ABSTRACT
In the eyes of the world Russian literature is perhaps the chief glory of Russian culture. What the world knows, above all, is the classic Russian novel, whose great age was amazingly brief – a mere quarter century, all within the reign of Alexander II (1855-81), which saw the publication of the best works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Goncharov. Those with a deeper interest might extend their knowledge back to the time of Pushkin and Lermontov in the early nineteenth century, and forward to Chekhov and the modernist Silver Age – around a century altogether – so becoming aware that Russian literature has more to it than blockbuster narratives: in particular an intensely-developed poetic tradition. Few outsiders (and not all Russians) understand, however, how deeply literaturnost’ (‘literariness’) has been ingrained in Russian cultural consciousness over the thousand years since the Conversion, or realize that what is usually called Old Russian literature forms part of a distinctive tradition whose effects are far from being exhausted yet. Of course the forms of sophisticated literature, like the forms of upper-class behaviour, were changed radically and forcibly after Peter the Great’s westernizing measures, but many underlying older principles remained intact, to be revealed in numerous ways as time went on.
