Great Books tend to arise in the presence of great audiences.

On 19th-century Russia and the literary hotspot

Recently I started reading Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album, which is a series of short stories about the people of rural Russia, when I realized that I'd put off for too long learning about the social and economic and political makeup of a time/place (19th century Russia) that's probably the most productive time and place in Western literary history (after 4th/5th century Athens). It's still a bit astonishing honestly, because usually when a time and place is fertile on a literary level, whether Enlightenment France, Victorian England, Tang Dynasty China, it's because the society in question is also at the apex of its military and economic power. But in 19th-century Russia that's far from the case. After repelling Napoleon in 1812, Russia suffered a century of humiliating military losses, culminating in their defeat in WWI and the punishing treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But at the same time, they produced Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov—four of the most important writers in the 19th century (and Pushkin, Turgenev, and Goncharov weren't slouches either).

So I went looking for a book about 19th-century Russia. Strangely, once you go outside the big six Western civilizations—France, Italy, Spain, the UK, Rome, and Greece—it's very hard to find decent history books in English that are at something beyond the survey level. The book I found somewhere between an academic monograph and a textbook. It's largely concerned with Russia's administrative reforms in the 19th-century: its efforts to gets its economy, military, and civil administration in order. I read the book for background, so I could understand the world of Russian literature better, but when you see how mismanaged and backwards the country was, it’s impossible not to wonder—how did this country produce some of the century’s greatest writers?

Although Russia began the century by defeating Napoleon, it rapidly became clear that the country was a hopeless mess and was neither economically nor militarily on par with the rest of Europe. In attempting to fix its problems, the Russian emperors embarked upon successive waves of liberalization and crackdown--first the serfs get freed, then they get bound to the land again (albeit this time to the commune instead of to the landlord). First jury trials are introduced, then when too many people start getting off, the process of administrative punishment (essentially punishment by fiat, without trial or even charges) is instituted to take care of political criminals. First the creation of joint stock corporations is made easier, then it’s made almost impossible. First the district zemstvos are given power, then it's taken away, then it's given back again, then it's taken away again.¹

But we shouldn’t be too hard on them. Even nowadays, most nations find it very difficult to hit the sweet spot in terms of creating an economic / political environment that’s conducive to industrialization. As we know now, creating the kinds of market incentives that lead to increasing industrial productivity (as opposed to increasing cronyism and rent-seeking) is very difficult. Throughout history, most settled societies have been structured in such a manner that the most productive use of military, political, economic, or social power is through office-seeking: since the state is the most powerful actor, the person who captures control of state power is the person who will ultimately enrich themselves the most.² In a society that rewards office-seeking, it becomes positively fool-hardly to engage in market operations. Why put your wealth into building a railroad when: a) the state has its hand in most economic activities, so if you don't have state support your railroad will have no customers and can't be profitable; and b) you could instead directly invest your money into capturing state office and being the person who awards contracts to build railroads.

So what about the writers? How do they fit in? And surely the country couldn’t have been that mismanaged if it could produce such great literature?

Well my theory is that as hard as it is to create the proper market incentives for economic growth, it is infinitely harder to create the proper incentives for literary growth. I am reminded of another time of hyper-achievement in the arts—early 20th-century Vienna. Writing about that time and place, Stefan Zweig essentially said that the entire city of Vienna took pride in its achievement in the arts, and they demanded the utmost in perfections from all of their artists. It wasn't a matter of there being some uniquely talented set of writers—it was that for this one particular time and place, the audience itself was talented. Where in most places the audience demands nothing special (or, worse, actively demands schlock), in Vienna they demanded perfection.

The same was true in Periclean Athens. All of the well-known Athenian playwrights competed in the City Dionysia, which was a religious festival—their plays had both a sacramental and civic purpose. The richest citizens were assigned to put on the festival for the benefit of the populace, and the quality of the plays was considered to be a reflection of the health and power of the entire polis.

In 19th-century Russia, the intelligentsia was divided into a number of tendencies. The rightward tendencies believed that Russia had a unique and special relationship with God, and its own particular destiny as a nation. The leftward tendency believed Russia to be backward, and that its only special destiny was that its backwardness made it, perhaps, the best laboratory for creating socialism. Neither tendency loved the status quo, both were critical of the current form of the autocracy—the left because autocracy was backwards, and the right because the autocracy was poorly-managed and self-important. But, generally speaking, the most important writers in 19th-century Russia belonged to the rightward tendency, even as it was ultimately the leftward tendency that would have the most impact on world affairs. The opposite can be seen in Prussia! There it was the leftward tendency that would produce the greatest writers, while the ideas of the rightward tendency, with their open espousal of nationalism and Germany's special destiny amongst nations, that would have the most impact on world affairs.

I get the impression that in Russia, because of the low levels of education, there was very little mass audience for literature. You had only the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia in Russia regarded itself as having a special destiny to reform the nation and guide its affairs. However, because they lived in an autocracy, both the left and right intelligentsia was (as in Prussia and Austro-Hungary and Enlightenment France and Tang Dynasty China (but not Victorian England or Classical Athens)) shut out of the power that it desperately desired and found part of its energies channeled into literature. These two tendencies were not allowed to conduct their disputes on the field of pure power (by taking control of the government and suppressing or politically defeating the other tendency). Instead, they were forced (for almost a century) to fight with each other using only their words. They had no outlet, no way of telling who was right, beyond “Who has made a better-sounding argument?”

The key I think is not that the Russians were good writers, but that they were good readers. To them literature mattered—these little journals mattered—their debates and internecine disputes mattered. When the readers are good, then the writers are pushed to their utmost and are able to perform at a level that's otherwise impossible.

I think it's more or less impossible to create that critical mass of good readers. It occurs mostly by accident. And even when it happens, the results might not last—for instance, in medieval Iceland, we clearly had a critical mass of good listeners, which is how the sagas came to be composed, but they likely would never have been written down if the island hadn't: a) converted to Christianity and, thus, gained literacy; and b) been very conducive to raising sheep, such that the cost of vellum was much lower on Iceland than in the rest of the West. Similarly, without Russia's increasing importance throughout the 19th and 20th centuries on the world stage, the rest of the world likely wouldn't have gained such an awareness of its literature. It's impossible to say how many literary hotspots have come and gone and passed unnoticed (at least in the Anglophone West) simply because nobody ever wrote down, or copied, or translated, their works.

Part of the thing about a literary hotspot is that because the readers are so good, the best writers rise to the top, and are more likely to endure. All of the Russian writers I mentioned were very successful during their lifetimes. And if you look at the authors of the Great Books, they were, by and large, very successful in their own times: we only know the Greek playwrights because they competed in and won prizes in the City Dionysia. Ovid, Vergil, Moliere, Cervantes, Shakespeare—all very popular in their own lives. I think that's what separates, say, contemporary Norway from contemporary America. We have writers who are (probably) the equal of Dag Solstad, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jon Fosse, but (with the possible exception of Jonathan Franzen), they don't have nearly the preeminence in our country that those three writers have in theirs. We bury our best amidst the mediocrity, while Norway raises them up.

And it's precisely that market incentive—the fact that in some countries you can win fame and readers by writing work of extremely high quality, while in others the high quality of the work acts as a drag against your career—that separates a literary hotspot from the average literary environment.

1. I would say that the fault lies in the autocracy, but Prussia and Austro-Hungary were also autocracies and were, ultimately, much better managed. My read is that the agricultural sector was the biggest drag on the economy. For geographic and demographic reasons, agriculture in Russia was much less productive than in the West, meaning it was difficult to free up any significant portion of its population for industrial pursuits. Attempts were made to liberalize the agricultural sector, incentivizing individual proprietors to improve their land and increase yields, but they ran up against serfdom, and the entrenched interests of the landed nobility—interests that in the rest of Europe had already been substantially weakened by the 19th century to a much greater degree than in Russia.

2. Office-seeking grows in direct proportion to the size and power of the state. In stateless societies, the incentive tends to be to use your personal charisma to amass a band of followers that you can use to either coerce the rural peasantry (feudalism) or to raid / conquer your neighbors. In Russia the state was generally weak, but the problem was that, as the state increased in size, resources were poured into office-seeking rather than into capitalist endeavor. As an aside, it’s notable that in the birth of industrial capitalism there was a large bourgeois class, the Dissenters, that was prohibited from seeking office, and it was this minority that was disproportionately represented in the early ranks of industrial and merchant capitalists. Of course in most Empires it’s the opposite—Emperors often tend to trust and empower ethnic minorities more than they trust their own people, because they know the minority cannot rule without their support. This is how, for instance, Phanariot Greeks became so powerful in Ottoman Turkey or Turkic slave soldiers became powerful in medieval Egypt.