NOTES
1. Richard Ware, "Some Aspects of the Russian Reading Public in the 1880s," Renaissance and Modern Studies, 24 (1980), 27; quoted from S. F. Librovich, Na knizhnom postu (Petrograd-Moscow, 1916), p. 99.
2. Ware, "Some Aspects," p. 28; quoted from E. N. Lebedeva, "??? prezhde chitali knigi - stranichki vospominanii," Vsemirnyi vestnik, 10 (1908), 7.
3. Nicholas Bachtin, Lectures and Essays (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1963), p. 28.
4. John Garrard (éd.), The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 3.
5. A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1954-60), vol. vu, pp. 329-30.
6. See Robert Belknap (éd.), Russianness: Studies of a Nation's Identity (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990).
7. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford University Press, 1990).
8. Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. no.
9. David Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1989).
10. See Rufus Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd edn (Stanford University Press, 1975) on the impact of French Socialism on the apocalyptic trend in Russian thought.
11. J. D. Elsworth, Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 88-116.
12. John E. Bowlt (éd.), Russian Art of the Avant Garde, Theory and Criticism, rev. edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).
13. Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature, Avant-garde Visual Experiments 1900-1930 (Princeton University Press, 1984). On Belyi's novels, see pp. 25-44.
14. Chevengur appeared for the first time in full in Russian in 1988; We appeared for the first time in Russia in 1988.
15. See Richard Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Noveclass="underline" Turgenev to Pasternak (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 77-122, "Revolution and instinct."
16. English translations of substantial extracts of Furmanov's Chapaev, Serafim-ovich's The Iron Flood, Gladkov's Cement, Fadeev's The Rout, Ostrovsky's
How the Steel was Tempered and Sholokhov's The Fate of a Man, all classics of the Socialist Realist novel, can conveniently be found in Nicholas Luker (trans, and éd.), From Furmanov to Sholokhov, an Anthology of the Classics of Socialist Realism (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988).
17. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Noveclass="underline" History as Ritual (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 34; quoted from "Rech' sekretaria CK VKP(b) A. A. Zhdanova," Pervyi s"ezd pisatelei. stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Ogiz, 1934), p. 4.
18. Clark, The Soviet Novel, pp. 37, 39.
19. Comparisons might also be made with the Victorian Evangelical novel, on which see, for example, Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses, Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: John Murray, 1977).
20. It may be noted that the only chapter with a title in Anna Karenina (part v, chapter 20) is called "Death" and his third and last novel is entitled Resurrection.
21. Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women's Writing 1820-1992 (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 443.
I
THE SETTING
2
ROBERT A. MAGUIRE
The city
Russia is unique among European states for having had two capitals during much of its modern life: St. Petersburg and Moscow. The first was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, and became the administrative, political, and cultural capital. In these respects, it displaced Moscow, whose history went back at least four hundred years. But Russians continued to regard the older city as the spiritual center of the country; even the tsars, who presided in Petersburg, went to Moscow to be crowned; and the Bolsheviks reconfirmed its traditional importance by moving the government back there in 1924. Each city has come to represent very different and often conflicting values, as we shall see, and each has functioned as a pole around which the vexed question of Russia's character and destiny has revolved.
Since the early nineteenth century, St. Petersburg and Moscow have figured prominently in the Russian novel. But many of the issues that attach to them are far older. In Kievan Rus, the first East Slavic state, cities were not only centers of culture, but enclosures against domestic and foreign enemies. It is instructive, and perhaps psychologically significant, that in Slavic languages, the word for "city," as in Russian gorod and Church Slavonic grad, has no etymological connection with the Latin civis and its derivations in English and the Romance languages, but instead goes back to the Indo-European root designating an enclosed place. Counterparts are found in such words as English "garden," Latin hortus, and Irish gort ("cultivated field"). Russians were hardly unique in feeling that the world at large was hostile and must be shut out. What is unusual is the persistence of this feeling throughout the nation's history. The sources of potential danger were early identified in ways which have also persisted. Under the year 862 (ad) in the Primary Chronicle (twelfth century), we read that the Eastern Slavs, unable to govern themselves, turned west to the Varangians, or Vikings, with the following request: "Our land is great and bounteous, but there is no order in it. Come to reign and rule over us."1 The result was Kievan Rus. A century later, according to the same source,
Great Prince Vladimir wished to import a major religion to replace the native paganism, and for various reasons settled on Eastern Christianity, then centered in Byzantium. Even if the Chronicle's accounts are legendary, they register the early presence in the national mind of two foreign elements, traditionally called "West" and "East," terms which the Russians have used for centuries in pondering their national identity. To be sure, both elements are viewed favorably in the Chronicle. But never having quite melded, they have often been seen as threats to the integrity of native enclosures - political, cultural, psychological - and have inspired ambiguous feelings. "West" may stand for good order and high civilization, but also for tyranny and soullessness. "East" may betoken beauty and a truth rooted in the senses, but also mindless cruelty and destructiveness. Enclosure, East, and West form a cluster of motifs that, with many variations, have helped shape a literary version of the city which is peculiar to Russians.
In the first great work of Russian literature, The Song of Igor's Campaign (1186), "East" is a negative concept, embodied in the vast steppes that are inhabited by the Kumans, a people of Turko-Mongolian origin with no settled way of life. Without consulting the senior prince, Igor sets forth from his town to join battle with them far to the east, is defeated and captured, but eventually escapes and makes his way back. For the author of the poem, the town is a secure, nurturing bastion, and Igor acts unwisely and rashly in leaving it to seek personal glory. A century later, the threat from the East became catastrophic reality when the Mongols, or Tatars, swept westward and destroyed the old Russian state. Towns remained intact; many developed a lively local literature. But it was not until the fourteenth century that one of them, Moscow, began to expand until it achieved predominance.