what is Russian literature?
Well, most people believe that Russian literature is essentially great 19th-century novels, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, that sort of thing. The truth is more complicated, even if the oldest stock of Old East Slavic texts are to be associated with the Kievan Rus' and thus with present-day Ukraine. The political centres of the north, such as the Grand Duchy of Moscow emerged later on, in the 13th century, and initially had little cultural splendour; little more than anonymous texts such as The Tale of Igor's Campaign may be associated with them. The Tsardom of Russia is a 16th-century invention, usually considered the work of Ivan IV the Terrible. The Russian Empire is an 18th-century state, founded by Peter I in 1721. It is only then that Russian literature took the shape of a complete system of expression under a pronounced western influence, as far as literary genres are considered (I acknowledge that the Russian ideas are very distinct, and I often see them in blatant contradiction with the West European ones). The great Russian poetry starts with Romanticism that takes on a peculiar hue under the pen of Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. The novelistic genre starts its northern flourishing with Nikolai Gogol, then Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, without forgetting the minor genre of the short story illustrated by Anton Chekhov.
The beginning of the 20th century is often called the "Silver Age" of Russian poetry. It's the time of Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Yesenin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. The development of Russian modernism is perturbed by the Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent age of ideologically predetermined aesthetics, such as social realism in the 1930s. The writers who did not comply with it, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, were marginalised and silenced; others, such as Vladimir Nabokov, continued writing in exile. Some, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dared to challenge the regime by writing about the Gulag camps. Curiously, the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century coincided not with a surge of new literature, but rather with a period of silence, with few distinguishable voices. The present-day Russian literature is epitomized, in my eyes, by a specific literature of exhaustion, the popular novels of Boris Akunin.
The beginning of the 20th century is often called the "Silver Age" of Russian poetry. It's the time of Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Yesenin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. The development of Russian modernism is perturbed by the Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent age of ideologically predetermined aesthetics, such as social realism in the 1930s. The writers who did not comply with it, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, were marginalised and silenced; others, such as Vladimir Nabokov, continued writing in exile. Some, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dared to challenge the regime by writing about the Gulag camps. Curiously, the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century coincided not with a surge of new literature, but rather with a period of silence, with few distinguishable voices. The present-day Russian literature is epitomized, in my eyes, by a specific literature of exhaustion, the popular novels of Boris Akunin.
I have readEwa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonialism (2000)
Nikolai Berdyaev, Русская идея (Основные проблемы русской мысли XIX века и начала XX века) | The Russian Idea (1946) Фёдор Достоевский, Идіотъ (1868-1869) Лев Толстой, Война и мир (1869) - in progress... |
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I have written... nothing ...
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reading Russia as a palimpsest |
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Is it a privilege to know Russian? This idea came to me for the first time while reading George Steiner's Errata. The comparativist's autobiography contains a lament concerning "doors that remained unopened", one of them the world of great Russian novelists read in the original. Myself, I learned Russian under duress, at school, in total for some nine years, which is a lot for a language that is not so distant from my mother tongue; but it was enforced, and we saw it as the language of the enemy. This is why my Russian is hardly at the level of those nine years of formal education. Actually, it is rather laborious for me to read Cyrillic, laborious enough to make me abandon any book after a couple of pages. Nonetheless, I enjoy audiobooks with Russian literature, specially if it is some light reading, like a little novella of Chekhov. Be that as it may, I have some Russian books in my Polyglot Library, especially Dostoevsky. I'm sure to have Anna Karenina, and others. I remember to have searched for them on my last trip to Kiev, not quite sure what I actually found and bought; between one of those travels of mine and another, I missed enough time to unpack and read all my books.
During my school years I might have read some verses of Pushkin. If I gathered my wits, I might even be able to quote a verse from memory. But my perspective on Russian authors needed time to turn from resentfully hostile to postcolonial. I see through them all those underlying layers of landscapes, peoples, languages, identities of Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia. No wonder that, rather than one Russian literature, many literatures of Russia exist for me. Not only just Myshkin, Dostoevsky's Idiot. It used to be the other way around. Europe and the western world used to see Russia, the imperial, metropolitan Russia, and nothing but her. I would rather see the peoples of Russia, and nothing but them. The Yakuts, the Buryats, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Circassians. Dostoevsky, Chekhov hardly form a background, a context for all of them. Certainly, there is a Bulgakov, and other metropolitan writers. I do keep them, under a thick cover of dust, in my Multilingual Library. But my real interest resides very far from Moscow, in the wilderness. Kraków -Neuville-sur-Oise - Kraków again... |
