Introduction: Russian Classics

Russian literature, which of course is the focus of this journal, has a marvelous wealth of classic writers. Aleksandr Pushkin, the best-known 19^th-century Russian poet, exerts an expanded influence as his poems, plays and stories are the foundation of operas by Russia’s world-class composers. The great Realist novelists are widely read and taught in the Anglosphere—so much so that the most important novels exist in multiple English-language versions, making them a fascinating corpus for comparative translation studies as well as scholarly or pleasure reading. The most prominent Modernist poets—Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva—are now firmly ensconced in the international canon, often translated and widely read. In Russia as well as elsewhere, these authors continue to reveal new depths and riches to scholarly study. This issue includes three substantial articles that address the Russian classics.

Tat’iana Kasatkina’s article has a weighty title: “The Problem of Access to a Writer’s Philosophy and Theology: The Unavoidability of Philology. Apollon and the Mouse in F.M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.” It reflects the multiple topics the article addresses: how best to interpret philosophical and theological elements in works of literature, and how Dostoevsky has been (mis)interpreted by readers who seek explicit expressions of these other kinds of discourse or else are too ready to impose their own on a complex fictional work. The tools of philology prove essential for more nuanced, and more responsible, understanding of how literary texts may express or even embody stances of all kinds. Kasatkina then focuses in on Dostoevsky’s well-known Notes from Underground, first discussing the ways it has been appropriated as a pre-text for existentialist literature and philosophy, then focusing on one example of its embedded complexities, the figures of Apollon in Part 2 (with Apollo as a source of cultural associations) and the mouse in Part 1. Readers may find themselves wanting to debate a few of her assertions and thought-provoking interpretations. In particular, translations of Notes will tend to lose the rhythms and associations of the Gospel references, by necessity choosing words that only partly preserve the semantic field of the original. Even Russian readers often no longer know the underlying texts as well as Dostoevsky (who had only the Gospels to read while in prison, and so naturally read them in particular depth), but in the Russian original text the Biblical associations are always available to be reawakened by an attentive reading. In recent decades Russian scholars have been free once more to carry out religiously-informed readings of Dostoevsky, whose mature work counts on such a reading.

Evgenii Ponomarev’s article, “The Intertext of Dark Avenues: How the Novella Dissolved in the Later Works of Ivan Bunin,” turns to a more recent classic who has been less celebrated than Dostoevsky—Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), the 1933 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature. Ponomarev identifies Bunin’s late collection Temnye allei (Dark Allées) as the place where the author shifts from Modernism to something more resembling post-modernism. The article notes numerous open or more implicit references to earlier masters of Russian prose such as Chekhov, Tolstoy and Turgenev, which bring Bunin into dialogue with the longer literary tradition. Ponomarev treats the collection as a whole, delving into every single story. Many of the stories have been translated into English and so are available to us for teaching, though Bunin is not as well-known in the West as his Nobel Prize would suggest; this has been the fate of many émigré writers. Dostoevsky was a possible though somewhat restricted topic for study in the Soviet period, but Bunin has not yet been wholly “processed” by Russian scholars, and his influence not yet assimilated by subsequent Russian writers. This article (like the work of T.V. Marchenko to which it often refers) is a step in the incorporation of a classic.

Irina Popova faces a broad horizon in her article, “Literature and the Theory of Literature: The Development of the Russian Classics against the Background of the European Tradition.” Drawing both on modern scholarship and on writers like Goethe, Popova identifies the concept of a classic writer, drawn originally from Greece and Rome and their fame and exemplary status as it reemerged during the European Renaissance, and updated for the modern era in Neoclassical France with its pantheon of important authors, many of them exemplars of particular literary genres. The sped-up and “intentional” development of Russian literature in the 18^th century led by the early 19^th century to the emergence of authors who are still recognized as classics; Popova devotes several pages to Pushkin’s appreciation of what a national literature requires, particularly his support and encouragement of Gogol, his younger contemporary. She additionally focuses on the difference between writers and literary critics, noting authors such as T. S. Eliot—and Pushkin himself—whose creative activity took place amid their sharp awareness of the role they might be playing in literary development and history. The article delivers both incisive comments on individual texts or episodes and a valuable consideration of the big issues of literary tradition in the modern era.

So, all you lovers of Russian literature: here are three studies that will help with understanding its significance, and that will inspire you to engage in the arguments they address.