An odd characteristic of Russian literature is that the first novel to appear in the vernacular was not an original work but a translation from the French — and not until the 18th century. This was at least 200 years after the rest of Europe had shelved their churchy tongues: Dante praised the “eloquence of the vernacular” at the beginning of the 14th century; Du Bellay offered a “Defense and Illustration of the French Language” in the 16th; and languages with far fewer speakers — Dutch, Portuguese, Polish — had broad and distinguished literatures when all the Russians had were a scattering of medieval epics and devotional works written in the ecclesiastical language, Church Slavonic.

Image Benjamin Moser Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Even at the end of the 19th century, Russian, as readers of Tolstoy know, still reeked of bog and tundra. Classy people spoke French, and the relation of French to Russian in the 19th-century Russian novel offers an uncomfortable metaphor for the society as a whole: an elegant foreign language stretched like a glistening membrane atop the “real” language of the people. As the classical colonnades of St. Petersburg never quite hid the destitute swamp upon which they were built, the language of Descartes never supplanted the hallucinated utopias that populated the dreams of the Slavonic saints.

French was civilization; Russian, its discontents. A generation before Freud, Dostoyevsky — a favorite of Freud’s — depicted humans as beings whose lunacy and lust and terror were held in check by only the gauziest of veils. The village idiot admonishes the magnificent czar; the pretty princess, back from Baden-Baden, brushes gigglingly past the soothsaying hag. In a land that knew no Renaissance, the superstitious medieval village, with its thunderclaps and forebodings, inevitably swamps the Gallic palace. The Russia of Dostoyevsky and Pushkin lurks in the alleyway behind the mansion, a materialization of the id.

The experiences of the Russian writers echoed their particular national history, but there is nothing particularly national about the volcanic passions that threaten to burst through the carefully maintained surfaces of every human life. That they explored the depths did not mean that the great Russians neglected their brilliant surfaces, whose Fabergé luster makes them irresistibly romantic, and makes us feel the pathos of their destruction.

When that destruction came, the surface — the heritage of Cartesian formalism — would keep the demons at bay. If, a century before, French seemed like a froufrou frill, the vision of humane culture of which it was a symbol now offered consolation, however meager. Amid the Stalinist terror, nothing is more self-consciously classical than the poems of Akhmatova, who wrote sonnets in besieged Leningrad; of Tsvetayeva, who looked longingly, insistently, to Greece; or of Mandelstam, who, in an instance unique in literary history, committed suicide by ode. If Dostoyevsky insisted on the enduring reality of the irrational, the 20th-century poets described — but refused to reflect — the chaos swallowing them, and clung to form as to a vital lie.

Joseph Brodsky wrote that Russia combined “the complexes of a superior nation” with “the great inferiority complex of a small country.” In a nation so tardily arrived at the banquet of European civilization, its mentality makes the world’s biggest country strangely provincial. But its smallness and its bigness offer an obvious metaphor for the extremes of the human psyche. “I can be led only by contrast,” Tsvetayeva wrote. In the eight time zones sprawling between the galleries of the Hermitage and the frozen pits of Magadan, there is contrast enough. Awareness of this unbridgeable distance makes Russian books, at their greatest, reflections of all human life — and suggests that the old cliché, the “Russian soul,” could lose the adjective.