In Moscow Russia
In Russia
the written word has power, and relations between writers and the state have
often been antagonistic. Almost every significant Russian author of the last two centuries has battled censorship, oppression
and- as often as not- his fellow scribes. Russian writers
have thus earned an intimidating reputation as philosophers, martyrs and
madmen, responsible for an epic literature that inspires global fascination. In
the West, awe at the perpetual turbulence, strife and disaster of the country’s
history has led to a belief that Russian literature must contain uniquely
profound insights into the terrible depths of the human experience. But how much of that is myth, and how much is
truth?
In fact, by European
standards Russian literature is young – it was not until the 19th century that the country acquired
its “National Poet”, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837). Pushkin is a crucial figure for understanding
Russian literature, even if he is little read in the West. Descended from an
ancient aristocratic family but with the blood of an Abyssinian slave running through
his veins, he flirted with political radicalism during his youth. Indeed, the
only thing that prevented him from joining the doomed “Decembrist” uprising against
Tsar Nicholas I was that he had been exiled to his mother’s estate for possible
atheism. He struggled with debts, fretted about his reputation and died at age
37, in a duel fought over his wife’s honour.
Thus
Pushkin seems to be the archetypal Russian author- anti-establishment; passionate
to the point of tragedy; creating works of genius in the face of oppression. Perhaps
however that is too simple an
explanation. Pushkin’s patron was the Tsar himself, and Andrei Zorin, Professor of Russian
at New College, Oxford argues that censorship was “very mild” in Russia until
the Decembrist uprising, after which Pushkin lost interest in revolutionary politics:
“Pushkin was close to Radicalism in his early
period and in exile. His Radicalism subsided later, but not his creativity -
his most important works were all written after the end of his radical period.”
Meanwhile although much
of his later work contained implicit criticisms of the system and was initially
suppressed by hyper-sensitive censors, it was not “inspired” by censorship-
Pushkin always wrote for publication and covered an astonishingly broad range
of themes.
To truly
understand Russian literature, we must also consider his dark twin, Nikolai
Gogol. In a story by Gogol you might encounter a demon with a single giant eye so
huge it needs assistants to help it blink; a nose might escape from the face of
its owner and become a prominent member of society, or a ghost might run around
Saint Petersburg
Gogol was a
strange character- celibate, stooped, frail and with a huge hooked nose, he was
originally hailed by liberal critics as a ruthless satirist exposing the horrors of Tsarist tyranny; however his personal
preoccupations soon overpowered his work and reputation. Possessed by a messianic, religious
fervour he became a fervid supporter of the Tsar and started writing an epic
trilogy which he hoped would “save” Russia
Pushkin was
aristocratic, classical, and “enlightened”; his verse is universally regarded as approaching
perfection, and in his writing the world can be analysed rationally. Gogol represents
the other side of the Russian tradition, spinning bizarre, grotesque narratives,
as if the nation can only be grasped through distortion, absurdity, lunacy. The
approaches of the two writers would have an immense influence on everything to
follow.
***
In the mid
19th century the novel became the major form of Russian literature.
It was the perfect vehicle for discussing
history, philosophy, and
the battle of ideas that raged in the country. Opposition to the Tsar had grown
more extreme; liberal humanists were replaced by anarchists, nihilists and
terrorists who embraced murder as a political weapon.
Emerging against
this background of increasing extremism was the man often cited as the greatest
novelist of all time- the Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910). Like Pushkin, Tolstoy was an
aristocrat, but he was also a man of action who had spent his youth fighting in
Russia ’s then-as-now
volatile Caucasus region. His experience of
combat informed the book regarded as his masterpiece, War and Peace, which he wrote between 1862 and 1869.
Ostensibly
about the Napoleonic wars, Tolstoy’s ambitions for the
book were massive. He admitted himself that it was not really a novel, nor
history but rather a hybrid encompassing philosophical discussions, historical
analysis, psychology and much else besides. Tolstoy, says Professor Zorin,:
“…strongly
believed in the strong moral and political role of literature and the
writer…Both novels were meant as a direct input in the ideological battles of
the age and the contemporaries could easily recognise the message.”
But as much
as Tolstoy could write about the vast sweep of history, so too he could write
about the intimate inner life of a lonely woman: indeed he viewed Anna Karenina, a tragic story about doomed love (which
also contains long discussions on serfdom and profound meditations on death,
naturally) as his greatest work. Moving from epic battles to private emotional turmoil,
Tolstoy displayed the breadth of scope and piercing psychological insight for
which Russian authors are held in awe.
Tolstoy was
feted as genius in his own lifetime, but he was ambivalent about literature. He
disliked other writers, hated the writing life and periodically abandoned it as
not “useful” for dealing with Russia
Tolstoy’s
great rival Feodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), led an extraordinarily dramatic life even by Russian standards. His father was murdered while he
was a student, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and sentenced to
death, only to be dispatched to Siberia for ten years; he had mystical religious
experiences, suffered from epilepsy and was a compulsive gambler who usually lived
on the verge of ruin.
Thus, like
Tolstoy the soldier-prophet, Dostoevsky’s life experience was rich and extreme.
But in his case conflict and struggle did
produce great work, for he went into exile as a minor writer and emerged a
great one. Dostoevsky had gained an almost supernatural degree of insight into
the depths of the human soul, and in his novella Notes from Underground he offered a portrait of human nature as
dark, irrational, self-destructive and perverse- in striking contrast to his optimistic,
rationalist peers who dreamt of building a new world on the ashes of Tsarism. Dostoevsky
wrote for money, and so filled his books with melodrama, violence and murder,
but in Crime and Punishment he took
that base matter and explored profound spiritual questions regarding sin and
redemption. Meanwhile he threw himself into the ideological battles of the age.
In The Devils, he launched an attack on Russia ’s radicals that was so vicious it was banned
in the USSR
If Tolstoy
was classical and rational a la
Pushkin, then Dostoevsky had plunged headfirst into the grotesque and
abominable, uncovering the fantastical, irrational nature of reality, resulting
in a vision much darker than Gogol’s. The two author’s lives and work also
exemplify the violent extremes of experience with which Russian authors are
perhaps uniquely familiar. Had life been more stable in Russia, then no doubt a
nation so vast and populous would still have produced great authors, but they
would have written about quieter things- like Jane Austen in England, or
Gustave Flaubert in France.
Russians have been “lucky” to have fantastic source material to work from; their
Western European peers really had nothing comparable. And so War and Peace is still cited as the
greatest novel of all time, while Dostoevsky’s probing of the lower depths had
a huge impact not only on the 20th century novel, but also on
psychology and our very understanding of the self. And, most importantly-
neither author ever forgot to include a good plot!
***
Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky defined the expectations of millions as to what a Russian author
should be- serious, philosophical and bearded. And yet at the start of the 20th
century, many Russian writers were disengaged from the ideological battles of
the day. Tolstoy himself complained that nothing happened in Anton Chekhov’s “boring”
plays, while many poets embraced Symbolism, Decadence and Spiritualism, even if
it was the politically radical Russian avant-garde that made the biggest impact
internationally.
The October
Revolution of 1917 had a catastrophic effect on all forms of Russian art, and
quickly turned violent, oppressive and totalitarian. The poet Nikolai Gumilev was
executed in 1921 and, taking the hint, many authors fled abroad, among them Vladimir
Nabokov and Yevgeny Zamyatin author of the science fiction dystopia We (a major influence on both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World). Inside Russia
In 1932 all
independent literary organizations
were abolished and replaced with the Union of Soviet Writers. According to Joseph Stalin,
authors were “engineers of human souls” and their books had
to reflect and promote “socialist reality” which was, needless to say,
absolutely wonderful. Anyone who dissented from the doctrine of Socialist
Realism either stopped publishing, or went to the Gulag. Natasha Perova, editor
of Glas, the journal of contemporary
Russian literature in English translation points out:
“Censorship
and dissent split the writing profession under the Soviets, and
influenced author’s writing one way or another – you were either pro- or
anti-Soviet. If you practiced “art for art’s sake” you were anti-Soviet anyway.”
So too Socialist Realism led to a perception
in the West that the only good writers in the country were dissidents, working
underground, circulating critiques of the system in samizdat, or smuggling it out of the country for publication abroad.
The most celebrated dissident author was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) who
spent eight years in prison camps and a further three years in exile for
criticizing Stalin in a letter sent from the front during World War II.
Like Dostoevsky
before him, Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in prison opened his eyes to a world of
extremes, and his short novel about that experience One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a literary sensation at
home and abroad. However the Soviet
authorities blocked publication of his subsequent works and when The Gulag Archipelago, his three volume
expose of Stalin’s crimes appeared in the West in 1973, he was declared persona
non grata in the country and exiled; meanwhile as Solzhenitsyn sold millions of
copies of his books, so Western publishers started to churn out other forbidden
works by a seemingly endless series of oppressed literary genii.
Nowadays
most of those other dissidents are forgotten, suggesting that the interest in
them was primarily political and not literary. Even Solzhenitsyn’s reputation
has waxed and waned. In the West he was accused of anti-Semitism and extreme
nationalism, and the Red Wheel cycle-
which he considered his major work- languishes half-published. In Russia Russia
“He will
never be forgiven for his "Gulag Archipelago" - not
because it is not true, maybe it is true, but it was
written for foreign export, and this book helped destroy
the Soviet Union – which did Russia
Perhaps
some of the despised works of Socialist Realism were not so bad after all. Danilkin
argues that certain authors had the artistry to produce great literature even
while serving an oppressive police state: “Leonid. Leonov, who wrote Russian Forest Russia
“It's hard
to know just what Platonov thought he was writing, but he was certainly, almost
without exception, writing with the aim of publication… There were many
occasions when he got contracts for work that, in the end remained unpublished,
but there are only two or three occasions when he clearly wrote something
"for the drawer" - as Russians say…. I think he was, above all, a
philosophical writer. He returns again and again to the same huge and
impossible questions, but he does this in a unique way. ”
***
In the mid 1980s
Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed censorship in the USSR Russia USSR Russia
“The authorities have finally realized how
harmless intellectuals really are and have left them alone. Now they can talk
whatever they like, let off steam, and the authorities could not care less
about their dissent so long as it is published in small print-runs. Writers
yearned for freedom but when they were granted freedom they found that nobody
cared much about their brave ideas.”
Once again Russian authors were at the centre of the historical
hurricane, but the results this time were chaos. During the 1990s Russian
authors revelled in themes that had previously been forbidden: grotesque,
absurd, nihilistic, the long-suppressed Gogolian tradition returned in extreme
form. The most famous exponent of this trend was Vladimir Sorokin, whose
scandalous, pornographic works, according to Perova “…are Bosch-like visions of
the world, or rather x-ray pictures which show the ugly truth (but not the
whole truth).”
Sorokin got
so accustomed to shocking the bourgeoisie and being rewarded for it that he was
extremely surprised when protestors threw copies of his novel Blue Lard inside a giant toilet erected
outside the Bolshoi Theatre in 2002. Ultimately however his sales benefited, he
won more awards and the publicity helped sell his books to foreign publishers.
Around the same time Edward Limonov, another scandalous writer and opposition
figure was imprisoned for two years. This was not for his books however but
rather his political activities: he was accused of trying to buy weapons to
invade Kazakhstan Russia
So after the end of
two centuries of censorship and oppression, where does Russian literature stand
now? Where is it going? It’s difficult to say. The fashion for fantastical,
grotesque narratives has passed, and while major authors of the 1990s such as
Viktor Pelevin and Boris Akunin remain popular with audiences and critics,
according to Natasha Perova, all styles exist simultaneously in Russia today,
with no single trend dominating. Lev Danilkin however sees a return to an
almost classical realism:
“Literature as a whole has moved away
from postmodernism, the concept of all-out game, from experiments with
language, the techniques of narrative - and returned to "life as it is
lived."
Meanwhile a
new generation is coming of age, and for them the USSR
One thing
is for sure however: as Natasha Perova convincingly argues, there is no need to
mourn the end of censorship and oppression:
“Many people believe that art is stimulated by
oppression. I don’t think so. A little hunger may stimulate an artist but a
prolonged hunger will simply kill him. Thousands of talented writers perished in the Gulags, the best of Russian thinkers were exterminated with too much
oppression, reducing Russia
Originally published in Open Skies magazine, May 2012