In my last blog, I gave an overview of Rolf Hellebust’s How Russian Literature Became Great, in which he explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature in Russia from antiquity to the present.

For this blog, I will focus specifically on Chapter Three of Hellebust’s Essays:

 “Literary History and National Identity”

To the Russian people/He showed a lofty destiny—Pushkin of Napoleon

After Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, there was an awakened national consciousness that motivated the cultural elite to refocus on Russia’s destiny through literature and literary criticism (Hellebust, 55). The “Literary History and National Identity” section of Hellebust’s book looks at the 1840’s, which were dubbed the “remarkable decade” by critic Pavel Annenkov, as the development of German idealism and romanticism became an inspiration to the Russian literary community. German authors Herder, Schlegel, Hegel, Schelling, and Gottlieb Fichte led the newly pre-romantic thought centered around their national identity and inspired Russian literature.

Herder was the greatest inspiration to the Russian literary community during this time. As Hegel chose to diminish the role of the individual in history, Herder emphasized both the individual writer and the national culture.

Hellebust explains Herder’s position that the human condition “posits an essential duality between the world with its mundane impediments and the infinite realm of our aspirations” (56). He explains that as humans, we exist in both the natural and spiritual realms; therefore, an artist in the literary tradition stands between these two worlds—that of actual history (real events, people, dates, political movements) and that of tradition’s symbolic history (myths, legends, religious narratives, collective memory, etc). Herder argued that the Volk, or nation, understands itself not just through facts of the past, but through stories. Therefore, the artist must stand between the concrete world and the meaningful world.

This is one reason I am drawn to the literature of the United States, France, Germany, and Russia. For the past twenty-five years, I have been obsessed with these writers and their literature as they help me understand the history and culture of these nations at unique crossroads, just as Herder describes. These writers did not merely record history; they interpreted it. They bridged history and identity and helped me connect these two worlds. Thank you, Herder.

Hellebust continues to assert that as Revolutions reshaped nations (the French Revolution, the Civil War in United States, the Russian Revolution), national identities were being formed.

Many of the authors of this time lived through these revolutions—Hugo, Tolstoy, Longfellow—and wrote about how it felt to live through them. The poet’s role in the pursuit of national identity remained “an article of faith” throughout this era across the European continent; this “faith,” in central and eastern Europe in particular, was not just religious; it was political (56).

The works of the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron work were embraced with greater passion in Poland, Hungary, and Russia than in England. Writers and artists filled a social and intellectual vacuum in these countries where the middle class had been unable to emerge from the rigid framework of “noble society”(57).

We see in nineteenth-century Russian writing that prose realism replaced the unhealthy idealism of romantic poetry. There became a “clear-eyed focus on material existence and its ills” instead. Works from Russian literature, according to Belinsky, “do not make up or fabricate, but express facts of actuality”. The idiosyncrasies and innovations of Russian writers are measured less against those of their compatriots than against the standards of the West (60).

“One of the greatest intellectual successes of our time consists in our finally understanding that Russia has indeed had its own history, a history in no way like that of even a single European state”(Belinsky, 69).

Work Cited

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