Andrei Bitov on "Russian Wealth"

Great Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, Fedor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Others) mused about the dilemmas of late imperial Russia. Some of them penned specific proposals as to what should be done--Herzen's novel What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat', 1863), Tolstoy's philosophical tract of nearly the same title, So What Are We to Do? (Tak chto zhe nam delat', 1886), and Lenin's What Is to Be Done (Chto delat') of 1902. In addition to listing the social ills that they desired to see eradicated, some social critics of the day identified as well what deserved to be protected--those aspects of Russian culture that characterized and enriched the nation. With the late-twentieth-century demise of the Soviet Union, these grand questions occupy the attention of great thinkers once again. Writers cum "public intellectuals" such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Bitov speak and write extensively on the Russia that they have inherited, about what has been lost (as well as jettisoned) over the last two centuries, and what has endured. As an emblem of these polemics, which pursued Russia's essence and the abiding question of "What is to be done?", we might consider the two incarnations of a journal entitled Russian Wealth (Russkoe bogatstvo; translated also as Russian Riches and Russian Treasures). It was first published from 1876 to 1918 (until the Bolshevik Revolution). It was then "reincarnated" in the post-Soviet period, from 1991 to 1994. Populist editors of the nineteenth-century journal, Nikolai Mikhailovskii and Vladimir Korolenko, identified the wealth of Russian culture and civilization generally from "below." For them, Russia's treasure lay in the common folk (narod) who had forever fed and clothed the nation. This understanding was not lost in the reincarnation of Russian Wealth in 1991. Yet, the editor and publisher of the late-twentieth-century journal, Anatolii Zlobin, and his editorial board did not strive simply to replicate its populist predecessor from the nineteenth century. They considered Russia's riches as emanating from "above" as well: "Russian Wealth is a major publishing innovation: each issue is dedicated to only one author, offering the reader works created in various genres." (1) The editors strove to encompass the wealth of Russian high culture that had long been recognized in the pre-Soviet period by particular iconic Russian writers who had been graced by it. Two members of that pantheon, Russia's national poet Alexander Pushkin (born in 1799) and Vladimir Nabokov (born in 1899), both of aristocratic heritage, bore witness to the decline and fall (respectively) of the Russian aristocracy. Yet, recognizing the contributions of high culture to the Russian "treasure-trove," they gave testimony (figuratively and, at times, even literally) to the particular benefits of privilege for the arts. Pushkin's commitment to aristocratic privilege was decidedly more ambivalent than that of the famously disdainful Nabokov. At various times and in various ways Pushkin called into question the tacit acceptance of social inequality. Scholars have chronicled and have even attempted to reconcile the protean Pushkin with the arrogant aesthete, the dandy, and even the revolutionary. For example, inherent contradiction, which is at the core of Yurii Lotman's understanding of Pushkin's politics and aesthetics, characterizes Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1833) against the backdrop of the Enlightenment and the Decembrist revolt of 1825. Lotman states: "The proponent of enlightenment, the 'intelligent man,' will inevitably be a lover of freedom." (2) Aristocratic privilege provides the opportunity for enlightenment. Yet, enlightened thinking must call into question the very system that provided that opportunity. Onegin's political consciousness remains undeveloped because he chose not to avail himself of the opportunity granted him for enlightenment. …