(Chapter 4)
Popular feasting and the Christian Eucharist, with its link to resurrection on the one hand and crucifixion on the other, come together in a tour-de-force of neo-Slavophile cultural criticism, which synthesizes rather than analyses and is rooted in a determination to celebrate the wholeness of life, and not to discriminate between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘anti-aesthetic’, acceptable and unacceptable, sensations.
Bakhtin’s book is also a tribute to the vitality of humour in Russian culture, as, too, are Rozanov’s miniatures, not only the vessels of ‘exaggerated profundity’ but of studiedly ridiculous self-portraits – having confiscated his children’s Sherlock Holmes stories as ‘harmful reading’, Rozanov devoured them himself at every possible opportunity, ‘so that the train journey from Siverskaya to St Petersburg flew past like a dream’. A popular Western view of Russia sees the place as grim, dank, and with permanently gloomy inhabitants given to fits of weeping and talking about their souls. No one could maintain this
illusion for long when reading Russian literature. In Chekhov’s plays, even characters prone to maudlin fits of self-pity display a talent for flights of black comedy (as when Uncle Vanya responds to a social banality about the nice weather with the words, ‘Nice weather to hang yourself in’). Here, humour is a weapon for exposing artificiality (as it also is in Dostoevsky’s novels, where lapses into absurdity threaten every carefully planned social event). But ridicule is often more universal than this, giving a sense of human existence as necessarily grotesque – as in the scene from Chekhov’s ‘Ward No. 6’ (1892) where one madman boasts of his fantasy service decorations to another invalided out of the civil service when he became wrongly convinced he was making mistakes and developed paranoia.
Black humour of this kind survived at even the darkest eras of history, such as the late 1930s. To be sure, in Socialist Realist texts, humour that was not of the unintentional sort was limited to crude jokes directed at a narrow range of social types (shirkers at work, women who used too much make-up, men who tried to lay down the law to their wives). In unofficial writing, though, a vivid and subtle feeling of the ridiculous survived, and pompous bureaucrats were its main targets (in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, comic vengeance is exacted on a whole crowd of such people). In texts of this kind, humour was a survival strategy, but it was also a manifestation of freedom, a means of transcending oppression, a gesture of indifference towards authority. The exhilirating carnival foolery celebrated by Bakhtin was only one form of challenging official puritanism. The humour of the ‘holy fools’, the popular saints of early modern Russia whose filthy habits and bizarre behaviour assailed ordinary proprieties, and thus called into question conventional ideas about goodness, also worked its way through into some later literary texts. Kostoglotov, the protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, who is saddled with an absurd name (Boneswallower), and is, in every obvious way, decidedly unamiable – surly, brusque, unrepentantly naive – moved like some latterday, secularized version of the holy fool through 1950s Soviet society, saving no one but himself, yet at the same
time exposing the illusions upon which the ideals and aspirations of those surrounding him were based.
The uniqueness of Russian literature (and Russian culture more generally) has been held by many Western observers to lie in precisely this ability to embrace spiritual and material worlds. As the classicist and Russophile Jane Harrison declared in 1919, ‘The Russian stands for the complexity and concreteness of life – felt whole, unanalysed, unjudged, lived into . . .’. But as I come to the end of this short tour along pathways suggested by Pushkin’s ‘Monument’, I would not want to leave you with the impression that this chapter has spoken ‘the last word’, that we have reached the heart of the maze. Rather, there is no such heart: we have met the beginning of a path leading backward. For Pushkin, the last word was not ‘O Muse, be obedient to the command of God’, but ‘Don’t dispute with fools’: which leads back to the discussion of savoir faire placed here in Chapter 6. We saw in Chapter 5 that judging life has been a constant preoccupation of Russian writers, while Pushkin himself is an illustration that intelligent Russians have had just as large a talent for, and inclination towards, analysis as their counterparts anywhere in the world. In Russia itself, writers have often been regarded as sages, as moral guides to how life should be lived; but there are many other reasons for reading Russian literature. Like any other literature, it represents the world in new and extraordinary ways, it investigates areas of human experience that we sometimes prefer not to think about (madness, homicidal urges, tyranny); and it offers not only intellectual stimulation but the sensual delight of language stretched to its limits, of laughter, and of flights of imaginative fancy.