Over my Christmas break, I began a quest into Russian literature by reading works by the authors Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, and Alexander Pushkin. To help in this quest, my university librarian (and good friend!), Debby, suggested a new acquisition of How Russian Literature Became Great, by Rolf Hellebust, Associate Professor in Russian Studies at the University of Nottingham, England.

In How Russian Literature Became Great, Rolf Hellebust offers a scholarly discourse on literary traditions in the highly theoretical work of Russian literary criticism. His abstract theoretical framework and specialized terminology made it a challenging, but rewarding read. [ I kept my dictionary close at hand for definitions of new vocabulary, such as : epigonism, a posteriori, primogenitor, verisimilitude, etc.] Hellebust explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature in Russia from antiquity to the present, including literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories.

Fortunately, Hellebust includes in his book some of the authors and works that I have recently acquired for my personal library which made this a relevant and insightful read: Pushkin’s Boris Godunov; Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and On the Eve;  Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Resurrection; and Gorky’s Creatures That Were Once Men and Tales of Two Countries.

Secondly, Hellebust shows the social significance of nineteenth-century Russian Literature in comparison with that of French and German Literature, and he includes several of my favorite nineteenth-century authors such as : Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Voltaire, Goethe, and Hegel. Hellebust observes that Russian literature advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments that “could have only been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building”. The Russian example shows innovation, universality, and specificity at the heart of these modern conceptions of tradition, Hellebust explains (How Russian, Introduction).

What is the writer’s social function with national identity?

Hellebust asks the crucial literary-historical question of the writer’s social function and the equation of literature with national identity. I believe Hellebust would have benefited here from Jean Paul Sartre’s essay “What is Literature,” which he wrote after living through the German Occupation in France. In Sartre’s essay, he states:

“The writer is a speaker; he designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses, interpolates, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates. If he does so without effect, he is talking and saying nothing”(Sartre, 38).

Sartre asserts that once a writer is aware of what is going on in the world, he has a responsibility to speak. Silence is a refusal to speak and therefore violates the “code and law” of literature [see my post on Sartre].

To aid in his claim of the social function of Russian Literature, Hellebust quotes the novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky on the exceptional status of Russian writing:

“In countries where intellectual and social life is highly developed, there is, so to say, a division of labor among the various branches of intellectual activity, of which only one is known to us—literature” (How Russian, 1).

Russian literature, Hellebust adds, plays a more significant role in intellectual advancement than French, German, and English literature do in the advancement of their own nations; “and it bears heavier responsibilities than does any other literature” (2).

Is literature a collective experience or just the work of individual artists?

Hellebust sees Russian literature as a “cultural force” that has directed entire generations along a particular path. This force has been passed down from age to age and is linked together by one great historical principle. ”Russian literature exists as a single, well-formed, organic whole…In truth, no literature in the world has realized its prophetic mission like that of Russia” (Hellebust,2).

Russian Literature in the Nineteenth Century

To further his claim that Russian literature reveals its nations identity, Hellebust cites a famous Russian historian, Semyon Vengerov, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, contended that Russian literature “‘is the most remarkable phenomenon of the Russian spirit…Nowhere does it appear such an exclusive manifestation of national genius as it does with us’”( Geroicheskii kharakter russkoi literatury, 1911, 2).

Hellebust observes that this statement is directly correlated with the artistic greatness of the nineteenth century in Russia. From the twilight of poetry by Pushkin in the 1820s and 1830s to the great age of the novel by Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy some fifty years later, this is the period during which and for which the critics and historians claim that Russian authors were exceptional and were instrumental in the whole history of Russian literature. Most of these authors knew each other and took each other’s work “for their intertexts” (3). Dostoevsky claimed at the end of his career that “hardly ever, in any literature, over such a short period, did there appear so many talented writers as in Russia—one after the other, without interruption”(3).

Dmitry Mirsky, the classic English-language historian of the nineteenth-century canon, agreed with this assessment as he stated that this peak period of growth in the years after 1855 was the “‘finest quarter-century of achievement that any modern literature has ever witnessed’”(The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, 1992, 190).

A second support to Hellebust’s claim of national identity in the nineteenth century was inspired by the German Romantics such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, who asserted “A poet is the creator of a nation around himself…without poetry, we cannot even exist”(5). Herder promoted an idea of a national and patriotic renewal in which literature, grounded in common language, is enlisted to support a sense of individual pride and national identity (5).

Included in this list of German Romantics who inspired Russian writers is Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Grimm brothers, Heinrich Heine, Schubert, and Wagner. Hellebust cites Iván Berend who relates the writers and poets to “The most important messengers of Western ideas in the East…writers and artists filled a social and intellectual vacuum in these countries where a modern citizenry and middle class had been unable to emerge from the rigid framework of noble society” (57). The small “intelligentsia”, therefore, played a central political role in Russian culture.

My Connection to Hellebust’s Nineteenth-Century Comparative World Literature: Goethe and Longfellow

In my years of studying nineteenth century literature, I have found these same ideas from authors Goethe in German literature and Longfellow in English Literature.

In fact, Goethe took the next step to consider this idea of nation-building in world literature as he inquired: “Should different nations inform themselves about world literature and the other works in existence? One lives with those who are alive” (Goethe and World Literature, 1949, 46).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Because of the German Romantics who inspired Russian culture In the early nineteenth century, knowledge of the German language was spreading widely across Russia through translations of Germany’s best modern writers. In addition, works in German philosophy and science were introduced through periodicals.  These works were regarded with religious awe. According to Fritz Strich in Goethe and World Literature, “Russia’s intelligentsia wanted not only to merely read and understand these German works, but to possess completely their desire and intention” (Strich,285).

Most importantly, Goethe’s Werther was translated into Russian in 1788 and caused a great excitement despite the difference between the minds of eastern and western Europe. It was identified with the paganism of Classical antiquity. Goethe’s influence on Russian literature was quite different than his influence on the literatures of the West. In Russia, his influence tended to make thought more humane and European, thereby sparking a Renaissance movement that had been lacking in Russian thought.

A circle soon formed in Russia, the “Friends of Wisdom,” which aimed to make German thought known in Russia and to instill fresh life and youth into it (292). Two members of “Friends” who had translated Helena and Werther came to visit Goethe in Weimar in 1825. Goethe formed a great friendship with these linguists, Shevirev and Rozhalin, and stated, “we are brought closer to those distant eastern talents which are separated from us by a language less widely known”(295). Goethe’s poem “Helena” introduced Russian youth to “Classical-Romantic” literature.

Strich states that Goethe’s reputation and influence in Russia can be measured by two poems on his death from two important Russian writers: Baratynsky, the greatest of Russian elegiac poets, and Tyutchev, one of Russia’s greatest lyric poets. Baratynsky promises the dead poet everlasting fame because in his lifetime he had already attained  unity with the All and can now “soar towards the endless light”(298). ).[for more on Goethe’s influence on Russian Literature, see my post

Hellebust analyzes the relationship between German and Russian Literature, specifically between Goethe and Pushkin, in his chapter “The Canonic Moment”. Pushkin and Goethe have often been compared: “The great Goethe, conversing with a certain traveler about Russia and hearing about Pushkin, said, ‘Give this pen of mine to my colleague’”(Bartenev, Rasskazy o Pushkine, 1937, 139). This quote is attributed to the Russian poet Zhukovsky, who came to visit Goethe in Weimar and made a deep impression on him. When Zhukovsky left Weimar, he presented Goethe with a poem “To the Great and Good Man” in which he wrote:

“You are a youth upon God’s earth, and your spirit is still creative as was His. Your genius will not soon lay aside the garment familiar to us on earth. In the far North, your Muse has made the earth beautiful for me! And my genius Goethe gave life to my life” (Bartenev, 296).

According to Hellebust, this canonical moment promotes Pushkin as a national poet on par with those who enjoy the same exalted status abroad (How Russian Literature, 128).

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow was also very instrumental in bringing the Russian language and literature to the United States. As we know, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our nation was primarily aware of  international works available only in English. translation Longfellow did this. He brought German, French, and Russian language and literature to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century through his translations and tenure as the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College and Harvard University.

Longfellow lived in a new Country that encouraged and welcomed emigrants from all over Europe; he chose to travel to their countries to learn the language. The Colonies were a melting pot of little pockets of native speakers from Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Spain, and many more countries. What an opportunity to learn the cultures and languages of Europe right here on our soil. Yet, I understand the great importance of Longfellow’s desire to be immersed in these native countries, which held literature by their writers and scholars, to attend university lectures by these world-renowned Professors, and to visit imposing architecture and landscapes. Longfellow had a notable, if indirect, relationship with Russian literature and culture through his broad study of European languages and the translation of his works. He published Poems of Places, Russia, V. 20, in 1876.[see my post on Longfellow and world literature here]

Conclusion

Voltaire invented the notion of eternal classicism and elevated those writers henceforth called classic to an unattainable summit of literary art (Siècle de Louis XIV, 1751, 184). In How Russian Literature Became Great, Hellebust argues that this especially applies to the tradition of Russian literature.

In his conclusion, Hellebust states that this tradition is “a virtual text of texts…a text of the culture as a whole, not simply the sum of all the literary texts attributed to it” (169). This would include literary criticism, biography, and the history of literature. This text of tradition, he continues, is more than a list of works or authors or ideas and norms, and certainly more than a scholarly explanation of how these all relate to one another.

Hellebust’s work helped me place the newly discovered works of nineteenth-century Russian Literature into the context of world literature from this time period, specifically, for me, the literature of the American, French, and German languages. It specifically places the “writers as symbolic links between literature and the actual world”. Hellebust’s function of this book is “to show how the great writers receive, transmit, and contribute to the totality of aesthetic value that is at the heart of the tradition”(170).

Works Cited

Hellebust, Rolf. How Russian Literature Became Great. Cornell University Press, 2023.