DARIUSZ TOLClYK
POETICS AND POLITICS
Russian literary criticism waits for its own
The Captive Mind,
in which
the problem of various writers' attraction to communism, especially in
the 1920s and 1930s, would be given as expansive study as Czeslaw
Milosz's gave to Eastern European writers and Stalinist dogmas. Yet does
the problem of a writer's attraction to communism still pertain to
literary criticism? Can it be described in literary terms, or is its only
literary context in the fact that we are aware of the political choices of
writers? At least in some cases, there does exist a crucial connection
between the parameters of literary expression assumed by a writer and his
ideological options. For if we treat the parameters of literary expression
as remaining in an inseparable relationship to a writer's philosophical
model of the universe - either consciously assumed or, perhaps more
often, immanently implied in a chosen descriptive strategy - then the
question of a writer's ideological choices ceases to be an extraliterary
one.
The work of the post-realist Soviet writer Yuri Olesha (1899-1960)
embodies such a close mutual conditioning between poetical and politi–
cal options. The contradictions in his peculiar combination of ideologi–
cal and poetic assumptions contributed to, if not determined, Olesha's
artistic fate . The literary preoccupations of nineteenth-century Russian
sentimentalist and realist poetics were consequential to Olesha's develop–
ment, and the nineteenth-century writers' conception of nature is
reflected in his own ideological appropriation of the concepts of truth
and beauty.
Modern Russian prose began in the 1790s with Nikolai Karamzin. It
owes him not only its original secular idiom but also its "sentimental
education ." Karamzin's sentimentalist works confronted the Russian
reader with an entirely new sensibility and immediately reverberated in
the culture. Soon, Karamzinian literary heroes and heroines became the
models for many real-life contemporary lovers. Never before had Russia
experienced a literary fashion of such powerful appeal.
The title heroine of the most famous of all Karamzin's novellas,
Poor Liza,
a sentimental peasant girl, confesses to her mother, "Ah,
mother dear! What a beautiful morning. How cheerful everything is in
the field! Never have the larks sung so well, never has the sun shone so
brightly, never have the flowers smelled so pleasant!" Liza speaks in the
