Russian Literature in the Imperial Period
In his 1880 Oration on Pushkin at the Moscow meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Letters, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky called the 12-line “Children of the Russian village” of Pushkin’s 1831 poem “I have grown up in the darkness…” — the negligee style of the early 19th century, the psalmodic style of the psaltyr, the grecheskii style of the high ode — the “second Rus’”: “Pushkin came and explained to us all — the great truth of Russian socialism.” It was, in Dostoevsky’s reading, the moment when the tsifirnyi and the brat’ya of the 18th-century school lost to the Rossiya of the 19th century. The canon of “Russian” literature — the Pushkin-Gogol-Turgenev-Dostoevsky-Tolstoy-Chekhov list — is a 19th-century construction. It was made by Chernyshevsky, by the Sovremennik circle, by the zemstvo generation, and by the Soviet school curricula. By 1914 the canon was the world canon, and Russia had produced two Nobel laureates in literature (Sully Prudhomme’s prize of 1901; Ivan Bunin’s prize of 1933 was post-imperial). (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002; Bethea, Realizing Metaphors, 1998; Cornwell, The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, 2001.)
1700–1800: the Petrine and the Elizabethan schools
The first Rossiiskaya grammatika was the Grammatika of the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, published in Moscow in 1755. The first Russian literary theory was the Trikhravye (Three Styles) of Mikhail Lomonosov, written in 1739, which divided the Russian literary language into the visokii (high), posredstvennyi (middle), and nizkii (low) — a Russian version of the genus sublime and the genus humile of classical rhetoric. Lomonosov’s ode “Evening Meditation on God’s Grandeur on the Occasion of the Great Northern Lights” (1743) and the 1747 ode “Letter on the Use of the Church Slavonic Language” were the first Russian odes in the posredstvennyi style; the 1751 ode on the Empress’s accession day, “The Lord is My Shepherd,” was the first visokii. Gavrila Derzhavin’s “God” (Bog, 1784) and “The Taking of Ismail” (Vzyatie Izmaila, 1795) gave the Russian ode its 19th-century moral weight. Denis Fonvizin’s Brigadir (1769) and Nedorosl’ (1782) are the founding Russian comedies; the first Russian tragedy, Alexander Sumarokov’s Khorev (1747), was written in 1747 and performed at the court theatre the same year (Khodnev, Istoriya russkoi literatury XVIII veka, 1983; Gukovsky, Ocherki po istorii russkoi literatury XVIII veka, 1936; Cornwell, 2001).
1800–1840: the age of Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) wrote the 1820 Ruslan i Lyudmila; the 1821 Kavkazsky Plennik; the 1824 Bakhchisaraysky Fontan; the 1825 Tsigani; the 1831 Eugene Onegin; the 1826 Tsyganskaya; the 1827 Poltava; the 1833 Dubrovsky; the 1834 Kapitanskaya Dochka; the 1833–1835 Pikovaya Dama; the 1836 Medny Vsadnik; the 1830 Malenkie Tragedii; the 1825 Boris Godunov; the 1837 Dubrovsky. The Russkii Vestnik of Mikhail Katkov (1856–1906) and the Otechestvennye Zapiski of Andrey Kraevsky (1839–1867) were the two literary-political journals that defined the period. The 1836 Sovremennik of Pushkin, which folded in 1866, was the model for the thick Russian literary journal of the 1860s. The 1836 Pochin (the first “Literary Gazette” of Delvig) and the 1840 Otechestvennye Zapiski under Belinsky defined the 1840s. Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) published Viy in 1835, Revizor in 1836, Shinel’ in 1842, and the first volume of Myortvye Dushi in 1842. Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) published Smert Poeta in 1837, Maskarad in 1836, Geroy Nashego Vremeni in 1840, and Mtsyri in 1839 (Bethea, 1998; Figes, 2002; Cornwell, 2001).
1840–1880: the age of the great novel
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) published Zapiski Okhotnika in 1852, Rudin in 1856, Dvoryanskoe Gnezdo in 1859, Nakanune in 1860, Ottsy i Deti in 1862, Dym in 1867, and Nov’ in 1877. The novel form was the medium of the Sovremennik (the journal of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov) and the Otechestvennye Zapiski (the journal of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky 1873–1874, Nekrasov 1868–1877). Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) published Bednye Lyudi in 1846, Dvoynik in 1846, Zapiski iz Myortvogo Doma in 1860–1862, Unizhennye i Oskorblennye in 1861, Zapiski iz Podpolya in 1864, Prestuplenie i Nakazanie in 1866, Idiot in 1868–1869, Besy in 1871–1872, Podrostok in 1875, and Bratya Karamazovy in 1879–1880. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) published Detstvo in 1852, Sevastopolskie Rasskazy in 1855, Voina i Mir in 1865–1869, Anna Karenina in 1873–1877, Ispoved’ in 1882, V chem moya vera in 1884, and Voskresenie in 1899. The 1855 Otechestvennye Zapiski of Nekrasov and Saltykov-Shchedrin was the thick journal of the 1860s; the 1860 Sovremennik of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov was the journal of the pisatel’ naroda (the writer-of-the-people) (Figes, 2002; Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, 1995; Christian, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 2002).
1880–1917: the late imperial
The 1880s and 1890s were the period of the narodicheskoe and the marksistskoe journals. The Russkoe Bogatstvo (1880–1918) of Mikhailovsky, the Nasha Literatura (1889–1905) of the tolstovtsy, and the Nasha Zhizn’ (1904–1906) of Gorky were the principal non-legal outlets. Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) published Sakhalin in 1893–1895; the Dama s Sobachkoy in 1899; Tri Sestry in 1901; Vishnevy Sad in 1904. Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) published Makar Chudra in 1892, Starukha Izergil’ in 1895, Delo Artamonovykh in 1925. The Symbolist generation — Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Andrei Bely (1880–1934), Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945) — published in the Vesy (1904–1909) of Briusov and the Zolotoye Runo (1906–1909) of the Moscow mir iskusstva. The Acmeist generation — Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), Nikolai Gumilev (1886–1921), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936) — published in the Giperborey (1912–1913) and the Apollon (1909–1917). The 1909–1917 Vladimir Solovyov tradition of the Vladimir Solovyov society was the philosophical matrix of the late imperial period (Figes, 2002; Bethea, 1998; Cornwell, 2001).
The thematic core
The canon of imperial Russian literature has a small number of recurring themes. The lichnyi chelovek (the lichnyi — the sober individual — the “superfluous man” of Pushkin’s Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin) is the central figure: the educated, idle, aimless son of the dvorianstvo, Rurikid by birth, griaznyi by the moral weight of the bureaucracy of the Rossiiskaya imperiya. The obshchina (the peasant commune of Turgenev’s Zapiski Okhotnika, of Tolstoy’s Polikushka, of Nekrasov’s Komu na Rusi Zhit’ Khorosho) is the second central figure. The pravoslavie (the pravoslavie — the Russian Orthodox religious revival of the 1860s, of the Optina Pustyn’ starets tradition, of Dostoevsky’s Starets Zosima) is the third. The intelligentsiya and the narod (the educated class and the people, in the Zapiski iz Podpolya and the Zapiski iz Myortvogo Doma of Dostoevsky, in the Chto Delat’ of Chernyshevsky) is the fourth. The Russia and the Zapad (the Slavophile-Westernizer debate, the Moskovskie Vedomosti of Katkov and the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti of Kraevsky) is the fifth. The pattern of meshchanstvo — the late-19th century merchant and bureaucratic classes — of Chekhov’s Tri Sestry and Vishnevy Sad is the sixth (Figes, 2002; Bethea, 1998; Khodnev, 1983).