I
Russian Literary Attitudes from
Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn
As Alice remarked in Through the Looking-Glass:
'What curious attitudes he goes into!'
'Not at all,' said the King. 'He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger- and
those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy.'
Between English and Russian literary attitudes there is a similar lookingglass difference: they may appear to be the same thing, save that, if the
Anglo-Saxon attitudinises when he's happy, then the Russian usually
does so when he's not. But the fact remains that every literary attitude
involves some degree of attitudinising. The chief difference between one
cultural response and another to literary attitudes is often no more than
a degree of seriousness. The Russian response to literature demands of
the writer that his social commitment should be manifest and his political
position unambiguous. Russian literary attitudes are frequently surrounded
by fierce public debate and far from disinterested official concern. They
are never frivolous. They are often tragically enmeshed with government
policy. In certain notorious cases they have become the pretext for
persecution, exile or death.
We have grown used to expecting Russian writing to encroach on areas
of learning and experience which are not, stricdy speaking, the concern of
literature. Politics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, religion, not to mention history or economics, are areas of knowledge which Russian literature has readily assimilated. It is arguable that the history of the Russian
intelligentsia, perhaps even the history of Russian national consciousness,
was first chronicled in the pages of the Russian novel. What has therefore
chiefly excited Russian sensibilities in determining standards of literary
excellence has been not how such-and-such is written, nor whether it
should be written in this way or that, but its relevance to living experience, its concern for reality. As mere Anglo-Saxons we may have our own
preferences and dislikes in assessing the greatest representatives of Russian
writing, and we may assume that historical and geographical distance
makes it relatively easy for us to pass objective judgement on the phenomenon, but it is still essential for us to realise that attitude as well as
R. Freeborn et al. (eds.), Russian Literary Attitudes from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn
© Macmillan Publishers Limited 1976
2
Russian Literary Attitudes from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn
expertise separates Dostoevsky from Gorky, say, or Pushkin from Pasternak. The attitudes are part of a history and tradition alien to us, yet by
no means irrelevant to our experience in the final quarter of the twentieth
century. We like to be pragmatically sure that literature is 'fiction' and
in making such a distinction we may be in danger of overlooking the
essential truths that literature alone can properly enshrine. Such a distinction is hardly recognised in Russian critical writing. In the Russian
attitude to literature there is a tendency to assume that it, and it alone,
is a repository of truth, that eternity is its birthright and the immortality
of the soul its rightful subject. To Solzhenitsyn, for example, iri his Nobel
speech, one of the great attributes of literature was the way in which
it could transmit condensed experience from generation to generation:
'So it becomes the living memory of a nation. It sustains within itself
and safeguards a nation's missing history- in a form which cannot be
distorted or falsified. In this way literature together with language preserves the national soul.'
Solzhenitsyn's tone, or manner of expression, in this statement may
seem too bold, out of keeping perhaps with the soft, ingratiating apologetics which we are accustomed to expect from English writers when they
speak about their role. Indeed, he assumes something about literature
which may seem exaggerated and a trifle old-fashioned. There is no
doubt at all that he believes sincerely in the truth of his view of literature, but as Anglo-Saxons, despite our own attitudes, we can hardly
speak of our literature today with that degree of conviction and commitment. The tone belongs, one suspects, to another age and clime, when
our literature aimed to preserve national values against the industrialism
and imperialism of Victorian England. In this sense it resembles the tone
of Thomas Carlyle and it has something of his attitude in it. When he
delivered his lecture on 'The Hero as Poet' on 12 May 1840 and posed
his fundamental query about the English view of the hero as poet, he
was speaking in an idiom which would be familiar to Solzhenitsyn:
Which Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours, which million
of Englishmen, would we not give up rather than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that we would sell
him for. He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honour
among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English household, what
item is there that we would not surrender rather than him? Consider
now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian Empire or your
Shakespeare, you English; never have had any Indian Empire, or never
have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a grave question. Official
persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our
part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no
Indian Empire, we cannot do without Shakespeare! Indian Empire will