The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature Mikhail Epstein

The Irony of the Ideal:

Paradoxes of Russian Literature

Mikhail Epstein

Russian literature is prone to self–contradictions. This book investigates the paradoxical logic of self–denial characteristic of certain authors and literary epochs and trends. A “paradox” is a situation or utterance that, according to its own logic, unexpectedly contradicts itself, refutes its own premises, and lays waste to its own foundations. Besides this international term, Russian also has colloquial words and idioms to express the experience of the perversity of existence: za chto borolis’, na to i naporolis’ ‘the very thing we were fighting for is what we skewered ourselves on’ (to describe people being harmed by the unintended results of their actions).

This manner of moving from thesis to antithesis is quite typical of Russia. Such a dialectic has little in common with the Hegelian or Marxist dialectic, where one presumes that both thesis and antithesis are sublated (the unity of and struggle between opposites). Instead it is a sort of reinforcement and intensification of the thesis, of taking the thesis to the extreme where it turns into its own antithesis and begins to undo itself. This kind of dialectic can be called ironic, in that it returns to the original thesis, but now with a minus sign. As Andrey Bely wittily remarked, the triumph of materialism in the USSR led to the abolition of the material. Striving for the highest ideals– freedom, good, greatness, reason, harmony, happiness – in each case brings forth the reverse and turns into suffering, poverty, slavery, absurdity. Russian literature, like Russian history, is full of such unexpected twists and the pathos of tragic irony.

If a culture has no established neutral zone, it starts to be thrown from one extreme to the other, from piety to godlessness, from asceticism to debauchery. Binary thinking leads to revolutions, to a “revolving” model of development where opposites rapidly change places, but no gradual evolution occurs. All the extremes are accentuated: God and the devil, holiness and sin, spirit and flesh, religion and atheism, Christianity and paganism, the God-Man and the Man-God, the state and the individual, power and anarchy… Even when Russian culture makes an attempt to unite its poles, this is not accomplished through their evolutionary moderation, but by their direct confrontation, as in the images of the “excessively broad” person in Dostoyevsky who simultaneously contemplates the void below and the void above, the ideal of Sodom and the ideal of the Madonna.

Russian culture has acquired a means of working with these oppositions that consists of “twisting” and “inverting” them: the lofty and grand reveals its demonic traits, while the low and petty displays traits of spiritual asceticism. The culture’s dynamism comes through in its supercharged paradoxicality. If Peter the Great and even Russia itself take on demonic features in Pushkin’s and Gogol’s depictions, it is also true that one of the littlest “little men,” Bashmachkin, evolves as a literary type to become Prince Myshkin, the most exalted image in Russian literature. This model of the ironic “inversion” of opposites allows us to penetrate into the persistent structural idiosyncrasies of Russian culture, which recur in its various historical stages: pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post– Soviet.

Joseph Brodsky famously stated that “appetite for metaphysics distinguishes a work of art from mere belles-lettres.” A peculiarity of this book is the attention to the metaphysical underpinnings of Russian literature, to its intellectual “underside,” the indirect and “accidental” positing of eternal questions that sets it apart from philosophy. The author is more interested in the metaphysical “unconscious” of Russian literature than in the more or less well-known philosophical and religious views of its creators. The book examines, for example, Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman and his “Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” both written in October 1833, as two variations on a single metaphysical theme: “the power of humans over the sea and the vengeance of the unrestrained elements.” The book explores the image of Russia in the famous lyrical digressions in Dead Souls as a development of Gogol’s demonology (“Viy”, “The Portrait”), with Russia unwittingly presented as a witch. The poetry of Pasternak and Mandel’shtam is interpreted in the context of the Jewish spiritual traditions that they inherited but hardly realized completely—Hasidism and Talmudism.

All of this is done not for the purpose of “exposing” the writers’ incomprehension of themselves, but to envision the interconnection between the metaphysical images and artistic ideas at work in the entire space of Russian literature.

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