Any national literature is to some significant extent a mirror held up to its people’s collective countenance: its myths, aspirations, national triumphs and traumas, current ideologies, historical understanding, linguistic traditions. But it is also more than that - more than a reflection in the glass of what has come before and what is now, even as one glances into it, passing from view. It is, in a real sense, generative of new meaning, and thus capable of shaping that countenance in the future. For the society that takes its literary products seriously, the text of a novel or poem can be a kind of genetic code for predicting, not concrete outcomes or actual progeny, but something no less pregnant with future action: the forms of a culture’s historical imagination. The variations seem limitless, and yet how is it we are able to determine any given work of literature is clearly identifiable as Russian? Why could Flaubert’s Emma Bovary in some sense not be imagined by the great realist who created Anna Karenina? How is Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov both alike, but more importantly, unlike Dickens’s Micawber? What, in short, can be shown in a mirror that speaks back?

Few societies have been more dependent on their literature for overall meaning (social, psychological, political, historical, religious, erotic) than the Russia of the modern period (1800 to the present). For a variety of reasons we will touch upon in the pages to follow, Russians have turned repeatedly to their literature as the principal source of their national identity and cultural mythology. But this relationship to the written word is a two-edged sword. It gives Russian literature both a high seriousness that can be genuinely inspiring and at times an intrusive didacticism that can be annoying to a more pluralistic (or “secular”) Western audience.

The essay is an essentially rhetorical genre, in which the author need not defend his or her views in a rigorously logical manner, nor justify conclusions with formal disciplinary support. Rather, the essayist gives a personal, reasonable, informed opinion on subjects of common and usually immediate interest, to a literate public. As such it is a literary form particularly suited to the dissemination of ideas, controversy, and the critique of ideology. There are a variety of types of essays (historical, philosophical, topical) and related subgenres and modes (treatise, newspaper article, autobiography, meditation, confession). It is best to think of the essay not as a predetermined form but rather as a variable model of communication between writer and public that reflects the expressive needs and particular ideological agenda of the author and which, depending on literary quality and degree of intellectual richness, complexity and sophistication, may transcend its immediate purpose and achieve the status of a classic.

The twenty-odd years following the death of Franco - although they have seen the deaths of such central figures to poetic writing as Jorge Guillén, María Zambrano and, from another tradition, Gabriel Celaya - have been ones of extraordinary vitality for poetry. Developments have been particularly swift and multi-directional not just because of poetry's continuing ability to act as the prism for change through language and as the catalyst for intense new ways of participating in culture, but also because of a confluence of the following processes: the opening out of poetry to a wide range of cultural and theoretical perspectives from beyond the immediate Spanish contexts; the development of new poetic languages to express desire, sexual, and gendered identity; the publication of new works in new voices from earlier established poets (José Ángel Valente and Francisco Brines chief among them); an especially acute sensitivity to the creative possibilities offered by reworkings of poetic traditions in contexts of radical novelty; an increasingly sophisticated and enliveningly partisan apparatus of critics, prizes, and autonomous regional authorities needing to remake their cultures; a growth in prestigious and successful collections and poetry lists (in Madrid Adonais, Visor and Hiperión; Renacimiento in Seville; El Bardo and, lately, Tusquets in Barcelona); considerable numbers of collections and periodicals devoted to poetry, more than one thousand volumes of verse published a year, and an audience avid if not for poetry to read in print then certainly for poetry read out in performance and recital.

The Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship were pervasive in the cultural life of Spain from the start of the armed conflict on 18 July 1936 until the Generalísimo's death on 20 November 1975. With a country divided into two irreconcilable factions, most individuals had to choose a side, willingly or not, and their private plans or desires seldom coincided with the events that engulfed them. Any cultural object, be it a novel, a movie, or a daily column in a newspaper, was scrutinized for its political impact by special governmental, political, and religious organizations which existed solely to multiply the rules that creators and producers had to obey and to reinforce the limits of transgression. If one takes into account this restricted field of operations and its consequences, the narrative of this period reveals itself as daring, experimental, and accomplished.

A novel that appeared in the first year of the war, Cinematógrafo (1936) by Andrés Carranque de Ríos, is a reminder that several creative strains in Spanish culture were drastically interrupted by the insurrection. Carranque, besides being a writer, was an actor in several movies who sympathized with anarchism. He draws a funny and scathing portrait of the primitive Spanish film industry. His main characters are exploited, frustrated by poverty and physical limitations, but manage to see beyond their private suffering and to act for the larger social and political good. Carranque's novel presents a contrast to the dreamy and Utopian novels published in the anarchist series La novela ideal (The Ideal Novel) and La novela libre (The Free Novel) that for thirteen years, until interrupted by the war, churned out almost 600 titles with runs of between 10,000 and 50,000 copies.

Spain is a country of dancers. Residents of small towns and villages perform ancestral folk dances during the local festivities. Crowds gather on Sundays before the cathedral of Barcelona to perform Catalonia's emblematic sardana and young people fill the discotheques every weekend. When Felipe González, a native of Seville, was elected prime minister in 1982 the Andalusian folk dance sevillanas enjoyed a popular revival that still endures.

Blessed with one of the most diverse dance cultures in the world, Spain is invariably identified with Andalusian flamenco. Today's Spain, with its well-defined autonomous regions, presents a much wider spectrum of dance than that which was promoted by the Franco regime. A new generation of artists is leading flamenco into the twenty-first century, while Spanish modern and ballet dancers and choreographers are well equipped to hold their own anywhere in the world.

Born as a melding of Spain's gypsy, Moorish and Jewish heritages, flamenco furnishes an outlet for individual temperament. Centered around rhythm, or compás, its musical structures provide opportunities for improvisation and communication between singers, guitarists, and dancers. The contrast between driving staccato heelwork, pressed downwards towards the earth, and the majestic lifting of the upper body illustrates the dichotomy of the flamenco essence, as eloquent an expression of intense sorrow as it is of uncomplicated, sheer love of life and joy.

The cultural and social conditions underlying Spanish poetry during the Civil War really originated in the early 1930s. The strained economic circumstances motivated by the world depression, as well as the increasing political ferment in Spain that culminated in the advent of the Republic in 1931, and in the ever-greater polarization between the right and the left from then until the war, led writers and readers to focus on social rather than aesthetic issues. In this climate, the search for timeless meanings which had typified the poetry of the 1920s now seemed irresponsible and escapist. The quest for “pure poetry” as well as the linguistic experimentation of vanguard writing were soon left behind, and many poets, including prominent members of prior generations, sought a poetry relevant to the times. This led to works more expressive and emotive on the one hand, and more concerned with social issues on the other. The exact nature of any social “commitment” varied greatly, from a general awareness of social circumstances to an advocacy of specific political and social positions. Still, the bonds between literature and social issues grew tighter (Cano, Poesía, p. 96).

Contemporary Spanish art is generally portrayed in histories as an uneven agglomeration of outstanding moments, boasting isolated figures of genius, and separated by periods of apathy. In contrast to the medieval era or the Golden Age, more recent art is largely disparaged. An exception is made, of course, for the works of a few major figures, though these products are often seen as heroic deeds of epic grandeur, conceived in a country that has otherwise failed to live up to its own glorious past tradition.

This is a conception that is both superficial and historiographically outmoded. Once a fuller understanding of the period in question is attained, a rich continuity of trends makes itself known, revealing numerous artists who not only represented their era masterfully but who also became figures of international standing in their own right. A history of European art would be incomplete if it claimed to value more than simple novelty or vanguardist movements, yet failed to take these artists into account.

Certainly by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain was no longer the world power of a bygone era. She was instead a nation struggling to modernize, burdened with a backward economy, a weak bourgeoisie, social and political instability, and periods of isolation - circumstances which could hardly be expected to inspire a flourishing of the arts.

In Rus' the official conversion from paganism to Christianity took place in the tenth century. Paganism, thriving in the vast East European territory inhabited by different Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Lithuanian, and Turkic tribes was not an “organized” religion, which could be viewed as some kind of unified whole with common gods for all tribes or with a common level of world understanding. There were, instead, higher deities unifying the tribe or several tribes, and there were local deities, of particular settlements, and even of homes (for example, the house spirits or domovye).

With the adoption of Christianity in the population centers, only the higher deities, such as Perun (in Finno-Ugric Perkun, god of thunder and war), Veles (god of household animals and trade), and Dažbog (god of the harvest), were deposed. The “lesser” deities, the house gods, those imagined by the people to inhabit swamps, forests, rivers, and outbuildings, continued to be objects of worship – or, more exactly, superstition – into the twentieth century. Faith in them coexisted with belief in Christianity, just as superstitions continue to exist to the present day in different varieties of omens, fortune-telling, and so on.

The main impact on the Spanish publishing industry of the shift from dictatorship to democracy has been the creation of a literary scene led by market forces. The Franco regime, in its attempt to control cultural production through censorship, forced the publishing industry, like the other media, into an at least obliquely political role. The only publishers which could be said to cater to the market were those which, like Planeta, co-existed happily with the regime. However, the market was largely construed by them as a passive entity that would consume what it was given. Opposition publishers, notably Carlos Barral, tended to act as good-intentioned cultural mandarins decreeing what the public ought to want. Consequently they failed to reach the masses, except with the 1960s Latin American fictional “boom,” whose exhaustion by the early 1970s drove publishers to invent “the new Spanish novel” by commissioning a body of highly intellectual, largely unreadable novels by young writers.

Modernization arrived late and fitfully in Spain. Democratic government, secular philosophy, industrialization, urbanization, and social reform for women and the working classes only began to have a major role in Spanish life after the September Revolution of 1868. It is no coincidence that at the same time as Spain undertook social and ideological modernization, Spanish fiction picked up the thread it had dropped after the major accomplishments of the picaresque genre and Don Quijote in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The novel, a genre whose form and length equipped it to reflect multiple social phenomena, accompanied Spain on its belated journey into the modern era, recording it, critiquing it, and helping to shape it.

Standing out among the novelists who chronicled the rapid changes in Spanish social and political life after the ill-fated “Revolution” are Juan Valera, José María Pereda, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bázan, Leopoldo Alas (“Clarín”), Armando Palacio Valdés, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Their ideological positions are widely divergent, and in many ways their novelistic production of the period following the 1868 Revolution represents a national forum on the issues - the position of the bourgeoisie (the third estate) and the working classes vis-à-vis public policy and decision-making, the role of the church (especially the clergy) in public and private life, and women's place in society - foregrounded during the brief revolutionary period (1868-1875).

The music enthusiast probably knows Spanish music principally because of the well-recorded early masters, a few modern composers, and several international stars. Lovers of opera and song know of the many great Spanish voices, including those of nineteenth-century Manuel García (for whom Rossini wrote a role in his Barber of Seville) and of his famous daughters María Malibrán and Pauline Viardot-García. Today's best voices include Victoria cle los Ángeles, Teresa Berganza, Montserrat Caballé, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Alfredo Krause, and Pilar Lorengar. Music fans will know of the work of the great Spanish instrumentalists such as Pablo Sarasate (violin), Nicanor Zabaleta (harp), Paco de Lucía, Emilio Pujol, Regino Sainz de la Maza, Andrés Segovia, and Francisco Tárrega (guitar), José Iturbi, Alicia de Larrocha, Ricardo Viñes, and Miguel Zanetti (piano), and Pau Casals (cello). They will likewise be familiar with the conducting of Ataúlfo Argenta and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.

The period 1868 to 1936 was witness to a political and social struggle between left and right and the inability of politicians to create a viable democratic system which would respond to the demands of all the people and the diverse regions of Spain. The history of the poetic developments in the same period is also one of a confrontation between a traditionalist and Catholic outlook and one that is progressive, impatient of aesthetic strictures, profoundly skeptical, and élitist. The former seeks a consensus from above, the second is subversive of the consensus and offers its own intellectual aesthetic agenda from the margins. The first is undynamic, reactionary, resistant to change. The second is dissident, deconstructive of the status quo and anxious for new aesthetic goals, profoundly transgressive in its engagement with the taboos of Catholic Restoration society: cultural diversity, individuality, sexuality and sensuality, nonrational states of mind, aesthetic subversion and inversion. The contrast is a striking one manifest in two statements.

Background material

Introduction

Among the Slavs, as among many other peoples, cultural identity tends to be defined by language: in a way that would be difficult for a Québequois, a Mexican, or an American to understand, to be Russian is primarily to have Russian as one’s mother tongue. This is especially true in a preliterate society with its limited comprehension of time and space, but remains substantially accurate as a society develops into a modern nation. Historical and geographical awareness, the ability to respond to psychological and aesthetic dimensions of literature, the challenge and pleasure of intellectual interchange, even the possibility of truly understanding non-verbal experience like music and art - all are mediated by language. Some, perhaps exaggerating, have averred that the form of our language determines the form of our thought, while others, more convincingly, maintain that language is the primary modeling system through which we view all our surroundings and through which all other systems must be filtered. At the very least, it is obvious that language plays an essential role in culture, and in defining culture. This is especially true of Russian cultural history.

Russian and Slavic

Russian, like Belorussian and Ukrainian, is an East Slavic language, distinct from West and South Slavic. West Slavic includes Polish, Czech and Slovak, Sorbian, and a few minor or extinct languages, while South Slavic includes Slovene, Serbian and Croatian, Bulgarian, and (since 1945) Macedonian. At the end of the first millennium ad, the three territorial groups were already distinct from each other, but had not yet separated into the individual languages we know today. At this time, for example, there was no separate Russian, Ukrainian, or Belorussian language, but a linguistically more or less homogenous East Slavic language, spoken with only minor dialectal differences from the Novgorod-Pskov area in the North to Kiev in the South.