#anthony briggs

[russia-libertaire]

Alexander Pushkin

'This writer's greatest achievement, apart from the literary quality of his work as a whole, in which the disciplines of classicism mesh with new freedoms released in the age of Romanticism, is nothing less than to have reformed his national language. This bold claim is no exaggeration. As he grew up, the young Pushkin was presented with at least three different linguistic forces existing as separate entities in his large country. Posh people spoke French, ignoring or despising ordinary Russian, though Pushkin heard a good deal of this tongue from the local lads and also from his dear old nanny, Arina Rodionovna. In addition, he was continually subjected in church and at school to the rich sonorities of Old Church Slavonic. By some miracle, almost without thinking about it, he created modern Russian simply by using it, choosing at will between elegant Gallicisms, vernacular Russian and his nation's equivalent of our King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer, with a sensitivity to sound, style and meaning that gives him an elevated place in the annals of linguistic reform. The newly expressive modern language was snapped up immediately by writers such as Lermontov and Gogol, and gratefully assimilated by all the (now legendary) Russian authors who followed on so soon. Every writer since Pushkin has acknowledged the latter's significant contribution to his rapidly developing culture, and they all look back with special affection to Yevgeny Onegin.'

Anthony Briggs, introduction to Yevgeny Onegin

[evendwarvesstartedsmall-blo-blog]

this is interesting: Gogol's role in the exile of Dostoyevsky

"

One unfortunate artistic development darkens the last period of Gogol's life. In 1847 he published his last work, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. This was a new departure with clear purpose. In his mood of growing self-criticism and religiosity he had begun to feel several needs in one: to repudiate the frivolity of his earlier works, to explain his meanings and set a new moral tone, to perfect himself and declare affirmative personal values, to portray more positive characters (in the continuation of his novel), and, since he was finding it difficult to integrate the artistic with the didactic, to publish his ideas on morality in a volume of thoughtful essays intended for the benefit of Russia and the world at large. He felt certain that his ideas would be welcomed by a grateful public, and alter attitudes in the direction of ethical and spiritual improvement. Alas, his efforts at organised moral philosophy turned out to be no more successful than his earlier teaching of world history. Worse than that, he had brought about a double calamity. First, his ideas suffered from the kind of juvenile simplicity that no one was going to lend a serious ear to, and beyond that, they swerved right away from the cause of social and political reform that had apparently been so well served by his earlier comic exposure of human foibles and society deficiencies. This work was so awful that it offended even his friends, and repelled interested parties of both left and right. Selected Passages upheld the existing Tsarist autocracy and the patriarchal system with such vigour that landowners were advised, for instance, to prevent their peasants from reading anything other than the Bible lest they pick up dangerous ideas. His strongest supporter, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, furiously denounced Gogol's new work; the open letter in which he did so became famous throughout the land, even though it had been published abroad and suppressed at home by the censor. Belinsky himself was saved from cruel reprisals only by his death a few months later (in 1848), and the reading of this letter to a dissident group was the chief charge levelled against Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which led to a death sentence commuted at the last moment to a decade of imprisonment and exile.

"

(from Anthony Brigg's introduction to Gogol's Dead Souls)