Fifteen Eighty Four

When the editors of The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature first contacted me with a request to serve on the volume’s advisory council, they promised that their demands on my time would be “neither too frequent nor too arduous.”  They were true to their word, and as a result I can claim little credit for the resulting volume.  By the time I signed on, the editors had already outlined the scope, envisioning four parallel histories, structured around Russian literature’s Movements, Mechanisms, Forms and Heroes.  The book was six years in the making, and the cohesiveness of the project was aided by the pandemic, because more contributors shared and discussed one another’s work on Zoom than could possibly have been present at the workshops in Cambridge initially envisioned.  Having eavesdropped and kibbitzed at those virtual transatlantic sessions, I find myself in the position of a traveler who returns home after a long voyage to discover with amazement the palace or, to set the scene more specifically in the context of Russian collectivism, the scholarly phalanstery that has been built in his absence.

Several aspects of this new volume are worth highlighting.  First is the extent to which it reorganizes the way we conceive the history of Russian literature by radically reducing the status of the Author as the fundamental building block of literary history.  For those of us who grew up with Victor Terras’s Handbook of Russian Literature as a go-to source, and who took comprehensive exams based on lists of authors, with the titles of their individual works huddled incestuously below their names, this change comes as a fundamental shake-up.  It is also a marked difference between this volume and the recent History of Russian Literature published by Oxford University Press.  That tome was organized according to the traditional parameter of chronology, and its historical narrative was routinely interrupted by case studies naming a particular writer.  If one leaves out critics, the table of contents of this Cambridge volume contains the name of only one author – Mayakovsky.  In all other places, where one might expect to find author’s names, a reader will find the names of works: “A Nineteenth-Century Verse Form: The Onegin Stanza”; “A Nineteenth-Century Prose Form: A Hero of our Time.”

One might ask, to whom else but Pushkin would the Onegin Stanza belong?  True enough, but tables of contents often contain unnecessary information to help the uninformed shape an understanding of the rounded loaves they are about to receive.  Likewise, attempts to use the index of the New Cambridge History  to reconstruct author-focused knowledge will lead to frustration for those who seek to group their sense of history around specific bodies and specific names, references to which are scattered throughout this 922-page text. And a canonical, chronologically ordered attempt is further thwarted by the way in which a single history has become a quadrivium, each history departing from but also reinforcing and recalling the others.

The Name of the Author has not been completely effaced in this volume, of course, just symbolically muted, although, as I once was conflictingly advised by two senior colleagues when deciding whether to accept an invitation at a university which wasn’t going to pay me, certain things like an honorarium – or a table of contents – can be merely or highly symbolic. Authorship is still important as a measure of scholarship; the scholars writing the chapters are all named in the table of contents, and the word “author” is used most densely in this volume in its list of contributors:

She is the author of State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin.

She is the author of The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol.

He is the author of several books on Russian poetry and poetics ,including The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry) etc.

But there are so many authors that this list of contributors has the complementary impact of organizing these individual scholars into a merged chorus, and not only is the singular foundational status of the author drawn into question, but of particular texts as well.  The four different histories contribute to a set of frameworks in which the definition and significance of a given work can blur and float.  This instability of author and work is quite appropriate to a history of literature in Russia.  Two of the History’s entries, in particular, provide an engaging autoreferential lens for the entire enterprise. 

In certain respects, the New Cambridge History of Russian Literature is a devotional text, as that concept is defined in Simon Franklin’s opening chapter.   As Franklin writes: “Literature of the age of devotion should not be imagined as a sequence of definitively established works created by known and named authors…At one end of the spectrum were works in what has been called a closed tradition [with named authors]. … However, the further one moves from scripture and liturgy, the more open the tradition becomes; the less fixed the text, the weaker its association with any named author”.  Franklin continues: “The work is the totality of its sequential and co-existing realisations in time. It is a field of variously actualised possibilities and mutations. No embodiment is definitive; the story exists only in its mutations. The work is not a fixed thing but a field of variously realised possibilities that can continually reshape and recontextualise themselves over an extraordinarily long timespan.”

For decades far too many Western scholars of Russian literature have paid insufficient attention to religion. As part of my graduate training, I received virtually no training in the culture or Orthodoxy, and it was only much later that I realized how much praying at the altar of Russian formalism had blinded me to an essential context for the study of Russian literature.  The New Cambridge History takes us back to the monastery in its dissolution of more modern paradigms. 

But at the other end of the spectrum, Josephine von Zitzewitz’s examines a different but uncannily familiar dynamic.  In her discussion of samizdat, the self-published literature of the late Soviet period, she writes: “The author lost control over their own text the moment he or she ‘published’ it; this was the price of it reaching the reader. Samizdat thus challenged the Gutenberg model that was established when print made it possible to widely reproduce identical physical copies of a text. This paradigm presupposes that the text has been created by one or several individually known authors; that the printed text is final; and that it is the author or authors, together with the editors and publishers, who have ultimate responsibility for the text.”

Let’s imagine a not, I hope, entirely hypothetical reader who reads the New Cambridge History from cover to cover.  As such a reader moves through the volume, the four sections will talk to each other and eventually they will begin to merge in that reader’s mind, as she attempts to produce a single mental narrative.  The history of Russian literature will become, in other words, a version of the Passion, with four narratives giving way to one single story.  (That synthesizer of the Gospels, Tolstoy, angry at not being afforded a chapter of his own, would take the New Cambridge History and hammer its four parts out into one single narrative.).

But here I want to throw one more book into this mix: Pierre Bayard’s only pseudo-comic How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, because that is what a book like the New Cambridge History will enable many of its readers to do.  Bayard points out two things.  First, knowing what is in a book is often less important than being able to put books in conversation with one another.  Each of us may have our own “inner library,” the book or books through the phantasmatic memory of which we see all other books; our shared “collective library” puts these books into a system of knowledge which is never quite stable.

Bayard makes another relevant point: there is really no such thing as reading a book, because the instant we read something we begin to forget it.  A book persists as an imperfect memory, not identical in one reader’s mind to its “text” in a second’s. On the other hand, and this is really comforting, there is almost no such thing as not having read a book, because as part of a shared culture we have so many proximate attachments to so many texts in the collective library.  As one of the contributors to the volume, Anna Berman, has told me, the members of her family live by a wise and useful refrain: “I haven’t read that book personally.”  This is the position in which even specialists find themselves with regard to a canon as massive as Russian literature’s.  Yet there are degrees of impersonal reading, one can reread a book impersonally — and more thoroughly — by encountering it in a variety of contexts and as part of a number of different, compelling narratives.

To continue this line of thought, readers of the New Cambridge History will benefit from access to a collective library that admits and revels in its canonical mutability.  And make no mistake, the structure of the History ensures that these narratives will sink in, because through recursive readings of a single chronology written by different hands, the reader will almost certainly be engaged in a self-reinforcing curriculum that grounds knowledge in a firm foundation while disarmingly never pretending that that foundation is firm.  In this respect, the New Cambridge History manages to be both positivistic and post-modern.  It takes Russian literature back to its devotional, collective roots and remains devoutly faithful to its origins, even as it diversely tracks Russian literature’s growth in new and productive ways. Russian history has produced some disastrous collaborative experiments – from the communal apartment to collectivization.  The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature confirms that the best phalansteries are the ones on paper.