POETRY IN EXILE
599
disappears. On the anniversary of his disappearance, celebrated as a politi–
cal event by the radical intelligentsia, he reappears as a guilt-ridden,
repentant pilgrim who has seen a brighter light. Taking the microphone,
he urges his audience of intellectuals to repent and to experience, as he
has, a religious rebirth.
Tolstoy, too, felt the impulse to move from the "limitations" of a
merely aesthetic commitment to the claims of absolute authority that
distinguish the prophet. The chains that bound Dostoevsky to hard labor
and a prison cell were attached to his coffin and clanked down Nevsky
Prospect as thousands followed his body to the grave. The themes of the
"new man" and of the burden of the "intelligentsia obligation" to the
suffering peasant, raised by Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov in the 1860s,
echoed through all the works and institutions of Russian literature for
almost three decades. Nor did the utopian-transformative strain disappear
with the rising influence of decadence and symbolism in the 1890s.
Aesthetics assumed a new importance. There was a vital reanimation of
religious life and a strong reaction against the pseudo-scientific, positive–
realist attitudes of the 1860s. Portentousness, grandiosity, outsize gestures
with too little motivation, a certain muteness and inexpressibility of final
aspiration, all these could be seen as the characteristic weaknesses of Rus–
sian literature. They can be seen parodied in Milan Kundera's well–
known outburst against Dostoevsky or in the more popular and philis–
tine vein of S.
J.
Perelman's and Woody Allen's lampoons of the Russian
novel. The strength of this literature, however, lay in its seriousness of
purpose, its self-assurance, and the depth of its humane vision. The great
scholar Erich Auerbach valued Russian literature for its fresh recapitula–
tion of a Christian creatural-realist aesthetic, seeing it as the realm of a
kind of secularized Christianity.
Curiously, neither did the state entirely forget its bond to literature.
There was always something essentially literary about Russian civilization,
by
which I mean an externally imposed shaping artifice that characterized
the state as much as it did the intelligentsia, which was, after all, the
state's creation. But the intelligentsia had been created to perform mid–
dle-class functions without the independently sustained economic base of
the European bourgeoisie. Literature identified itself on the one hand
with the intelligentsia's need to achieve some of the fostering warmth,
protection of rights, and opportunity for autonomous activity that were
provided in Europe by the formations of civil society. On the other hand
it aligned itself with the basic humility of the all-enduring peasant. Such
identification seemed threatening to the stability of the autocratic regime
with its insecurely grounded social base. Yet censorship laws were all
worded as if their intention were to "protect" literature, not to suppress
it. Censors were often highly educated people and included in their
