Every other book in this series was written to argue. Vladimir Kuskov's was written to teach. A History of Old Russian Literature is a university textbook: a survey of the writing of the eleventh to seventeenth centuries — the Primary Chronicle, Ilarion's Sermon on Law and Grace, Vladimir Monomakh's Instruction, the lives of Boris and Gleb, The Lay of Igor's Host, the tales of the Time of Troubles, the Life of the Archpriest Avvakum — issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1980 for readers learning the subject. That fact governs everything about how it should be read, and it sets it apart from the doctrinal and foreign-policy volumes the series usually examines. Its material is not the Revolution, or the Party, or the Cold War. It is a thousand years of monastic and princely manuscripts whose entire visible content is Orthodox Christianity, written down four to nine centuries before Marx was born.
That is the interesting thing about it, and the difficult thing. A Marxist-Leninist textbook on this material faces a problem no other book in the catalogue faces: how does dialectical materialism narrate a literature that is, on its own surface, wholly religious? Kuskov states the difficulty himself, and states it honestly. Of the surviving parchment manuscripts from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, he writes, "only twenty do not deal with religious concerns" — twenty out of roughly fifteen hundred. Books "were stored and copied primarily by monks," who had little reason to preserve secular texts, so that "the overwhelming majority of surviving Old Russian works are religious in character." He even concedes the distortion this introduces into his own object of study: "As a result Old Russian literature appears more ecclesiastical than it may, in fact, have been." This is not a man hiding his sources. It is a scholar telling the reader, on the first pages, that the archive is a church.
The spine reads 1980, and for once there is little reason to argue with it. Unlike several Progress titles, which front an old Russian text in a new jacket, this one carries no earlier-edition notice and no large lag. The imprint code is 014(01)-80; the latest scholarship it cites is recent to the printing — the thirty-first volume of the Transactions of the Department of Old Russian Literature (1977) and the 1979 Moscow edition of Marx and Engels's Precapitalist Socio-Economic Formations. (A single late token, an "April 20, 1986" attached to a letter from Mamin-Sibiryak, who died in 1912, is a scanner's corruption of 1896 and no evidence of date.) The manuscript therefore closed around 1979 and appeared in English in 1980. The book itself does not state Kuskov's own post; it names D. S. Likhachev as head of the Old Russian section of the Pushkin House and A. N. Robinson as leader of the Gorky Institute group, but leaves its author's affiliation unstated, and this introduction will not supply one.
What the book was for is easier to answer than usual. This is not export polemic; it is pedagogy. It reads like what it is — a course, complete with periodisation, per-chapter source lists, and a conspectus of the scholarly debates a student is expected to know.
The ideological apparatus is thin, concentrated, and detachable, and it is worth setting out precisely, because the rest of the book does not depend on it. It has three components.
First, a licence. The book opens not on a chronicle but on Lenin, quoted from his 1920 speech to the Third Komsomol Congress: "Only a precise knowledge and transformation of the culture created by the entire development of mankind will enable us to create a proletarian culture." This is the standard warrant under which a state calling itself the heir of October could publish, and teach, a thousand years of Orthodox writing at all: the cultural heritage is to be critically assimilated, not discarded. Medieval literature, Kuskov writes, "can be most instructive and is of profound educational value as the natural historical point of departure for Russian literary development."
Second, an instruction to the reader about what to do with the religion. It comes in a single, revealing sentence. The historical vision of Old Russian literature, Kuskov writes, is medieval: events are "explained in terms of Providence from a religious perspective," its heroes are princes at the summit of feudal society. "By discarding the religious casing, however, the modern reader will easily discern the living historical essence of Old Russian literature whose true creator was the Russian people." Everything the frame needs is in that sentence. The religion is a "casing" — Marx's own word for the Lay, which Kuskov quotes: "Christian-heroic in character though heathen elements are still very much in evidence." Peel it away and underneath is "the people," retrojected as the "true creator" of texts that were, on the evidence Kuskov has just given, composed by monks for princes. The move is performed openly, and hedged with as much care as it can bear: the literature "expressed and defended the interests of the feudal ruling class," and only "insofar as the progressive forces of feudal society reflected the interests of the state and these interests coincided with the interests of the people" can one "speak of Old Russian literature's affinity with the people." That is a heavily qualified claim, and to Kuskov's credit he does not pretend it is more.
Third, an engine to run the casing off, and here the workhorse is not Lenin but Engels. The genuinely medieval phenomena that a class analysis must account for — the urban heresies, the great seventeenth-century schism — are handled through Engels's thesis that medieval class conflict wore religious dress. The town heresies, Kuskov quotes Engels, "were directed primarily against the clergy, whose wealth and political station they attacked," demanding "a cheap church" as the modern bourgeoisie demands cheap government. And the schism, the Raskol, is subsumed under Engels's most useful sentence: "Although the class struggles of those days were clothed in religious shibboleths, and though the interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen, this changed nothing at all." Religion as shibboleth, screen, casing: the vocabulary is consistent, and it does one job — it converts a literature of faith into a document of class without having to deny that the faith was real.
None of that would matter much if the book underneath were worthless. It is not. This was one of the strongest fields in Soviet letters, and it was strong partly because its subject was safely distant — a scholar dating a fourteenth-century manuscript is under less pressure than one narrating 1937. Kuskov's book is a competent, sometimes fine, transmission of that scholarship, and the reader should be told so plainly.
The philology is the real thing. Kuskov lays out, without fear or favour, the rival reconstructions of how the Tale of Bygone Years was composed — Shakhmatov's, Likhachev's, Rybakov's — and reports Likhachev's arresting thesis that Russian chronicle-writing arose out of the eleventh-century struggle to secure the Kievan church's independence from Byzantine tutelage. He explains textology and palaeography properly: why the original of almost no work survives, why scribes edited as they copied, how recensions are distinguished, how watermarks and letter-forms date a manuscript. He is scrupulous about the material history — parchment giving way to paper, uncial to semi-uncial to cursive — and about how much has simply been lost to fire and invasion. The name that recurs, some seventy times, is Likhachev's, the towering figure of the field, and Kuskov leans on him honestly and cites him by title and page. The per-chapter bibliographies are real bibliographies. Where the book reads the Lay of Igor's Host as poetry — its imagery, its lament, its "golden word" — it is doing literary criticism, not agitation; and it is not cheating when it notes that Marx himself admired the Lay and read its message as a "call on the Russian princes for unity." Marx really did. The frame, for once, has a genuine root in its own tradition.
So the honest verdict is the one the house style demands: where Kuskov does philology, he does honest work, and a student who read this book learned a great deal that was true. The pressure is only at the joints — the introduction, the conclusion, and any sentence that must connect the medieval to the modern.
The best place to watch the method strain is the seventeenth-century schism, because there the book's two obligations pull hard against each other. Avvakum, the Old Believer archpriest who refused Patriarch Nikon's liturgical reforms and was burned at the stake in 1682, wrote the Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself — a founding masterpiece of Russian prose. Kuskov cannot not celebrate it. He calls Avvakum "the most talented writer of the second half of the seventeenth century" and renders his defiance with unmistakable sympathy: "Neither torture nor exile nor persecution nor the promise of material blessings made by the boyars and the tsar in return for renouncing his faith could force Avvakum to give up the struggle." He quotes Avvakum denouncing the tsar himself, and dwells on the sincerity of a man who, "condemned to death, ... has no reason to be cunning and has nothing to hide."
But a religious martyr who dies defending the old rite against a state-imposed reform cannot be left as a hero, and so the movement he led is filed, by Engels's licence, as something else. The schism was "really" anti-feudal class struggle in religious dress — and its backward-looking content damns it: the Old Believers "saw their ideal in the receding life of the past," "actively opposed everything new and gradually became a bulwark of reaction," and "attempted to turn back the clock of history." The writer is rescued; the cause is condemned; the Engels quotation is what makes the two verdicts compatible. It is a genuinely deft piece of ideological carpentry, and it is worth pausing on the irony it cannot see. In 1980 the reanimation of old, pious, pre-Petrine Russia was not a dead antiquarian matter — it was the living material of Solzhenitsyn (absent from this book, as one would expect of a medieval survey) and of the "village prose" writers, whose romance of the vanished countryside the authorities half-tolerated and half-feared. A textbook that condemns nostalgia for old Russia as "reaction" was, without meaning to, taking a side in a very contemporary quarrel.
There is a sharper thing to notice, and it is the reflexivity question this series always asks, put in the terms this particular book allows. Kuskov describes, at length and with scholarly relish, the machinery by which the medieval Church suppressed the texts it disliked. He explains how the official church "established the canon of Holy Scriptures" and "began to list apocrypha circulated by heretics among 'false' or 'repudiated' books"; he notes "the first Index of 'false' books"; he credits the nineteenth-century scholar Pypin with the first study of the Apocryphal and Forbidden Books of Old Rus. The suppression of dissenting writing is, in other words, one of his running subjects.
And in a book published in Moscow in 1980, in the country of Glavlit, the word censorship does not occur once. Not of the Church's Index, not of the tsar's decree that had the archpriest Avvakum burned at the stake "for greatly abusing the house of the tsars," not anywhere. The machinery is described; the category is withheld; and at no point is the medieval suppression of heretical writing permitted to rhyme with the present. This is not a slip, and it should not be over-read as a hidden confession — a philology textbook has no occasion to editorialise about 1980, and its silence on the present is exactly what one expects. But the shape is worth naming, because it is the shape this series keeps finding: the description is free, the category is not. Kuskov can tell you precisely how the Orthodox Church listed and condemned the writings it feared, and how the state dealt with the writer who defied it. He cannot call it what a Soviet reader, in 1980, would instantly have recognised it to be, and the essence of the thing — the suppression of dissenting writing as an act a state can perform — never once escapes the seventeenth century to touch the twentieth. Error is admissible in these books; the category is not.
Here honesty requires an admission. The Fourth International and the wider anti-Stalinist left never wrote about medieval Russian literature as such; the Primary Chronicle and the Igor Tale were simply not their subject, and no amount of searching our archives will conjure a reply to Kuskov's philology that does not exist. The silence in the reply corpus on his actual material is a gap in our holdings, not a finding about the book, and it should be stated as such rather than papered over.
But Kuskov's frame is another matter, because the frame is not medieval at all. The decision to teach a thousand years of Orthodox literature as the deep patriotic heritage of "the Russian people" belongs to a specific and datable political turn — the Stalinist rehabilitation of the national past, of the family, and of a truce with the Church — and that turn was described, as it happened, by Trotsky. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the chapter "Family, Youth and Culture" records the very détente whose distant fruit this textbook is. The old militant atheism, Trotsky wrote, had been called off: "In relation to religion, there is gradually being established a regime of ironical neutrality"; the anti-church campaigns of "people of the type of Yaroslavsky" had "degenerated into buffoonery and mischief," and "The storming of heaven, like the storming of the family, is now brought to a stop." In the same chapter he named the cultural nationalism that would, in time, make a Progress textbook of Orthodox chronicles thinkable, and he named its mechanism: "And since the Kremlin is the residence of the authorities, and the outlying territories are compelled to keep step with the center, bureaucratism inevitably takes the color of an autocratic Russification, leaving to the other nationalities the sole indubitable cultural right of celebrating the arbiter in their own language." Russification for the centre; for everybody else, the right to applaud it in translation. A book that gathers the medieval Church's literature under the banner of the Great Russian nation is standing, whether it knows it or not, at the end of the road Trotsky mapped in 1936.
And the movement did watch the road being travelled. Kuskov's textbook is the respectable, licensed edge of a broad Russophile revival that the Fourth International's press was tracking through the 1970s. Ted Harding surveyed it for International, the theoretical journal of the British IMG, in the spring of 1973, and that September Intercontinental Press reprinted him for a world readership: "Russian nationalism/Slavophilism... is becoming a major influence among the upper strata of Soviet society. This current is reactionary through and through. It is racist and chauvinist. It attacks the regime for 'betraying traditional Russian values,' and attacks Marxism as a 'foreign transplant.' It rejects the October Revolution as 'un-Russian,' and eulogizes the 'mystical qualities of the Great Russian soul.'" (Ted Harding, "Emerging Opposition Currents in the Soviet Union," Intercontinental Press, vol. 11, no. 32, 17 September 1973, p. 1030, reprinted from International, second series, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1973, p. 24.) Its emigrated extreme was Solzhenitsyn, whom the same paper described two years later as having "turned to religion" and to "Great Russian nationalism, and an utterly Utopian vision of returning to a preindustrial society" (vol. 13, no. 27, 14 July 1975; "preindustri- al" de-hyphenated).
Set that beside Kuskov and the coordinates come clear. On one point the reply and the textbook simply agree: both call backward-looking nostalgia for old, pious Russia a reaction — Kuskov condemns the Old Believers for wanting to "turn back the clock of history," the Fourth International condemns the Slavophile dreamers' "utterly Utopian vision of returning to a preindustrial society." An introduction that pretended Kuskov was wrong to file antimodern religious romanticism as reactionary would be doing tribalism, not criticism; he was right, and our own tradition said the same. Where they part is on the nation. The Marxists of the reply held that "the reassertion of Russian nationalism" was itself the reactionary core of the bureaucratic degeneration (Intercontinental Press, vol. 14, no. 14, 12 April 1976; "reas- sertion" de-hyphenated). Kuskov built his entire method on the opposite premise — that "the Russian people" and the Great Russian nation are the redeeming hero beneath the "religious casing." The scholarship is his; the nation is the state's; and that, not the dating of any chronicle, is where the introduction and conclusion of this book have to be read against the grain.
Read it, then, for what it is: a genuine work of scholarship wearing a thin and removable ideological coat. The frame is honest enough to announce its own detachability — the reader is instructed to strip away the "religious casing" and find "the people" beneath. One can accept the invitation and reverse it. Strip away the materialist casing that Kuskov added, and beneath it is what he was really transmitting: a careful, learned, often loving account of the manuscripts of medieval Rus, the debts to Likhachev and Shakhmatov acknowledged, the sources listed, the Igor Tale read as the poem it is. The frame belonged to 1980. The philology belongs to the reader. It is the rare volume in this series where the second is by far the larger part.