Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In the article that opens this issue ("Where Angels Soar: Reading Russian Literature as a Single Text"), Igor' Kondakov ponders whether, in some distant future, it will be possible to distinguish between the various Russian literatures of the twentieth century. In a hundred years, will the literature of the Russian Silver Age seem so distinct from Soviet literature, or the literature of the Russian diaspora so different from post-Soviet literature, or official Soviet literature from dissident literature? Most likely not, according to Kondakov. From that distant vantage point, he argues, the differences between Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, Sholokhov and Babel, Fadeev and Platonov, Gorky and Solzhenitsyn will largely fall away, for "where angels soar" all of Russian literature of the twentieth century must ultimately appear as a single text. This single text—the product of "reciprocally referential and disputatious authors, their images and ideas, symbols and motifs, situations and conflicts, characters and subjects, themes and problems"—will of necessity make moot the categories that we are accustomed to using when we discuss Russian literature for a number of reasons, not the least of which is historical perspective. According to Kondakov, "once history has been overgrown with the ‘grass of oblivion’ " (to borrow Kataev's expression), it will not matter "who threw whom overboard from the steamship of modernity," for the truth will never lie in one or the other single view of literature so much as in the sum of all viewpoints. Moreover, all these viewpoints are the product of the same epoch, the same literary heritage, the same artistic and ideological struggle, and the same Russian readership regardless of the esthetic and ideological positions of authors or even of readers. When we understand this, Kondakov asserts, we will begin to read the past century differently. Texts that were "conceived as mutually exclusive" will "begin to converge, to merge," because they all respond to "a single set of traditions and norms and a unity of style and method that are rooted in Russian cultural history" itself. In other words, there is more that is inherently shared and common to the many different Russian literatures of the twentieth century than is usually acknowledged. Such a view of literary history, of course, is not particularly kind to authors, and, indeed, Kondakov follows Roland Barthes in arguing that the tragic contradictions and contrasts of the twentieth century wrote the text of Russian literature as much as any one author or creative camp. (To put it another way, The Gulag Archipelago would have been written with or without Solzhenitsyn.) By this approach, however, Kondakov aspires toward what Bakhtin called "outsidedness." By "abstracting ourselves from a certain time and space," Kondakov writes, quoting Bakhtin, "we free ourselves of obligations to the interpreted text." Such outsidedness makes it possible for us to distance ourselves from the "civil war" of Russian literature in order to see more clearly the larger "text" of the literature of the last century, the better to reclaim at last the corpus of twentieth-century Russian literature in its entirety.