'The Russian Efflorescence'

In 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo, Clarence Brown edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, an anthology with selections ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In his introduction Brown writes: 

“I now look back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will prevent your sharing. These writers, after all, continue in our time the tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of the three supreme literatures of the world.”

 

Brown was the translator and biographer of Osip Mandelstam. During the Cold War he befriended the poet’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and smuggled the manuscript of her memoir, Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970), out of the Soviet Union. Now, while reading Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023) by Gary Saul Morson, I find this close echo of Brown’s sentiment:

 

“With the possible exception of Shakespearean England or classical Greece, there has probably never been a period of greater literary creativity. And the Russian efflorescence was still more concentrated.”

 

Morson refers to the explosion of Russian literary genius during a brief period in the nineteenth century. He notes the old saw about Russia’s greatest masterpieces all appearing during the lifetime of a single man – Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910): Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Goncharov, Leskov, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and, of course, Tolstoy himself. Comparing this list with English literary history, Morson writes:

 

“To match the pace of Russian achievement, all [of England’s] greatest authors – Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, along with Pope, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, and George Eliot – would have to have been contemporaries or near contemporaries.”

 

When I was young I assumed everyone, in spite of Soviet Communism, would have fallen for the romance of the Russian soul. I could detect the “Russianness” in Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. I remember sitting outside the guidance counselor’s office in eighth grade, reading my first Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, while waiting to be called in. I had arrived at the dream sequence in which Raskolnikov witnesses the beating to death of an old horse (with crowbars!). Nothing I had ever read seemed so intolerable. A century-old novel from an alien world moved me more than any other book. Morson writes:

 

“[W]hat makes great literature great—in fact, what makes a work literature in the first place rather than just a historical document—is its ability to transcend its immediate context. If all one sees in Hamlet is a document about its epoch, one has bypassed what is most important about it.”