexpected source of inspiration for modern secular sensibilities. As we have seen, unlike the eighteenth century, with its strong rejection of religion, the beginnings of the nineteenth saw a religious revival and social and political structures created around religious values and impulses. The religious search for transcendent truths acted as a challenge for writers in new secular conditions. Even those men and women of letters who were not overly diligent in their attendance of church services—although we know that most of the major Russian writers of the nineteenth century did indeed participate in religious rituals and did learn their catechisms in childhood—responded to the long-standing ultimate issues of existence postulated in Russian Orthodoxy. One did not need to have a strong faith in the God of churchmen to attempt to define the nature of God (perhaps a sublimation of human needs, as Feuerbach suggested) or to investigate the psychological and moral implications of love, to question the value of suffering and humility, and to wonder about human directions deprived of a sense of transcendence.

Aesthetic and intellectual creativity stimulated by the challenge of older religious values to secular sensibilities was not unique to Russian culture, of course. The Russians, along with most Western intellectuals, felt the influence of religious-secular transmutations, in philosophy through German idealism and in literature through Romanticism, Most influential teachers of idealism in Russia during the 1820s and 1830s, in fact, had been trained in religious seminaries and academies.

Such training could be felt in an ideological extremism that produced, among the most harmful results, men and women who were willing not only to imagine Utopias common to Western social theory but to bring theories into practice no matter what the cost. In the arts, however, extremism stimulated daring, originality, hard work, and commitment to change. In the nineteenth century, Russian fiction, music, and painting played out to extremes some of the vital ideas of Western civilization, before succumbing in the twentieth to the temptations of shaping history according to ideology.

Ideology, of course, suggests communism, and Marx's eventual favored place in Russian history, although ultimately the source of tragedy and totalitarianism, in turn suggests another key element of aesthetic and intellectual vitality. For the reception of Marx in Russia could only have occurred in conditions of an essential openness to the ideas of others. As in most healthy and productive cultures, the nineteenth century in Russia saw an active pluralism invigorate intellectual debate and the arts. This pluralism helps to explain why censorship and authoritarian government under Nicholas I and Alexander III were not dominant or ultimately telling factors in aesthetic results. There was, as noted, an attachment to the long-standing heritage of Orthodoxy and a favored political interpretation of it, but those who wrote novels, composed music, and painted landscapes measured their native religious tradition not so much by politicians as by Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Darwin, and Mill, or Goethe, Byron, Stendhal, Dickens, and Dumas. Russian Orthodox theological thought itself interacted freely with Protestant and Catholic views. In result, the key intellectual debates noted in most histories—of the Westernizers, Slavophiles, left Hegelians, Utopian socialists, populists—took on universal issues and a passion for synthesis that cut across national and ethnic borders.

Open cultural and economic borders allowed a broad diversity of immigrants, who contributed to the vitality of the arts. We have already noted the architects and painters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who came out of foreign families or were Russians who had studied abroad. Of the writers included below, Lermontov was the descendant of a Scottish mercenary, Gogol a Ukrainian, and Pushkin, the Russian national poet, the great-grandson of an African slave. All three were the products of a culture that had learned to look not only to the West and East but south as well. Thus, if in politics Russia succumbed to the temptations of imperialism, in the arts its assimilation of the aesthetic and intellectual traditions of others created a rich and fertile ground for creative imagination.

The issues raised by men and women of letters stimulated an unprecedented outburst of interrepresentational activity. The texts included here were all transformed into other art forms and helped shape creative practices outside of literature. The writers responsible for them, however, did not work in cultural hothouses of aesthetic activity removed from outside social and political concerns. Pushkin's Boris Godunov is one such central instance of cultural intersections. The text induced major aesthetic transfigurations in music, art, and performance, but Pushkin's work was also a primary example of the Russian literary response to history and, in turn, of the historical sense Russians derived from literature.

Pushkin wrote the play in 1825, largely inspired, as he pointed out, by Nikolai Karamzin and William Shakespeare. The period he chose, the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, was a dynamic and unsettled time in Russia, not unlike Elizabethan England. The feudal era and Mongol domination had come to an end after the intelligent rule of Ivan III and the brutal imposition of military power and government terror by his grandson Ivan IV ("the Terrible"), who killed the prospective Ivan V, his oldest son and heir to the throne, an event later made familiar to many Russians through Ilya Repin's striking pointing done in 1885. Boris Godunov, a respected member of Ivan's court, began his rule as regent for his brother-in-law, Ivan's other son, Fedor. Another younger son of Ivan IV, Dmitry, died in 1591 under mysterious circumstances but quite definitely from knife wounds. When Fedor in turn passed away in 1598, an Assembly of the Land elected Boris to the throne, a highly democratic process for that time. Votes from representatives of different social classes were taken into account; unfortunately, the political chicanery familiar to elections (and reflected in Pushkin's play) was also evident.

In 1602 a man named Grigory Otrepyev suddenly appeared in Poland claiming to be Dmitry and thus the legitimate heir of Ivan. He invaded Russia with Polish aid; in the course of the invasion in 1605 Boris died. The "False" Dmitry did become tsar for a while but was eventually killed, and his remains were fired back to Poland out of a cannon. The collapse of his reign brought on the so-called Time of Troubles, a chaotic period full of disasters and new invasions by foreign armies. A semblance of political order was brought back to Russian history only with the election, again democratic by seventeenth-century standards, of another tsar, Mikhail (the young boy we have already encountered thanks to Glinka's opera), the first of the Romanovs.

These were the key events related in Karamzin's History of the Russian State (12 volumes, 1818—29), Pushkin's primary source. What in them attracted Pushkin to Boris's historical period and what elements of Boris's life made it important for Russian culture? A primary issue, aided considerably in its formulation by Shakespeare, was legitimacy, and legitimacy not merely in the simple monarchist's sense of God's genetic imprimatur but in the larger sense of opposing political and moral claims to determine the course of history. The Russian view that tsars were not just supreme political authorities but "servants" of two masters, God and the people, as well as a traditional distrust of chaotic democratic processes unresponsive to the harmony of transcendent standards, reflected this basic cultural concern. In the play, as in most historical accounts, Boris was recognized to be a wonderfully skilled politician; yet the clever, even wise manipulation of government was not enough and, in fact, was considered to be a prime example of short-sightedness when based on immoral action. Russian preoccupations with Boris's unfortunate life, with Dmitry's death, with the temporary success and eventual failure of the False Dmitry, and with the chaos of the Time of Troubles were part, then, of long-standing convictions that legitimacy in human affairs was related to spiritual legitimacy.

Such views were not confined to Russian culture, of course, and Shakespeare did much to show Pushkin the theatrical ways to explore moral and political illegitimacy in terms of psychological nuances. Western Romanticism's interpretation of Shakespeare and its emphasis on strong personalities in history were also clearly reflected in Boris's central positioning. The Boris story is joined by the Dmitry story in almost all Russian cultural responses, however, and the latter does indeed suggest particular issues inspired by the Byzantine heritage of kenoticism and holy foolishness.

As in the case of St. Dmitry's vita, the Boris and Gleb narratives, and Awakum's autobiography, prime values incorporated into Pushkin's play included humility, sacrifice, and suspicion of merely earthly well-being. In their light, Dmitry's murder, as retold by Pushkin, indicated once again the moral failure of political expediency and aggrandizement. Both in the play and in Mussorgsky's opera, a salos, a holy fool, is used to remind audiences of such long-standing belief in the higher truths.

For Pushkin, as for Karamzin before him and Mussorgsky after, religious values, however, were firmly joined to other, metacultural responsibilities. In play and opera the central role of men and women of culture in interpreting historical events and in judging them by transcendent standards is expressed by the monk Pimen. Pimen's famous monologue, beginning "One more, last narrative," is as finely composed as the best of Pushkin's verse and as memorable as the most engaging of musical motifs. It is as familiar to the Russian intelligentsia as the Pledge of Allegiance is to Americans, and it reflects a firm belief in the power of literature to provide an independent, honest engagement with vital questions. Although Pimen represents an obvious acknowledgment of the religious imperatives shaping cultural values, he does not simply offer testimony of God's punishment for a sinful life— the type of historical evidence naively religious Russians have found in the Mongol invasion, the Bolshevik revolution, or Stalin's terror...