Rivers in Russian Literature

By Margaret Ziolkowski

Rivers in Russian Literature focuses on the Russian literary and folkloric treatment of five rivers—the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. Each chapter traces, within a geographical and historical context, the evolution of the literary representation of one river. Imagination may endow a river with aesthetic or spiritual qualities; ethnic, national, or racial associations; or commercial or agricultural symbolism of many kinds. Russian literary responses to these five rivers have much to tell us about the society that produced them as well as the rivers they treat.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644531952

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Introduction

Mother Volga, Father Don. These appellations reflect the reverence and intimacy with which Russians have long regarded important rivers. Such attachment is not unique; rivers have inspired emotions and effusions across both time and space. World music, art, folklore, and literature boast numerous compositions about rivers. Rivers have played important roles in the formation of ethnic and national consciousness, the development and sustenance of religious affiliations, the creation of conceptions of social tradition and progress, and the growth of aesthetic appreciation and environmental anxieties.

Russian literature—oral and written, medieval, tsarist, Soviet, émigré, and contemporary—has particularly eagerly engaged with river-related topics and produced a vast quantity of extraordinarily varied compositions in which rivers feature prominently and significantly. This study examines the history of Russian literary responses to five rivers: the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. These responses include both well-known and scarcely remembered fictional and poetic compositions. The literary history of these works illuminates perceptions of individual rivers as well as crucial reflections on the meaning of Russian history. An analysis of this corpus as a whole reveals both stylistic and thematic consistencies and suggestive permutations in the treatment of these rivers across time. It provides a comprehensive look at the topics, imagery, and values associated with the Russian literary representation of rivers.

The study of rivers in Russian literature can be situated, broadly speaking, within the context of two related areas of interest that have received increasing scholarly attention in recent years: water and waterways. Water qua water may be approached symbolically and spiritually or materially and practically. The two approaches are by no means mutually exclusive. In Water in Medieval Literature: An Ecocritical Reading (2018), Albrecht Classen comments on water’s simultaneously practical and symbolic significance: Water constitutes life, and it symbolizes life at the same time.¹ A similar observation is made by Karlheinz Cless and Hans Peter Hahn in their introduction to People at the Well: Kinds, Usages and Meanings of Water in a Global Perspective (2012): Water is subject to multiple, often contradictory valuations. Any perspective which reduces water to a problem of supply or to questions of value and price will fall short of understanding the social and cultural valuations of water. Equally problematic is the reduction of water to being just a carrier of meanings, religious convictions or symbols and rituals, which would involve an exclusively culturalistic argumentation. Water is more than either of these approaches.² Like water itself, waterways too may assume both concrete and symbolic importance. As a growing crisis in both the availability and quality of water confronts us, the literature on water and waterways, material and symbolic, becomes ever more critical.

The spiritual significance of water has long been recognized. Decades ago, the renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade defined the supreme importance of aquatic symbolism in religious thought and commented on the remarkable cross-cultural unity of meaning ascribed to water: In whatever religious complex we find them, the waters invariably retain their function; they disintegrate, abolish forms, ‘wash away sins’; they are at once purifying and regenerating.³ In The Meaning of Water (2004), Veronica Strang examines patterns of and attitudes toward water usage in the English Stour River Valley, taking into account long-standing spiritual and secular beliefs. Like Eliade, Strang comments on the persistence of key concepts in the human apprehension of water: The consistency of the meanings encoded in water enables an unproblematic flow of ideas from one cosmological explanation to another. In each transition, water retains its core meanings as the source of ‘life’ and of the spiritual and social ‘essence’ of human being.⁴

In its purely material state, water has few equals in importance. As recognition grows that water supplies are not unlimited, that aquifers can be exhausted and water sources can be destroyed by pollution, scientific attention to water has grown. In Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind (2011), the anthropologist Brian M. Fagan charts examples over time of human ingenuity in exploiting water for survival, sanitation, irrigation, and energy production. In Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource (2014), a study of water treatment technology from the Roman Empire to the present day, the environmental engineer David Sedlak also underscores the centrality of water: If water is the essential ingredient of life, then water supply is the essential ingredient of civilization.⁵

As attention to water has increased, so has attention to waterways. In 1999, a special issue of the Geographical Review was devoted to the desirability of shifting the focus of scholarly analysis of waterways like seas and oceans from the periphery to the center.⁶ Such an emphasis was anticipated by Fernand Braudel’s monumental The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) and later by works like Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). A recent study of the Mediterranean, David Abulafia’s The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011), attempts, in contrast to Braudel’s horizontal approach, to provide a vertical history of the Mediterranean, emphasizing change over time.⁷ Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe (2015) employs a different but equally compelling specific maritime focus. Lincoln Paine’s The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013) adopts an even broader perspective in examining cultural interchange by sea and river worldwide.

As eminently visible conduits of water, and as a form of that element that has been highly susceptible to human manipulation, rivers worldwide have also emerged in recent decades as objects of heightened interest and speculation. In an article on the formation of river images in Russian mental worlds in Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture (2017), edited by Jane Costlow and Arja Rosenholm, the Russian geographer Dmitrii Zamiatin writes, The archetype of water, living organically and naturally as seas, lakes, swamps, ponds, and streams, is perhaps most fully and vividly manifested in the image of the river.⁸ For Russians certainly, rivers command greater interest than seas. As represented in Russian literature through the centuries, rivers lead the reader through diverse cultural eddies and currents. Viewed in its entirety, this body of work offers insights into Russian national intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations.

Rivers flow through space, time, and cultures. Through the millennia, perhaps more than any other geographical feature, rivers have attracted metaphysical commentary in disparate oral and written genres of both popular and elite literature. Consider a few examples from a vast and constantly expanding body of work. Everything changes…. You cannot step twice into the same river, declares the fifth-century BCE thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus in Plato’s Cratylus. Time is like a river, thought the second-century CE emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. In the twentieth century, the ferryman Vasudeva rejoices in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922), The river is everywhere at once—at its source, at its mouth, by the waterfall, by the ferry crossing, in the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains—everywhere at the same time…. For it there is only the present, not the shadow called the future.⁹ In the hit musical Showboat (1927), one of the protagonists dreams of trading the Mississippi for the River Jordan and engages in existential speculation on Ol’ Man River.

The physical significance of rivers in the development of human culture can scarcely be overestimated or perhaps even matched.¹⁰ Being next to a source of water for drinking, bathing, and washing, riverbanks were always a common choice for settlement and remain a favorite location for capital cities in many countries. Rivers provide food and, through flooding and irrigation, enable agriculture. The beneficial impact of the annual flooding of the Nile is but the best-known of many examples worldwide. Rivers can be used to dispose of waste, at least apparently. Rivers have constituted transportation routes that have long surpassed roads in speed, convenience, and cost. Even when their surfaces are frozen, rivers can be traversed, sometimes with greater ease than when they are liquid. Transportation of goods and people by river is important for both commercial and military endeavors. From an early date, water mills offered possibilities for grinding grain, thus easing food production, that far exceeded what people could accomplish on their own or with animals. In the twentieth century, the potential of hydroelectric power often made rivers a focal point for industrial development.

The manifold importance of rivers has long lent them territorial significance as borders and boundaries. Bridges have facilitated transportation and communication, but they can also serve as a means of intimidation. During his Gallic campaigns, Julius Caesar erected temporary bridges across the Rhine in part to awe the Germanic peoples with the power of Roman engineering and thus convince them that resistance was futile. Almost two thousand years later, in a similar effort to pacify a Germanic people, Gen. George Patton set up a heavy pontoon bridge at Remagen to cross the Rhine into Nazi Germany because more permanent structures had been demolished by bombing. During that same war, Soviet forces at Stalingrad were determined not to allow the Germans across the Volga River, the symbolic heart of the Russian motherland, which Adolf Hitler had hoped to make Germany’s Mississippi. Battles at bridges and crossings of rivers could assume pivotal and indeed almost mythical importance in national histories and legends. For the ancient Israelites under Joshua, crossing the Jordan meant entering the Promised Land. In 312 CE, the forces of Emperor Constantine I defeated those of his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber. Constantine’s conviction, actual or legendary, that a cross he saw in a vision before the battle was crucial to his victory contributed to the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire. Toward the end of the same century, the Emperor Valens permitted the Visigoths to cross the Danube into Roman territory, and on New Year’s Eve in 406 CE, Vandals, Alans, and others took advantage of solid ice to cross the Rhine. Both events were important markers in the decline of the Roman Empire.

On another continent fifteen hundred years later, Gen. George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776 in order to attack Hessian forces in Trenton represented the most symbolic moment in the American Revolution. Because of the popularity of numerous paintings, many Americans still recognize the importance of Washington’s river crossing, although they may have the haziest of ideas as to the actual role it played in events as a crucial step toward colonial independence. Similarly, while many people are familiar with Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon as a metaphor for making a fateful and irreversible commitment, most do not know the concrete historical basis of the metaphor. In 49 BCE, it was Caesar’s decision to cross the shallow riverine boundary between the province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper, an overt act of rebellion against the authority of the Roman Senate, that led to civil war and Caesar’s ultimate victory.

Rivers have long held religious significance as well. Many peoples have believed that rivers are inhabited by anthropomorphic, supernatural creatures or are embodiments of divinities. In ancient Egypt, there were gods and goddesses of the Nile, like Hapi, the god of the river’s annual flooding. Greek and Roman mythology is filled with tales of the adventures of such beings, like the river god Achelous, who, in the guise of a bull, lost a struggle with Heracles over a woman and, in the process, lost one of his horns, which was subsequently transformed into a cornucopia, or horn of plenty, a common accessory of rivers in visual representations ever since. This is one of several riverine narratives treated in the Roman poet Ovid’s first-century BCE composition Metamorphoses. Celtic mythology boasted multiple river goddesses, like Sinann, the goddess of the River Shannon in Ireland. On the other side of Europe, the pagan Slavs thought that rivers were inhabited by rusalki, occasionally beneficent female beings who assumed an increasingly malevolent aspect over time after the Christianization of the Slavs, and by decidedly hostile male creatures known as vodianye. There were gods and goddesses of rivers in China and India and among the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America.

The symbolic cleansing potential of river water has figured in religious beliefs worldwide. John the Baptist promised sinners a new beginning marked by immersion in the Jordan. A thousand years later, Prince Vladimir of Kiev ordered the baptism of an entire population in the Dnieper. In India, the Ganges is still the most sacred of waters, a frequent destination for Hindu pilgrims and, especially on a day in the late spring known as Ganga Dashahara, the site of mass immersions intended to wash away sins. In Russia, Orthodox Christians celebrate the January holiday of Epiphany, which marks the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, by plunging, under the direction of religious authorities, into a frigid river through a cross cut in the ice; even Vladimir Putin has participated in this activity. Rivers may also seem to provide practical supernatural insight. In July on Ivan Kupala Day, a syncretic celebration by East Slavic peoples especially of the Feast of John the Baptist and the summer solstice (according to the Julian calendar, which was used in Russia until the Soviet period), young women would cast wreaths of flowers lit with candles on rivers in hopes of ascertaining information about their future marriage by observing the wreath’s progress downstream.

Rivers have often captured the imagination as metaphors for human experience. In their apparent journeys from one place to another, rivers evoke life’s ineluctable progress from beginning to end, birth to death. The author of an otherwise dry account of the series of hydroelectric dams built on the Volga, published in 1964, muses in his opening paragraph, They say that rivers reflect in their eternally moving waters not only the clouds and the trees on their banks, but also the flow of life itself.¹¹ The flow of a river can call to mind the mystery of continuous and sometimes haphazard mental processes, as in the image of a stream of consciousness, which is meant to evoke the fast-moving flow of thoughts in the conscious mind. The quest to discover the sources of major rivers has commanded perennial interest, and these sources, however physically modest, are sometimes marked as sacred sites. The search for the source of a river provides an analogy for the search for knowledge. As a worthy symbolic opponent in the common conception of human interaction with nature as a struggle for domination, rivers have few geographical competitors. In the twentieth century, the taming of rivers by damming them especially encapsulated the desire to subordinate nature to human will.

Rivers inspire devotion, respect, even love. Through the centuries, the relations of Russians with rivers have often been intense, emotional, and very personal. The eminent and influential nineteenth-century historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii introduced a novel approach to Russian historiography by arguing for more attention to climate and geography, not just dynastic politics, in the study of the Russian past. For Kliuchevskii, forests, steppes, and rivers had played defining roles in Russian history and in the development of the Russian worldview. Of the three, he thought, only rivers evoked unequivocally positive feelings. In an often-cited passage of his Kurs russkoi istorii (Course in Russian history, 1904–22), the historian describes in passionate terms the relationship between Russians and the rivers beside which they settled or along which they traveled:

On the river [the Russian] came to life and lived with her soul to soul. He loved his river, he did not speak such affectionate words in song about any other natural element of his country—and with reason. During migrations the river showed him the way, when he settled down she was his devoted neighbor: he pressed close to her, he set up his dwelling, hamlet, or village on her uncontainable bank. During the significant Lenten portion of the year she even fed him. For the merchant she was a ready summer and even icy winter road, she did not threaten him with storms or underwater rocks: just turn the rudder in time at the constant capricious bends of the river and remember the shallows and shoals. The river constitutes even her own sort of tutor of a sense of order and social spirit in the people.¹²

For Kliuchevskii, rivers reigned supreme. During both the tribal and the princely era of ancient Rus’, they quickly provided a hydrographic basis for territorial divisions. The proximity of major river basins to one another also precluded isolation, helped foster a sense of ethnic unity, and contributed to state unification. Moscow later derived importance in part because of its fortunate position within an extensive riverine network. When Muscovy sought to expand its territory, it did so along the routes suggested by river basins. Russian history proceeded in accordance with natural conditions: rivers to a great extent inscribed its program.¹³ The Dnieper and the Volga initially dominated this program, later the Don, Neva, and, as the Russians moved east across Siberia, a host of other rivers did.

Geography

Kliuchevskii’s almost mystical apprehension of the importance of rivers in Russian history and culture becomes more comprehensible in the context of a brief overview of the riverine geography of Russia and of what was once considered Russian territory. The majority of Russia’s many rivers flow through the basins of three oceans: the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific. The lion’s share fall within the Arctic Basin, which incorporates the great rivers of northern Russia and Siberia, rivers whose names have little resonance worldwide but that are immense: the Pechora, Northern Dvina, and Onega in the west; the Iana, Indigirka, and Kolyma in the east; and the Ob, Enisei, and Lena in between. The last three command some of the largest river basins in the world: the Ob is 2,268 miles long, the Lena 2,734, and the Enisei 3,442. The much smaller Pacific Basin incorporates other unfamiliar but impressive rivers: the Anadyr, the Kamchatka, and the Amur, which is 1,755 miles long. The Atlantic Basin is even smaller but nonetheless sizable. It includes three seas, the Baltic, Black, and Azov, and numerous rivers, many of which are well known, like the Neva, the Volkhov, the Don, the Kuban, and a river long claimed by the Russians as part of their patrimony, the Dnieper. There is also the inland drainage basin of the Caspian Sea, into which flow the Volga, the Ural, the Terek, and others; the Volga, at 2,294 miles long, is the longest river in European Russia and in Europe as a whole.

The vast majority of Russian rivers exhibit a meridian flow; that is, they flow roughly from north to south in European Russia, through the great Russian Plain, and from south to north in Asiatic Russia (Siberia). For the western area of the country, this means that rivers often bring much-needed moisture to drier, southern areas. In the east, the flow of rivers into the Arctic Ocean means some lessening of the region’s iciness. Especially during the Soviet period, there were some who dreamed of reversing the flow of certain Siberian rivers from north to south in order to bring moisture to parched regions in the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Like many mid-twentieth-century utopian, or dystopian, schemes, these fantasies were never realized, although as recently as the 1990s, the Russian government was still considering such possibilities.¹⁴

In Russia, as elsewhere, major cities are generally situated on rivers. St. Petersburg was built beside the Neva at great human and financial cost. Centuries earlier, Novgorod grew up beside the Volkhov, and Kiev, whose ancient ethnic claims are still contested by the Ukrainians and the Russians, grew up beside the Dnieper. On the Dnieper, Smolensk is firmly within Russia. Moscow was sited at the confluence of the Moscow and Neglinnaya rivers. There are many important cities on the Volga: Iaroslavl, at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl; Nizhnii Novgorod, at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka; Kazan, near the confluence of the Volga and the Kama; and further south, Saratov, Volgograd, and, near where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan. Siberian cities are less densely situated than those in European Russia, but there too they were typically founded on major rivers: Omsk on the Irtysh, Novosibirsk on the Ob, Krasnoyarsk on the Enisei, Irkutsk on the Angara, and Yakutsk on the Lena.

The necessity for a rich network of waterways for national growth, combined with the tempting proximity of many Russian rivers to one another, led Russians from an early date to exploit their expansion along rivers to the maximum extent possible and to contemplate ways of linking waterways to improve their access to various seas; overland portage between rivers was often feasible but costly, difficult, and inconvenient. In 1946, the historian Robert J. Kerner titled his overview of Russian history The Urge to the Sea. He subtitled it The Role of Rivers, Portages, Ostrogs [small forts], Monasteries, and Furs. For Kerner, the domination of river systems was the secret of the mastery of eastern Europe.¹⁵ His book details the seemingly inexorable acquisition by Russians across the centuries of waterways spanning all points of the compass. The Russian quest for and sense of entitlement to riverine access to the Baltic, Black, Azov, and Caspian seas and the Arctic and Pacific oceans was a powerful factor in the development of the Russian state.

The attempt to systematically alter Russian riverine connections began in the early eighteenth century.¹⁶ Efforts across Europe to modernize in this era often included the modification of waterways to ease transportation and foster economic and agricultural development. In keeping with this trend, Peter the Great confidently asserted in one of his edicts, We have decided to unite the major rivers in our empire into one watery body.¹⁷ A few decades later, Frederick the Great of Prussia harbored analogous ambitions in regard to the Oder, for which he, like Peter, was praised by many of his educated contemporaries.¹⁸

Almost from the moment that construction of St. Petersburg was initiated under Peter, a desire to link the new city to the Volga Basin by water rather than by lengthy portage routes led to the construction of the Vyshnii Volochek system, a series of shipping canals and locks in the area south of Lake Ladoga. Canals had long been an object of British and American ambition especially. In Petrine Russia, the presence of canals linking rivers like the Tvertsa and Tsna meant that sizable ships could make their way from the city of Tver on the Volga northwest of Moscow through Lake Ladoga to the Neva and on to the Baltic, thereby supporting Russian imperial ambitions. Peter also dreamed, as had an Ottoman Turkish sultan in the sixteenth century, of linking the Volga with the Don and thus the Caspian with the Black Sea, but long-term Russian military commitments in the north prohibited such developments. Following Peter’s reign, expansion of agricultural development toward the southern steppes made improvements in navigation along rivers like the Dnieper desirable. In the late eighteenth century, the construction of the Oginski Canal enabled the creation of the Dnieper–Neman route, linking several rivers in the area of what is now Lithuania and Belarus. The Moscow River was also developed as a waterway at about the same time.

Nineteenth-century riverine ambitions continued apace. Extensive tsarist construction of railroads in the second half of the nineteenth century meant that, as in the United States, the focus on the improvement of commercial river transport diminished, but plans were by no means completely abandoned. The growing appearance of steamships on Russian rivers provided an incentive for such development. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth, multiple schemes for the amelioration of transportation and the exploitation of dams and hydroelectric projects were conceived. There were thoughts of submerging the treacherous Dnieper cataracts, which effectively prohibited ship traffic on a significant portion of the lower river, and dreams of linking the White and Baltic seas and providing irrigation to dry areas besieged by droughts. Later Soviet commentators sententiously attributed the prerevolutionary failure to realize such plans to the invidious impact of tsarism: It was necessary to free the Russian agricultural population from survivals of serfdom and from the oppression of noble latifundia.¹⁹

Vladimir Lenin and his compatriots shared a keen appreciation of the importance of developing both water transportation and hydroelectric power. They were well aware of modernization projects being pursued in countries like Germany and the United States to make water serve human goals. It was Lenin who famously declared that Communism meant Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country, an assertion plastered on billboards and promulgated in neon lights for decades. Hydroelectric endeavors would play a key role in this agenda. In 1920, the plan known as GOELRO, the Russian acronym for the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia, was officially approved and its implementation initiated. The ultimate goal of GOELRO was massive industrialization and cultural transformation through the benefits of electricity. The first major hydroelectric project undertaken under the auspices of GOELRO was a hydroelectric station completed in 1927 on the Volkhov River, which provided energy to Leningrad and eased shipping. Another early Soviet hydroelectric project that commanded a truly mythic reputation because of its scale was a station built on the Dnieper in the early