The body of written works produced in the Russian
language, beginning with the Christianization of
Kievan Rus in the late 10th century.
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.
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.
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.
Old Russian literature (10th–17th centuries)
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.
The Kievan period
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hilarion
of Kiev
Enthronement of Hilarion of Kiev from
Radziwiłł Chronicle
flourished 11th century
the first native metropolitan of
Kiev, who reigned from 1051 to 1054, and
the first known Kievan Rus writer and
orator.
A priest, Hilarion became the second
archbishop of Kiev, the chief city in
Rus at that time. Although Kievan
bishops had all previously been
appointed by the patriarch of
Constantinople, Hilarion was chosen by
Prince Yaroslav I the Wise and an
assembly of Rus bishops. Scholars are
divided in interpreting his election,
but it is likely that an agreement on
the matter had been reached between the
Rus and Greek hierarchies.
Hilarion’s importance to the Rus
Church derives from the sentiments he
expressed c. 1050 in his classically
structured panegyric of Saint Vladimir
(grand prince of Kiev 980–1015), the
first Christian ruler of Kievan Rus and
the institutor of Orthodoxy as the state
religion. Entitled “Sermon on Law and
Grace,” the encomium not only
rhetorically extolled the monarch for
implanting the true religion in his
country but also eulogized the Slavic
people. Recalling the historical events
by which Saint Vladimir uprooted the
pre-Christian Slavic cults so that
Christian worship and monasticism could
flourish, Hilarion fused local
patriotism with the universality of
Christian belief in the inexorable
unfolding of a divine plan of salvation.
He showed a wide familiarity with Greek
patristic and apologetic literature and
styled his work in the form of Byzantine
imperial panegyrics. His appreciation of
Greek Orthodoxy is manifested by his
concept of the Rus Church as the
Slavonic version of Byzantine Christian
culture.
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Nestor
born c. 1056, Kiev [now in Ukraine]
died Oct. 27, 1113, Kiev
a monk in Kievan Rus of the Monastery
of the Caves in Kiev (from about 1074),
author of several works of hagiography
and an important historical chronicle.
Nestor wrote the lives of Saints
Boris and Gleb, the sons of St. Vladimir
of Rus, who were murdered in 1015, and
the life of St. Theodosius, abbot of the
Monastery of the Caves (d. 1074). A
tradition that was first recorded in the
13th century ascribes to him the
authorship of the Povest vremennykh let
(“Tale of Bygone Years”; The Russian
Primary Chronicle), the most important
historical work of early medieval Rus.
Modern scholarship, however, regards the
chronicle as a composite work, written
and revised in several stages, and
inclines to the view that the basic
(though not final) version of the
document was compiled by Nestor about
1113. The chronicle, extant in several
medieval manuscripts, the earliest dated
1377, was compiled in Kiev. It relates
in detail the earliest history of the
eastern Slavs down to the second decade
of the 12th century. Emphasis is laid on
the foundation of the Kievan
state—ascribed to the advent of
Varangians (a tribe of Norsemen) in the
second half of the 9th century, the
subsequent wars and treaties between Rus
and Byzantium, the conversion of Rus to
Christianity about 988, the cultural
achievements of the reign of Yaroslav
the Wise of Kiev (1019–54), and the wars
against the Turkic nomads of the steppe.
Written partly in Old Church
Slavonic, partly in the Old Russian
language based on the spoken vernacular,
The Russian Primary Chronicle includes
material from translated Byzantine
chronicles, west and south Slavonic
literary sources, official documents,
and oral sagas. This borrowed material
is woven with considerable skill into
the historical narrative, which is
enlivened by vivid description, humour,
and a sense of the dramatic.
The Russian Primary Chronicle
also called Chronicle of Nestor or Kiev
Chronicle, Russian Povest vremennykh let
(“Tale of Bygone Years”)
medieval Kievan Rus historical work that
gives a detailed account of the early
history of the eastern Slavs to the
second decade of the 12th century. The
chronicle, compiled in Kiev about 1113,
was based on materials taken from
Byzantine chronicles, west and south
Slavonic literary sources, official
documents, and oral sagas; the earliest
extant manuscript of it is dated 1377.
While the authorship was traditionally
ascribed to the monk Nestor, modern
scholarship considers the chronicle a
composite work.
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"The Song of Igor’s Campaign"
Translated by
Vladimir Nabokov
also translated Lay of Igor’s
Campaign, Russian Slovo o polku Igoreve
masterpiece of Old Russian
literature, an account of the
unsuccessful campaign in 1185 of Prince
Igor of Novgorod-Seversky against the
Polovtsy (Kipchak, or Cumans). As in the
great French epic The Song of Roland,
Igor’s heroic pride draws him into a
combat in which the odds are too great
for him. Though defeated, Igor escapes
his captors and returns to his people.
The tale was written anonymously
(1185–87) and preserved in a single
manuscript, which was discovered in 1795
by A.I. Musin-Pushkin, published in
1800, and lost during Napoleon’s
invasion of Russia in 1812.
The tale is not easily classified;
neither lyric nor epic, it is a blend of
both, with a suggestion of the political
pamphlet as well. It is the product of a
writer familiar with oral poetry,
chronicles, and historical narratives.
It is distinguished principally by its
modernity. The author’s worldview is
secular; Christianity is incidental to
events.
The Song alone of all Old Russian
literature has become a national
classic, one that is familiar to every
educated Russian. An English translation
of it by Vladimir Nabokov was published
in 1960.
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From the 14th to the 17th century
Moscow’s
ascendancy
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.
The Second South Slavic Influence
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).
Possessors and Nonpossessors
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.
Works reflecting Muscovite power
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.
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.
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.
The 17th century
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”).
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.
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.
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.
Avvakum Petrov
The Burning of Avvakum (1897), by
Grigoriy Myasoyedov
born 1620/1621, Grigorovo, Russia
died April 14, 1682, Pustozersk
archpriest, leader of the Old
Believers, conservative clergy who
brought on one of the most serious
crises in the history of the Russian
church by separating from the Russian
Orthodox church to support the “old
rite,” consisting of many purely local
Russian developments. He is also
considered to be a pioneer of modern
Russian literature.
Avvakum Petrov (Russian: Аввакум
Петров) (November 20, 1620 or 1621 –
April 14, 1682) was a Russian protopope
of Kazan Cathedral on Red Square who led
the opposition to Patriarch Nikon's
reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church.
His autobiography and letters to the
tsar, Boyarynya Morozova and other Old
Believers are considered masterpieces of
17th-century Russian literature.
Starting in 1652 Nikon, as Patriarch of
the Russian Church, initiated a wide
range of reforms in Russian liturgy and
theology. These reforms were mostly
intended to bring the Russian Church
into line with the other Orthodox
Churches of Eastern Europe and Middle
East. Avvakum and others strongly
rejected these changes. They saw them as
a corruption of the Russian Church,
which they considered to be the "true"
Church of God. The other Churches were
more closely related to Constantinople
in their liturgies and Avvakum argued
that Constantinople fell to the Turks
because of these heretical beliefs and
practices.
For his
opposition to the reforms, Avvakum was
repeatedly imprisoned. For the last
fourteen years of his life he was
imprisoned in a pit or dugout (a sunken,
log-framed hut) at Pustozyorsk above the
Arctic Circle before finally being
burned at the stake[1] The spot where he
was burned is now marked by an ornate
wooden cross. Groups rejecting the
changes continued, however, and they
came to be referred to as Old Believers.
Avvakum's colourful autobiography
memorably recounts hardships of his
imprisonment and exile to the Russian
Far East, the story of his friendship
and rupture with the Tsar Alexis, his
practice of exorcising demons and
devils, and his boundless admiration for
nature and other works of God.
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Imperial literature
The Petrine reforms
The Westernization of Russia
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.
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.
The response of writers and critics
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.
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.
