Read an Excerpt

Russia's Dangerous Texts

Yale University Press

Chapter One

Over the course of a century and a half from Pushkin's time until the late Soviet period, intense interaction between literature and state power became a distinctive feature of Russian civilization. Both the government and those who opposed it believed that the artistic text could be a powerful force for good or ill and for that reason gave it serious and sustained attention. By the 1860s, Dostoevsky feared that despite the empire's watchful eye, Russia was being undermined by a progressive ideology widely supported in the literary world, although an official censor felt that books were "merely thermometers of ideas already present in society. To smash the thermometer does not mean that one changes the weather, but only that one destroys the means of keeping track of its changes." Seven decades later, the ever vigilant Communist government wondered whether reissuing Dostoevsky's own Notes from Underground and Demons would weaken support for Soviet authority. Both regimes feared their writers and both regimes eventually fell, reinforcing the widespread belief in the power of texts to move history.

After Stalin'sdeath in 1953, the official attitude towards nonconforming writers and their works provided both Russians and outside observers with a reliable way of monitoring the general political atmosphere in this secretive state. Our own estimate of Soviet Russia's capacity for civilized behavior rose and fell according to the treatment of Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and other key cultural figures. Since Pushkin's time, the hypertrophied literary-political nexus in Russia has generated powerful myths that have served as articles of faith and as thresholds for the analysis of both literature and politics. To examine these myths and beliefs is not to deny their truth-value or their impact; it is simply to hold them up to the light of a different age, one in which they are, thankfully, no longer matters of life and death.

TEN COMMON BELIEFS ABOUT THE CONNECTION BETWEEN LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN RUSSIA

1. The Russians read more than any other people

From the 1930s onward, the Soviet people were proclaimed to be "the most avid readers in the world" (samyi chitaiushchii v mire narod). This statement appeared on posters and billboards, reminding citizens to buy newspapers, magazines, and books. The superlative samyi is linked to an active participle, chitaiushchii (reading), and both words lend an aggressive character to narod (the people). Virtually everything in Russia had to be bigger, better, and more vigorous than anywhere else, as the USSR competed with the West on all levels, including in literacy rates and the amount of reading done by its citizens. At the same time, the government reminded itself that if in fact there were many millions of enthusiastic readers, then what they had access to counted.

While the tsarist and Soviet governments constantly monitored the reading practices of the intelligentsia, they were also worried about text-inspired ideas that might reach a larger number of people, some of whom were capable of translating ill-understood plans for change into action. Despite these concerns, during the 1960s and 1970s the print runs of novels, story collections, and literary journals were frequently very high, and as a result there was a substantial supply of affordable reading material, albeit of varying quality. The widespread popularity of the printed word in the age of television was something in which the Soviet Union could take pride, and it was an undeniable legacy of the universal literacy campaign carried out in the 1920s.

The devotion of the Soviet intelligentsia to texts continued traditions established more than a century earlier. Russians came to be known as a people who read broadly and deeply, who could memorize vast quantities of poetry and were able to recognize from "half a hint" a politically daring subtext. This long chain of subtexts formed a liberating "hidden transcript" for a captive people. In artistic literature Russians encountered the heroic figures and absorbed the national values that had helped the country to survive. Among educated people, belief in the centrality of writing, reading, and analyzing literature showed the cumulative effect of legends of impassioned discussion groups (kruzhki) in the nineteenth century, devotion to writers who had dared to address the nation's burning questions both before and after the Revolution, and memories of an intense, often costly attachment to literature that endured after 1917.

The encouragement of writing and reading as ways of fulfilling one's obligations to the state occurred at key moments in Russian history: the conversion in 988, the early eighteenth-century transformation by Peter I of a faith-centered kingdom (tsarstvo) into a more secular empire (imperiia), the nurturing of a better-educated elite by Catherine II, the disciplined reinforcement of the tri-adic values of Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Nationality after 1825, the reform agenda of the 1860s, the formation of the world's first socialist state, and in the wake of the Nazi invasion. A few years after Stalin's death, Khrushchev was asking writers to support de-Stalinization, and in the mid-1980s Mikhail Gorbachev hoped that the literary world would use glasnost to support perestroika. Along with a tradition of writers who answered the state's summons (or somehow worked around it), a parallel antigovernment tradition of writing, reading, and discussion arose among individuals and groups unhappy with the status quo, who found in texts a place to retreat and plan, however impractically, for change. Taking texts seriously was a national habit and a civic duty, whatever kind of Russia one envisioned.

Before 1985, a cadre of determined Soviet readers had engaged in the risky and exhausting practice of copying, distributing, and reading works in samizdat. Suddenly, these materials became available to a wider audience, along with volumes of light reading from entrepreneurs in the newly legal world of private publishing. "Employees worked multiple shifts.... An edition of a hundred thousand sold out in two weeks.... Libraries were rifled, reprints and reeditions were made of everything that had ever been in demand, no matter what or where." When publishers ran out of Russian works for the mass reader and reprints of previously translated foreign books, there was a push to quickly translate more works from abroad, especially from America and England. By the 1990s, this post-totalitarian reading frenzy seemed to have subsided. The nostalgia that surfaced during this decade included a sense that Russia's great attachment to reading had vanished, perhaps forever. Critics lamented that "we were always a literature-centered society, and now we're not." Literary newspapers still asked people involved in the cultural sphere what they had read most recently and which journals they found most interesting, but looking at the results, their correspondents complained that "once upon a time in Rus there was a WRITER WHO READ (CHITAIUSHCHII PISATEL')" but that time had passed. The "reading-est" nation, including its formerly well-read authors, had other pressing concerns, other interesting opportunities, and other forms of entertainment.

2. Literature is where the formation of politics, prophecy, and national identity took place in Russia

Aside from literature, there was nowhere to go. -the narrator of Notes from Underground Literature carried out a lofty mission, and a critic, when speaking about literature, was part of that mission. -Alexander Ageev

The Russian intelligentsia, modern Russian literature, and modern Russian national identity took shape simultaneously during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and everything was in place for Alexander Pushkin's genius to bring these processes to maturity a few decades later. The evolution of the intelligentsia, secular literature and a more supple written language between the 1780s and 1820s coincided with the waning tradition of the sanctified ruler. While the masses maintained their belief in the power of a "true tsar" to intercede for them, their primary attention devolved to the saints of old and to the righteous ones among them, and their "cognitive map" included real and legendary holy places on Russian soil, as well as Constantinople and Jerusalem. The Europeanized intelligentsia, whose philosophical, and, subsequently, ideological orientation ranged from ultraconservative and nationalist to radical, increasingly put its faith in the creative writers' and later the critics' ability to speak for the nation. A growing number of journals and newspapers gave voice to the more educated members of the population; the government paid great attention to these publications since their potential reach went far beyond elite circles.

Among the literary intelligentsia, whose ranks swelled in the 1840s with people not of gentry status (raznochintsy), the artistic text became the basis of their religion and their politics. The rise of nationalism had brought with it hopes and expectations about the ways culture might strengthen national identity and pride. At the same time, the Russian empire had grown large and ambitious, and its ruling apparatus was impatient with anything that opposed state power, including the voices of a newly confident culture. While accepting the responsibility of being witnesses and advocates for the people, writers felt the weight of the center's goals and restrictions. The poet Gavriil Derzhavin "spoke truth to power," but he did it with respect and wit; Alexander Pushkin took the negotiation of the uncertain territory that lay between power (vlast') and the people (narod) a stage further. In their own self-images, Russia's writers ranged from witty courtiers to aesthetic nihilists. The author acted not as an openly political person, but as someone with the right and the duty to speak for more than himself in his art.

Readers began to matter, and their approbation or condemnation, their buying or not buying works, came to be important during Pushkin's lifetime. One goal in the publishing world was to encourage those accustomed to reading French literature to take a greater interest in Russian journals, but Pushkin, although labeled a literary aristocrat, planted the seeds for a larger and less elite audience to come to belles-lettres. He helped to establish literature as the focal point for the expression of Russian national identity, and one aspect of his monumental legacy is that more than any other author, Russians have felt that to read Pushkin's verse was to read the nation.

Politics and Prophecy

In his Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti illustrates how French, German, and British ideas "acquire symbolic momentum" as they head eastward and into the Russian nineteenth-century novel, where they become a "genuine threat to all that is most deeply Russian." As this once-powerful tradition waned in the early 1990s, there were spirited discussions of how politically aware literature had evolved. In 1855, Nikolai Chernyshevsky had spoken of writers acknowledging "the direct duty" of expressing the "entire intellectual life" of the nation. Dmitry Pisarev (1861) saw "the whole sum of ideas about society ... concentrated in fiction and the criticism of fiction," which made writers out of would-be politicians, and moved artists towards journalism. In the 1880s, the Vicomte de Vogué found in Russia poetry and fiction a shelter for important ideas, and almost a century later George Steiner found it still to be true that "all of Russian literature is essentially political." Texts were written, examined for publication, and read in a tightly controlled political context.

Artistic texts and review articles were often "the only public forum for ... important political and social issues." However much literature was subject to censorship in the nineteenth century, it was still less suspect than writing that directly addressed the nation's problems. The beginnings of a serious critical press in the 1830s coincided with Romanticism's elevation of the poet and the growth of national consciousness; critics informed the writers of responsibilities to their fellow Russians, and reacted negatively when these sacred obligations were not met. But when writers went too far in addressing contemporary problems they ran into roadblocks from the state. A balance had to be found between two fundamentally different sets of political requirements if a writer hoped to be published without being attacked soon afterward.

The public airing of political questions had nowhere else to go, so it flowed into the only available vessels, literary and critical texts. In pre-Petrine Russia, the church had been "the main, if not the only source of political thought." Now a sacred status and spiritual power were transferred to modern secular literature. Writers were seen as political figures and modern-day prophets who addressed the nation and the ages. Alexander Radishchev's narrator used a prophetic voice in A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), warning that the accumulated anger of the serfs would eventually manifest itself in a bloody attack on their masters. The longer it took to alleviate the injustices of serfdom, the more serious would be the resulting vengeance. "This is no dream; my vision penetrates the dense curtain of time that veils the future from our eyes. I look through the space of a whole century." In The Captain's Daughter (1836) Pushkin's hero, recalling the after-effects of the Pugachev rebellion on his family's estate, sounds a similar note in predicting that any Russian revolt will be "senseless and merciless." The perceived martyrdom of Radishchev, Ryleev, Pushkin, and many other writer-saints lent their political and prophetic statements an even greater authority.

Dostoevsky's "Pushkin" speech both captured and improved upon this paradigm. According to Dostoevsky, Pushkin could see "the national spirit of our future, already concealed in our present and expressed prophetically," and he was able to explain the divine purpose behind the Petrine revolution, which was to create a Russia that could serve as a universalizing force, capable of resolving all of Europe's contradictions. "For what is the strength and spirit of Russianness if not its ultimate aspirations toward universality and the universal brotherhood of peoples? Having become completely a national poet, Pushkin at once, as soon as he came in contact with the force of the People ... senses the great future mission of this force. Here he is a visionary; here he is a prophet." Yevgeny Zamyatin's essays and his novel We warned readers about the entropy of human thought, whose unmistakable signs he saw all around him at the beginning of the 1920s. Literature must be "a sailor sent aloft" who reports below on what tomorrow will bring. A writer may be judged a heretic in his own time, and punished as such, but his "harmful literature" will prove to be right "150 years later." Radishchev and his work were quickly removed from circulation, and the section of Pushkin's Captain's Daughter devoted to unrest on the estate was first published only in 1880. Zamyatin's essays slipped through in the early 1920s, and then disappeared from view for sixty years. Eventually, though, these and many other voices were heard.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Russia's Dangerous Texts by Kathleen F. Parthé Copyright © 2004 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---