the cambridge introduction to russian literature

This page intentionally left blank The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked – and then conquered – the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian narratives (saints’ lives, folk tales, epic and rogue narratives), the book moves through literary history chronologically and thematically, juxtaposing literary texts from each major period. Detailed attention is given to canonical writers including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn, as well as to some current bestsellers from the post-communist period. Fully accessible to students and readers with no knowledge of Russian, the volume includes a glossary and pronunciation guide of key Russian terms and a list of useful secondary works. The book will be of great interest to students of Russian as well as of comparative literature. Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Cambridge Introductions to Literature This series is designed to introduce students to key topics and authors. Accessible and lively, these introductions will also appeal to readers who want to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy. r Ideal for students, teachers, and lecturers r Concise, yet packed with essential information r Key suggestions for further reading Titles in this series: H. Porter Abbott The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (second edition) Christopher Balme The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies Eric Bulson The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce Warren Chernaik The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays John Xiros Cooper The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot Patrick Corcoran The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone Literature Gregg Crane The Cambridge Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century American Novel Kirk Curnutt The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald Janette Dillon The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre Janette Dillon The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tragedies Caryl Emerson The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature Penny Gay The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies Jane Goldman The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf KevinJ.Hayes The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville Nancy Henry The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot Leslie Hill The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida David Holdeman The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats Adrian Hunter The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English C. L. Innes The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures M. Jimmie Killingsworth The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman Pericles Lewis The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism Ronan McDonald The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett Wendy Martin The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson Peter Messent The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain David Morley The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing Ira Nadel The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound Leland S. Person The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne John Peters The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad Justin Quinn The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry Sarah Robbins The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe Martin Scofield The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story Emma Smith The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare Peter Thomson The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900 Janet Todd The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen Theresa M. Towner The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner Jennifer Wallace The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy 0 0 5 0 0 m ile s 5 0 0 1 0 0 0 km 2 5 0 SIBERIA Moscow Novgorod Pskov Kiev U R A L S B l a c k S e a Ob V o l g a D o n D n i e p e r C A U C A S U S CHECHNYA K A Z A K H S T A N St Petersburg Riga Smolensk Teheran Yalta Sevastopol CRIMEA Irkutsk Omsk L. Baikal Semipalatinsk Ob Tobolsk L e n a L e n a P e c h o r a Kazan O ka Magnitogorsk L.Svetloyar Tula L. Chud L. Ladoga L. Onega Boldino Yasnaya Polyana Borodino Nizhnii Novgorod Mikhailovskoe BASHKIR Ufa U Z B E K I S T A N T A J I K I S T A N Vladivostok Magadan Y e n e s e i ARCTIC OCEAN P A C I F I C O C E A N Sea of Japan G u l f o f F i n l a n d C a s p i a n S e a Writers’ estates Cities Sakhalin Island Oryol Murom Arzrum Belamorcanal Map of Imperial Russia The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature CARYL EMERSON CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK First published in print format ISBN-13 978-0-521-84469-7 ISBN-13 978-0-521-60652-3 ISBN-13 978-0-511-41376-6 © Caryl Emerson 2008 2008 Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521844697 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written p ermission of Cambrid g e University Press. Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not g uarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or a pp ro p riate. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org paperback eBook (EBL) hardback For Nicholas, wonderworker [...]... reasons of space, the ´ Russian emigr´ community is excluded from this book (together with the e aristocratic and very Russian genius of Vladimir Nabokov, who has stimulated a Russo-American industry of his own) The most significant compression in the present volume, however, occurs in the realm of Russian poetry, which can only be a secondary presence in the story The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry... Peter the Great (d 1725) The remaining chapters then unfold chronologically Several factors led to this compromise decision First, Russian literary “types” do not cluster especially well in the abstract They are historically conditioned and best grasped within those conditions What is more, the practice of 11 12 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature clustering heroes is usually unfair to the. .. self-defensive 20 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature narrative shields and comic narrators For the Symbolist and Modernist period (Chapter 7), our theme is the city and its devils – which yields up the greatest Petersburg novel, the greatest Moscow novel, and a dystopian city-state that distils the myths of both these great Russian capital cities For the Stalinist era (Chapter 8), we consider the doctrine... Dostoevsky, Russian literature is a common denominator for the world, yet only Russians are privileged to understand it Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some leading Russian sociologists still see in the Russian national character a “negative identity” driven by self-deprecating exceptionalism, ennui, sentimentality, constant expectation of 10 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian. .. in all its fullness And finally: unlike the progressive, falsifiable sciences or (at the other extreme) the capriciously marketed world of fashion, great literature does not date It accumulates contexts rather than outgrows them, for literature is designed to speak to the current needs of the person who activates it Who are these “activators”? Although today’s Russian school curriculum might no longer... prototypes created by Nikolai Gogol a decade earlier – and to underscore the debt, he obliged his own heroes to read, react to, and measure themselves against fictive characters created by Gogol and Pushkin Maksim Gorky (real 14 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature name Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, 1868–1936), who knew both Tolstoy and Chekhov personally and revered them both, lived to become... us, their readers, and their friends These are all valid categories and inquiries But they apply as readily to philosophy, sociology, politics, cultural anthropology, psychology, and simply getting through the day as they do to verbal art This profligate applicability of stories to life was one reason why the Russian Formalists, attempting to professionalize literary study in the 1920s, took up the. .. urged them to do? The story of the two-hundred-year rise of Russian literature became its own bestselling novel – although, some now suggest, largely among the elite groups invested in the story This hazard is inherent in discussions of any canon, but of the Russian more than most Among the virtues of Jeffrey Brooks’s path-breaking study When Russia Learned to Read (1985) is its conclusion that the majority... Juliet) and Spanish speakers the tribulations of Don Quixote Merely mentioning the name is enough to bring up the story, for these are common denominators, a sort of cultural shorthand Although these plots are themselves often of international (or pan-European) origin, the Russian canon is unusually rich in common denominators that peaked first in other national literatures and then were adapted, with fierce... that our habitual perceptions would be 16 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature jolted out of their drowsy rut and we would wake up to life anew As he put it in 1916: after viewing nature – or people, or ideas – through the lens of art, the sun seems sunnier and the stone stonier”; without art, our automatized life would “eat away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, at our . to the American Short Story Emma Smith The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare Peter Thomson The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900 Janet Todd The Cambridge Introduction to. Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot Leslie Hill The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida David Holdeman The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats Adrian Hunter The Cambridge Introduction to the. Fitzgerald Janette Dillon The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre Janette Dillon The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tragedies Caryl Emerson The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature Penny