The eighteenth century witnessed a remarkable ascendancy of Russia as a political power. During the reign of Catherine ii some 200,000 square miles were added to the country’s territory, and the population in creased from 19 million to 36 million. By the end of that century Russia was “a full-fl edged and, at times, leading member of the quarrelsome community of European states”
(Florinsky 363). Despite these rapid developments, “there was no corresponding transformation in the fi eld of cultural en deavor” in the Russian Empire (Ibid.). The cultural infrastructure of the era was meager and uninspiring: a few pretentious institutions with important-sounding names, such as the Academy of Science, the Academy of Arts, and the University of Moscow (it had a small number of students and bore little resemblance to a higher education institution); a few literary journals were run by a handful of professional historians and men of letters. Music, painting, and architecture were dominated by Western European infl uences, and the exponents of these arts were predominantly foreigners (Ibid.).
All of this began to change dramatically during the tense years of the Napoleonic Wars, which, in Russia as elsewhere, were notable for a surge of cultural creativity and artistic innovation. Indeed, the early decades of the nineteenth century (roughly 1810-30) have become known as the Golden Age of Russian culture. In the salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow, “poets, musicians, and intellectuals — most of whom were also offi cers in the imperial army — debated questions of literary form, translated the latest English and German romantic verse, and refl ected on the question of Russian history, all with unprecedented intensity” (Goldfrank et al. 26). Numerous journals emerged in the two capitals, each with its own personality and literary direction. One particular feature of this Russian development, especially after the Decembrist uprising in 1825 (which sought at a minimum to establish a constitutional monarchy), was that the authorities regarded any manifestation of civil society “with deep suspicion”
(Hosking 291). Philanthropy, educational initiatives, the formation of public
interest groups and voluntary associations were seen as “the progenitors of subversion” (Ibid.). The government looked askance at literature too, especially since the literary community already possessed a network of printing presses and bookshops independent of the regime, and a good many enthusiastic customers.
“Unlike music or painting, literature dealt in words and hence could comment directly on political or social matters; but at the same time its use of words was ambiguous and multi-layered” (Ibid.). Fiction posed tricky problems for the censorship apparatus: it was diffi cult for censors (who were themselves members of the educated public), “without appearing foolish before the educated public, to assign a single unambiguous meaning to a text and then in good conscience declare it unacceptable” (Ibid.).
The innovations and ferment of the Golden Age were concentrated primarily in three fi elds — language, literature, and religion. The 1810s and 1820s were, above all, the Golden Age of poetry, from which the modern Russian language emerged. At the center of the poets’ circles, both in his years at the Lyceum and afterward, stood Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837). Pushkin is often considered a starting point in Russian literature. Born in Moscow, he was of African as well as Russian ancestry. Pushkin’s early liberal verse not only gave him notoriety, but also earned him considerable infl uence and great popularity in educated society. In Russia in the nineteenth century literature came to play the role of what can loosely be termed an “alternative government.” Given the lack of political democracy, “literature became the main forum for discussion of oppositional or even slightly critical ideas” (Andrew 9).
Tsar Alexander I (1801-25) exiled Pushkin for writing revolutionary epigrams that had come to his attention in the same year when Pushkin’s fi rst major publication, Ruslan and Lyudmila, met with resounding success (1820). Pushkin spent the remaining part of Alexander’s reign moving constantly between the Caucasus, Bessarabia, and southern Ukraine, yet eventually coming to reside as an exile at his parents’ estate, Mikhailovskoe, in 1824. Only Alexander’s death and the accession of a new Emperor brought Pushkin back to Moscow and St.
Petersburg in 1826.
The creator of modern literary Russian and the fi rst truly national writer, Pushkin set the standard for nineteenth-century literature. He belonged to the era of Romanticism: an early admirer of Byron, Pushkin then outgrew his Romantic sensibilities and moved to Realism in several of his later works. As a modern writer with deep classical instincts, Pushkin had a sense of responsibility to tradition and to society: Russia, he thought, needed “Shakespearean” drama, and the result was his play Boris Godunov. He also produced “the best novel Walter Scott never wrote,” The Captain’s Daughter (Milner-Gulland 122). The importance of his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, lay in its poetic creation of characters who were to become prototypes for the novels of Lermontov, Goncharov, and Turgenev. According to
Boris Gasparov it was Pushkin’s own literary evolution that eventually connected Russian literature to European Romanticism: Russian authors mastered the formal accomplishments of the newest literary schools at the turn of the nineteenth century quickly and brilliantly (the elegy, the historical ballad, the friendly epistle, and the Byronic poetic monologue), but the romantic “poetry of life,” the romantic struggle of thought with language, romantic refl exivity came signifi cantly later, in the 1830s (Gasparov 545). Pushkin did not go as far as most romantics in his break with literary convention in overcoming fi xed forms: “The reader himself is left to decide what lies concealed behind this faultless exterior. Peering into the smooth surface of Pushkin’s verse, one begins to take note of more and more layers of implied meanings and interpretations, entirely new directions of his hints and allusions, dizzying intersections and collisions of disparate perspectives,”
reminiscent of a kaleidoscope (Ibid. 550). In a certain sense the complexity of Nabokov’s texts is modeled after that of Pushkin’s works. To use Gasparov’s analogy, they do not “play hide-and-go-seek” with the reader “but instead really do refrain from showing him much, without the slightest concern for whether or not the ‘right’ reader, or any other kind of reader, will succeed in seeing the invisible. On the textual surface the reader does not detect the slightest trace that his understanding might differ from the quite obvious meaning offered by the surface with such aphoristic clarity and elegance” (551).
[Ill. 2-1] Nikolai Ge. “Pushkin in the village Mikhailovskoe”
(1875, Th e Art Museum of Kharkiv collection)
The last decade of Pushkin’s life was tinged with tragedy: some of his friends were involved in the Decembrist conspiracy and were exiled to Siberia. This left Pushkin feeling extremely isolated as he would, most likely, have been involved himself in the revolt had he not been forced to live at Mikhailovskoe. Although Eugene Onegin was completed in 1831, the new generation of poets and writers was distant from Pushkin and saw him as a venerable relic of an earlier age.
Finally, his marriage, in 1831, to the beautiful and frivolous Natalia Goncharova, soon became a source of unhappiness. In 1837 Pushkin challenged his wife’s admirer, Baron Georges D’Anthes (a French royalist in the Russian service) to a duel and was fatally wounded.
The cult of Pushkin, originating in the late nineteenth century, has lasted through the Soviet period and beyond: his poetry has been memorized by every educated Russian and continues to constitute a touchstone for literature, ideas, and political views. As the acclaimed essayist and critic Andrei Sinyavsky writes, in his light-hearted manner, “all themes, like women, were accessible to [Pushkin], and running through them he marked out roads for Russian letters for centuries to come. No matter where we poke our noses — Pushkin is everywhere, which can be explained not so much by the infl uence of his genius on other talents, as by the fact that there isn’t a motif in the world he didn’t touch upon. Pushkin simply managed to write about everything for everyone. As a result he became the Russian Virgil, and in this role of teacher-guide he accompanies us in no matter which direction of history, cul ture, or life we go” (Tertz 76).
If Pushkin’s niche is that of the classic poet, then the great age of the Russian novel begins with Nikolai Gogol (1809–52). Pushkin welcomed Gogol’s early stories, with their Ukrainian folk background. His next cycle, the so-called Petersburg tales, revealed an alarming underbelly beneath a surface of comedy and pathos. In a few years on either side of his thirtieth birthday, mostly spent abroad, Gogol produced his masterpieces: the play The Inspector General, “The Overcoat,” and the fi rst part of Dead Souls. Looked at in detail “these works are uproariously funny,” while from a broader perspective they are terrifying
“in their haunted soullessness” (Milner-Gulland 122). Gogol’s “unruly genius deserted him, his projected [three-part] ‘Divine Comedy,’ Dead Souls, remained a fragment and he died in pitiful dejection” (Ibid.).
Russia and the West
Nabokov once stated that the reader “does not seek information about Russia in a Russian novel, for he knows that the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekhov is not the average Russia of history but a specifi c world imagined and created by individual genius” (Lectures on Russian literature 11). Nineteenth-century Russian literature is now part and parcel of the European canon. Nearly all Russian writers, as
Benedict Sumner writes, were deeply versed in French, German, and English literature — mostly in the originals, sometimes in translation; the range and quality of translations were wide and high. Similarly, Russian social thought and philosophy developed from European thinkers and were subject to infl uence from the same trends that were dominant in the West. Even Communism was born out of the West, out of Marx and Engels, and the Bolshevik revolution was international in its philosophy and appeal (Sumner 303). On the other hand, despite the fact that Russian literature belongs to “the great European heritage, there was in it, and still more in Russian social and religious thought, a persistent and often violent insistence that Russia was not and would not be Europe . . . Russia was regarded by many as a separate civilization, with its own basic foundations either in Orthodoxy or in the unique spirit of her people” (Ibid.
308). Peter the Great himself was reputed to have said: “Europe is necessary to us for a few decades, and then we can turn our backs on her.”
Another important factor that shaped the Russian identity was its initial landlocked condition, which fueled expansionism in the form of a constant struggle to gain access to the oceans. Following the ideas of Russia’s celebrated historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii, the philosopher Nicholas Berdiaev, in search of a metaphysical answer to the meaning of domestic history, recognized the formative signifi cance of Russian geography. Self-preservation, he observed,
“forced the Russians to push off invaders and to entrench themselves fi rmly in their habitat, but since it afforded them precious little natural protection they were constantly pressed to expand their borders to keep their enemies at bay” (Hunczak 20). Thus, the Russian identity can be seen in no small part as a product of the struggle for control of a vast territory: Nabokov’s response to this spatial paradigm in The Gift to some extent defi nes the meaning of Fyodor’s father’s explorations.
Even as Russia struggled with its national identity, caught spatially and philosophically between Europe and Asia, the country produced a level of fi ction that was equal to authors in the West. “That successful works of Russian literature would now be routinely translated into the languages of the West showed that Russia had arrived culturally, though it would take some time until the West realized that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–77) was a ‘European event,’ as Dostoevsky put it, and that the Russian novel of that period was one of the high points in all literature” (Terras 294).
The intellectual history of that period is marked by the ongoing debate between the so-called Slavophiles and Westernizers. Slavophiles believed that the nation needed to return to the purity and simplicity of early Russian society. Russia’s ills, they believed, were caused by foreign infl uence and by the government’s importation of Western institutions. The Slavophiles “had little patience with bureaucratic stupidity and autocracy,” but they sought relief in Slavic equality and Christian brotherhood (Wren 391).
To the Westernizers, on the other hand, “Western Europe stood for enlightenment and freedom,” while Russia embodied obscurantism and slavery (Ibid.). Russia suffered, they argued, “not from too much Western infl uence but from entirely too little. The West to them meant democratic government, economic progress, intellectual freedom, and moral dignity” (Ibid.). The radical Westernizers, although few in number, included such major fi gures as Alexander Herzen (1812–70) and Michael Bakunin (1814–76).