Conclusion

Abstract

This concluding chapter reviews the model of Russian literary tradition constructed in the previous chapters. Because of the peculiarities of its path and its cultural situation in relation to western Europe, nineteenth-century Russia provides an asymptotic test case for the concept of a modern, postromantic national literary tradition. As in other countries, the Russian tradition advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal “ideal order among themselves.” Yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment, during the golden nineteenth-century age of national political and literary historiography, and of nation building in general. The Russian example reveals with particular clarity the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity that have lain at the heart of modern conceptions of artistic tradition. It also shows the fullest elaboration of those cultural mechanisms that have evolved, despite all the contradictions, to preserve the image of a unified tradition that is essential for the creation of a unified national consciousness, however insoluble the contradictions that cleave the nation itself. The chapter then emphasizes Russia’s continuing eagerness to fill the empty ideological vessel of its political greatness with cultural content.