Letteratura, ideologia e contraddizioni socioeconomiche in Russia. 1825-1861

Abstract

Literature, Ideology and Socio-Economical Contradictions in Russia. 1825-1861

Studying the evolution of poetical forms as a succession of interferences between socioeconomic and ideological series helps to unravel the way Russian literature of the period going from the Bednaja Liza up to the abolition of serfdom develops in close connection with the crisis of the pomest’ja. The intellectuals who become spokesmen of the culture of declining nobility elaborate a “patrimonial-patriarchal” ideology according to which “freedom” is considered only negatively, as isolation of a community based on either parental relationships or personal (= feudal) fidelity from all modern intermediary mechanisms (State, money, urban society, codified laws). On the other hand, such ideology is objectified in a well-defined series of literary paradigms, which is a sign of the contradictory and destruction-bound relationship between the small pomeščik and modernity: the projection of an imaginary pre-political and pre-modern “Golden Age” on some vague and idealized past goes together with an oppressive sense of threat and an anthropologic involution of the noble character (degraded to an outlaw or a gambler) as the contradictions of contemporary reality become worse and worse. Only after the crisis of 1861 the traditional social group yields cultural hegemony to other subjects, to other instances and other representations of reality, both in the field of ideology and in literary practice.