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A History of Russian Literature
 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman,
and Stephanie Sandler 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
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Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017909825
ISBN 978–0–19–966394–1
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Contents

Note on the Text xi

List of Abbreviations xiii
List of Figures xv
List of Plates xvii
Acknowledgmentsxix

Introduction1

Part I The Medieval Period

Introduction: Defining the medieval 13
1. Institutions and contexts: Writing and authorship, 1100–1400 17
A new language for a new people: Old Church Slavonic 19
Monastic writing: Translation, open boundaries, and selectivity 21
The limits of the literary system: Rhetoric, compilation, and genre 24
The meaning of readership 31
Scribal culture and the author function 33
Literary identity: Collective writing and singularity 35
Case study: The Voyage of Afanasy Nikitin: Self and other 37

2. Holy Rus´: Landmarks in medieval literature 44

Founding stories: The Primary Chronicle44
Case study: The bylina and Russia’s magical kingdom 48
The sermon: Ilarion and the chosen people of Kiev 52
The prayer: Daniil Zatochnik 56
Hagiography as life-writing 57
Saints alive 62
Hagiographic collections 62
Founders and Holy Fathers: The example of St. Feodosy 65
Miracle workers, the Virgin, and holy fools 67
Case study: The holy fool in the modern tradition 70
Ilarion redux: The fifteenth-century elaboration of hagiography 72
Keyword: Word-weaving 75

3. Local narratives 82
Unhappy families: The trauma of invasion 82
The Lay of Igor’s Campaign and the princely image 84
vi | Contents

Case study: National identity, medievalism, and the discovery of the

Lay of Igor’s Campaign  88
Narratives of invasion 91
Catastrophic narratives: Defending Holy Russia 95
From Grand Prince to Tsar, 1200–1565: Elevation through charisma 101
Vladimir Monomakh 104
Alexander Nevsky 105
Dmitry Donskoi 107
Ivan the Terrible: Tsardom and the absolutist “I” 110
Center and periphery and the localism of the Tale of Petr and Fevronia114

Conclusion 119

Part II The Seventeenth Century

Introduction: The problem of transition and a new approach 123
1. Paradise lost: National narratives 127
Narratives from the Time of Troubles to the Schism (1613–82) 128
Visions of salvation 132
Case study: Dukhovnye stikhi (poetic songs or spiritual rhymes) 136
Literature of the Schism (Raskol)140
Case study: The Life of Archpriest Avvakum 142

2. Cultural interface: Printing, Humanist learning, and Orthodox resistance

in the second half of the seventeenth century 146
3. Court theater 153
Keyword: Baroque 154

4. Poets 158
New expressions and techniques 168
Paradise regained: Simeon Polotsky’s poetic garden 177
Friendship 178
Mortality 181

5. Prose 184
Popular fiction for a disrupted age: Social satire or literary fantasy? 184
Petrine novellas and fantasy fiction 193

Conclusion 197

Part III The Eighteenth Century

Introduction: The innovation of the eighteenth century 201
1. Defining classicism: The canons of taste 203
Keyword: Russian classicism 207
Questions of language and style 208
Case study: The creation of modern verse  213
Literary quarrels and a culture of contest 219
 Contents | vii

2. Institutions of writing and authorship 226

Court literature and absolutism: The ode 226
Court theater and tragedy 233
The reform of comedy and comedy of reform 236
The literary field: Writers and readership 239
Literary journals 243
Amateur writers, coteries, and readership 245
The authority of the writer: Satirical journals, politics, and society 248
The pleasures of literature 252
The genius of the poet 259

3. National narratives 264

The myth of Peter the Great and the progress narrative 264
Case study: Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler274
Literary voices on civic virtue and absolute rule  278
Case study: Aleksandr Radishchev and the philosophical life 286
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment: A contemporary critique 292

4. Poetics and subjectivities between classicism and Romanticism 302

Writing a modern self: The discovery of feeling and the diary 303
Case study: Radishchev and the experimental diary 308
Poetry and self-creation 313
Love and death 315
Case study: Horatian monument poems from Lomonosov to Brodsky  320
Modes of landscape 326

5. Prose Fiction 331

Entertainment literature, or the problem of the novel 331

Conclusion 339

Part IV The Nineteenth Century

Introduction: Defining the nineteenth century  345
1. Institutions 348
Male poetic circles: Friendship and intellectual networks  348
Case study: Dueling writers 351
Radical friendships and female networks 354
Case study: Albums 360

2. The literary field: From amateur societies to professional institutions

and literary alliances 363
Professionalization of literature: Thick journals and literary criticism 364
Case study: Imperial censorship 368
Landmarks in criticism 375
Case study: Nikolai Gogol 378

3. Subjectivities 385
Diary-writing and autobiography: Documentary and fictional self-presentation 385
viii | Contents

Case study: Nadezhda Durova  387

Case study: Leo and Sofia Tolstoy as diary-writers 396
Elegy, love, and self-expression 401
Keyword: Romanticism 410

4. Forms of prose 423

The emergence of prose and the genres of fiction 423
The literature of Realism, the realism of literature: Fiction, class, society 427
Case study: Realism/realism 429

5. Literary identity and social structure of the imperial period 431

Cultural spaces 433
Keyword: Regional literature 436
Educated elite 439
Case study: Intelligentsia 441
Peasantry 444
Case study: Narod/The people 446
Merchants 448
The clergy 449
State bureaucrats (chinovniki)452
Where do the raznochintsy fit? 455
Keyword: Nihilism 455
Where all classes meet 457
Case study: Corporal punishment 458

6. Types: Heroes and anti-heroes 460

Romantic outcasts, “superfluous men” 461
The genius 466
Madmen 467
“Little men” 471
The provincial 472

7. Heroines and emancipation 475

Status of women 475
“The necessary woman” 476
Mothers 477
Wives and mistresses 480
Fallen women and seductresses 487
Revolutionaries 490
Case study: Terrorism 491

8. Narratives of nation-building 496

The dramatization and fictionalization of history 496
Case study: War and Peace499
The search for national identity 504
Keyword: Sobornost´512
Case study: The national poet 514

Conclusion 518
 Contents | ix

Part V The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Introduction: The shape of the period 523
1. Institutions 525
Defining the Silver Age 525
Literary groups of the 1920s 528
Case study: Formalism 532
Case study: Mikhail Bakhtin 534
Literary life of the emigration, 1918 through the 1980s 536
Creation of the Union of Soviet Writers 542
Case study: Prorabotka, or political rebukes of writers 545
Literature and politics after Stalin: Aesopian language and ideological divisions 549
Samizdat, tamizdat, and the literary underground in the 1960s through 1980s 554
Case study: The Moscow–Tartu School 557
Perestroika and post-Soviet transformations of the literary field 560

2. The poetics of subjectivity  565

Symbolists and Acmeists 566
Keywords: Life-creation and self-construction (zhiznetvorchestvo)568
Case study: Anna Akhmatova 573
Women’s writing as a modernist legacy 575
Late modernism: Neo-Acmeism and other classical poetry 578
Case study: Joseph (Iosif ) Brodsky 580
Russian spiritual poetry 589
Case study: Elena Shvarts 593
Neo-Romanticism 599

Interlude: Misfits in Russian poetry 606

3. The poetics of language 611
Futurism 611
Case study: Elena Guro 617
Avant-gardists of the 1920s 620
OBERIU 621
Neo-avant-garde 624
Concrete and Conceptualist poetry 631
Case study: Dmitry Prigov’s “Militsaner” 635
Metarealism 639
Post-Soviet poetic languages 641

4. Prose and drama: Negotiations with history 644

New forms of prose and drama 645
Case study: Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreev 646
Utopia and dystopia in early Soviet literature 654
Grotesque modernism of the 1920s and 1930s 661
Keyword: Skaz664
Case study: Vladimir Nabokov 668
Socialist Realism 672
x | Contents

Women’s prose and drama of the 1960s through 1990s 678

Case study: Liudmila Petrushevskaya 680
Existentialist prose and drama of the 1960s through 1980s 684
Underground modernisms of the 1960s through 1980s 688
Postmodernist literature: From late Soviet underground to post-Soviet mainstream 693
Case study: Moscow to the End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev 694
In-between prose 704

5. Catastrophic narratives 709

Narratives of the Revolution and Civil War 709
Case study: Isaac Babel 714
Narratives of the Great Terror I 717
Narratives of the war 721
Narratives of the Great Terror II 729

6. Intelligentsia narratives 739

Intelligentsia narratives of the 1900s through 1920s 741
Intelligentsia narratives of the 1930s through 1950s 747
Case study: Osip Mandelstam’s “I lost my way in the sky . . .”  751
Intelligentsia narratives of the 1960s through 1980s 756
Post-Soviet intelligentsia narratives 763

Conclusion767

Guides to Further Reading 771

Notes787
Picture Credits 911
Index913
 Note on the Text

T
HE following transliteration conventions and abbreviations have been adopted in the
History of Russian Literature.
We use a modified Library of Congress system of transliteration in the text, adopt-
ing y in names to match the ending -ii. We use the standard spelling of first and last names
adopted in the West: Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Herzen, Alexander Nevsky, Leo Tolstoy,
Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Lydia Ginzburg, Lydia Chukovskaya,
Natalia Baranskaya, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tatyana Tolstaya, Liudmila Petrushevskaya,
Ludmila Ulitskaya. We also spell Sofia, Natalia, and Dunia, rather than Sofiia, Nataliia, and
Duniia. Other modifications include: Asya, Ilya, Yakov, Yulian, Yuri, Tatiana, and Olga. We
omit soft signs from the ends of both first and family names, such as Igor, Gogol, Dal. The soft
sign is retained mid-word to indicate underlying phoneme or palatalization, for example,
Murav´ev (and not Muravyev), L´vov (and not Lvov). The soft sign is also retained at the end
of place names. German surnames that have not been Russified include Benckendorff,
Küchelbecker, and the characters Stoltz and Sachs.
When citing Russian sources in the bibliography and notes, we use the Library of Congress
system without diacritics.

Dates
In Parts I and II, the year of composition is given for all works unless otherwise noted. In Part
III, the date given for poems is usually the publication date, as is the case for prose works and
works of theater (for which a performance date is provided). In Parts IV and V, dates reflect
the date of first publication except for most poems, where date of composition is given.
Exceptions are noted.

Translations
Unless otherwise attributed, all translations are our own. Prose quotations at length are given
only in English with no block quotation in Russian. For poetry, we provide original Russian
block quotations in Cyrillic for substantial extracts (usually more than three lines). Otherwise,
when we quote a phrase in the body of the text, English translation comes first followed by
transliteration in parentheses.
 List of Abbreviations

In the notes and Guides to Further Reading the following will be used:
BLDR Biblioteka literatury Drevnei Rusi
NLO Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
PLDR Pamiatniki literatury Drevnei Rusi
SEER Slavonic and East European Review
SEEJ Slavic and East European Journal
TODRL Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury
 List of Figures

i.01. Sts. Vladimir, Boris, and Gleb with the Lives of Boris and Gleb,
first half of 16th c. 42
i.02. Tsar Ivan the Terrible arrives on pilgrimage at the Holy Trinity Monastery
of St. Sergii, miniature from an illuminated manuscript chronicle, 16th c.  79
i.03. The Battle of Suzdal and Novgorod, School of Novgorod, second half of
the 15th c.  87
i.04. Anonymous, Parsuna [portrait] of Ivan IV, early 17th c. 111
i.05. Madonna and St. Sergius, 15th c. 117
ii.01. Battle between the Russian and Tatar troops in 1380, 1640s. 130
ii.02. Avvakum, Life of the Archpriest Avvakum (c. 1682), colophon. 143
ii.03. Anonymous, Portrait of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, late 18th c.  147
ii.04. Simeon Polotsky, The Rhymed Psalter (Psaltyr´ rifmotvornaia, Moscow:
Verkhniaia tipografiia, 1680), plate opposite p. 17.  162
ii.05. Simeon Polotsky, The Rhymed Psalter, title page.  163
ii.06. Simeon Polotsky, The Harmonious Lyre (Moscow, 1676), labyrinth.  173
ii.07. L. Tarasevich, Engraving of Sophia surrounded by the seven virtues,
with inscriptions, 1687.  175
ii.08. Andrei Ryabushkin, Zemsky sobor c.1645 under Tsar Alexis (Aleksei
Mikhailovich Romanov), consultation with a council of boyars, 1893.  179
ii.09. Sil´vestr Medvedev, Funerary epitaph for Simeon Polotsky, 1680.  182
ii.10. Illustrated tale, 17th c.  185
ii.11. Ilya Muromets and Nightingale the Robber (Il’ia Muromets i
Solovei-razboinik), lubok print, 18th c. 195
iii.01. D. G. Levitsky, Portrait of Nikolai Novikov, before 1792.  217
iii.02. Jean-Louis Voille, Portrait of Ivan Elagin, c.1789.  222
iii.03. Catherine the Great’s Rules for Good Conduct, c.1760.247
iii.04. Catherine and the Nakaz, miniature enamel. 249
iii.05. Jean-Pierre Ador, Catherine the Great as Minerva, snuff box after medallion of
J. G. Waechter commemorating the accession of the Empress Catherine, 1771.  273
iii.06a–b. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (Opyt o cheloveke, trans. Nikolai Popovsky),
illustration and opening page of Part III, manuscript copy by Ilya
Savinov, c.1779.  305
iii.07. Aleksandr Radishchev, The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie
iz Peterburga v Moskvu, St Petersburg, 1790), title page of first edition.  336
iv.01. A. S. Pushkin, Duelists, 1830.  353
iv.02. A. S. Pushkin, Self-portrait, December 1828–January 1829.  362
iv.03. N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi) (1842), cover of the first edition as
designed by Gogol.  381
xvi | List of Figures

iv.04. A. S. Pushkin, A portrait of Jean-Paul Marat, 1823.  390

iv.05. A. S. Pushkin, Portraits of Pavel Pestel, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Ivan
Pushchin, 1826.  391
iv.06. A. S. Pushkin, Self-portrait, 1823.  392
iv.07. A. S. Pushkin, Five executed Decembrists, 1826. 393
iv.08. M. Iu. Lermontov, A Caucasian Mountaineer, 1830s–1841. 438
iv.09. F. M. Dostoevsky, A face of a peasant in the rough drafts of The
Adolescent (1874).  445
iv.10. F. M. Dostoevsky, A portrait with “infernal” features in the early rough
drafts of The Idiot (1867).  470
v.01. Aleksei Remizov, Baliev from the album “Teatr,” collage with India ink and
colored paper, 1929. 541
v.02. Leonid Aronzon, “An empty sonnet,” 1969.  585
v.03. Vladimir Burliuk, Portrait of Elena Guro, 1910.  617
v.04. Daniil Kharms (1905–42), Russia, early 1930s.  623
v.05. Elizaveta Mnatsakanova, A page from Das Buch Sabeth (1979).  625
v.06. The First Group Exhibition of Moscow Conceptualists in the Moscow
gallery AptArt, 1982.  634
v.07. Dmitry Prigov in a militiaman cap, late 1970s. 636
v.08. Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreev, 1901.  647
v.09. Venedikt Erofeev, 1980s. 694
v.10. The closing ceremony of the 22nd Winter Olympics, Sochi, Russia, 2014.  768
v.11. Dmitry Bykov and the “Stroll with Writers” along the Moscow boulevards,
May 13, 2012.  769
 List of Plates

1. Leaf from the Ostromir Gospel, The Evangelist Mark, mid-11th c.

2. Icon, Saints Boris and Gleb, Novgorod, 14th c. 
3. Icon, St George the Victorious (Pobedonosets), Novgorod, 14th c. 
4. Blessing of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoi by Sergii of Radonezh, from the
Tale of the Rout of Mamai, early 17th c. 
5. Icon, Prince Dmitry of Thessalonike, Vladimir-Suzdal, early 13th c. 
6. Icon, The Church Militant, detail of Archangel Michael and Ivan the Terrible, mid-16th c.
7. Icon, Virgin Orans [Bogoroditsa], Suzdal, c.1224. 
8. View of fortified city of Solovki on White Sea, detail from Panel of Saints
Sabazio and Zosima, c.1645. 
9. Karion Istomin, A Book of Love to Mark a Noble Marriage, 1689.
10. Fedor Rokotov, Portrait of Vasily Maikov, 1760. 
11. Johann Gottfried Tannauer, Peter I at the Battle of Poltava, 1724. 
12. Vigilius Eriksen, Equestrian portrait of Catherine II, c.1762. 
13. Dmitry Levitsky, Portrait of Alexandra Levshina from the series Smolianki,
portraits of young women students from the Smolnyi Institute for Noble Girls, 1772–76. 
14. Nikolai Feofilaktov, Cover of Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri, 1904) by
Andrei Bely. 
15. Aleksei Remizov, A letter of credit for the Monkey Designation of the
First Degree.
16. L. Baskin, Poster “Greeting to the Congress of Soviet Writers,” 1934. 
17. Elena Guro, A Woman in a Headscarf, 1910. 
18. Erik Bulatov, Sunrise or Sunset, 1989. 
19. Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socialist Realism, oil on canvas, 1982–83.
 Acknowledgments

O
UR work on this History has been helped by many colleagues in and beyond the field
of Russian literature. Several generously read and extensively commented on por-
tions of the draft manuscript, sometimes very large portions: Catherine Ciepiela,
Nicholas Cronk, Evgeny Dobrenko, Caryl Emerson, Ann Jefferson, Ilya Kukulin, Olga
Maiorova, Jennifer Nuttall, Cathy Popkin, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, William Mills Todd III,
Alexandra Vukovich, Justin Weir, and Wes Williams. We are grateful for their deep engage-
ment with our ideas as well as their corrections, additions, and emendations, and we extend
the same thanks to our anonymous readers, who offered scrupulous readings and suggestions
for improvement on the final draft. We also thank the following individuals for much valued
help of different kinds: Natalia Ashimbaeva, Jennifer Baines, Nadezhda Bourova, Tatiana
Goriaeva, Catriona Kelly, Irina Koshchienko, Ilja Kukuj, Henrike Lähnemann, Peter McDonald,
Deborah A. Martinsen, Martin McLaughlin, Nikita Okhotin, Florentina Viktorovna-Panchenko,
Lynn E. Patyk, Stanley Rabinowitz, Ritchie Robertson, Gisèle Sapiro, Fiona Stafford, Jonathan
Stone, Natalia Strizhkova, and Boris Tikhomirov.
For generous financial and other research support, the authors would like to acknowledge
the British Academy (Conference Grant); the Arts and Sciences Fund of Excellence and Eugene
Kayden Research Fund at the University of Colorado-Boulder; the Publication Committee of
the Harriman Institute at Columbia University; the FAS Tenured Faculty Publication Fund,
Harvard University; the John Fell Fund, the University of Oxford; the Fellows’ Research Fund,
St Edmund Hall, Oxford; the Humanities Division, University of Oxford; and CEELBAS,
University College London. Librarians at several institutions have offered generous help dur-
ing our work. We would like to thank Nick Hearne and Elena Franklin of the Taylor Institution
Library, Oxford; Amanda Saville, The Queen’s College, Oxford; the staff at Houghton Library,
Harvard University; Tanya Chebotarev, Curator, Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University;
the Amherst Center for Russian Culture.
In preparing the manuscript, we have been aided by Alison Oliver, Gillian Pink, Rebecca du
Plessis, and Philip Redko; and by Emily Kanner, Jenya Mironova, Sara Powell, Alex Tullock,
and Sarah Vitali, who fact-checked the draft manuscript.
We owe special gratitude to our editors at Oxford University Press. Jacqueline Norton has
been a stalwart source of expert advice and deft encouragement from the conception of this
project and over its long gestation. Eleanor Collins has offered good-humored, astute guid-
ance. We thank Ela Kotkowska for her copyediting and work on translations of poetry. For
advice about the reproduction and rights to images included here, we are grateful to Deborah
Protheroe, and we thank our picture researcher Sophie Basilevitch, Penny Trumble, Viki
Kapur, and Hannah Newport-Watson, Senior Production Editor, for their skillful assistance.
Warm thanks to all.
Plate 1. Leaf from the Ostromir Gospel, The Evangelist Mark, mid-11th c.
Plate 2. Icon, Saints Boris and Gleb, Novgorod, 14th c.
Plate 3. Icon, St George the Victorious (Pobedonosets), Novgorod, 14th c.
Plate 4. Blessing of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoi by Sergii of Radonezh, from the Tale of the Rout of
Mamai, early 17th c.
Plate 5. Icon, Prince Dmitry of Thessalonike, Vladimir-Suzdal, early 13th c.
Plate 6. Icon, The Church Militant, detail of Archangel Michael and Ivan the Terrible, mid-16th c.

Plate 7. Icon, Virgin Orans [Bogoroditsa], Suzdal, c.1224.

Plate 8. View of fortified city of Solovki on White Sea, detail from Panel of Saints Sabazio and
Zosima, c.1645.
Plate 9. Karion Istomin, A Book of Love to Mark a Noble Marriage, 1689.

Plate 10. Fedor Rokotov, Portrait of Vasily Maikov, 1760.

Plate 11. Johann Gottfried Tannauer, Peter I at the Battle of Poltava, 1724.
Plate 12. Vigilius Eriksen, Equestrian portrait of Catherine II, c.1762.
Plate 13. Dmitry Levitsky, Portrait of Alexandra Levshina from the series Smolianki, portraits of
young women students from the Smolnyi Institute for Noble Girls, 1772–76.
Plate 14. Nikolai Feofilaktov, Cover of Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri, 1904) by Andrei Bely.
Plate 15. Aleksei Remizov, A letter of credit for the Monkey Designation of the First Degree.
Plate 16. L. Baskin, Poster “Greeting to the Congress of Soviet Writers,” 1934.
Plate 17. Elena Guro, A Woman in a Headscarf, 1910.

Plate 18. Erik Bulatov, Sunrise or Sunset, 1989.

Plate 19. Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socialist Realism, oil on canvas, 1982–83.
 Introduction

The shapes of literary history

Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to
the eleventh century. Our History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of
Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day,
which is still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. Readers will find
here accounts of genres, including heroic lays and spiritual poetry (dukhovnye stikhi), the novel,
elegy and love poetry; movements such as classicism, Sentimentalism, Romanticism, Realism,
modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism. And readers will find discussions of the
well- and lesser-known writers who have contributed to this influential and vital tradition for
each of these periods and genres.
Do twenty-first-century readers still need histories of national literatures now that the
obsession with the global has virtually displaced the interest in discrete traditions? In a word,
yes. The rise of world literature and the sense of new deracinated global canons taking form
before our very eyes do not inherently invalidate national literary history. Global histories
might encourage an assumption that the national is by definition static or one-dimensional.
The border crossings that dominate globalized literature do seem manifestly more dynamic
than any single tradition.1 Yet those border crossings can help us comprehend Russia’s own
literary history, which vividly belies the idea of insularity. The map of Russian literature has
never been identical with Russia’s borders: its centers of creative production occupy territories
both within and beyond Russia, and it includes works written in Russian (even if not always
in Russia nor necessarily by ethnic Russians). Cold War isolation was never the whole story
for a literary tradition and culture that was open to Byzantine and Balkan influences in the
medieval period and Ruthenian, Polish, and Latin trends in the seventeenth century. Russian
literature continued to be manifestly cosmopolitan and oriented toward Europe (mostly
France and Germany) in the eighteenth century; it became one of the great European litera-
tures in the nineteenth century, and then extended across new terrains in phases of diaspora
in the modern period, starting with the Romantic exiles of the nineteenth century and several
waves of emigration from the 1920s to the 2010s.
The professional modern study of Russian literature in the West has always forged con-
nections between native and foreign. Émigré scholars from Russia and Eastern Europe
founded many Slavic departments in the United States and Europe, among them the School of
Slavonic Studies, established by the influential critic and popularizer D. S. Mirsky (born Prince
Dmitry Petrovich Sviatopolk-Mirsky, 1890–1939), while Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) modernized
the Slavic Department at Harvard. In the post-Soviet era, Russian writing is being produced
and studied globally, and over the past decades the study of Russian literature as a discipline
has reacted to numerous changes, of which the most important might be another infusion of
talented scholars educated in Russia. In the 1990s and 2000s, two-way conversations became
2 | Introduction

the norm between Russian scholarship abroad and at home. Perestroika and the dismantling
of Marxist-Leninist shibboleths, as well as catch-up with Western critical schools, opened a
conduit for dialogue among students of Russian literature. This phenomenon of changing
places and exchanging ideas across open borders has coincided with paradigm shifts in the
study of literature, that have generally moved it closer to other disciplines, making it more
comparative, more historical, and more cultural without undermining a fundamental belief
in the traditional tools of philology and poetics.
Each decade has brought notable shifts in how we study and teach literature. The process
has become more cumulative as literary scholars have built on the insights of structuralism
and semiotics, at their height in the 1960s and 1970s, and of post-structuralism and deconstruc-
tion, absorbing lessons of the rediscovery of Bakhtin in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of feminist
scholarship in the 1980s, and cultural history of the 1990s. In the classroom, and among popu-
lar readerships, awareness of the depth of Russian literature has certainly changed. Translation,
often owing to the efforts of smaller presses, has made available in English and European
languages a much wider corpus of writers than what was featured on university syllabuses
even a generation ago. Attention to the history of women’s writing in the context of both
gender studies and cultural history has not only broadened the canon but raised important
questions about readership and literary evolution. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought
an end to censorship (although the 2010s have seen a rise in concern that some forms of cen-
sorship are returning), but the history of censorship in Russia of all periods, and most strik-
ingly during the Soviet period, has never been a story of silence but rather of extraordinary
networks of underground literature. Archival research and critical editions, among other
­benefits of the post-Soviet transformation of fields, have put pressure on old ideas of a canon.
Textual editing as a field has been intensively active over the past decades, and the legacies of
many writers from the imperial or Soviet periods, some now read for the first time in their
entirety, have been redefined.
All histories work with the idea of a canon, and no modern conceptualization of the canon
can be aloof from cultural politics. In the 1990s, identity politics led to intense debate about
literary canons and national literature.2 Russian literature was not immune, but it did not
experience a violent splintering along cultural and ethnic lines. Geography more than
­ethno­g raphy determined earlier splits. From the 1920s to the 1990s, Russian literary émigré
circles disputed the status of Soviet writing, also raising questions as to whether Russians who
had “made it” in English, like Nabokov, could genuinely be called Russian. The question of
whether Gogol was a Ukrainian-Russian, Russian-Ukrainian, Ukrainian Russian-language
writer, or Russian writer, an old question, remains a legitimate debating point and an invita-
tion to abandon entrenched positions. The net effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union was
not a spate of culture wars but a massive upsurge in the availability of writing, new and old.
Scholars have responded with discussions of canon formation and readership communities
within and outside Russia; openness to outside traditions poses productive questions about
the relationship of several canons in dialogue with each other.3
A second current development is the scale and volume of material now available. In an age
of information retrieval, readers can access and verify more facts and read a wider range of
works than ever before in all national traditions. The wish to attain perspective on the new
and multiple also compels us to recast our understanding of the old and monolithic. This may
be why the 2000s have seen a significant revival of literary history repackaged into introduc-
tory manuals, handbooks, and companions. The growth of specialist research and its mass
availability have altered the challenges of writing a large-scale literary history, creating a pro-
ductive tension between different demands of objective discourse and subjective narration,
comprehensive coverage and deliberate selection.
 Introduction | 3

In thinking about the scale of this History we have aimed for historical breadth for a
number of reasons. The first is a belief in the intrinsic value of the literary works we discuss.
The second comes from a recognition that literature tells a narrative about its own tradi-
tions and circumstances of creation that is intertwined with changing views on Russianness.
The third is a conviction, based on experience in the undergraduate classroom and graduate
seminar, that many works of Russian literature innovate and draw inspiration from a pro-
found sense of rootedness in the nation’s history. The history of Russian literature is about
authors, forms, and debates, and it also continuously responds to the complex relationship
between writing and the state, a dynamic that extends from the medieval period to the
­present day.

The contexts of Russian literary history

Literary history in Russia became an academic field in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Modern literary history has its intellectual origins in philology (and thus in the study of
languages; philology is now understood as a combination of literary criticism, history, and
linguistics), and philological investigations were augmented in the late nineteenth century by
Comtean positivism and a drive toward systemizing and cataloguing.4 Putting the right facts
in the right order was the basic task, requiring no small amount of labor. But literary histories
were never just encyclopedias or ordered collections of facts. First- and second-generation
nineteenth-century Russian literary histories—and they were many—had agendas.
From the 1850s, Russian literary history as a genre became de facto a form of national
­narrative open to politicization from both the radical left and the conservative right. At first,
the disciplinary boundaries between history and literary history were not clearly drawn.
Practitioners of both disciplines did much basic work of retrieval in recovering the nation’s
documentary heritage, especially from the period before 1800. The creation of a national his-
torical school by Vasily Kliuchevsky (1841–1911) in the 1860s, well after the Russian authorities
in the 1830s made “nationality” one official aspect of literature, found a ready and large read-
ing public, much augmented by the expansion of secondary and higher education. This same
public was avid for the masterpieces of the Great Russian Novel.5 Literary histories emulated
the model of the national historical school and assumed that national literatures must tell a
national story. Not everyone saw things this way, and literary history created its own dynamic
of revisionism. For instance, the editor, educator, and literary critic S. A. Vengerov (1855–1920)
felt that literature could best be accessed through biography formulated in reference manuals.6
From 1901 he directed the four-volume Library of Great Writers (Biblioteka velikikh pisatelei,
1901–1902). Vengerov’s method refuses both narrative and continuous institutional history,
and is further atomized by its multiple detached biographies (a method that continues to
attract adherents). This approach set the backdrop for the work of the Formalists, many of
whom had participated in his seminars; subsequently, in the 1910s–20s, they moved away from
the biographical approach.
Unlike literary historians influenced by the social science methods of Comte, A. N. Pypin
(1833–1904) was an outsider to the academic establishment, an important historian of censor-
ship and freemasonry who was a standard-bearer for philology and regarded literary history
as a vast archive. He was unusual and precociously modern in being influenced by social sci-
ence methods in studying institutional practices and intellectual groups, thereby creating a
frame within which he could practice traditional philology by editing and disseminating texts.
Yet thanks to his emphasis on political circumstance and his tenet that almost all writers neces-
sarily reacted to the regime, his narrative pays valuable attention to practices of censorship,
publishing, and journalism. Pypin anticipated the approaches of the sociology of literature
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