Russian Literature (20 page)

19. A Cossack soldier. Note the ‘orientalized’ appearance of this man and his wife, portrayed by a minor nineteenth-century Russian artist.

and the metropolitan gentleman’s mourning of the supposedly impassable barrier between ethnic groups with the lower-class settler’s conviction that such a barrier was an illusion. At the same time, Pechorin’s own confrontation with the Caucasus and the world of the Orient was not straightforward: it ended with his death in Persia, and before that he was repeatedly threatened with physical and mental disintegration. As Susan Layton has pointed out, Russian writers found it more difficult to believe in the ‘alterity of Orient’ than did their counterparts in Western Europe (with the exception of Spain, one might add), because of their country’s absorption of waves of invaders (the Pechenegs, the Tartars) and the assimilation of ‘Orientals’ into their own culture.

The labile, fluid character of Russian national feeling was never more clearly indicated than in the publication of the merchant Afanasy Nikitin’s remarkable fifteenth-century account of his visit to India,
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Voyage Beyond Three Seas
, in Karamzin’s epoch-making
History of
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the Russian State
(1818). At the heart of a history that celebrated the creation of a puissant Russia stood a text ending with an almost exact
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transcription of the prayer spoken by converts to Islam. The publication of Nikitin’s narrative in Karamzin’s showed the uncertainty at the centre of Russian national identity and illustrated how the result of contact with ‘the other’ could be a sense of Russia’s closeness to the East, rather than of the gulf between Russia as part of Europe and the further territories.

This sense of closeness had resonance not only in the foundation, during the 1820s, of an outstanding tradition of scholarly investigation directed at the languages and cultures of the Eastern Empire, but also in philosophy and in artistic representations, culminating in the ‘Eurasianism’ of the early twentieth century. Blok’s important cycle of lyric poems ‘At Kulikovo Field’ (1908) was a highly original interpretation of a famous victory over the Tartars in 1380, a battle as crucial to triumphalist national history as Borodino (or, in English
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tradition, Agincourt). The imagery of Blok’s cycle recalled not only the
Zadonshchina
, a late fourteenth-century text celebrating the victory at Kulikovo, but also
The Lay of Igor’s Campaign
, a still more famous twelfth-century text eulogizing a glorious Russian defeat. This intertextual double-exposure was only one of many layers of ambiguity in a text whose perspective slipped between the fourteenth century and the time of its composition, and which – as was revealed by Blok’s contemporaneous essay ‘The People and the Intelligentsia’ – was also intended as a lament for the ‘infrangible boundary’ between the ‘Tatar’

intelligentsia and the ‘true Russian’ lower classes.

In a sense, then, one could see Russian literature as at once colonial and post-colonial, speaking simultaneously from the viewpoint of conqueror
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and conquered. Nikolay Trubetskoy, the most original thinker in the
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Eurasian group, took a militantly relativist attitude to European
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culture – ‘European culture is obligatory only for the group of nations
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that created it’ – which was very much in the spirit of
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, the
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self-assertion movement among Francophone African and West Indian
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intellectuals in the 1940s, and of African-American philosophy as well.

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For Trubetskoy, the diversity of Russian culture was a source of pride, as
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was the racial mixture in the Russian Empire. So far as landscape was
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concerned, though, the Eurasian sensibility was attracted to the familiar
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rather than the exotic. It was the steppe, rather than the impassable mountain ranges of the Caucasus, that had become the preferred imaginative space. Rivers, the only borders in the steppe, were seen not only as ‘infrangible boundaries’ between battle-lines, but also as frontiers that might be crossed by stealth, or used as trading routes.

Exactly so was the Russian language, the primary symbol of national difference for a Westernized Russian such as Turgenev, now seen as permeable to the East, distinguished from other Slavonic languages by its capacity for absorbing Turkic loan-words and phonetics.

Ten years after writing ‘On Kulikovo Field’, Blok himself moved from seeing tragedy in the binary inheritance of Russian culture, ‘Tatar’ and
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‘Russian’, to seeing this as a source of strength. His 1918 poem ‘Scythians’ (quoted here in Robin Kemball’s translation) celebrated a tribe that had been seen since classical Greek times as the epitome of vigorous barbarism. The Scythians stood for the resurgent life of Russia, traditionally the bulwark against incursions from the East, but now threatening to overwhelm enfeebled Western civilization with its hybrid vitality: So, Russia – Sphinx – triumphant, sorrowed too – With black blood flows, in fearful wildness,

Her eyes glare deep, glare deep, glare deep at you, With hatred and – with loving-kindness!

Yes, so to love, as lies within our blood,

Not one of you has loved in ages!

You have forgotten that there is such love

That burns and burning, lays in ashes!

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The ‘Scythian’ side of Russia was implicitly associated, in Blok’s representation, with the creation myth of the Russian Revolution,
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understood by the poet in his first and enthuasistic response to it as a coming to power of the formerly oppressed, ‘barbarous’ underclasses.

The association was not peculiar to Blok. The history of representation of the East was intimately intertwined with that of representation of ‘the people’ (
narod
, a noun signifying both ‘people’ and ‘nation’). In a culture where, as late as 1897, only 21 per cent of the population was literate, the divide between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ had sometimes been understood to map on to the division between ‘Westernized’ and ‘native Russian’. With the rise of the Slavophile movement in the 1830s, the idea that cultivated Russians were foreigners in their own country became a cliché in literature and in journalism. There was a realization that the discovery of uncorrupted exoticism did not always require a visit to the Caucasus: it could also be found in the Russian countryside. In the 1820s, some Russian Romantic writers, like their counterparts in other European countries, began to
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see folk tales and folk songs as a source of inspiration for literary endeavour. At first, it was the motifs and plots, rather than the language and structure, of folkloric texts that provided the inspiration. Some of Pushkin’s tales on folklore subjects (
skazki
), such as ‘The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda’ (1830), paraphrased subjects from oral tradition (the poet had himself noted material from informants when staying on his estate at Mikhailovskoe in the late 1820s) and were composed in a genteel approximation of popular speech. But others, such as
The Golden Cockerel
(1834), were taken from Western European sources, were written in verse rather than prose, and used the vocabulary and inflections of educated conversation. Like his fairy-tale narrative poem
Ruslan and Ludmilla
(1820), and like verse tales by his contemporaries and successors (for example, Pyotr Ershov’s
Little
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Hunchback Horse
, 1834), Pushkin’s
skazki
had the charming artificiality of
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Charles Perrault or Jeanne L’Héritier’s reworkings of French folklore,
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such as
The Sleeping Beauty
and
Beauty and the Beast
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But the actual daily life of the Russian peasantry – beset by disease,
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poverty, poor to non-existent education, and (before 1861) enserfment –
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did not incline writers to witty brilliance. On the contrary, from the late
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eighteenth century, Russian literature had a sentimental preoccupation
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with the sufferings of the Russian peasantry at the hands of cruel or
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callous landowners. The customary symbol of the dashing Russian officer as the romantic pioneer of civilization in the Caucasus had its antipode in the figure of the exploited lower-class woman, as evoked in, say, Karamzin’s story
Poor Liza
(1792), showing a peasant girl betrayed by a selfish young man from the upper classes. To be sure, Pushkin’s story ‘The Station-Master’ in his
Tales of Belkin
(1829) suggested that the relationship between an upper-class man and his mistress from ‘the people’ might be based on affect and mutual contentment rather than one-sided exploitation. But this was, from the point of view of the Russian radicals who began to dominate Russian literary production in the 1840s, not a tenable suggestion. Indeed, in the 1840s and 1850s serfdom was seen even by some conservatives as an institution that was
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intrinsically wrong. And in 1851, the radical poet Nikolai Nekrasov, the most talented among politically committed authors of verse, made a degraded and beaten peasant woman the symbol of his verse and emblem of his social sympathy: But early lay heavy upon me the shackles

Of another, untender and unloved Muse,

Of the sad travelling-companion of sad beggars, Beggars born for struggle, suffering, and labour – Of a weeping, lamenting and hurting Muse,

Perpetually hungry, pleading in degradation,

Whose only idol was gold.

The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 did not mitigate the emphasis on rural misery but rather enhanced it. To be sure, some writers, such as Tolstoy, took a Utopian view of the new relationship between
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landowners and peasants. The scenes on Lyovin’s estate in
Anna
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Karenina
(1876–8) show the patriarchal peasant household as a model for a successful family in which husband and wife have complementary
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and fulfilled lives. Two decades before, in his ‘Landowner’s Morning’

(1851), Tolstoy had shown an enthusiastic young Russian gentleman trying to introduce rational work methods to his serfs: now Lyovin learned from his freed peasants not only how to mow, but also how to look at life. Having been unable to allay his suicidal frustration by studying philosophy and theology in books, Lyovin was finally set on the path to equilibrium by hearing of the attitude to life of an old peasant who ‘lived for his soul and remembered God’.

But eulogization of rural life was possible only in conditions where peasants’ land-holdings afforded them a tolerable existence. The chaotic process of land reform not only bankrupted many landowners who had lived on estate incomes before 1861, but also subjected peasants to economic uncertainty, leaving some worse off than they had been before the reforms. A single bad season could spell destitution
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and famine. All of this was observed at close quarters by the educated employees of the new post-Emancipation institutions of rural administration, the
zemstva
, such as doctors and teachers, many of whom were sympathetic to Populism (
Narodnichestvo
), a movement aimed at bringing education and political enlightenment to ‘the people’

but also (and paradoxically) at preserving the traditional practices and values of peasant life. A flowering of ethnography (the systematic collection of folklore and recording of material culture and daily life) was accompanied by a burgeoning of fiction rich in ethnographical detail, but also in social pessimism. The critical-realist stories of writers such as Gleb Uspensky, Nikolay Uspensky, Valentina Dmitrieva, and later Vsevolod Garshin, Vladimir Korolenko, and Ekaterina Letkova, painted an unremittingly bleak portrait of the Russian village. The degradation
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represented was so extreme that it raised questions about how this
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could possibly be mitigated by social reforms. A later and particularly
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grim example of this tradition was Chekhov’s story ‘The Peasants’,
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which went down extremely badly with populists of a more idealistic
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colouration, such as Tolstoy. In Chekhov’s imaginary village, with its
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rubbish-strewn stream, squalid huts, and brutal human relationships,
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the only event distracting from the daily grind was an annual religious
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procession, received with a pious and hysterical fervour that had
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absolutely no relevance to the tenor of life for the remainder of the year.

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Significantly, the only ‘human’ characters in the story were a waiter and his family who had returned from years of life in the city.

The sense of rural devastation, of what was often termed the ‘bestialization of the people’, prompted a search for the picturesque in the far North of Russia, which had remained relatively untouched by serfdom and which was saved by its remoteness from the seasonal migration to cities that had (in the eyes of many Populists) tainted the regions nearer to Moscow and St Petersburg with urban ways. It was here above all that folklore collectors searched for the rituals, celebrations, spells, songs, and tales that they believed preserved traditions stretching back to pre-Christian times. But the region
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