Russian Literature (22 page)

the only way in which the will may be exercised. And several poems of 1836 juxtapose worldly power and religious feeling, which latter draws in the lyric hero despite his strong sense of personal sin (as the critic Sergey Davydov has argued, there is strong reason to suppose that these poems, including ‘Monument’, may have formed part of a poetic cycle round the theme of Holy Week).

Like most aspects of Pushkin’s creation, the question of the extent to which the writer was an active believer is controversial. It became particularly so once Soviet censorship disintegrated: at this point the patriots who had fulminated against Andrey Sinyavsky’s
Strolls with
Pushkin
as a profanation of the writer’s memory began an all-out promotion of Pushkin’s Orthodox connections, using books, articles,
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pamphlets, and a specialized journal,
The Pushkin Era in the Light of
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Christian Culture
. It was above all Pushkin’s late poetry of repentance
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that was used as evidence here. But the desire for faith that these texts unquestionably did express is not the same thing as religious faith in a
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direct sense. There seems little to justify even the more moderate claim
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for Pushkin as an instance of how ‘theology in Russia [ . . . ] expressed
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itself through poetry’. Rather, he was a crucial figure in the creation of a secular Russian literature. His great poetic predecessors, Lomonosov
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and Derzhavin, were not only inspired directly by liturgical texts (as in
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Derzhavin’s remarkable paraphrases of the Psalms), but built their grandest poetic edifices on a foundation of the liturgical language, Church Slavonic (so, for example, in Derzhavin’s ‘The Waterfall’, a profoundly Christian meditation upon the transience of worldly power).

Such magnificent sententiousness and theological self-declaration is not to be found in Pushkin’s writings; indeed, the extent to which he was an active believer is neither evident nor, in the end, relevant, except perhaps to those the leftist writer and critic Osip Brik termed ‘maniacs such as those passionately seeking the answer to the question “Did Pushkin smoke?” ’. If Belinsky and his radical colleagues could consider Pushkin an ‘encyclopedia’ of Russian life, this was partly because spiritual matters were as marginal here as they were in the French
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Encyclopédie
. Bypassing Pushkin, the Russian tradition of metaphysical poetry was revived, after Derzhavin, by Pushkin’s contemporaries Evgeny Baratynsky and Fyodor Tyutchev; it then resurfaced again – after decades of dormancy – in the 1890s, most notably in the poetry of the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and his successor Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Pushkin’s prose was still less accommodating to mystical matters than his poetry. His great contemporary, Nikolay Gogol, was far more openly pious, as was reflected, for example, in his moralistic correspondence with his mother and sisters. Yet even Gogol’s beliefs remained curiously marginal to his works. To be sure, some of his stories have an affinity with Christian parable. Both
Old-World Landowners
(1835) and
The
Overcoat
(1841) are intimately connected with an ascetic Christian critique of self-gratification and the accumulation of material possessions: in both, the ‘mistake’ made by the characters is not to ‘lay
ture
up treasure in heaven’, not to prepare for the inevitable day of divine
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judgement. But both texts, like Gogol’s great novel
Dead Souls
and his play
The Government Inspector
, were the product of a talent that found
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sinfulness easier to imagine than virtue. The main character of
The
Overcoat
, the pathetic Akaky Akakievich, with his scatological name (
kakat’
is a childish word for defecation, ‘to cack’) and his haemorrhoidal complexion, was a walking vision of fleshly disgust, someone who, like the characters in
Dead Souls
, was a corpse in Christian terms long before his death.

The search for an Orthodox revival in literature emerged in theory before it did in practice, then. It was expressed not only in Gogol’s treatise
Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends
, but also in the work of writers associated with the ‘Slavophile’ movement of national conservatives that began to emerge in the late 1830s – Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksey Khomyakov, and Konstantin Aksakov. Where radical writers were rabidly secular in their tastes, the Slavophiles looked back nostalgically to Russia before the time of Peter the Great, when, so they
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believed, religion had infused every aspect of secular life. The fact that imaginative literature was itself a Western concept (as I mentioned in Chapter 2, textual production in medieval Russia was dominated by ecclesiastical needs) did not worry the Slavophiles, since they believed it was possible to combine the best features of Western and native Russian ‘enlightenment’ (
prosveshchenie
). The culmination of their ideas, in a literary sense, was the work of Dostoevsky, a socialist sympathizer transformed by the experience of mock execution and incarceration in a labour camp into an Orthodox believer, a conservative, and by far the greatest ‘theological’ writer of the nineteenth century. The memoirs, novels, and stories that Dostoevsky wrote after his return from Siberian exile were not ‘religious’ merely in the sense that they focused upon themes of transgression and
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repentance, or topical issues such as the reform of the church courts, or
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because they included characters who were believers. They were also
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permeated by religious concepts that shaped structure and plot as well as appearing in arguments, most importantly
sobornost
(a term coined
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by Khomyakov to describe a social unity modelled upon that of the
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sobornaya tserkov
, the phrase used for ‘Holy Catholic Church’ in the
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Orthodox Creed) and
kenosis
(‘emptying out’, a term denominating the striving to commune with others, to the point of self-loss). Both of these
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concepts were central to Dostoevsky’s final and most obviously
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Orthodox novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
(1879–80). They underlay the portraits of Alyosha Karamazov and of his teacher Zosima, whose godly death was a counterbalance to the brutal parricide at the heart of the novel. They were also at the heart of the Fable of the Grand Inquisitor, where the Inquisitor himself spoke for a utilitarian, ‘Western’ view of Church power working in the world to right material injustice, while the silent Christ stood for spiritual probity of a non-interventionist, contemplative kind.

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
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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
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Ivan in
The Brothers Karamazov
is a disagreeably chirpy middle-aged
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man whose mediocre brown suit suggests a middle-ranking provincial civil servant, the Evil One as pen-pushing bureaucrat.

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

If the canonical Gospel texts have been reflected in Russian literature only obliquely, though, the absorption of writers in eschatology, or the ‘four last things’ of Christian theology (death, judgement, heaven, and hell), has made the Apocalypse a central book for them. This is
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particularly clear in texts written during the late nineteenth and early
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twentieth centuries. The pessimism of the
fin de siècle
inspired interest
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not only in the writings of such intellectual nihilists as Nietzsche or Oswald Spengler, but also in the Orthodox tradition of looking forward
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to the destruction of the wicked secular world and the establishment of
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religious rule. Successive historical catastrophes – national defeat in the
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Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the ‘year of revolutions’ that followed, the First World War, Revolution, and the Russian Civil War – were
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represented by writers using apocalyptic imagery. A particularly striking
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example was Bulgakov’s novel
The White Guard
. The book had some allegiance to the historical fiction of Tolstoy, in that the experience of one family and their connections was used to stand for the experience of historical subjects in general. But Tolstoy’s emphasis upon history as a dialectic between predestination and human will (according to the epilogue of
War and Peace
, the wise historical subject was one who did not place too high a value upon the import of his or her own actions) had been replaced by a stress on malign destiny. This reinforced the powerlessness of historical subjects, who were left only with the power to regret. In this, Bulgakov echoed the moralism of Russian medieval texts such as
The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Baty
, where defeat and destruction were visited upon God’s people ‘because of our sins’: ‘A
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great year but a fearful year was the year of Our Lord 1918’, the novel begins, and the arrival in Kiev of the vicious peasant leader Petlyura, tales of whose atrocities are shown spreading round the city as he approaches, is accompanied by cosmic portents: Quite suddenly the grey background in the gap between the domes burst open, and an unexpected sun showed in swirling dark dimness. It was vaster than any sun people in the Ukraine had ever seen, and a true scarlet, like pure blood.

(Chapter 16)

In a world where the immanence if not the existence of God had become subject to serious doubt, it was the antichrist, and satanic forces more generally, that could be imagined as physically present in the material world. Just so, when the body – notably absent from Romantic and Symbolist writing – reasserted itself in the writing of
ture
Russian Modernism, this was often as a detested ‘envelope’ for the mind
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or the spirit. The hatred felt by the narrators of Yury Olesha’s
Envy
, or Nabokov’s
Lolita
, for their physical selves is matched in Joseph Brodsky’s
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poem ‘The Year 1972’, which represents the lyric hero’s self as ‘stinking of breath and creaking of joints/a blot on the mirror’ and with ‘enough caries in my teeth/to map out Ancient Greece, at least’.