A History of Russian Literature by Kahn Andrew (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 98, 1, 2020 Reviews Kahn, Andrew; Lipovetsky, Mark; Reyfman, Irina and Sandler, Stephanie. A History of Russian Literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2018. xix + 939 pp. Illustrations. Guides to further reading. Notes. Index. £69.00: $93.00. Happily, as we flounder about today at the mercy of too much auto-assembled information, the consciously authored literary history is flourishing. In humanities publishing, the market is healthy for both overviews and what might be called ‘underviews’. Each has its strengths and risks. An overview — such as the volume discussed here — is the comprehensive chronological story: fine-grained thick description, broad horizons, the slow crawl along the wide road with luxurious excursions into political and social context, all in one massively overweight tome. It co-exists in the field with the immensely popular underview: skinny underweight series paperbacks with such titles as Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2001) or Russian Literature: A Brief Insight (New York, 2010), in this instance both by Catriona Kelly and each built around Alexander Pushkin. Both long and short variants of historical viewing assume that wisdom in the humanities is not just mechanical or accretive (that is, not googled, tweeted or blogged) but takes time to think through. To aspire to historical wisdom is to be integrated, visionary, ‘voiced’, and willing to take risks and stands that endure beyond the passing moment. The special vulnerability of ‘very-shorts’ and ‘brief insights’ is their authorship by experienced individual minds, whose synthesizing brilliance compensates for all compressions and omissions. It is easy and pleasant to absorb such stripped-down, artful profiles of a literary tradition — and tiny single-authored surveys, which can inadvertently create new norms by their very elegance and quotability, are read as much for the author as for the subject matter. The vulnerability of the lengthy contextualized overview lies elsewhere. Today, any in-print survey pretending to fullness can be instantly outdated. All academic fields are under pressure to be constantly open to shifting global perspectives and previously unheard voices. Can even the most meticulous hard-copy linear narrative hope to keep up with these challenges? In my view, the new Oxford History of Russian Literature, a staggering accomplishment, manages to do so. This review suggests some reasons why. Generically, the Oxford History is a massive, multi-authored overview, supplemented by select under-views. Its overall structure is chronological, in five parts: ‘The Medieval Period’ (from the origins of writing through the end of the sixteenth century); ‘The Seventeenth Century’ (the literary fallout of the Church Schism followed by the embattled advent of humanism in theatre, REVIEWS 153 poetry and prose); ‘The Eighteenth Century’ (imported classicism, the rise of national narratives and satire); ‘The Nineteenth Century’ (with close attention to social classes, literary types, women writers and evolving readerships — but not tightly tethered to the old Romanticism-to-Realism model); and finally ‘The Twentieth and Twenty-first Century’ (in one unified sweep, with Soviet Communism tucked in between two freer, more experimental eras). Within each part, however, movement and mutual causation are more lateral than linear or temporal, more of a mesh than a ribbon. Official institutions mould writers,butviceversatoo;thehistoryofRussiansyllabicsandthensyllabotonics is in dialogue with the differing rules of Polish and Ukrainian versification. Thematic anchoring is provided by keywords (baroque, sobornost´, nihilism, skaz) and by the occasional topical under-view: a ‘case study’ set off in a shaded box. These case studies vary in length from a paragraph to several pages. Some are devoted to persons (Gogol´, Petrushevskaia, Elena Shvarts, Nabokov — for writers who fled Russia or were exiled are integrated into the fabric, not given a lens of their own). Other shaded boxes discuss objects (albums), processes (word-weaving, corporal punishment, the prorabotka or ‘political rebuke’), institutions (the Moscow-Tartu School), individual works (Lay of Igor’s Campaign, Prigov’s ‘Militsaner’), or a combination of persons, processes and texts (Leo and Sofia Tolstoi as diary-writers). A gorgeous inlay of colour illustrations begins with a leaf from the eleventh-century Ostromir Gospel, passes through regal portraiture and modernist design, and ends with Komar and Melamid’s Origin of Socialist Realism, a parodic icon featuring Joseph...