At some levels, then, there could scarcely be a more instructive contrast in styles than between Pushkin and Dostoevsky. On the one hand, there is The Brothers Karamazov, a sprawling, immensely ambitious study of the nature of belief, if also of the nature of doubt (there is passionate conviction in the agnostic Ivan Karamazov’s refusal to acknowledge the goodness of a deity who tolerates suffering on the part of the innocent). On the other, there is The Queen of Spades, a brilliant miniature in which the existence even of the supernatural in a low-level sense, let alone of God, is open to question, and in which the Church figures only in the form of a worldly priest whose lip-service to the moral qualities of the dead Countess in his funeral oration is in ironic contrast to her querulous and egotistical character in life. Dostoevsky’s admiration for Pushkin (even a Pushkin made in his own image) seems at first mysterious. Yet the two tales do have much in common, and not just because Pushkin’s frivolous beau-monde is the world in which Elder Zosima has moved before his conversion. Similar, too, is the matter-of-fact, even homely, attitude to the uncanny in both texts. The dead Countess’s appearance to Hermann in The Queen of Spades (whether as hallucination or ghost is unclear) is preceded by ‘a shuffling of slippers’; the Devil who appears to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov is a disagreeably chirpy middle-aged man whose mediocre brown suit suggests a middle-ranking provincial civil servant, the Evil One as pen-pushing bureaucrat.
The other world as seen here is, in the words of Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov’s sinister double in Crime and Punishment, hell as ‘a bath-house full of spiders’. The chilling sense of a sort of parallel universe of banality and boredom recurs in Daniil Kharms’ absurdist stories of the 1930s, here acting as a counterweight to the synthetic ‘heaven’ of Socialist Realist myth. It is present once more in the figure of Quilty from Lolita, a travesty Doppelgänger whom Humbert Humbert cannot throw off, any more than Ivan can his horribly bonhomous devil. In all these texts, the sense of hellish claustrophobia retains its hold, but in each it is modulated quite differently. It never hardens into stereotype, unlike the view of everyday life as a domain of inescapable banality, an impediment to intellectual activity, which gives many Russian texts, from Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done to the final part of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a strange vacancy at their heart, with specific settings treated as though they were of no more consequence than the standard fittings of a station waiting room before a train is boarded to head off somewhere more interesting. The most vivid evocations of Christ in Russian literature are of failed Christs: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, whose commitment to salvation through love destroys Nastas’ya Filippovna rather than saving her, and Ieshua, the eccentric, holy-fool Jesus of Bulgakov’s debunked Jerusalem in Master and Margarita.
If the canonical Gospel texts have been reflected in Russian literature only obliquely, though, the absorption of writers in eschatology, or the ‘four last things’ of Christian theology (death, judgement, heaven, and hell), has made the Apocalypse a central book for them. This is particularly clear in texts written during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pessimism of the fin de siècle inspired interest not only in the writings of such intellectual nihilists as Nietzsche or Oswald Spengler, but also in the Orthodox tradition of looking forward to the destruction of the wicked secular world and the establishment of religious rule. Successive historical catastrophes – national defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the ‘year of revolutions’ that followed, the First World War, Revolution, and the Russian Civil War – were represented by writers using apocalyptic imagery. A particularly striking example was Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard. The book had some allegiance to the historical fiction of Tolstoy, in that the experience of one family and their connections was used to stand for the experience of historical subjects in general. But Tolstoy’s emphasis upon history as a dialectic between predestination and human will (according to the epilogue of War and Peace, the wise historical subject was one who did not place too high a value upon the import of his or her own actions) had been replaced by a stress on malign destiny. This reinforced the powerlessness of historical subjects, who were left only with the power to regret. In this, Bulgakov echoed the moralism of Russian medieval texts such as The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Baty, where defeat and destruction were visited upon God’s people ‘because of our sins’: ‘A great year but a fearful year was the year of Our Lord 1918’, the novel begins, and the arrival in Kiev of the vicious peasant leader Petlyura, tales of whose atrocities are shown spreading round the city as he approaches, is accompanied by cosmic portents:
Quite suddenly the grey background in the gap between the domes burst open, and an unexpected sun showed in swirling dark dimness. It was vaster than any sun people in the Ukraine had ever seen, and a true scarlet, like pure blood.
(Chapter 16)
In a world where the immanence if not the existence of God had become subject to serious doubt, it was the antichrist, and satanic forces more generally, that could be imagined as physically present in the material world. Just so, when the body – notably absent from Romantic and Symbolist writing – re-asserted itself in the writing of Russian Modernism, this was often as a detested ‘envelope’ for the mind or the spirit. The hatred felt by the narrators of Yury Olesha’s Envy, or Nabokov’s Lolita, for their physical selves is matched in Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘The Year 1972’, which represents the lyric hero’s self as ‘stinking of breath and creaking of joints/a blot on the mirror’ and with ‘enough caries in my teeth/to map out Ancient Greece, at least’.
The emphasis on death and punishment has often drawn (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) on the strong vein of anti-physicality in Russian Orthodox culture. Earlier manifestations of this in Russian literature had included Derzhavin’s ‘On the Death of Prince Meshchersky’ (1779), which stressed the universality of decay (‘The monarch and the captive are alike food for worms’). Later ones included Tolstoy’s Confession (1879–80), with its extraordinary image, borrowed from an Eastern legend, of the living human suspended over the abyss on a tree-trunk gnawed by a serpent. But if Derzhavin’s or Tolstoy’s response to the inevitability of death had been to stress the importance of a virtuous life, twentieth-century texts tended to represent the alternative and better reality as something elusive and insubstantial. It was associated with mysterious, uncommunicable experience, what Aleksandr Blok called, in one of his poems addressed to the Beautiful Lady, ‘the call of dim life/Splashing secretly within me’. It manifested itself in the colours of ‘non-being’, of death and of spiritual life at one and the same time, whiteness and transparency. Though, as David Bethea has pointed out, Utopian writing was the polar opposite of apocalyptic writing, in that it anticipated a paradise in the future (often a technological one) rather than mourning the loss of the ‘original pristine faith’ of the past, in practice the two discourses often exploited similar imagery – as, indeed, did Socialist Realism, whose spotless factories, ever-patient party officials, and peaceful, hard-working labourers made it a form of bastardized Utopianism. Just so did the traditions of pre-Petrine Russian religious literature find themselves preserved in Socialist Realism’s earnest commitment to expressing the ‘elevated belief of human beings in Sublimity’, as a typical Soviet Realist, Vera Panova, put it in 1972.