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1 results

  • 4.3 - The Lowly Civil Servant

  • from History 4 - Heroes
  • Edited by Simon Franklin, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Reich, University of Cambridge, Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature
    Published online:
    31 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024, pp 719-736

  • Summary

    The bureaucratic hierarchy established by Peter I’s Table of Ranks in 1722 irrevocably shaped the Petersburg text, above all through the poor insignificant copy clerks immortalised in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Dostoevskii all produced characters who became permanent literary icons as hapless cogs in the bureaucratic machine. The critic Vissarion Belinskii touted Gogol’s ‘realism’, promoting his use of ‘social types’ – characters recognisable from real life – to effect social change. Yet Gogol’s clerks were hardly realistic, let alone typical. Clearly the most salient prototypes for literary clerks are the literary clerks preceding them; these precursors (rather than any real-life models) became the ground on which new iterations of the hero emerged. The figure of the lowly civil servant persisted through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first, its copying itself becoming a medium for both cultural memory and artistic innovation.