Foreword

As a consequence of Peter the Great's reforms, eighteenth-century Russian culture was exposed to a massive influence from Western Europe. Peter's reforms aimed at developing a new, secularised culture, liberated from the control of the church and serving the purposes of the new ideology of enlightened absolutism. The church was subjected to the state and deprived of its role as ideological authority.

In the history of Russian literature these changes resulted in an abrupt break with the old, Church Slavonic tradition and with the Byzanto-Slav heritage that had continued to determine the development of Russian literature right up to the seventeenth century. From the second quarter of the eighteenth century this age-old Orthodox tradition was marginalised and replaced by an imaginative literature based on the adaptation of Western European Baroque and neo-Classicism to Russian conditions. By the end of the century Russian literature had become wholly Europeanised and secularised.

At the same time, however, new tendencies began to reach Russian literature from the West. In Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder had developed the theory that every nation has its own national spirit and culture, the highest expression of which is found in language and in folk poetry. It was in its folk songs Herder sought and found a nation's original mode of thought, its character, and principle of life, the "imprint of its heart." A nation that had been politically or culturally dominated by other nations could only recover its national cultural identity through the rediscovery of its history and folklore.

In Russia, these new Romantic ideas became particularly influential after Napoleon's invasion of 1812. From 1820 onwards the Romantic movement in Russia was in open revolt against the rules of French Classicism and the predominance of French culture. In their search for a national identity the Russian Romantics turned to the poetic heritage of the Slavs and to the half-forgotten culture of pre-Petrine Russia.

In Russian literary criticism of the 1820s the question of a national cultural identity was eagerly debated in connection with the new concept of a national literature, that is, a literature in which the national character of the Russian people could find expression. The debate centred around the idea of narodnost', a term introduced by the poet Petr Viazemskii in 1819 as the Russian equivalent of French nationalité in the sense of national quality or character.

In 1824, Aleksandr Pushkin joined the debate, defending what he saw as "true" Russian Romanticism against those to whom "Romanticism means Lamartine." In his unfinished essay "On narodnost' in literature" (1825), he defines the concept as a quality (dostoinstvo) in a writer and as an imprint (pechat') in a work, listing as its main ingredients climate, mode of government, and religious faith. These factors "give to every people a peculiar physiognomy which is to a greater or lesser degree reflected in the mirror of poetry."

In another unpublished text, "Notes on Russian history in the eighteenth century" (1822), he says that "the Greek creed, different from all others, gives us our particular national character" (grecheskoe veroispovedanie, otdel'noe ot vsekh drugikh, daet nam osobennyi natsional'nyi kharakter).

It is worth emphasising that Pushkin regarded the Orthodox, Byzanto-Slav tradition as a main constituent of narodnost' and the Russian national character. In this, his definition differs from the prevailing conceptions of narodnost' in the nineteenth as well as in the twentieth century.

In the nineteenth century, mainstream Russian literary criticism was anti-religious and atheistic, taking its lead from Belinskii and the revolutionary democrats, to whom narodnost' was not a cultural phenomenon, but innate - vrozhdena ot prirody - just like the physiological characteristics of a nation, according to the materialist definition of Nikolai Dobroliubov, taken up by Lenin and canonised in the Soviet period.

As a result of this definition, the Orthodox creed was no longer seen as a constituent part of the Russian national character. Consequently, it could also be dispensed within nineteenth-century Russian literary history, which to this day has been dominated by people whose axiology and ideological stance have prevented them from realising the importance of the Orthodox tradition in the development of a Russian national literature in the nineteenth century.

With the fall of the communist régime in Russia it became possible at long last for Russian scholars to return to Pushkin's definition of the Byzanto-Slav tradition, the "Greek creed," as the differentia specifica of narodnost' in Russian literature.

The essays published in this volume all congregate around this theme. They are revised versions of papers given at the conference Discontinuity and Reconstruction: The Byzanto-Slav Heritage and the Creation of a Russian National Literature in the Nineteenth Century, organised at Bergen in September 1994 as part of the project Rhetoric and the Translation of Culture, headed by Jostein Børtnes and Tomas Hägg at the Centre of the Study of European Civilisation, University of Bergen, and financed by the Norwegian Research Council.

The essays are arranged in three sections. In the first section, Vladimir Zakharov discusses the role of the Byzanto-Slav heritage from the point of view of Russian ethnopoetics, Ivan Esaulov analyses the Christian subtext of Russian literature as an expression of sobornost', the Orthodox idea of communality, while Victor Bychkov pursues the idea of Sophia or Holy Wisdom in Russian religious thought around the turn of the twentieth century.

The second section is devoted to the problem of paraphrase and the function of the Byzanto-Slav tradition in nineteenth-century Russian poetry. Here, Per-Arne Bodin focuses on the fate of the famous Akathistos hymn in Russia, the poetics of paraphrase is dealt with by Tatiana Malchukova as well as in the joint contribution of Jostein Børtnes and Ingunn Lunde, who is also the author of a rhetorical analysis of Pushkin's poem "Mirskaia vlast'."

The contributions grouped together in the third section are concerned with the role of the Byzanto-Slav tradition in nineteenth-century Russian prose. Malcolm Jones, Robin Feuer Miller, Diane Oenning Thompson, and Sophie Ollivier all centre their discussions around Dostoevskii, Knut Andreas Grimstad addresses the problem of Orthodox rhetoric in Leskov's novel Cathedral Folk, Marianna Raneva-Ivanova investigates Chekhov's use of the Christian motif of the Prodigal Son in the short story "Dreams."

We are grateful to Knut Andreas Grimstad of the University of Trondheim, NTNU, who translated the Russian contributions into English, and to our editorial advisors Ursula Phillips of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London and Diane Oenning Thompson of the University of Cambridge. Also, we thank the Norwegian Research Council for their financial support.

Cultural Discontinuity and Reconstruction: the Byzanto-Slav heritage and the creation of a Russian national literature in the nineteenth century
© 1997 The authors and Solum forlag A/S