The Mythopoetic “Vectors” of Russian LiteraturePART I Russian Literature: Background, Foreground, Creative Cognition Chapter 1 The Mythopoetic “Vectors” of 27. Russian Literature1 Any national literature is to some significant extent a mirror held up to its people’s collective countenance: its myths, aspirations, national triumphs and traumas, current ideologies, historical understanding, lin guistic tra- ditions. But it is also more than that — more than a reflection in the glass of what has come before and what is now, even as one glances into it, passing from view. It is, in a real sense, generative of new meaning, and thus capable of shaping that countenance in the future. For the society that takes its literary products seriously, the text of a novel or poem can be a kind of genetic code2 for predicting, not concrete outcomes or actual progeny, but something no less pregnant with future action: the forms of a culture’s historical imagination. The variations seem limitless, and yet how is it we are able to determine any given work of literature is clearly identifiable as Russian? Why could Flaubert’s Emma Bovary in some sense not be imagin- ed by the great realist who created Anna Karenina? How is Dostoevsky’s 1 Originally appeared 2 See Chapter 4 in Part 1 as part 1 of the essay/chapter of the present volume with its “Russian Literature,” in Cambridge discussion of how genes and Companion to Modern Russian “memes” work together to create Culture, ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky an individual’s and a culture’s (Cambridge: Cambridge University views of itself. Press, 1998), 161–204. Russian Literature: Background, Foreground,Pushkin Creative the Poet, Cognition Pushkin the Thinker Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others Marmeladov both alike, but more importantly, unlike Dickens’s Micawber? What, in short, can be shown in a mirror that speaks back? Few societies have been more dependent on their literature for overall meaning (social, psychological, political, historical, religious, erotic) than the Russia of the modern period (1800 to the present). For a variety of reasons we will touch upon in the pages to follow, Russians have turned repeatedly to their literature as the principal source of their national identity and cultural mythology. But this relationship to the written word is a two-edged sword. It gives Russian literature both a high seri ousness that can be genuinely inspiring and at times an intrusive didacti cism that can be annoying to a more pluralistic (or “secular”) Western audience. Regardless of one’s orientation as reader, however, Russian culture is unthinkable without this literature — and not only the great novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky out of which Westerners have for decades constructed their own versions of “Russianness.” The purpose of the present study is to acquaint the non-specialist reader with the basic cultural contours necessary to read and understand this literature, including its formative influences and salient themes. Along the way, and where appropriate, I will also discuss how certain important Russian writers and cultural figures creatively 28. engage aspects of contemporary Western thought. The goal here cannot PART I be historical thoroughness or authoritative canon-formation, but rather a reasonably accurate readerly orientation — that is, an attitude toward the subject that takes its cultural values seriously and tries to understand its various verbal traces in their proper context. Formative influences, salient themes In recent times, culture has been compared to a kind of “supraconscious ness” hovering over the physical globe in a circumambient cloud. It manipulates on a massive scale the same communicative codes that every human being operates in his/her individual world. Building on discover ies in cell biology, organic chemistry, and brain science, the Russian theo rist and literary scholar Yury Lotman has devised the term “semiosphere” to capture this notion of human communication writ large as cultural ecosystem: the place where intracranial brain function (i.e. the relation ship between right and left hemispheres), meaning production, and the shapes and symbols we project onto (or extract from) the external world coalesce The Mythopoetic “Vectors” of Russian Literature into our collective organism’s psychic drive for growth and dis covery. That this site is a metaphor, a product of language and therefore invisible like the atmosphere over the earth, does not make it any less “real” to those constructing meaning out of their interactions with others. In this regard, literature has traditionally been seen as a rich source of communication (i.e. new information) because, potentially, many different codes and “languages” (in the sense of stylistic registers, dialects, idiosyncratic speech patterns, etc.) can coexist and be artfully juxtaposed within its boundaries. Modern Russian literature, as I have already intimated, has played a dynamic, even crucial role in the larger “ecosystem” of Russian culture. To appreciate this role, let us propose another metaphor — an interior photograph, or what neurosurgeons call a CAT scan, of the Russian liter ary “brain.” This figure of speech is, of course, inexact, in that it registers likeness more than difference (as all metaphors do); and it cannot do justice to subtle changes over time or to the historical specificity of certain phenomena. Still, as a means of isolating global psychic tendencies that become, as it were, imprinted on the larger social organism’s memory, it is not without heuristic value. Exceptions to these tendencies exist, to be sure, some of them very significant, but the fact that these exceptions take the tendencies into account (i.e. they thwart them or undermine them but 29. they do not ignore them) means that this psychic mapping is not invisible. Chapter 1 Why these tendencies and not others have become salient in the Russian context is buried deep in the past, and is as much a question of cultural mythology (Russians’ sacred legends about themselves and about their destiny as a people) as of history per se. The list could of course be expanded, but the following seem a good place to start: (1) Religious sensibility (dukhovnost’) (2) Maximalism (3) Writer as secular saint (4) Heterodox literary forms (5) Belatedness (6) Literature as social conscience (7) Problem of personality (lichnost’) (8) Space-time oppositions (East/West, old/new) (9) Eros-cum-national myth (1) Religious sensibility. Perhaps the first and arguably the most impor tant formative influence/psychological trait to come to mind is Russian culture’s Russian Literature: Background, Foreground,Pushkin Creative the Poet, Cognition Pushkin the Thinker Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others pervasive spirituality (dukhovnost’) and, correlatively, the written word’s traditionally sacred status. Russia (Kievan Rus’) was Christianized under Prince Vladimir in the year 988, and from roughly that point until well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire notion of literature as a secular form of pleasure or edification was largely moot. There were saints’ lives (vitae), sermons, chronicles, and even epics (e.g. The Igor Tale), but what is interesting from a modern vantage is that the category of “fiction” (i.e. a self-contained world wholly created through words that is understood by its reader to be artificial, hence “untrue”) came late to Russian literature. Indeed, it can be argued that much of the attraction of the great works of Russian literature is due to th is tendency of reader reception/perception: Russian “fictions” about the world are more “real” than the real-life context into which they are read and absorbed. Russian writers have long operated under the convic tion that they are writing, not one more book, but versions, each in its way sacred, of The Book (Bible). Thus, when some modern Russian writers have taken a militantly materialist, anti-spiritualist approach to reality, the fervidness and single- mindedness of their commitment to new belief systems often suggest a replay of various medieval models of behavior, replete with the latter’s 30. thematics of conversion. Likewise, Leo Tolstoy’s anti-clericalism and his PART I sharp criticism of Orthodox dogma and ritual are, significantly, not in the name of Voltairean enlightenment and urbane secularism but in that of a new religion, which came to be known as “Tolstoyanism.” One of the attributes of this religious sensibility that continues in the shadow life of some of the most influential Russian poems, novels, and dramas is the transposing of medieval forms of sacred writing (especially hagiography) to later secular works. Examples include Ivan Turgenev’s “Living Relics,” Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Sergei Stepnyak -Kravchinsky’s Andrei Kozhukhov, Maksim Gorky’s Mother. What the vita requires is that the personal become sanctified, monumentalized, sub sumed within the impersonality of holiness, which means — if one con- siders how much the modern novel in the European and Anglo-American “bourgeois” traditions depends on individual, concrete examples of an open, developing biography and history (e.g. the Bildungsroman) — that in many instances the Russian novel will be acting against prevailing trends in Western practice. Saintly behavior can be actively submissive (the “meek” model of the martyred brothers Boris and Gleb) or defiantly The Mythopoetic “Vectors” of Russian