Abstract. By the end of the 19th century, Russian literature had gained world-leading status. The process of its conquest was connected in particular with the political realities generated by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 (as a result of which the role of the ideal Other in French cultural consciousness shifted from Germany to Russia), and the formation of the Entente in the lead-up to World War I. In this context, the importance of Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s book The Russian Novel (1886), which played the role of cultural support for the political doctrine of creating the Franco-Russian alliance (1891-1892), should be assessed. The links between politics and literature were often paradoxical. For example, the Crimean War, accompanied in the West by the formation of an anti-Russian propaganda industry, simultaneously fostered Russophile tendencies in Western European literature. This article pays particular attention to the modeling of the image of the Other through the examples of Nikolai Karamzin and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The author concludes that in the world’s critical reception, Russian classics are often fundamentally “unclassical”: They are a modern phenomenon associated with the metaphysics of the crisis of the rational paradigm.
On November 4, 1930, the émigré writer Boris Zaitsev published an article titled “Russians and the French” in the Parisian newspaper Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance), which began as follows:
When Turgenev arrived in France, [the French] had no concept of Russia. Hardly anyone besides Mérimée showed any interest – knew anything. Turgenev had to start with Pushkin, to insist, to translate himself, to hammer in. (Flaubert stubbornly rejected Pushkin.… And even now Pushkin has made the least headway in the West – we respond to this with a lack of understanding of Racine.) [18, p. 112].
The writer then attempts to show just how profoundly the status of Russian literature changed in the span of a few decades. He observes:
Among the various meanings of the Russian revolution, one seems particularly compelling, almost self-evident: Russia’s full entry into the ‘world.’ In Turgenev’s time, both politically and culturally, Russia occupied the place of a province … a faraway kingdom. Today, the world has seen her from many angles. Contemporary Russia may be good or bad. One may see in her … a fatal beginning. One may have mistaken ideas about her, may praise her foolishly. But one cannot consider her ‘nonexistent.’ There is no one in the world today who does not know that Russia not only exists, but that she is a force, a mystery, perhaps death, perhaps a new life-giving power capable – after convalescing – of refreshing the world [18, p. 113].
What is telling, however, is that a similar thought – also based on Ivan Turgenev – had been expressed by another writer, Konstantin Leontiev, 40 years before Zaitsev, in his 1890 book On the Novels of Count L. N. Tolstoy: Analysis, Style, and Trend. In his version, this leap of Russian literature from relative obscurity to an unquestioned place among the world’s leading literatures took just a few decades, the period from the youth to maturity of one person, one contemporary, himself.
Leontiev recalls a conversation with Turgenev back in the 1850s. When the young admirer [i.e., Leontiev] suggested translating A Sportsman’s Sketches into French and publishing them in Paris, the author of the much-discussed work replied: “How can we presume to have worldwide significance! It is enough if we are read in Russia” [7, p. 36]. A little over three decades later, Leontiev cites this remark in his book as a striking illustration of just how much the international status of Russian literature had changed in that time.
One of the most vivid attestations of this change is the 1886 publication of Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s The Russian Novel. This work, which enjoyed considerable popularity among Western intellectuals of the time, presented the titular phenomenon not merely as the subject of a fashionable craze that swept across Europe in the final decades of the 19th century, but as a model for creative engagement by French literature.
Vogüé speaks of the “embarrassing” richness of Russian literature (“sa richesse fait notre embarras”) [16, p. IX], as well as of the “timely arrival” of the Russians (“les Russes arrivent à point”) [16, p. LIV], whose influence “will be salutary for our exhausted art” (“l’influence des grands écrivains russes sera salutaire pour notre art épuisé”) [16, p. LIII]. In his view, the Russians bring back to Europeans a true idealism: a taste for the spiritual and religious intuitions that were so lacking in French literature, which had been dried out by uninspired positivism and naturalism. And that assessment very soon ceased to be an element of just the French or even just the European reception of Russian literature. Virtually the same would soon be written about it in many different languages and corners of the world. The approaching 20th century would only affirm Russian literature’s standing as one of the leading national literary traditions, with which global culture would enter into a sustained, intense, and fruitful dialogue.
But what is the nature of this dialogue? The question is extremely complex, and the answers depend on a multitude of factors, including the scope of the time frame being considered.
Russian literature gained a central place in the global literary pantheon in the second half of the 19th century, and this is far from accidental. It was a time of a fundamental reorientation of cultural perspective in Europe’s traditional metropolitan centers. Many factors throughout the century contributed to this shift. Anglo-German Romanticism and German classical philosophy that reshaped the spiritual landscape of the West in the first half of the industrial revolution; the political realities brought about by Napoleon’s defeat (namely, the Congress of Vienna, and its long-term consequences); the divergent yet complementary processes of recognizing the intrinsic value of unique national traditions alongside the internationalization of all aspects of life in an era of technological leaps and the formation of modern bourgeois societies – all of this contributed to the erosion of the former civilizational and literary hegemony of France in Europe and the emergence of a fundamentally new cultural field. Among other things, Europe began to create ideological portraits of large ethno-cultural communities in the lead-up to World War I and to the spiritual shifts that would later be crystallized in Oswald Spengler’s famous book The Decline of the West.
Of course, much as we might sometimes wish otherwise, literature can never be fully free of its external context, especially the socio-political one. These connections turn out to be both essential and, at the same time, “non-Euclidean,” unexpected, paradoxical.
Thus, a direct precondition for the appearance of Vogüé’s book and the triumphant global march of the Russian novel was France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, which led French culture to replace German literature – as the exemplary agent of transnational dialogue, both influencing and being influenced by an ideal Other – with Russian literature. On the political level, this was accompanied by the formation of the Franco-Russian alliance (Alliance franco-russe) and the future Entente (L’Entente). It is worth remembering that Vogüé was not only a critic, writer, and member of the French Academy, but also a politician and staff member of the French diplomatic mission in the Russian capital. Thus, The Russian Novel is also a form of cultural support for the political doctrine behind the creation of the Franco-Russian alliance as the foundation of the anti-German bloc in Europe.
Incidentally, the trauma of France’s defeat in the war of 1870 also inspired an entire new cultural movement centered in Paris: the culture of modernism. In a sense, among the derivatives of this event are the Impressionist movement in art; the renovation of Paris under the direction of Baron Haussmann that gave the city its present unified architectural ensemble; the world’s fairs as tools for restoring France’s reputation after its military collapse; the Eiffel Tower and the Grand and Petit Palais (remnants of those expositions that became iconic landmarks of the city); as well as the most beautiful bridge in the French capital, named after Russian Emperor Alexander III, France’s principal ally in Europe.
The earlier surge of interest in Russian literature in Europe, associated with the “discovery” and initial acquaintance with the great Russian prose tradition, coincided with the years of the Crimean War (1853-1856) and its immediate aftermath. And this occurred even though these same military events superficially seemed to give rise to an entire industry of Russophobia in Western countries – a systemic and large-scale anti-Russian propaganda effort in which some of the leading figures of European culture participated, including the famous illustrator Gustave Doré, who produced an entire album of biting and vicious caricatures – a kind of proto-comic book – titled The History of Holy Russia [4].
Yet paradoxically, Russia’s loss in the war to Western Europeans sparked a wave of interest in Russian literature in Western Europe. And ultimately, political Russophobia gave birth to cultural Russophilia.
It is tempting to see a providential sign in the fact that almost immediately after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which was so unfavorable to Russia after its defeat in the Crimean War, a translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights appeared in 1857 in the capital of a hostile power, Paris. The translation was by Théophile Gautier fils [12] (thus continuing the work begun by Prosper Mérimée to introduce Pushkin into French literature). Together with his father, Gautier the younger would go on to mark the beginning of a long period of European “Russophilia” through their travels in Russia and the literary travelogues they produced about them [15, pp. 248-257].
A feature of all these processes was polycentricity – a gradual move toward plurality, the simultaneous presence of diverse national cultural (including literary) traditions on a shared value scale. Unilateral influences began to give way to more complex mechanisms of dynamic interaction between literatures of different languages in the dialectic of cultural transfer. With difficulty and uneven success, the “old,” influential European cultures not only became more interpenetrable but also began to open up to cultures previously relegated to a limitrophe or peripheral status.
As a result, the end of the century is marked by the affirmation in the pan-European – and more broadly, global – literary pantheon of writers from Russia, Scandinavia, and the East. The vogue for “Nordic” and “Oriental” literature in France, Germany, and England coincides chronologically with the triumphant spread of the “Russian novel” across Europe. And de Vogüé’s book The Russian Novel became a signal for the reorganization of the first-tier literary canon, which from the 1890s onward began to include a number of Russian and other, so to speak, “non-traditional,” non-Romance, non-Germanic authors.
Very soon after the publication of the French critic-diplomat’s work, Russian literature would definitively acquire the status of one of the world’s leading literatures, a development that would be reflected, among other things, in the rhetoric of exceptionalism and superlatives with which it would be described by major intellectuals of both the West and the East.
For example, already impressed by the first London performance of The Cherry Orchard in 1911 (which, in fact, was nearly a failure with the British audience of the time, as the latter was neither particularly prepared nor especially discerning), Bernard Shaw wrote in a letter to Herbert Wells: “Everything we write in England seems sawdust after Tchekhov and the rest of them” [13, p. 322; 6].
And nearly a century later, on the other side of the world in Latin America, when Gabriel García Márquez would say that “for any writer in the world, the Russian novelists are the foundation of all foundations,” and would particularly emphasize: “I think that War and Peace is the greatest novel ever written in the history of humanity” [10, pp. 155, 162], his words would merely echo what Albert Camus had said in old Europe: “I place Demons on a level with the three or four works that crown the achievements of the human spirit, such as the Odyssey, War and Peace, Don Quixote, and the theater of Shakespeare” [2, p. 39]. (A telling selection, bringing together two Russian classic novels!)
This idea would also resonate with a characteristic admission by Thomas Mann, made four years before his death:
I do not know a single word of Russian, and the German translations in which I read the great Russian authors of the 19th century in my youth were quite weak. And yet I count that reading among the most important experiences that shaped me [9, p. 230; 11, p. 9].
The declaration of the German classic resonates with a passage by Tom Stoppard from an interview with the Estonian newspaper Postimees:
Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia [14].
And, of course, the subject of the profound influence of Russian literature on the development of modernized literatures of the East – beginning with the emergence of modern Chinese literature in the aftermath of the Xinhai Revolution – deserves an entirely separate and more than thorough discussion. This is a literature that listened to the “Russian voice” with special attentiveness and gratitude.
However, it is clear that Russia’s cross-cultural dialogue with the outside world began not merely at an earlier stage – it is, in essence, the same age as Russian statehood and Russian national culture itself. Today, thanks to serious philological research, we have a fairly detailed understanding of how densely Ancient Rus was embedded in the network of literary contacts with the outside world. Particularly fascinating material on the literary connections between the Russian state and foreign countries can be found in the 16th and 17th centuries, the era of Ivan the Terrible and the subsequent Time of Troubles. Traces of this era in world literary history are linked to a wide range of phenomena – from the “Russian theme” in the drama of Spain’s Golden Age (one need only recall Lope de Vega’s play El gran duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido (The Great Prince of Moscow, or The Persecuted Emperor) or the fantastical “Duke of Moscow” by the name Astolfo (borrowed from Ludovico Ariosto) in Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream [1, pp. 125-164]) to a veritable “craze” for the Russian language at the court of Elizabeth I in London. This interest was fueled by British merchants who lived for extended periods in Muscovy and returned home with knowledge of the Russian language and handwritten books in it [1, pp. 206-266]. Hence the unexpectedly rich collection of old Russian manuscripts and books preserved in British archives.
But of course, the type of relationship between Russian and foreign literatures that is most relevant to us today took shape primarily in the wake of Peter the Great’s reforms – in a newly modernized and Europeanized Russian culture that, through its very Europeanization, increasingly came to understand the complexity and dialectical nature of its own identity. At the heart of this identity is the need for the Other and the impossibility of full fusion with it – in other words, liminality as a constant of self-consciousness. This may sound, on the one hand, like a textbook cliché, and on the other, too abstract. So let us turn to concrete examples.
To begin with, let us consider Nikolai Karamzin, author of Letters of a Russian Traveler (bearing in mind that this was arguably the first work of modern Russian literature with a broad translational legacy across various languages).
Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky, noting that for the broader Russian readership Karamzin’s works began with the Letters of a Russian Traveler and ended with the History of the Russian State, emphasize:
In this arrangement, for all its historical-cultural and biographical determinants, lies the beauty of a strict compositional structure. Karamzin began as a writer who showed readers Europe and the progress of culture in the mirror of his own work, and he completed his path by revealing to them Russia and its history [8, p. 492].
This observation leads us to one of the deepest dominants in Karamzin’s worldview and literary model: the dialectical and necessary interdependence of the self and the Other – the path to the self through its objectification, the understanding of the self through the Other, the comprehension of Russia through Europe, and the construction of a native literary poetics inseparable yet distinct from Western European conceptions and values. In essence, this defining trait of all secularized Russian post-Petrine culture found its first distinctly literary expression in the works of Karamzin, securing for him the right to be called the father of classical Russian literature. But in the writer’s own creative biography, this trait manifested itself first and foremost in Letters of a Russian Traveler, published from 1791 to 1801, following the young nobleman from Simbirsk on his travels from May 1789 to July 1790 through Germany, Switzerland, France, and England.
Karamzin was a man of that era in which, from the experience of the late Enlightenment and in anticipation of the bourgeois universalism of the coming 19th century, a fundamentally new category was born – “world literature,” first named as such by Goethe. And Letters of a Russian Traveler was perceived as the first work of Russian secular literature to become part of that category.
The distinguishing feature of the “cultural personality” of Karamzin was his natural involvement in the European civilizational context, including the literary one. He had already fully assimilated the essential corpus of Enlightenment literature – from the skepticism of the Encyclopédistes and Voltaire to the Rousseauism of the time. His development was shaped by picaresque and sentimental novels and novellas from Smollett, Fielding, and Richardson to Marmontel and Sterne, along with the lyrical spirit of “sensibility” [Empfindsamkeit] in the works of Thomson, Jung, Gessner, Wieland, Herder, and Klopstock.
It was Karamzin who was to undertake a major cultural task: to provide a literary transcription of a particular type of personality – one that playfully tries on different roles while subordinating them to a unifying dominant, a deep purpose. That purpose was to capture his own identity as a bearer of the new Russian culture through the cognitive appropriation of the other – foreign experience – and through self-definition in relation to it. Ultimately, this led to the development of a dialectical model for the relationship between the national and the Western – one equally removed from uncritical reverence for the foreign and from arrogant self-satisfaction or intoxication with cultural insularity.
In essence, Karamzin’s entire journey and his Letters… are an exercise in “training the eye” through contemplation in the mirror of another culture, for otherwise, it is condemned to blindness.
Karamzin’s traveler is above all a person who “adapts” Europe as his own – but a different kind of own – testifying to a sense of affinity with it, yet from without. He unfolds a subtle tapestry of illustrations that show his full immersion in the Western cultural context, his equality with it, and his absolute command of its language – even, so to speak, “without an accent,” as if it were his own language, though not his native tongue. Hence, the deep distance – a “participative outside-position” (to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term) – of the protagonist in the Letters… in relation to Europe and the external world in general.
This kind of “participative outside-position” sets the model for the relationship between Russian literature and foreign – primarily Western – literature as a whole. Karamzin’s model would prove highly productive for decades, even centuries to come.
Characteristic in this sense are the patterns by which the West and the world at large would go on to adapt the work of a very different Russian writer, one who likely left the deepest imprint on world culture – precisely when Russian literature was being firmly established as one of the canon-forming traditions in supranational, universal literary discourse. The reference here is to Fyodor Dostoevsky in global criticism from the mid-1880s onward.
At this stage, the global reception of the great novelist became closely linked with the emergence of a stable system of stereotypes about Russia and Russians, and with the rhetorical elaboration of one of its key components: the myth of the so-called “Russian/Slavic soul.” Through the lens of European perception and judgment, Dostoevsky is involuntarily cast in the role of one of the main authors of that myth. This phenomenon is driven by a complex and important process: the gradual erosion of the paradigm of pure Eurocentrism and the self-sufficiency of old European cultures, alongside an emerging need to portray national distinctiveness and the figure of the Other – as an object of Western reflection and a potential agent of global processes at the stage of remaking the world in the perspective of the coming 20th century. Russia, a European country still belonging to a civilization type distinct from the Romance-Germanic model, was ideally suited to play the role of a dynamically apprehensible and easily adaptable Other. And Dostoevsky, perhaps more than anyone, became the clearest, most representative, and most sought-after voice of that “otherness” in the accessible for all language of literature.
Above all, this “otherness” was understood through Dostoevsky’s image of man – familiar, yet other, fundamentally different from a Western European, precisely in his irreducibility to the imperatives of the rational, the formalized, the reasonably bounded. The “Slavic soul,” or the “Dostoevskian man,” within this framework of perception, is one who, first, absorbs extremes into his inner experience, and second, abolishes the boundaries between them, rendering these poles reversible.
Dostoevsky’s Russia was perceived as the Other, and this great and little-understood spiritual space became a canvas onto which many things could be projected – both hopes and phobias. What is fundamentally important, and what transforms Dostoevsky into a world classic, is the fact that his artistic universe proved capable of breaking through the limitations of questions about the relationship between national and foreign. Very soon – already by the early 20th century – he ceased to be perceived as Other in the minds of leading Western writers and critics; he was adapted as one of their own. His message about human being, previously received as a message about Russian man, now clearly emerged as a revelation about man in general.
It is at this point of transition – where the Russian word moves from the status and function of a message about Russian man to the status and function of a message about man in general – that Russian literature becomes irrevocably established as an essential and significant part of the global cultural canon.
At the same time, Dostoevsky truly changed the landscape of world culture by presenting his experience of the ingenious convulsions of crisis consciousness in search of redemption as a key to constructing and profoundly decoding a new paradigm of total crisis – the epoch of great cataclysms, revolutions, world wars, the collapse of traditions and of human identification in a world that had proclaimed its own godlessness. This crisis-driven rupture could only resonate with the grand pathos of transcendent-Romantic tragic beyond the word itself. It is no coincidence that two such different yet equally towering classics of 20th-century world literature found a musical counterpart to Dostoevsky’s literary revelations. Let us quote Hermann Hesse:
Two powers seize us in his works; from the clash of two contradictory elements is born the magical depth and astonishing fullness of his music…. The first voice says yes to death, no to hope…. But the second voice, the truly divine second voice, shows us, on the heavenly side, another element different from death, another reality, another essence: that is the human conscience…. These two voices, these teachings, have I heard from Dostoevsky at those times when I was a good reader of his books, in those hours when despair and sorrow had prepared me. There is a musician I feel the same way about, whom I do not love at all times or always wish to listen to, just as I by no means always like to read Dostoevsky. It is Beethoven. He possesses the same knowledge of happiness, wisdom, and harmony, which are not, however, to be found along smooth roads, but rise resplendent only along paths close to the abyss. One does not grasp them smilingly but only with tears and in exhaustion and sorrow [5, pp. 143-145].
Hesse is echoed by the Frenchman Paul Claudel, though from a different, distinctly aesthetic frame of reference: “[F]rom the standpoint of art, his (Dostoevsky’s – Author) novels are constructed marvelously – vast passages of 50 pages, like Beethoven” [3, p. 177; 17].
And yet, overall, things are not so simple here. The logic of “participative outside-position” is a non-Euclidean logic, one in which straightforward, one-dimensional, and expected regularities often do not apply. Patterns are constrained by caveats. Such caveats arise as well when we speak of the role of classical Russian literature in world culture. The fact is that an impartial analysis of foreign critical reception leads to the conclusion that, for many, Russian classics are fundamentally “unclassical.” They are a phenomenon of the modern type, associated in particular with a revision of the rational worldview, with fervent claims for the legitimacy of tools for exploring the irrational dimensions of human nature – the unconscious, the subconscious, the psycho-mysterious.
It is no coincidence that Dostoevsky became such a central figure in the global hierarchy of Russian classics. The “craze” for Russian literature arrived in Europe during the transitional period from late Romanticism and Naturalism to “decadence,” Symbolism, and, more broadly, Modernism. And very often, it was thanks to Russian classical literature – serving as a kind of intermediary or mediator in the process of a “modernist revaluation of values” – that Western writers restructured the canon of their own literary past along innovative lines. Dostoevsky, absorbed into Western cultural consciousness, contributed to this transformation no less than the actual “decadents” themselves – albeit indirectly. Through him, figures such as Knut Hamsun, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, the poets of the Baroque, and many other former “outcasts” were “rehabilitated” into European literary prominence. As a result, world literature as a whole opened itself to the future, and the high tradition adapted itself to express the painful, tragic, yet profound experience of the new – modern – era.
It is also no coincidence that the principal form through which Russian literature conquered global heights was the novel – the most “non-canonical,” “raw,” “mobile,” and forward-looking genre in Bakhtin’s conception. One can only hope that this, too, is both prophetic and symbolic – that Russian participation in the global network of connections between literatures, staying true to its peculiar nature of “modern classicism,” will fundamentally resist the cementing and immobilizing forces of “pseudo-classicism” – and will remain free.
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