Russian Literature
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The unusual shape of Russian literary
history has been the source of numerous controversies. Three major and sudden
breaks divide it into four periods--pre-Petrine (or Old Russian), Imperial,
post-Revolutionary, and post-Soviet. The reforms of Peter I (the Great; reigned
1682-1725), 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. |
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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 (1828-1910). 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. |
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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. |
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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 orthodoxa--that
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. (see also
Old Church Slavonic language) |
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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. |
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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 contribution--a literary fact reflecting Russia's status as a
self-conscious cultural borrower for much of its history. |
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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 1056-57 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. |
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A celebrated monument of Old Russian
literature is Hilarion's Slovo o zakone i blagodati (1037-50;
"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 (1130-82). 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. (see also homily) |
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The monk Nestor
(c. 1056-after 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. |
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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. |
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Beginning in the 1230s, the Tatars
conquered most of the Russian lands, thus destroying the hegemony of Kiev and
initiating a period in which political and cultural power was dispersed among
numerous principalities. Eventually the grand princes of Moscow succeeded in
defeating the Tatars (1480) and subduing the principalities. (The exception was
the lands under the rule of the Lithuanian-Polish kingdom, and this division
initiated the development of separate Ukrainian and Belarusian cultural
traditions.) Once the Russian lands were united, Tsar Ivan IV (Ivan the
Terrible; reigned 1533-84) undertook a campaign against the remaining power of
the old aristocracy (boyars). Reflecting these political facts, chronicles
and saints' lives served the interests of particular local powers. A series of
works in various genres, known as the Kulikovo cycle, celebrated the first (but
by no means definitive) Russian victory over the Tatars in 1380 under the
leadership of Grand Prince Dmitry Ivanovich ("Donskoy"). A rather weak
imitation of the Igor Tale, the Zadonshchina
(attributed to Sofony of Ryazan and composed no later than 1393) glorifies
Dmitry Donskoy. |
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The Ottoman occupation of the Balkans at
the end of the 14th century, and later the conquest of Constantinople in 1453,
drove a number of prelates to Russia, thus initiating the "Second South
Slavic Influence." Schooled in an Eastern Christian theological movement,
Hesychasm, these men brought with them a style of writing closely linked to
their theological doctrines. Known as "word weaving," this ornamental
style played with phonic and semantic correspondences. It appears in the most
notable hagiography of the period, Zhitiye
svyatogo Sergiya Radonezhskogo ("Life of Saint Sergius of
Radonezh") by Epifany Premudry ( Epiphanius the Wise; d. between 1418 and
1422). |
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A theological and political controversy
of great significance took place between St. Joseph of
Volokolamsk (1439-1515) and his followers, known as the "Possessors,"
or "Josephites," and Nil Sorsky
(1433-1508) and his followers, known as the "Nonpossessors."
Joseph justified the killing of heretics and the church's possession of lands
(thus the name "Possessors"). These positions were disputed by Nil and
his followers, especially Vassian Patrikeyev (d. before 1545) and Maximus the
Greek (c. 1475-1556). The
Nonpossessors called for greater tolerance and an inner, more spiritual
religion, a view that left its mark on a tradition eventually embodied in
Dostoyevsky's ideal monk, Father Zosima, in his novel The
Brothers Karamazov. With the Josephites' triumph, the division between church
and state dissolved; apostasy and treason became inseparably linked. |
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Accompanying Moscow's rise were a series
of writings on the theme of translatio
imperii ("translation of empire"), which constructed genealogies
and described the transmission of imperial and ecclesiastical regalia to Russia.
Particularly important is the monk Philotheus' (Filofei's) epistle to Vasily III
(written between 1514 and 1521), which proclaimed that, with the fall of
Constantinople (the second Rome), Moscow became the third (and last) Rome. Along
with the title tsar (caesar) and the claim that Orthodox Russia was the only
remaining true Christian state, the doctrine of the Third
Rome came to justify Russian imperial ambitions and to legitimize the
idea that it was Russia's destiny to save and rule the world. |
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Reflecting the consolidation of
Muscovite power were a series of encyclopaedic works, including the enormous Velikiye
Minei-Cheti ("Great Martyrologue") of 1552, the Ulozheniye
("Code of Laws"), and other collections or codifications.
Encyclopaedic writing also includes the famous Domostroy, or rules for household management, which later became a
byword for oppressive narrow-mindedness. The 16th century also saw the first
examples of polemical writing by laymen. Ivan Peresvetov (rather superfluously)
urged Ivan the Terrible to inspire fear. From a literary point of view, the most
remarkable work of this period is the correspondence between Andrey
Mikhaylovich, Prince Kurbsky (1528-83) and Ivan
the Terrible. In a series of letters Kurbsky, who escaped from Russia and
entered the service of the Polish king, denounced Ivan's tyrannical rule and
developed a theory justifying rebellion against unjust power. In a simple but
polemically powerful style, which included citations from Cicero, he also
denounced Russian cultural backwardness, thus earning a reputation as Russia's
first "Westernizer" (as well as first
"dissident" and first "émigré" writer). In his
vituperative replies, Ivan exhibits the psychology of a victim (self-pitying in
accounts of his childhood) turned victimizer. |
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Among the other noteworthy works of this
period are some tales of entertainment, including Povest o Petre i Fevroni (mid-16th century; "Tale of Peter and
Fevroniya"). In his Khozhdeniye za
tri morya ("Journey Beyond Three Seas") a merchant, Afanasy
Nikitin, describes his travels to India and Persia during 1466-72. However, what
is most striking about this period is what did not take place: Russia
experienced no Renaissance and became quite isolated from the West. With nothing
resembling Western secular literature, philosophy, or science, it remained a
land remarkable for its lacks. |
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The 17th century began with a period of
political chaos. The ruling Muscovite dynasty came to an end in 1598. Before
Michael Romanov was at last proclaimed tsar in 1613, Russia was convulsed by
struggles for power, peasant rebellions, and foreign invasions. This Time
of Troubles became the topic of a number of historical or memoiristic
works, including Avraamy Palitsyn's Istoriya
v pamyat sushchim predydushchim godom (completed in 1620; "History to
Be Remembered by Future Generations"). |
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Western cultural influences gradually
penetrated Russia in the 17th century. They entered the country through a number
of channels, including the "German [foreign] quarter" in Moscow and
through Ukraine, which was united with Russia in 1654. Ukrainian and Belarusian
clerics, who had received a Polish-style education at the Kiev
Academy, brought Western and Latin culture with them to Moscow. By the
end of the 17th century, Russian literature had changed in important ways. A key
figure in producing these changes was Simeon Polotsky
(1629-80), a monk educated at the Kiev Academy. He played the leading role in
introducing syllabic poetry (verse that is measured by the number of syllables
in each line), based on Polish models, into Russia. Old Russian literature had
been dominated entirely by prose, and so Polotsky's verse marked a decisive
break. So did the introduction of drama into Russia with Polotsky's school
dramas (modeled on Jesuit Counter-Reformation plays having biblical or religious
themes), the establishment of a court theatre by Tsar Alexis, and the production
of Artakserksevo deystvo (1672;
"Action of Artaxerxes"), the first court play (in prose), by Johann
Gottfried Gregory. The change in literary culture is also evident in the
beginnings of prose fiction. Translations of foreign adventure romances
appeared, along with Russian stories, parodies, and satires, including the
picaresque (and erotic) Povest o Frole
Skobeyeve ("Tale of Frol Skobeyev") and Kalyazinskaya chelobitnaya ("The Kalyazin Petition"). Povest
o Gore-Zlochastii ("Tale of Woe-Misfortune"), written in folk-epic
verse, combines motifs of temptation, adventure, and salvation. (see also syllabic metre) |
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In the mid-17th century liturgical
reforms undertaken by Patriarch Nikon split the Russian church. The dissenters
(or Old Believers) produced some remarkable
work, including the masterpiece of 17th-century Russian writing Zhitiye protopopa Avvakuma (1672-73;
The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum). Avvakum,
who eventually was burned at the stake, narrates his life in a powerful
vernacular alternating with Church Slavonicisms. Written in prison, his
narrative conveys a feel for his fanatic, earthy personality in a paradoxical
form that is both autobiography and autohagiography. |
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The "Ukrainian hegemony" over
Russian letters continued during the reign of Peter I the Great. St. Dmitry
(Tuptalo) of Rostov, Stefan Yavorsky, and Feofan Prokopovich, the three most
important writers of the period, were all educated at the Kiev Academy. |
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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. |
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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 city--Peter's "window to the
West"--became 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. (see also
Saint Petersburg) |
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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. |
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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 cliché, 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 exist--a question
that reveals the peculiar ethos of Russian literary culture. |
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The 18th century was a period of
codification, imitation, and absorption of foreign models. The century's major
contribution was the development of a literary language. Under the pressure of
new subject matter and the influx of foreign expressions, Church Slavonic proved
inadequate, and the resulting linguistic chaos required the standardization of
literary Russian. In 1758 Mikhail Lomonosov
published "Predisloviye o polze knig tserkovnykh v rossiyskom yazyke"
("Preface on the Use of Church Books in the Russian
Language") in which he classified Russian and Church Slavonic words,
assigning their use to three styles, and correlated these styles with
appropriate themes, genres, and tones. Thus the Russian literary language was to
be established by a combination of Russian and Church Slavonic. |
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Verse also changed decisively. The old
syllabic verse, based on qualities of the Polish language, gave way to
syllabotonic verse (i.e., verse in
which the number of stressed syllables in each line becomes the dominant
prosodic element), more suitable to Russian. Theories of versification were
advanced by Vasily Trediakovsky in 1735 and 1752 and, especially, by Lomonosov
in 1739 (the date Belinsky chose as the beginning of Russian literature). It is
also noteworthy that the Petrine assault on the church decisively ended the role
of the clergy in Russian literature. |
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Throughout the 18th century Russian
writers imitated, adapted, and experimented with a wide variety of European
genres, thus grafting them onto the Russian tradition and making them available
for later, more original, use. Much classical and western European literature
was translated, read, and assimilated, thus producing a kind of telescopic
effect, as works and movements that were centuries apart were absorbed at the
same time. Four writers dominate the period from the death of Peter to the
ascension of Catherine II the Great in 1762. Antiokh Kantemir is best known for
his verse satires. In addition to his treatises and poems in various genres,
Trediakovsky produced a poetic psalter. Lomonosov, who was also a scientist and
played a key role in founding Moscow State University (1755), achieved his
greatest poetic success in panegyric and spiritual odes, especially "Oda na
vzyatiye Khotina" (1739; "Ode on the Seizure of Khotin"),
"Vecherneye razmyshleniye o Bozhiyem velichestve" (1743; "Evening
Meditation on the Majesty of God"), and "Utrenneye razmyshleniye o
Bozhiyem velichestve" (1743; "Morning Meditation on the Majesty of
God"). Whereas Baroque poetics strongly influenced Trediakovsky and
Lomonosov, the younger Aleksandr Sumarokov, a poet and dramatist, stood for a
rigorous and lucid classicism. |
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Catherine began her reign as an
enlightened despot. She corresponded with Voltaire and Denis Diderot and
sponsored the arts. Although her native language was German, she has to her
credit a number of plays in Russian as well as a statement of legal principles, Nakaz
(Instruction). In 1769 she established a satiric journal, Vsyakaya
vsyachina ("All Sorts and Sundries"), which was soon followed by
others, including the Truten
("Drone"), founded by Nikolay Novikov.
In a curious exchange between journals, Novikov and Catherine disagreed with
each other about the nature of satire--like the Kurbsky-Ivan correspondence in
the 16th century, it was a case of a sovereign deigning to argue with a subject.
Shocked by an uprising of Cossacks and peasants (1773-75), known from the name
of its leader as the Pugachov Rebellion, and later by the French Revolution,
Catherine turned increasingly conservative. Generally speaking, these events
marked a turning point as the Russian autocracy switched from being a
modernizing to a restraining force. When Aleksandr
Radishchev published Puteshestviye
iz Peterburga v Moskvu (1790; A
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow), a work that was sharply critical of
Russian society and serfdom, Catherine had him condemned to death, a sentence
she commuted to Siberian exile. Offended by a posthumously published play by
Yakov Knyazhnin (1742-91), Vadim
Novgorodsky ("Vadim of Novgorod"), she had copies of the
manuscript burned and the published text torn from the offending volume. |
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Catherine's reign saw real
accomplishment in Russian poetry. Excellent verse was produced, and the canon as
it is known today began to take shape. It is worth stressing the important role
of tradition and the canon in Russian poetry. To a much greater extent than in
many other traditions, including the English and American, Russian poetry
typically relies on the reader's detailed knowledge of earlier poems. The poems
of the past constitute a sort of literary bible, a common culture known in
detail by the literate public. Poets count on their readers being sufficiently
familiar with the tradition to detect even faint allusions to earlier poems.
Moreover, Russian poets also rely on readers to appreciate the semantic
associations that specific verse forms have acquired, which is perhaps one
reason why free (unrhymed and unmetered) verse has played a relatively small
role in Russian poetry. |
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Three poets--Ivan Khemnitser, Ivan
Dmitriyev, and Ivan Krylov--are known for their fables. Krylov's fables rapidly became classics and some of his lines
proverbial. Rossiyada (written
1771-79; "The Rossiad"), an epic by Mikhail Kheraskov, is a rather
stilted effort that proved a literary dead end. It was the ode, rather than the
epic, that was the successful high poetic genre of the age. But Vasily Maykov
and Ippolit Bogdanovich wrote amusing mock epics. Maykov's Elisey; ili, razdrazhenny Vakkh (1769; "Elisei; or, Bacchus
Enraged") cleverly parodies a Russian translation of the Aeneid
with a narrative in which the Greek pantheon directs whores, drunks, and other
low-lifes. In Dushenka: drevnyaya povest v
volnykh stikhakh (1783; "Dushenka: An Ancient Tale in Free
Verse"), Bogdanovich produced a light and witty updating of the Greek myth
of Cupid and Psyche. |
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Gavrila Derzhavin
is generally considered to be Russia's greatest 18th-century poet. He is best
known for his odes, including his chatty panegyric "Oda k Felitse"
(1782; "Ode to Felitsa"), in which praise for the prosaic virtues of
Empress Catherine alternates with depictions of the low amusements of courtiers.
His poems "Bog" (1784; "God") and "Vodopad"
(1791-94; "The Waterfall") daringly make the metaphysical concrete and
the specific poetic. Derzhavin, who also served as a governor and as Catherine's
personal secretary, exemplifies the tendency of 18th-century writers to pursue
government careers, a practice that was almost unthinkable a century later. |
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Although the theatrical repertoire in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries continued to be dominated by translations
and adaptations, numerous, if not very distinguished, tragedies were written by
Sumarokov, Kheraskov, Vladislav Ozerov, and others. Of greater merit were two
comedies by Denis Fonvizin, Brigadir
(1769; The Brigadier), a satire on
Gallomania, and Nedorosl (1783;
"The Minor"). Prose fiction began to appear in print only in the
mid-18th century. Mikhail Chulkov's picaresque Prigozhaya povarikha (1770; "The Comely Cook") is
addressed to a popular audience. At the end of the 18th century, the dominant
figure of Russian sentimentalism was Nikolay
Karamzin, author of Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika (1792; Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790), describing a journey to
western Europe in 1789-90, and of the very popular story "Bednaya
Liza" (1792; "Poor Liza"), a tale of lovers separated
because they belong to different social classes, which seems cloying to the
modern reader. Appointed imperial historiographer, Karamzin later wrote the
12-volume Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo (1818-26; "History of the
Russian State"), which is a landmark of Russian literature. Karamzin's
importance also lies in his contribution to the Russian literary language. His
writing reflected the language of high society, using a Gallicized vocabulary
and syntax at the expense of Church Slavonic. |
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The Russian 19th century is one of the
most fruitful periods in world literature. Several features, in addition to
those mentioned above, distinguish the literary culture of these years: (1)
Literature enjoyed greater prestige in Russia than in the West, and its
achievements were sometimes thought (as Dostoyevsky once declared) to be the
justification for the Russian people's very existence. Literary critics were
typically the leaders of Russian intellectual life and political thought. (2)
Literature and criticism were expected to fulfill functions, such as
philosophical, moral, and religious analysis, that in Europe were typically
assigned to distinct disciplines. Thus Dostoyevsky's works are central to the
histories of all these areas of Russian thought. One can see why the highest
achievement of Russian literature was probably the philosophical novel. (3) In
the 19th (still more, the 20th) century, politics and literature were intimately
connected, and a writer or critic was often called upon to be a political
prophet. |
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Readers relying on translations usually
think of Russian literature almost exclusively in terms of prose, but for
Russians their tradition is also, and perhaps equally, one of poetry. The 19th
century began with the "Golden Age" of Russian poetry. An aristocratic
sensibility, the culture of salons, an aura of friendly intimacy, and genres
suitable to this ethos marked the poetry of this period. The romantic poet Vasily
Zhukovsky is celebrated for several translations or adaptations that are
major poems in their own right, including versions of the English poet Thomas
Gray's An Elegy Written in a Country
Church Yard (1802 and 1839), Homer's Odyssey
(completed 1847), and Lord Byron's "The Prisoner of Chillon" (1822).
His "Svetlana" (1813) reworks the German poet Gottfried August Bürger's
"Lenore." Konstantin Batyushkov was
noted for playful and erotic as well as melancholy verse and for the elegy Umerayushchy Tass (1817; "The Dying Tasso"). The
"Pushkin Pleiad," consisting of poets of Pushkin's generation and
closely associated with him, included Anton Delvig, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, and,
most important, Yevgeny Baratynsky, who was a superb philosophical "poet of
thought." |
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Pushkin occupies a unique place in
Russian literature. It is not just that Russians view him as their greatest
poet; he is also virtually the symbol of Russian culture. His life, as well as
his work, has acquired mythic status. To criticize Pushkin, or even one of his
characters--as, for example, Tatyana, the heroine of his novel Yevgeny
Onegin (written 1823-31; Eugene Onegin)--has
been taken as something akin to blasphemy. Pushkin's quasi-sacred status has
itself been parodied by Russian authors, including the satirist Mikhail
Zoshchenko, the absurdist Daniil Kharms, and, most recently, Andrey Sinyavsky in
his Progulki s Pushkinym (1972; Strolls
with Pushkin). |
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Even if one sets this mythic image
aside, Pushkin is truly one of the world's most accomplished poets; his verse,
however, which relies on the author's perfect control of form, tone, and
language, does not read well in translation. Deeply playful and experimental,
Pushkin adopted a vast array of conflicting masks and personae. He writes now
seriously, now with irony, and now with irony at his own irony, on moral and
philosophical themes. He is ultimately a philosophical fox, appreciating the
limitations, as well as the virtues, of any set of ideas. A master parodist,
Pushkin wrote a number of erotic and at times sacrilegious mock-epics, such as
"Gavriiliada" (1821; "The Gabrieliad"), a scabrous retelling
of the Annunciation, and Ruslan
i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Ludmila), which, after parodying
epic, folk tale, literary ballad, and romance in a spirit of pure play, ends
with a startlingly sombre epilogue. His diverse lyrics include a series on the
poet's double identity as artist and man of the world; political poems that got
him into trouble with the tsar as well as poems in praise of the tsar and his
suppression of the Poles; some remarkable elegies ("Vospominaniye"
[1828; "Remembrance"]; "Elegiya" [1830; "Elegy"]);
love poems, including the "imageless" "Ya vas lyubil" (1829;
"I Loved You Once"); and powerful meditations on human evil
("Anchar" [1828; "The Upas Tree"]; "Ne day mne Bog
soyti s uma" [1833; "God Grant I Go Not Mad"]). |
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Pushkin's narrative poems include Tsygany
(1824; "The Gypsies"), which considers the meaning of freedom. Plot is
mere excuse for parody of literary forms and conventions in Domik
v Kolomne (1830; The Little House in
Kolomna). Most famously, Medny
vsadnik (written 1833; The Bronze Horseman), which reflects on Peter the Great and the
significance of St. Petersburg, examines the meaning of history in relation to
individual lives. Concern with the nature of historical causation also led to
complex formal innovations in the quasi-Shakespearean drama Boris
Godunov (written 1824-25), which reworked Karamzin's Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo and was in turn reworked by other
artists, notably Modest Mussorgsky in his opera Boris Godunov (1869; revised 1874). Pushkin's greatest work was
probably Eugene
Onegin, the first truly great Russian novel and the source of
countless themes and images in Russian fiction. Playful in the manner of
Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Lord
Byron's Don Juan, it far surpasses
them for sheer brilliance of form, wit, and thought. Amid endless clever
digressions, in which the poet adopts a dazzling array of tones and engages in
myriad self-conscious self-parodies, it tells the story of Onegin, a "superfluous
man"--that is, a man with no core or purpose to his life--and
Tatyana, who stands for authenticity in a sea of literary or social clichés,
which she somehow manages to transcend even when she accepts them. The work's
serial publication over several years enabled both its own unpredictable
creation and changes in the author's perspective to become themes of the poem
itself. |
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Each of Pushkin's four "little
tragedies," all written in 1830, succinctly deals with a philosophical
problem. The most remarkable, Motsart i
Salyeri (Mozart and Salieri),
based on a legend that Salieri poisoned Mozart, meditates on the nature of
creativity while introducing, in brilliantly compressed speeches, what was to be
one of the important Russian themes--metaphysical rebellion against God. |
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After 1830 Pushkin turned to prose. He
wrote both a novella and a nonfictional account--Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The
Captain's Daughter) and Istoriya
Pugachovskogo bunta (1834; The History
of Pugachev)--about the same historical events, as if to illustrate that
representing the historical truth requires more than one genre. Povesti
pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (1830; Tales
of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin) filters five narratives, each a parody of
a received plot, through the minds of several narrators, collectors, or editors.
Pikovaya dama (1834; The Queen
of Spades) offers a suspenseful account of a man seeking mystic knowledge
that would enable him to gamble without risk and, implicitly, to know the
deepest forbidden truths. Dostoyevsky's Crime
and Punishment may be seen as an expansion of Pushkin's brief story. |
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Next to Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, who
personifies Romanticism, is probably Russia's
most frequently anthologized poet. His celebrated lyrics often recycle lines
from his own and others' poems. "Smert poeta" (1837; "Death of a
Poet"), which first earned him fame, deals with Pushkin's death shortly
after a fatal duel in 1837. Among his narrative poems, Demon (1841; The Demon)
describes the love of a Byronic demon for a mortal woman; Pesnya pro tsarya Ivana Vasilyevicha, molodogo oprichnika i udalogo
kuptsa Kalashnikova (1837; A Song
About Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Bodyguard, and the Valiant Merchant
Kalashnikov) is a stylized folk epic. Also an accomplished prose stylist,
Lermontov wrote Geroy
nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero
of Our Time), which in form is something between a novel and a complexly
framed cycle of stories about a single hero, a Byronic superfluous man. This
work ranges from sketches of philosophical brilliance ("The Fatalist")
to episodes of near puerility ("Princess Mary"). The theme of the
superfluous man finds another important rendition in Aleksandr Griboyedov's
classic work, Gore ot uma (completed
1824; Woe from Wit). |
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One of the finest comic authors of world
literature, and perhaps its most accomplished nonsense writer, Gogol is best
known for his short stories, for his play Revizor
(1836; The Inspector General, or The
Government Inspector), and for Myortvye
dushi (1842; Dead Souls), a prose narrative that is nevertheless subtitled a
"poem." "Nos" (1836; "The Nose"), a parable on the
failure of all explanatory systems, relates an utterly inexplicable incident and
the attempts to come to terms with it. Both "Shinel" (1842; "The
Overcoat"), which is probably the most influential Russian short story, and
"Zapiski sumasshedshego" (1835; "The Diary of a Madman") mix
pathos and mockery in an amazing display. As in "Nevsky prospekt"
(1835; "Nevsky Avenue") and "Povest o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan
Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem" (1835; "The Tale of How Ivan
Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich"), language itself seems to
generate its own absurd content while the universe turns out to be a counterfeit
of which there is no original. Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless
superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that
suddenly turns into metaphysical horror. The Inspector General develops a sequence of (witting and unwitting)
confidence games within confidence games in a corrupt world of endless
self-deception. The mock-epic, even mock-satiric, Dead Souls simultaneously allegorizes the timeless bureaucratic
tendency to make official documentation more genuine than actual existence, the
emptiness of the human soul, and the mind's absurd ways of grasping meaning or
value. It is one of the most striking (and most Gogolian) ironies of Russian
literary history that radical critics celebrated Gogol as a realist. |
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From the death of Lermontov until the
end of the 19th century, Russian literature was dominated by prose, but some
poets of lasting interest appeared. Fyodor Tyutchev,
a member of Pushkin's generation, wrote nature, love, and political poetry but
is probably best appreciated for his philosophical "poetry of
thought," including "Silentium!" (1830). Afanasy Fet wrote delicate love lyrics remarkable for their absence
of verbs. Violently attacked by radical critics as symbolizing pure art, he came
to be appreciated by the Symbolist poets to follow. Nikolay
Nekrasov, who was also a major figure in Russian journalism, wrote social
satires, tendentious "civic" verse, and compassionate accounts of
peasant life, including Komu na Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?), which he began writing in
1863 and left unfinished at the time of his death. |
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Among the dramatists of this period, Aleksandr
Ostrovsky, who has proved much more popular in Russia than abroad, wrote
many slice-of-life plays about the Russian merchantry. His plays Svoi
lyudi--sochtyomsya! (1850; "It's a Family Affair--We'll Settle It Among
Ourselves"; Eng. trans. A Family
Affair) and Groza (1859; The
Thunderstorm) were the subject of reviews by Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836-61),
one of Russia's most influential radical critics. Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin
wrote a macabre trilogy, whose third play, Smert
Tarelkina (1869; The Death of Tarelkin),
is a brilliant piece of grotesque humour about a man who fakes his own death.
The theme of the faked suicide, a motif of Russian drama, later appeared in Leo
Tolstoy's Zhivoy trup (written 1900; The
Living Corpse) and Nikolay Erdman's Samoubiytsa
(1928; The Suicide). |
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Beginning about 1860, Russian culture
was dominated by a group known as the "intelligentsia," a word that
English borrowed from Russian but which means something rather different in its
original Russian usage. In the word's narrow sense, the
"intelligentsia" consisted of people who owed their primary allegiance
not to their profession or class but to a group of men and women with whom they
shared a common set of beliefs, including a fanatic faith in revolution,
atheism, and materialism. They usually adopted a specific set of manners,
customs, and sexual behaviour, primarily from their favourite book, Nikolay
Chernyshevsky's utopian novel Chto
delat (1863; What Is to Be Done?). Although
appallingly bad from a literary point of view, this novel, which also features a
fake suicide, was probably the most widely read work of the 19th century. |
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Generally speaking, the intelligentsia
insisted that literature be a form of socialist propaganda and rejected
aesthetic criteria or apolitical works. In addition to Chernyshevsky and
Dobrolyubov, typical members of the intelligentsia came to include Lenin,
Stalin, and other Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917. Thus it is not surprising
that a gulf separated the writers from the intelligentsia. In an important
anthology attacking the mentality of the intelligentsia, Vekhi
(1909; Landmarks), the critic Mikhail Gershenzon observed that "an
almost infallible gauge of the strengths of an artist's genius is the extent of
his hatred for the intelligentsia." Typically, the writers objected to the
intelligentsia's intellectual intolerance, addiction to theory, and belief that
morality was defined by utility to the revolution. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and
Anton Chekhov were all sharply contemptuous of the intelligentsia. |
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Having been imprisoned in Siberia for
political activity, Dostoyevsky parodied What
Is to Be Done? in Zapiski
iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the Underground), a novella that has had incalculable
influence on Western literature for formal as well as thematic reasons. In a
complex series of paradoxes, its hero argues against determinism, utopianism,
and historical laws. In Prestupleniye
i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and
Punishment), a philosophical and psychological account of a murder,
Dostoyevsky examines the tendency of intelligents
(members of the intelligentsia) to regard themselves as superior to ordinary
people and as beyond traditional morality. Besy
(1872; The Possessed), a novel based
on Russian terrorism, is famous as the work that most accurately predicted
20th-century totalitarianism. In Idiot (1868-69; The
Idiot) and Bratya Karamazovy (1879-80; The
Brothers Karamazov), Dostoyevsky, who is generally regarded as one of the
supreme psychologists in world literature, sought to demonstrate the
compatibility of Christianity with the deepest truths of the psyche. |
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Probably even more than Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy has been praised as being the greatest novelist in world literature. The
19th-century English critic and poet Matthew Arnold famously expressed the
commonest view in saying that a work by Tolstoy is not a piece of art but a
piece of life: his novels read as if life were writing directly, without
mediation. Tolstoy's techniques reflect his belief that no theory is adequate to
explain the world's complexity, which unfolds by "tiny, tiny
alterations" fitting no pattern. He denied the existence of historical laws
and insisted that ethics is a matter not of rules but of supreme sensitivity to
the particular. "True life," he contended, is lived not at moments of
grand crisis but at countless ordinary and prosaic moments, which human beings
usually do not notice. All these ideas are illustrated and explicitly expressed
in Voyna i mir (1865-69; War
and Peace), set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, and in Anna
Karenina (1875-77), which applies this prosaic view of life to
marriage, the family, and work. Anna Karenina also contrasts romantic love, which is based on
intense moments of passion and leads to adultery, with the prosaic love of the
family, which is based above all on intimacy. |
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After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy underwent a religious crisis, which
eventually led him to reject his two great novels, formulate a new religion that
he thought of as true Christianity, and cultivate a different type of art. To
outline his views, he wrote a number of tracts, including Tsarstvo bozhiye vnutri vas (1893; The Kingdom of God Is Within You) and Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1898; What
Is Art?). His only long novel of this period, Voskreseniye (1899; Resurrection),
is a tendentious failure. But he produced brilliant novellas, many of which were
published posthumously, including Otets
Sergy (written 1898; Father Sergius),
in which he seems to reflect on his own quest for sainthood, and Khadzhi-Murat
(written 1904; Hadji-Murad). Smert Ivana Ilicha (1886; The
Death of Ivan Ilyitch), which is often considered the greatest novella in
Russian literature, conveys the existential horror of sickness and mortality
while describing civilization as a web of lies designed to distract people from
an awareness of death. |
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The first Russian writer to be widely
celebrated in the West, Turgenev managed to be hated by the radicals as well as
by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for his dedicated Westernism, bland liberalism,
aesthetic elegance, and tendency to nostalgia and self-pity. He first gained
fame with his subtle descriptions of peasant life in Zapiski okhotnika (1852; A
Sportsman's Sketches), which contributed to the climate leading to the
abolition of serfdom. He is celebrated for his novels about intelligents
and ideology: Rudin (1856), Nakanune (1860; On the Eve),
and Dym (1867; Smoke). His most distinguished work, Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers
and Sons), offers both an evenhanded portrait of the radical
nihilists and an allegorical meditation on the conflict of generations. |
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The mid-19th century produced a number
of other fine prose writers. Sergey Aksakov
wrote fictionalized reminiscences: Semeynaya
khronika (1856; The Family Chronicle)
and Detskiye gody Bagrova-vnuka (1858;
Years of Childhood). Aleksandr
Herzen wrote his greatest works in emigration. In S
togo berega (written 1847-50; From the
Other Shore), which combines essays and dialogues, he reflects with
penetrating skepticism on the idea that history has knowable laws. Herzen's Byloye i dumy (written 1852-68; My
Past and Thoughts) is regarded as the best Russian autobiography. Ivan
Goncharov is the author of the comic masterpiece Oblomov
(1859), a study of dreamy slothfulness: its hero spends a hundred pages getting
out of bed. Nikolay Leskov is remembered for his
short stories, including "Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda" (1865;
"Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District"), as well as for his novel Soboryane
(1872; The Cathedral Folk). Like Gogol before and Mikhail Zoshchenko after
him, he was a master of skaz, a
written narrative imitating a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect,
slang, or a particular idiom. A radical satirist and (remarkably) a government
official who attained general's rank, Mikhail Saltykov wrote (under the
pseudonym N. Shchedrin) the extremely dark novel Gospoda Golovlyovy (1876; The
Golovlyov Family), portraying the relentless decline of a family. The agony
of an intellectual who wants to merge with the common people and the intimate
link of utopianism to madness figure as prominent themes in the short stories of
Vsevolod Garshin, including
"Khudozhniki" (1879; "Artists") and "Krasny
tsvetok" (1883; "The Red Flower"). |
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When Tolstoy abandoned the prosaic
ethos, Chekhov, one of the greatest short story writers in world literature,
remained loyal to it. Indeed, he reinterpreted it within his essentially
bourgeois values, stressing the moral necessity of ordinary virtues such as
daily kindness, cleanliness, politeness, work, sobriety, paying one's debts, and
avoiding self-pity. Replying to the intelligentsia's demand for political
tendentiousness, which he equated with a stifling intellectual conformity, he
maintained that his only "tendency" was a protest against lying in all
its forms. In his hundreds of stories and novellas, which he wrote while
practicing medicine, Chekhov adopts something of a clinical approach to ordinary
life. Meticulous observation and broad sympathy for diverse points of view shape
his fiction. In his stories, an overt plot subtly hints at other hidden stories,
and so the experience of rereading his fiction often differs substantially from
that produced by a first reading. Especially noteworthy are "Skuchnaya
istoriya" (written 1889; "A Dreary Story"), "Duel"
(written 1891; "The Duel"), "Palata No. 6" (written 1892;
"Ward Number Six"), "Kryzhovnik" (written 1898;
"Gooseberries"), "Dushechka" (written 1899; "The
Darling"), "Dama s sobachkoy" (written 1899; "The Lady with
the Lap Dog"), "Arkhiyerey" (written 1902; "The
Bishop"), and "Nevesta" (written 1903; "The
Betrothed"). |
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Along with Gogol's The Inspector General, Chekhov's plays are the high point of Russian
drama. In his four great plays, Chayka
(1896; The Seagull), Dyadya
Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya), Tri sestry
(1901; Three Sisters), and Vishnyovy
sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard),
Chekhov's belief that life is lived at ordinary moments and that histrionics are
a dangerous lie found expression in a major innovation, the undramatic
drama--or, as it is sometimes called, the theatre of inaction. |
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The period from the 1890s to 1917 was
one of intellectual ferment, in which mysticism, aestheticism, Neo-Kantianism,
eroticism, Marxism, apocalypticism, Nietzscheanism, and other movements combined
with each other in improbable ways. Primarily an age of poetry, it also produced
significant prose and drama. Russian Symbolism, which was influenced by French
Symbolist poetry and the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), is usually
said to have begun with an essay by Dmitry Merezhkovsky,
"O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy
literatury" (1893; "On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New
Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature"). A poet and propagator of
religious ideas, Merezhkovsky wrote a trilogy of novels, Khristos
i Antikhrist (1896-1905; Christ and
Antichrist), consisting of Yulian
otstupnik (1896; Julian the Apostate),
Leonardo da Vinchi (1901; Leonardo
da Vinci), and Pyotr i Aleksey
(1905; Peter and Alexis), which
explores the relation of pagan and Christian views of the world. (see also
Symbolist movement) |
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The Symbolists saw art as a way to
approach a higher reality. The first wave of Symbolists included Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942), who translated a number of English
poets and wrote verse that he left unrevised on principle (he believed in first
inspiration); Valery Bryusov (1873-1924), a poet
and translator of French Symbolist verse and of Virgil's Aeneid,
who for years was the leader of the movement; Zinaida
Gippius (1869-1945), who wrote decadent, erotic, and religious poetry;
and Fyodor Sologub, author of melancholic verse and of a novel, Melky
bes (1907; The Petty Demon), about
a sadistic, homicidal, paranoid schoolteacher. |
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Three writers dominate the second wave
of Symbolism. Eschatology and anthroposophy shaped the poetry and prose of Andrey
Bely, whose novel Peterburg (1913-22; St.
Petersburg) is regarded as the masterpiece of Symbolist fiction. Aleksandr
Blok, who wrote the lyric drama Balaganchik
(1906; "The Showbooth"), is best known for his poem Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve),
which describes 12 brutal Red Guards who turn out to be unwittingly led by Jesus
Christ. The principal theoretician of the Symbolist movement, Vyacheslav
Ivanov (1866-1949), wrote mythic poetry conveying a Neoplatonist
philosophy. |
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In the second decade of the 20th
century, Symbolism was challenged by two other schools, the Acmeists, who
favoured clarity over metaphysical vagueness, and the brash Futurists, who
wanted to throw all earlier and most contemporary poetry "from the
steamship of modernity." Among the Acmeists, Nikolay
Gumilyov (1886-1921), who stressed poetic craftsmanship over the occult,
was executed by the Bolsheviks. Already an accomplished creator of superb love
lyrics in these years, Anna Akhmatova produced
densely and brilliantly structured poems in the Soviet period, including Poema
bez geroya (written 1940-62; A Poem
Without a Hero) and Rekviyem
(written 1935-40; Requiem), which was
inspired by Soviet purges and was therefore unpublishable in Russia. From 1923
to 1940 she was forced into silence, and in 1946 Akhmatova and Zoshchenko became
the target of official abuse by the Communist Party cultural spokesman Andrey
Zhdanov (1896-1948). Some consider Osip Mandelshtam
(1891-1938), who died in a Soviet prison camp, to be the greatest Russian poet
of the 20th century. Many of his difficult, allusive poems were preserved by his
wife, Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899-1980), whose memoirs are themselves a classic.
(see also Futurism) |
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The two most important Futurist poets
were Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir
Mayakovsky. Khlebnikov hoped to find the laws of history through
numerology and developed amazingly implausible theories about language and its
origins. His verse, which is characterized by neologisms and
"trans-sense" language, includes "Zaklyatiye smekhom" (1910;
"Incantation by Laughter") and Zangezi (1922). Mayakovsky epitomized the spirit of romantic
bohemian radicalism. Humour, bravado, and self-pity characterize his inventive
long poems, including Oblako v shtanakh
(1915; A Cloud in Trousers). After the
Russian Revolution in 1917, which he ardently supported initially, Mayakovsky
"stepped on the throat" of his song to produce propaganda poems. But
he also satirized Soviet bureaucracy in the witty "Razgovor s
fininspektorom o poezii" (1926; "Conversation with a Tax Collector
about Poetry"). As a dramatist, he is best known for Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913), in which he played the lead role, and Klop
(1929; The Bedbug), in which a philistine, along with a bedbug, is
resurrected into the banal communist future of 1979. Having written a poem about
the suicide of the peasant poet Sergey Yesenin (1895-1925), Mayakovsky later
shot himself, leaving a brilliantly ironic suicide note with a poem explaining
that "love's boat has smashed against daily life." |
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Celebrated in their day, the fiction
writers Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919), Aleksandr Kuprin (1870-1938), and Vladimir
Korolenko (1853-1921) now have faded reputations. But Ivan
Bunin, who became the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
(1933), wrote superb works both before the Revolution and as an émigré
after it. Especially noteworthy are his dark novella Derevnya
(1910; The Village), which is relentlessly critical of Russians, and his Zhizn
Arsenyeva (1930; The Life of Arseniev,
or The Well of Days), a fictionalized
autobiography. Maksim Gorky became the official
founder of Socialist Realism. Western readers now appreciate his three-volume
autobiography Detstvo (1913-14; My
Childhood), V lyudyakh (1915-16; In the
World, or My Apprenticeship), and Moi
universitety (1923; My Universities)
and his Vospominaniya o Lve Nikolayeviche
Tolstom (1919; Reminiscences of Leo
Nikolaevich Tolstoy). His highly tendentious novel Mat
(1906; Mother), a model for Socialist
Realism, and many other works divide characters simplistically into two
groups--progressive and virtuous or reactionary and vicious. |
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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." (see also
Russian Revolution of 1917) |
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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
émigré 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. |
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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 (1940-96) published all his collections of verse
abroad and was forced to emigrate in 1972. Only Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-84) 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. Émigrés also
included the poets Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939) and Georgy Ivanov
(1894-1958). Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941),
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 1937-38; The Gift)
and Priglasheniye na kazn (1938; Invitation
to a Beheading). |
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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 Sister--Life),
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). (see also fellow
traveller, dystopian novel) |
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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 (1928-40;
"The Quiet Don"; translated in two parts as And
Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows
Home to the Sea). |
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The decade beginning with Stalin's
ascendancy in the late 1920s was one of unprecedented repression. The "war
in the countryside" to enforce the collectivization of agriculture cost
more than 10 million lives, about half of them by starvation. Purges took the
lives of millions more, among them Babel, Kharms, Mandelshtam, Pilnyak, the
peasant poet Nikolay Klyuyev (1887-1937), and the director Vsevolod Meyerhold
(1874-1940). In 1932 all independent literary groupings were dissolved and
replaced by an institution that had no counterpart in the West, the Union
of Soviet Writers. The union became the state's instrument of control
over literature, and expulsion from it meant literary death. In 1934 Socialist
Realism was proclaimed the only acceptable form of writing. Henceforth,
literature was to be governed by a series of official directives regarding
details of style and content in order to ensure that each work offered a
"truthful" depiction "of reality in its revolutionary
development." Literature had to be "party-minded" and
"typical" (that is, avoiding unpleasant, hence "atypical,"
aspects of Soviet reality), while showing the triumph of fully "positive
heroes." (see also purge
trials) |
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Some talented writers turned to the
safer areas of children's literature and translation. Others, such as Valentin
Katayev in his production novel Vremya,
vperyod! (1932; Time, Forward!)
and Fedin in Pervyye radosti (1946; Early
Joys), sought to infuse official writing with some interest. Quite popular
was Nikolay Ostrovsky's fictionalized autobiography Kak
zakalyalas stal (1932-34; How the
Steel Was Tempered). In his unfinished novel Pyotr
Pervy (1929-45; Peter the Great)
and his play Ivan Grozny (1941-43;
"Ivan the Terrible"), Aleksey Tolstoy,
an émigré who returned to become one of Stalin's favourite
writers, praised tyrannical tsars admired by Stalin. The moral nadir of Soviet
literature was reached in a collaborative volume, Belomorsko-Baltiski
kanal imeni Stalina: istoriya stroitelstva (1934; Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal Between the
White Sea and the Baltic Sea). With Gorky as an editor and 34 contributors,
including Gorky, Katayev, Shklovsky, Aleksey Tolstoy, and Zoshchenko, the volume
praised a project (and the secret police who directed it) using convict labour
and costing tens of thousands of lives. During these dark years the work now
generally regarded as the finest post-Revolutionary novel, Mikhail
Bulgakov's Master i Margarita (The
Master and Margarita), was written "for the drawer" (1928-40); it
appeared (expurgated) in Russia only in 1966-67 and unexpurgated in 1973. It
tells of the Devil and his retinue visiting Soviet Russia, where they play
practical jokes of metaphysical and political significance. A novel within the
novel gives the "true" version of Christ's encounter with Pilate. The
result is a joyful philosophical comedy of enormous profundity. |
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The need to rally support in World War
II brought a loosening of Communist Party control. The war itself created the
opportunity for a large "second wave" of emigration, thus feeding
émigré literature. The period from 1946 until the death of Stalin
in 1953 was one of severe repression known as the zhdanovshchina,
or Zhdanovism. During this campaign, attacks on "rootless
cosmopolitans" involved anti-Semitism and the rejection of all foreign
influences on Russian literature. The Soviet practice of samokritika
(public denunciation of one's own work) was frequent. |
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The years from the death of Stalin until
the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 saw several "thaws" separated by
"freezes." Ilya Ehrenburg's novel Ottepel (1954; The
Thaw) provided this term for a period of relative liberalism. In 1956
Khrushchev delivered a famous speech denouncing certain Stalinist crimes. From
that time on, it was possible for Russians to perceive orthodox communists as
people of the past and to regard dissidents not as holdovers from before the
Revolution but as progressives. The harsher years under Leonid Brezhnev
following Khrushchev's fall opened with the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of
two writers, Andrey Sinyavsky (whose pseudonym was Abram Terts) and Yuly Daniel
(pseudonym Nikolay Arzhak), for publishing "anti-Soviet propaganda"
abroad. In the years that followed, well-known writers were arrested or, in one
way or another, expelled from the Soviet Union, thus generating the third wave
of émigré literature. Among those who found themselves in the West
were Brodsky, Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Aksyonov, Georgy Vladimov,
Vladimir Voynovich, and Aleksandr Zinovyev. (see also
"Thaw, The," ) |
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Significant literary works written in
the post-Stalin years include Pasternak's poetic novel set at the time of the
Revolution, Doctor
Zhivago (first published in Italy in 1957), which sees life's meaning
as transcending politics. Sinyavsky's
book-length essay Chto takoye
sotsialistichesky realizm? (1956; On
Socialist Realism), attacking Socialist Realist aesthetic doctrine and
advocating the use of fantasy, and a number of "phantasmagoric works,"
including Lyubimov (1961-62; The
Makepeace Experiment), were published abroad. Charged with being the author
of these works, Sinyavsky was tried and imprisoned in 1966. Some have considered
the transcripts of his trial to be one of his most interesting
"works." After his emigration to France in 1973 he published the novel
Spokoynoy nochi (1984; Goodnight!)
under the name Terts and Osnovy sovetskoy
tsivilizatsii (1989; Soviet
Civilization: A Cultural History) under the name Sinyavsky. |
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A movement called "village
prose" cultivated nostalgic descriptions of rural life. Particularly
noteworthy is Valentin Rasputin's elegiac novel Proshchaniye
s Matyoroy (1976; Farewell to Matyora)
about a village faced with destruction to make room for a hydroelectric plant.
The novel's regret for the past and suspicion of the new dramatically marks the
difference between village prose and the Socialist-Realist collective farm
novel. Yury Trifonov wrote about what he called "the ordeal of ordinary
life" in Dom na naberezhnoy
(1976; The House on the Embankment)
and Starik (1978; The Old Man). Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's plays portray family life;
her collection of stories Bessmertnaya
lyubov (1988; Immortal Love) could
be published only under Mikhail Gorbachev. Works first published in full in the
West and in fundamental ways critical of Soviet ideology and culture include
Andrey Bitov's experimental novel Pushkinsky
dom (1978; Pushkin House),
Venedikt Yerofeyev's alcoholic, hallucinatory novel Moskva-Petushki (1977; Moscow
to the End of the Line), Zinovyev's Ziyayushchiye
vysoty (1976; The Yawning Heights),
and Voynovich's satire Zhizn i
neobychaynyye priklyucheniya soldata Ivana Chonkina (1975; The
Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin). |
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Solzhenitsyn
first earned fame with Odin den Ivana
Denisovicha (1963; One Day in the Life
of Ivan Denisovich), an understated novel about the horrors of a Soviet
camp. As part of his de-Stalinization campaign, Khrushchev personally saw to its
publication. Under Brezhnev, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the U.S.S.R.
Solzhenitsyn's Arkhipelag GULag,
1918-1956: opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya, 3 vol. (1973-75; The
Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation)
is arguably the greatest work of Soviet prose. It narrates the history of the
Soviet camp system with controlled fury and in an ironic mode reminiscent of the
18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon. |
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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 émigré 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
émigré 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. |
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BIBLIOGRAPHY. 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). |
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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. GUDZY (N.K. GUDZII), 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, 1800-1914 (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, 1917-1953 (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. PARTHÉ, Russian
Village Prose: The Radiant Past (1992); and HAROLD B. SEGEL, Twentieth-Century
Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present, updated ed. (1993). |
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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). |
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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). (G.S.M.) |
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