RUSSIAN LITERATURE

the body of written works produced in the Russian language, beginning with the coming of Christianity to Kievan Rus in the late 10th century Ad . Works of the Kievan period generally served ecclesiastic or utilitarian purposes. Many of them were translations from the Greek, including Ostromirovo evangelie (The Ostromir Gospel) of 105657, the oldest Russian manuscript. The first work of Russian medieval literature with a claim to greatness is Slovo o polku Igoreve (c. 118587; The Song of Igor's Campaign). By the 1230s the Tatars had conquered much of the Russian lands, ending the Kievan hegemony. It was not until the rise of Moscow in the late 15th and 16th centuries that signs of a renewal of a national Russian literature could be discerned. Much of the literature of this period is of interest primarily to scholars, particularly historians. The first major work of genuine human interest in Russian literature is the autobiography written by the archpriest Avvakum Petrovich toward the end of the 17th century. It was not until a century later, however, that an indigenous literature began to emerge with the odes of Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavrila Derzhavin and the documentary prose of Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolay Karamzin. Despite government censorship and official disapproval, Russia produced a literature of world importance in the 19th century. The golden age of Russian literature emerged with the works of Aleksandr Pushkin. The versatility, musicality, simplicity, and originality of his novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (1833) and his incomparable lyric poetry were extremely influential, as was the contribution to prose literature of his immediate successor Mikhail Lermontov with his novel Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time). After 1840 prose, especially the novel, became the most common medium of expression. The first important prose writer was Nikolay Gogol, whose superb comic gifts found expression in such masterpieces as the stage comedy Revizor (1836; The Government Inspector) and the novel Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead Souls). The first major novelist, Ivan Turgenev, became famous through his Zapiski okhotnika (1852; A Sportsman's Sketches), depicting the plight of the serfs, but his reputation now rests primarily on his short novels chronicling the plight of the intelligentsia, particularly Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons). Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy are now acknowledged as the greatest Russian novelists. Although Dostoyevsky began writing in the 1840s, exile to Siberia brutally interrupted his career. He did not produce his outstanding psychological novels until the late 1860sPrestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment), The Idiot (186869), Besy (1872; The Devils, or The Possessed), and his masterpiece, Bratya Karamazovy (187980; The Brothers Karamazov). Tolstoy's reputation as a novelist is founded on Voyna i mir (186569; War and Peace), his epic historical novel about the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, and Anna Karenina (187577), his critical study of romantic love. Other noteworthy Russian novelists were Ivan Goncharov and Mikhail Saltykov. At the end of the century the tragicomic short stories and penetrating, innovative plays of Anton Chekhov traced the decay of Russia's landed gentry, while Maksim Gorky, who sympathized with the working classes, proclaimed the need for revolutionary change and subsequently became a hero of the communists. The 20th century opened with a revival of poetry, dominated by that of Aleksandr Blok, while the 1917 Revolution initiated a period of intense, if short-lived, literary vigour that was marked by the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak. Anna Akhmatova emerged as one of the most important Russian poets of the 20th century. Prose also flourished, but, with the introduction of Socialist Realism as the official doctrine for Soviet literature in 1932, the quality of prose writing generally declined. The brief literary thaw that followed Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 gave way to renewed repression and a new wave of emigration by literary figures, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and became the leading Russian writer through such novels as V kruge pervom (1968; The First Circle) and his chronicle of the Soviet police state, Arkhipelag GULag (197375; The Gulag Archipelago). On the whole, the most vigorous and original Russian literary works to appear between 1917 and 1991 were produced by writers and poets either uncommitted to or actively persecuted by the Soviet regime. The collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically altered the literary landscape. migr literature and literature written but not published during the Soviet period became available, transforming Russians' understanding of their cultural heritage. the body of written works produced in the Russian language, beginning with the Christianization of Kievan Rus in the late 10th century. The unusual shape of Russian literary history has been the source of numerous controversies. Three major and sudden breaks divide it into four periodspre-Petrine (or Old Russian), Imperial, post-Revolutionary, and post-Soviet. The reforms of Peter I (the Great; reigned 16821725), who rapidly Westernized the country, created so sharp a divide with the past that it was common in the 19th century to maintain that Russian literature had begun only a century before. The 19th century's most influential critic, Vissarion Belinsky, even proposed the exact year (1739) in which Russian literature began, thus denying the status of literature to all pre-Petrine works. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik coup later in the same year created another major divide, eventually turning official Russian literature into political propaganda for the communist state. Finally, Mikhail Gorbachev's ascent to power in 1985 and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 marked another dramatic break. What is important in this pattern is that the breaks were sudden rather than gradual and that they were the product of political forces external to literary history itself. The most celebrated period of Russian literature was the 19th century, which produced, in a remarkably short period, some of the indisputable masterworks of world literature. It has often been noted that the overwhelming majority of Russian works of world significance were produced within the lifetime of one person, Leo Tolstoy (18281910). Indeed, many of them were written within two decades, the 1860s and 1870s, a period that perhaps never has been surpassed in any culture for sheer concentrated literary brilliance. Russian literature, especially of the Imperial and post-Revolutionary periods, has as its defining characteristics an intense concern with philosophical problems, a constant self-consciousness about its relation to the cultures of the West, and a strong tendency toward formal innovation and defiance of received generic norms. The combination of formal radicalism and preoccupation with abstract philosophical issues creates the recognizable aura of Russian classics. Additional reading General histories and handbooks of Russian literature include D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, from Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. by Francis J. Whitfield (1958); Victor Terras (ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature (1985); Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (1991); and Charles A. Moser (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. ed. (1992).Histories of specific periods or genres are found in the following texts: Dmitrij Cizevskij (Dimitrij Tschizewskij), History of Russian Literature from the Eleventh Century to the End of the Baroque (1960, reprinted 1981); N.K. Gudziy (N.K. Gudzi), History of Early Russian Literature, ed. by Susan Wilbur Jones (1949, reissued 1970; originally published in Russian, 2nd ed., 1941); Simon Karlinsky, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (1985); William Edward Brown, A History of Seventeenth-Century Russian Literature (1980), A History of 18th-Century Russian Literature (1980), and A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, 4 vol. (1986); William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (1986); William Mills Todd III (ed.), Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 18001914 (1978); Marc Slonim, The Epic of Russian Literature from Its Origins Through Tolstoy (1950, reissued 1975), and Modern Russian Literature from Chekhov to the Present (1953); Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (1968); Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature Since the Revolution, rev. and enlarged ed. (1982); Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin, 19171953 (1971); Boris Groys (boris Grois), The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (1992; originally published in German, 1988); John Garrard and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers' Union (1990); Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine, 3rd ed. (1981); Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, 2nd ed. (1985); Kathleen F. Parth, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (1992); and Harold B. Segel, Twentieth-Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present, updated ed. (1993).Studies providing interesting general ideas about the tradition include Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature (1958, reprinted 1981); Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd ed. (1975); Caryl Emerson, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (1986); Gary Saul Morson (ed.), Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies (1986); and Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (1994).Among the useful anthologies of Russian literature are Serge A. Zenkovsky (ed. and trans.), Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, rev. and enlarged ed. (1974), which contains many useful commentaries; Harold B. Segel (ed. and trans.), The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, 2 vol. (1967), with an excellent history in vol. 1 and useful commentaries throughout; George Gibian (ed.), The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader (1993); Clarence Brown (ed.), The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, rev. and updated ed. (1993); Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey (eds.), Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature Under Gorbachev (1990); Helena Goscilo (ed.), Balancing Acts: Contemporary Stories by Russian Women (1989); and Dimitri Obolensky (ed.), The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, rev. ed. (1965, reprinted as The Heritage of Russian Verse, 1976). Gary Saul Morson Imperial literature The Petrine reforms The Westernization of Russia Peter the Great's radical and rapid Westernization of Russia altered the daily life of the upper classes and all high culture. The nobility was made to conform to Western models in its dress, customs, social life, education, and state service; women came out of seclusion; a European calendar was introduced; Russians were sent abroad to study; foreign languages were learned. Western culture was absorbed so rapidly in the course of the 18th century that by the 19th century the first language of the upper nobility was not Russian but French. As a result, a large cultural gap opened between the nobility and the peasantry, whose distance from each other became an important theme of Russian literature. In the context of world history, Russia may be seen as the first of many countries to undergo rapid modernization and Westernization while wrestling with a question capable of different answers: in adopting Western technology and science, is it also necessary to adopt Western culture and forms of living? Under Peter's autocratic will, Russia was forced into an uncompromisingly affirmative answer to this question, which has concerned Russian writers up to the present moment. In 1703 Peter founded a new capital, St. Petersburg. It was built in Western architectural style and populated by his command on an inhospitable swamp. The cityPeter's window to the Westbecame a key theme of literary works, including Aleksandr Pushkin's poem The Bronze Horseman, Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, and Andrey Bely's novel St. Petersburg. In contrast to Moscow, St. Petersburg came not only to symbolize the power of the state over the individual but also to stand for reason and planning divorced from tradition, individual human needs, and the nonrational elements of human nature. The hero of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground calls the capital the world's most artificial city, associating it with utopian contempt for tradition and experience. Like Peter's reforms generally, the city evoked the idea of historical change by sudden leaps rather than by a gradual, organic process. The response of writers and critics By the 19th century it became commonplace to regard Russia as a young country that had entered history only with the Petrine reforms. The very genres in which 19th-century literature was written had essentially no counterpart in medieval Russia, deriving instead from European literary history. Thus, in tracing their literary past, Russians often felt the necessity of crossing borders. To be sure, it became common for Russian writers to appropriate old Russian themes, characters, and events, as is the case in Pushkin's Boris Godunov, Mikhail Lermontov's Pesnya pro kuptsa Kalashnikova, and Tolstoy's Father Sergius. But these works are recognizably conscious of overcoming a break. Some scholars have insisted that the idea of a radical break in Russian literary history is mistaken, but there is no doubt that the perception of discontinuity is a key fact of Russian literary history. An aura of foreignness adhered to high culture, which is one reason why a tradition arose in which the sign of Russianness was the defiance of European generic norms. Justifying the self-consciously odd form of War and Peace, Tolstoy observed that departure from European form is necessary for a Russian writer: There is not a single work of Russian artistic prose, at all rising above mediocrity, that quite fits the form of a novel, a poem, or a story. This (admittedly exaggerated) view, which became a clich, helps explain the enormous popularity in Russia of those Western writers who parodied literary conventions, such as the 18th-century British novelist Laurence Sterne, as well as the development of Russia's most influential school of literary criticism, Formalism, which viewed formal self-consciousness as the defining quality of literariness. The sense that culture, literature, and the forms of civilized life were a foreign product imported by the upper classes is also reflected in a tendency of Russian thinkers to regard all art as morally unjustifiable and in a pattern of Russian writers renouncing their own works. While English and French critics were arguing about the merits of different literary schools, Russian critics also debated whether literature itself had a right to exista question that reveals the peculiar ethos of Russian literary culture. Old Russian literature (10th17th centuries) The conventional term Old Russian literature is anachronistic for several reasons. The authors of works written during this time obviously did not think of themselves as old Russians or as predecessors of Tolstoy. Moreover, the term, which represents the perspective of modern scholars seeking to trace the origin of later Russian works, obscures the fact that the East Slavic peoples (of the lands then called Rus) are the ancestors of the Ukrainian and Belarusian as well as of the Russian people of today. Works of the oldest (Kievan) period also led to modern Ukrainian and Belarusian literature. Third, the literary language established in Kievan Rus was Church Slavonic, which, despite the gradual increase of local East Slavic variants, linked the culture to the wider community known as Slavia orthodoxathat is, to the Eastern Orthodox South Slavs of the Balkans. In contrast to the present, this larger community took precedence over the nation in the modern sense of that term. Fourth, some have questioned whether these texts can properly be called literary, if by that term is meant works that are designed to serve a primarily aesthetic function, inasmuch as these writings were generally written to serve ecclesiastic or utilitarian purposes. The Kievan period The Kievan period (so called because Kiev was the seat of the grand princes) extends from the Christianization of Russia in 988 to the conquest of Russia by the Tatars (Mongols) in the 13th century. Russia received Christianity from Byzantium rather than from Rome, a fact of decisive importance for the development of Russian culture. Whereas Catholic Poland was closely linked to cultural developments in western Europe, Orthodox Russia was isolated from the West for long periods and, at times, regarded its culture as dangerous. Conversion by Byzantium also meant that the language of the church could be the vernacular rather than, as in the West, Latin; this was another factor that worked against the absorption of Western culture. Russia was not the first Slavic culture to be converted to Christianity, and a standardized language, the Old Church Slavonic pioneered in the 9th century by Saints Cyril (or Constantine) and Methodius, was already available. Bulgaria, which had been Christianized a century earlier and had offered a home to the Cyrillo-Methodian community, became a conduit for the transmission of Greek culture, translated into Old Church Slavonic, to Russia, which in turn rapidly established its own scribal activities in copying and translating. Thus a significant literary activity of the Kievan period consisted of translating or adapting borrowed works. It is worth stressing that the enormous prestige accorded to translating has continued to be a distinctive characteristic of Russian culture. Even in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, major Russian writers devoted their energies to the translation of foreign works, which in some cases constituted their most significant contributiona literary fact reflecting Russia's status as a self-conscious cultural borrower for much of its history. During the Kievan period the selection of translated foreign works circulating in Russia by and large reflected the interests of the church: almost all were from the Greek, and most were of ecclesiastical interest. Ostromirovo evangeliye (The Ostromir Gospel) of 105657 is the oldest dated Russian manuscript. Versions of the four Gospels, the Book of Revelation, guidebooks of monastic rules, homilies, hagiographic collections, and prayers reflect the religious interests of the clerical community. To be sure, translations of secular works also circulated, including Flavius Josephus' The Jewish War (which influenced Russian military tales), chronicles, and some tales. But, on the whole, translations offered a rather limited access to Greek culture aside from the ecclesiastical. A celebrated monument of Old Russian literature is Hilarion's Slovo o zakone i blagodati (103750; Sermon on Law and Grace), an accomplished piece of rhetoric contrasting Old Testament law with New Testament grace. Other significant homiletic works were written by Clement of Smolensk, metropolitan of Russia from 1147 to 1154, and by St. Cyril of Turov (113082). The central genre of Old Russian literature was probably hagiography, and a number of interesting saints' lives date from the earliest period. Both a chronicle account and two lives of Boris and Gleb, the first Russian saints, have survived to the present day. The sanctity of these two men, who were killed by their brother Svyatopolk in a struggle for the throne, consists not in activity but in the pious passivity with which, in imitation of Christ, they accepted death. This ideal of passive acceptance of suffering was to exercise a long-lasting influence on Russian thought. The monk Nestor (c. 1056after 1113), to whom a life of Boris and Gleb is ascribed, also wrote Zhitiye prepodobnogo ottsa nashego Feodosiya (Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius) (d. 1074). The Kievo-Pechersky paterik (The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery), closely related to hagiography, collects stories from the lives of monks, along with other religious writings. A saint's life of quite a different sort, Zhitiye Aleksandra Nevskogo (Life of Alexandr Nevsky) (d. 1263), celebrates a pious warrior prince. The tradition of pilgrimage literature also begins in this period. Nestor was involved with compiling the Povest vremennykh let (Tale of Bygone Years; The Russian Primary Chronicle), also called the Primary Chronicle of Kiev (compiled about 1113), which led to the writing of other chronicles elsewhere. From a literary point of view, the best work of Old Russian literature is the Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Song of Igor's Campaign), a sort of epic poem (in rhythmic prose, actually) dealing with Prince Igor's raid against the Polovtsy (Kipchak), a people of the steppes, his capture, and his escape. Composed between 1185 and 1187, the Igor Tale, as it is generally known, was discovered in 1795 by Count Musin-Pushkin. The manuscript was destroyed in the Moscow fire of 1812; however, a copy made for Catherine II the Great survived. The poem's authenticity has often been challenged but is now generally accepted. Its theme is the disastrous fratricidal disunity of the Russian princes. Post-Revolutionary literature Literature under Soviet rule The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 radically changed Russian literature. After a brief period of relative openness (compared to what followed) in the 1920s, literature became a tool of state propaganda. Officially approved writing (the only kind that could be published) by and large sank to a subliterary level. Censorship, imprisonment in labour camps, and mass terror were only part of the problem. Writers were not only forbidden to create works that were dissident, formally complex, or objective (a term of reproach), but they were also expected to fulfill the dictates of the Communist Party to produce propaganda on specific, often rather narrow, themes of current interest to it. Writers were called upon to be engineers of human souls helping to produce the new Soviet man. As a result of Bolshevik rule, the literary tradition was fragmented. In addition to official Soviet Russian literature, two kinds of unofficial literature existed. First, a tradition of migr literature, containing some of the best works of the century, continued until the fall of the Soviet Union. Second, unofficial literature written within the Soviet Union came to include works circulated illegally in typewritten copies (samizdat), works smuggled abroad for publication (tamizdat), and works written for the drawer, or not published until decades after they were written (delayed literature). Moreover, literature publishable at one time often lost favour later; although nominally acceptable, it was frequently unobtainable. On many occasions, even officially celebrated works had to be rewritten to suit a shift in the Communist Party line. Whereas pre-Revolutionary writers had been intensely aware of Western trends, for much of the Soviet period access to Western movements was severely restricted, as was foreign travel. Access to pre-Revolutionary Russian writing was also spotty. As a result, Russians periodically had to change their sense of the past, as did Western scholars when delayed works became known. From a literary point of view, unofficial literature clearly surpasses official literature. Of Russia's five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature during the Soviet period, Bunin emigrated after the Revolution, Boris Pasternak had his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) published abroad, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) had most of his works published abroad and was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Joseph Brodsky (194096) published all his collections of verse abroad and was forced to emigrate in 1972. Only Mikhail Sholokhov (190584) was clearly an official Soviet writer. In the early years following the Revolution, writers who left or were expelled from the Soviet Union included Balmont, Bunin, Gippius, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Kuprin, and Merezhkovsky. migrs also included the poets Vladislav Khodasevich (18861939) and Georgy Ivanov (18941958). Marina Tsvetayeva (18921941), regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, eventually returned to Russia, where she committed suicide. Vladimir Nabokov, who later wrote in English, published nine novels in Russian, including Dar (published serially 193738; The Gift) and Priglasheniye na kazn (1938; Invitation to a Beheading). From the 1920s to c. 1985 Experiments in the 1920s Within Russia the 1920s saw a wide diversity of literary trends and works, including those by mere fellow travelers (Leon Trotsky's phrase) of the Revolution. Isaak Babel wrote a brilliant cycle of linked stories, collected as Konarmiya (1926; Red Cavalry), about a Jewish commissar in a Cossack regiment. Formally chiseled and morally complex, these stories examine the seductive appeal of violence for the intellectual. A modern literary genre, the dystopia, was invented by Yevgeny Zamyatin in his novel My (1924; We), which could be published only abroad. Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, which are modeled on it, We describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman. Yury Olesha's Zavist (1927; Envy) is a satire in the tradition of Notes from the Underground. Like Chekhov, Zoshchenko was a master of the comic story focusing on everyday life. Pasternak, who had been a Futurist poet before the Revolution, published a cycle of poems, Sestra moya zhizn (1922; My SisterLife), and his story Detstvo Lyuvers (1918; Zhenya Luvers's Childhood). Other important novels include Boris Pilnyak's ornamental Goly god (1922; The Naked Year); Andrey Platonov's deeply pessimistic Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit), which was written in the late 1920s and published in the West in 1973; Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov's clever satire Dvenadtsat stulyev (1928; The Twelve Chairs); Konstantin Fedin's novel Goroda i gody (1924; Cities and Years); and Leonid Leonov's Vor (1927; The Thief). The Russian Formalists were a school of critics closely tied to the Futurists. They developed a vibrant, comprehensive theory of literature and culture that inspired structuralism, an influential critical movement in the West. Two of them, Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov, wrote significant fiction illustrating their theories: Shklovsky's Zoo; ili, pisma ne o lyubvi (1923; Zoo; or, Letters Not About Love) and Tynyanov's Podporuchik kizhe (1927; Second Lieutenant Likewise). Their respectful opponent, Mikhail Bakhtin, whom some consider the most original, far-ranging, and subtle theorist of literature in the 20th century, wrote Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929, 2nd ed., 1963; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics) and essays about the relation of novelistic form to time, language, psychology, and ethics. The 1920s also produced novels that became classics of official Soviet literature, including Dmitry Furmanov's Chapayev (1923) and Aleksandr Serafimovich's Zhelezny potok (1924; The Iron Flood). Fyodor Gladkov's Tsement (1925; Cement) became a model for the industrial production novel. Also in this period, Sholokhov began writing the best-known official work, a four-part novel published as Tikhy Don (192840; The Quiet Don; translated in two parts as And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea). Post-Soviet literature Almost no one expected the Soviet Union to come suddenly to an end. The effects of this event on literature have been enormous. The period of glasnost (verbal openness) under Gorbachev and the subsequent collapse of the U.S.S.R. led first to a dramatic easing and then to the abolition of censorship. Citizenship was restored to migr writers, and Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. Doctor Zhivago and We were published in Russia, as were the works of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Voynovich, and many others. The divisions between Soviet and migr and between official and unofficial literature came to an end. Russians experienced the heady feeling that came with absorbing, at great speed, large parts of their literary tradition that had been suppressed and with having free access to Western literary movements. A Russian form of postmodernism, fascinated with a pastiche of citations, arose, along with various forms of radical experimentalism. During this period, readers and writers sought to understand the past, both literary and historical, and to comprehend the chaotic, threatening, and very different present.