Last month, a new novel appeared, called The People’s Act of Love. It is being hailed as one of the most significant works of fiction of recent years. It’s set in Siberia at the end of the civil war, it tackles great themes of Russian history and philosophy, and reviewers are already hailing it as a Great Russian Novel. The only problem is, it’s written in English by a Scotsman - James Meek, former Moscow correspondent of the Guardian newspaper.

It’s not the only recent example of major literary works on Russia to be written by foreigners. Tom Stoppard, Britain’s leading playwright, recently wrote and produced a trilogy of plays about Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky and the other Romantic Exiles of the 1840s. It is now being translated into Russian by the Financial Times’ Moscow correspondent, Arkady Ostrovsky, who says he hopes the plays will help inspire a renaissance in Russian literature.

But both works beg the question - why aren’t Russians writing Great Russian Novels, or at least, why are foreign-penned works gaining greater acclaim abroad? Are foreign writers stealing the tradition of Russian literature from its own people? Is it the ultimate humiliation for a former literary super-power, when even its own history and suffering is told by foreigners? Does Russia need a literary Nashi, or a literary Igor Sechin, to re-nationalize Russian literature from the thieving foreigners, and bring it back to the narod?

You can put the question another way. Why haven’t Russian writers produced Great Novels of their own in the last 30 years, and is this a sign of the country’s ill-health?

Not necessarily. Obviously it’s very difficult to say why Russia should have been blessed with such literary talent in the middle of the nineteenth century. The same thing happened to Athens in the middle of the fifth century BC, to Britain in the early sixteenth century, to the US in the 1850s. Such flowerings of national consciousness happen just once, unfortunately, and the lucky writers working in such periods are in part raised to great heights by the awareness that their nations are “yet unsung” as Emerson wrote. The fact that the literature in these countries fails to reach those heights again is not necessarily a sign of the decline in health of those countries. It’s just that first revelatory phase of literary consciousness is over.

There were also specific conditions in Russia that gave literature such national prominence in the nineteenth century. Firstly, many men of great intellectual power, such as Alexander Herzen or Fyodor Dostoevsky, had been barred by their radical beliefs from real political participation in the autocratic state of Nicholas I. Others, like Tolstoy or Belinsky, turned away from such a state in disgust. Blocked from meaningful participation in the official life of their state, they thus channelled their energies into imagined worlds.

In modern Russia, there are simply more avenues of expression for a young person of talent and energy. This is the theory James Meek put forward, when I met him on a recent visit to London to discuss the issue of why foreigners like him were writing Great Russian Novels and not Russians.

Meek says: “It’s a valid question, and a worrying one. Perhaps now, there are so many more directions that a towering spirit like Dostoevsky could go. He could easily lose himself in music or drugs or crappy TV.”

There are more avenues in the private sector too – a young man of talent could become a successful lawyer, or journalist, or banker, and such careers open the way for success abroad as well as at home. With these careers, unlike with literature, comes money, and money is a much more universal symbol of success now than literary fame. Meek says: “We’ve never been in the situation before where the prospect of success is such an enemy of genuine achievement.”

Within literature, the easiest way to money is to write popular genre works, like Boris Akunin’s detective fiction. This is what the people want, not earnest ‘state of the nation’ novels as Belinsky or Tolstoy thought.

These are not particularly problems confined to Russia. Very few great novels are written anywhere. The belief held by people like Thomas Carlyle or Vissarion Belinsky of the profound role literature had in forming nations and connecting the intellectual to the masses seems to have had its day.

In our more populist and less paternalist times, this role of ‘national glue’ seems to have been picked up by pop music, sport, TV and cinema. If an intellectual really wants to connect with the narod now, they should write a detective book, or go on Big Brother and take their clothes off, as the intellectual Germaine Greer did in the UK.

Meanwhile the educated middle class, the people who really read Great Works, have become increasingly de-nationalized and cosmopolitan. It has become far more normal to work abroad, to marry foreigners, to travel between capital cities. One can pick one’s culture like ice-cream flavours. Perhaps, like James Meek, one can even pick one’s literary tradition.

To end on a hopeful note, perhaps this educated literary class, dimly aware that the work of imagining national communities has already been accomplished, is setting itself the next goal – creating a world literature that imagines a world community.

Perhaps that explains the increasing popularity of world writers such as Salmon Rushdie, Haruki Murakami or Tom Stoppard, who are consciously writing about global culture for a globe-trotting audience. In this globalized literary landscape, great British films can be made by a Pole, like Pawel Pawlikowski, and great Russian novels can even be written by a Scotsman.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

August 3, 2005