Russian Literature by Catriona Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

Tatiana, an imaginative young woman from a family of small landowners in the Russian provinces, falls in love with Evgeny, a sophisticated, blasé St Petersburger with Byronic aspirations, but finds her feelings reciprocated only when she is no longer able or willing to return them, has alternately provoked and enraptured readers by its simultaneous defiance and assertion of convention, its combination of deep emotion and ironic non-committal. Evgeny and Tatiana, especially the latter, ‘Tidin were precursors of many later characters in Russian novels, gs of
    from Turgenev’s Liza in Nest of Gentlefolk to Tolstoy’s Anna me
    Karenina and Nabokov’s Ada. The book also has at least two will
    other niches in literary history. As a text set in a time before go
    o
    that in which it was actually written, it is, in a sense, the first ut o
    great Russian historical novel. It was also a pioneering example ver all
    of the serial novel, published chapter by chapter over seven great
    years (1825–32) and appearing in complete form only in 1833.
    Ru
    This piecemeal method of publication was later to be used for s’
    many other famous works, among them War and Peace and Crime and Punishment (though the instalments of these novels came out in journals, rather than in book form). In the course of serial publication, writers’ views of characters sometimes changed; they, and their readers, tended to see this positively, feeling that it gave their fictional creations the inconsistency and inscrutability of real people. It was rare for writers to make major changes to individual episodes before the book version came out: as Pushkin put it in the first chapter of Evgeny Onegin , ‘There are many contradictions/But I don’t want to correct them’.
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    exclusive rights to a text or collection of texts was rewarded by the sharing of profits between himself and the writer. In 1834, Pushkin entered into such an agreement with A. F. Smirdin for a book of whose commercial success both had high hopes, the historical novel The Captain’s Daughter . And in 1836 he started a literary journal, The Contemporary , which offered him, as well as the chance of commercial returns, a forum for his writings and direct control over the manner in which these appeared.
    One thing that Pushkin took authorship to mean, then, was the careful regulation by individuals of the manner in which their utterances came before the public. He also saw writing as an occupation which, though not exactly gentlemanly, at any rate helped raise the income necessary to a gentleman’s existence. But writing was also understood by him as cultural leadership. That Russia needed a literature equal in standing to that of France, Germany, or England, and that there existed no ture native literary tradition worth the name, were defining assumptions rae
    Lit
    for Pushkin and his generation of Russian writers. In their view, the Russian literary landscape resembled the ‘empty waves’, gloomy ssian
    Ru
    forests, and boggy lichen-covered shores of the unimproved North that Pushkin evoked in the prologue to The Bronze Horseman (1833).
    Monotony, rather than chaos, was the precedent and stimulus to creation. ‘We have neither a literature nor [good] books’, Pushkin grandly asserted in 1824. Though he allowed merit to various predecessors, including Derzhavin and Ivan Krylov (best-known for his lively and vigorous fables), it was clear none of these was a ‘natural genius’ ( Naturgenie ) in the Romantic sense, or for that matter a national genius. In an essay written a year later, Pushkin explicitly denied the right of the brilliant scientist and pioneering poet Mikhailo Lomonosov to be recognized in this capacity, presenting him instead as a mere craftsman: ‘For him poetic composition was a pastime, or, as more often, an exercise undertaken out of a stern sense of duty [ . . . ]
    In our first poet we would look in vain for flaming bursts of feeling or imagination.’
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