|
|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 4/01
Social Sciences
20th-Century Russian Literature
Konstantin Kedrov
*
The departing century is probably the most tragic and hard-going in the entire Russian history. It has surpassed in cruelty all the previous epochs. Yet Russian literature has not only retained its traditional humanism but surpassed the previous century in its wealth of talent.
1899 saw the publication of Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection, predicting all that would have happened to us. Prison, love, exile–that is the love triangle of the 20th century. Nekhludov and Katyusha, Doctor Zhivago and Lara. Snow-clad Russia, Siberia dotted all over with prison camps.
The 19th century left us Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead, and the 20th century produced Shalamov's Kolyma Stories. Dostoyevsky believed that "beauty would save the world", and Shalamov said: "I'd spit in the face of beauty." The constancy of the Russian types has been fully corroborated: idle dreamers, fanatics, martyrs of ideas. And yet Ivan Denisovich outstrips any of these types, Muzhik Marey by Dostoyevsky as an example. It was Solzhenitsin after all who had penetrated the essence of a common man better than any other writer (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
However Nekhludov's discovery, made after his visit to a prison, is still true. He used to think that on the one side of the prison bars were criminals while all those outside were honest people. His visit to the prison convinced him that it was the other way round. He discovered mostly honest people behind bars whereas real criminals, bandits and thieves, were at large outside.
Andrei Bely's St Petersburg and Moscow are the two first real novels in the 20th century. Many writers imitated Bely: Leonid Leonov, Nabokov, Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Babel, Yuri Olesha, to name a few. St Petersburg is a model novel on whose example works of genius had been written throughout the 20th century. Yet Bely himself had not reaped any fruit from his own work. Both the novels are highly appreciated by philologists and writers but not by readers.
Nabokov's genius gave the world not only the bestselling novel Lolita but also Invitation to a Beheading. Even Kafka's The Trial is not as brilliant and artistic as Nabokov's phantasmagoria. Cincinnatus, the protagonist of The Invitation to a Beheading, an agnostic with a touch of the Count of Monte Cristo, of Hamlet languishing in Elsinore, and of the prisoners in Solzhenitsin's The First Circle, is a real hero of the 20th century. His guilt is in being innocent. He is a spiritual being to the point of being not of this world. He is a free person locked up in a world prison.
The idea that even in solitary confinement you can retain your freedom has always been one of the greatest Russian illusions that has been inherited by such different writers as Nabokov, Solzhenitsin and Vassily Grossman (Life and Fate.)
From the endless multitude of "soil-related" Slavophile novels, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don stands out. Although "the Cossacks with paper swords" (to quote Nabokov) hardly deserved the Nobel Prize, the "Bermudian" love triangle of the main characters–Melekhov, Aksinya and Natalia–will continue to attract readers in the next century as well.
The formerly banned Russian prose of the 1920s and 30s retains its cult role today and is still regarded in the context of Stalinist repressions. This literature, too, has a chance of surviving into the next century not just as a rarity. Suffice it to mention such novels as Yuri Olesha's Blue Pears, Envy, and The Three Fat Men; Boris Pilnyak's Machines and Wolves; Ilya Ehrenburg's Julio Jurenito; Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry; Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, The Homeland of Electricity, Takyr, Sluices of Epiphany; Vsevolod Ivanov's U; Alexei Tolstoy's Blue Cities, Aelita, Hibicus, Love Is a Golden Book, Pinoccio. Even Alexei Tolstoy's ideological trilogy The Road to Calvary has survived the criticism of Solzhenitsin's Red Wheel. Even Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago could not avoid imitating the vivacious count's novel: Lara is another Dasha and Zhivago is another Telegin.
Doctor Zhivago is too much of a cult novel to judge it without prejudice.
However, there is not an ounce of doubt in the vitality of The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf by Ilf and Petrov. The protagonist Ostap Bender, a 20th century Chichikov, will ride into the next century in the same Chichikov's carriage. Some people may contradict me by pointing out that they find there not only laughter mixed with invisible tears, as in Gogol, but laughter mixed with invisible blood. I could not agree with it more: this is certainly laughter mixed with blood, the Russian carnival riot, which is neither meaningless nor ruthless. Perhaps Christ "never laughed", but he lived in a different, warmer climate. In Russia if you don't laugh you may freeze. In Ilf and Petrov's laughter there is that warmth which was later fully assimilated by Bulgakov. His Ivan Bezdomny has become a symbol of the literature of Socialist Realism. Paradoxically, the banned Doctor Zhivago became available to readers in Russia much earlier than the banned Master and Margarita, despite the fact that Doctor Zhivago was written at the end of the 1950s while Master and Margarita in the 1940s.
The Devil roaming Moscow first appears in Zagoskin's novel The Tempters, written much earlier than Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. In Zagoskin the Devil also appears from thin air during the hero's summer stroll in the park. One can argue about the quality of the scenes based on the Gospel themes, Renan, and Ghe's painting "What is Truth?" However "the accursed flat", Voland's performance in the Variety Theatre, the insane Ivan Bezdomny in a madhouse–these will never outdate and will stay in Russian literature forever. Sharikov, from Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog, is just as much a symbolic figure as Voltaire's Candide or Daudet's legendary Tartarin who serves as a key to understanding France. Sharikov is a kindred soul of Smerdyakov (from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov), and the next in line are the real personages such as Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, etc.
To sum up, here are the typical Russian people of the 20th century: the intelligentsia–Telegin and Dasha, Zhivago and Lara, Master and Margarita; the adventurers–Ostap Bender, Sharikov, and the like; and the people of the earth–Grigory Melekhov, Ivan Denisovich, Aksinya.
20th-century Russian literature has remained focussed on the person, his character and his soul. These will never disappear. Even such pompous and tendentious novels as How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky and The Young Guard by Alexander Fadeev have a chance to survive into the next century because Sergei Tyulenin and Ulya Gromova, and even the fanatic Pavel Korchagin are all people of the flesh and blood.
The end of the century has not produced writers who would be equal in talent to Bulgakov, Platonov, Alexei Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsin. Mention should be made of Vladimir Voinovich who has managed to create a Russian variant of Hasek's Schweik–Chonkin. Literary encyclopedias will feature many more authors, apart from the above-mentioned, but what will remain in literature is only compassion, love and smile. One who does not smile, love and feel for people will hardly cross the border into the next century, because there is enough evil and hatred in that age as it is. Despite the efforts of certain writers to depict life only in black colors, Russian literature will always remain kind and merry, and therefore great.
Translated by Natalia Perova
Endnotes:
*: K. Kedrov, a noted poet and critic, literary columnist for the Novye Izvestiya daily. This article was published in Russian in Novye Izvestiya, 13 November 1999. Back.