Introduction

Abstract

The Russians were latecomers to European civilisation. Isolated for centuries by their subjugation to the Tatars and unable to share the fruits of the Renaissance; oppressed by an autocratic régime that encouraged no intellectual activity; socially and economically retarded by the institution of serfdom; worshipping in a Church distrustful of foreign influence and secular culture — for all these reasons they altogether lacked until the eighteenth century a tradition of philosophy, poetry, prose, drama or letters of the sort that had gradually developed in the West since the Middle Ages. When a secular culture did emerge in Russia, in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was to a considerable extent an artificial growth, imitative of Western genres. To Belinsky, beginning his career as literary critic in 1834, Russia still lacked a literature, if by literature one meant a coherent body of writings that were internally related to one another and at the same time sprang from the native experience. The French traveller, the Marquis de Custine, confirmed the impression of the Russians as a voiceless people living in servitude and barbarism in his mordant account of Russia as he found it in 1839. Likewise Thomas Carlyle, speaking at the same period, detected among the Russians ‘no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times’.