I have a background in Russian cultural and literary studies. The digression group initially invited me to join this project based on the popular perception of “The Great Russian Novels” as baggy doorstoppers whose authors such as Dostoevsky allegedly excel in narrative digressions, as claimed for example by film director Lars von Trier (interview). The assumption that Russian classics are of a particular digressive nature is further nurtured by the prolific cultural stereotypes that inhabit the canon of Russian literature, such as Goncharov’s 1859 protagonist pair, the German hard-working, goal-directed, and rational Stoltz who thinks like this:

…versus his arch-Russian friend, the daydreaming anti-hero Oblomov who needs at least fifty pages to get out of bed and whose imagination looks like this:

However, if we think of a certain digressive mode as default to spontaneous thought and human imagination, as Nigel Rapport suggests in his entry, and narrative digression as constitutive for the novel genre as such, nothing can really justify an area-specific approach to some essential Russian digressive novel, mind, or soul for that matter. Obviously, 19^th century Russian novelists learned to digress from their German, French, Spanish, and British author colleagues, and drew on the long European literary tradition of narrative digression as a device, evolving from antique oral rhetoric to the mass-printed modern novel.

Nevertheless, the changing socio-cultural and ideological conditions for writing and publishing Russian literature in tsarist, Soviet, and even contemporary Russian society imposed stronger external constraints to expressing things directly than in many other European countries. Paternalist and political censorship, executed directly or indirectly by the church and state, or internalized as self-censorship, refined both writers’ art of the indirect and readers’ appreciation of circumlocution. Hence, in my sub-project I am especially interested in investigating the political and subversive qualities of digressions as a phenomenon of undisciplined discourse that challenges the power of cognitive control.

To examine this subversive function of digression within social life and communication closer, I compare selected examples of Russian literary representations of mushrooming as a starting point for digressions in their narratives. The motif of mushrooms and mushroom hunt take up a maybe marginal but still quite significant place in Russian literary canon and culture. The seemingly simple task of picking mushrooms stimulates textual mushrooming of the protagonists’ ‘task-unrelated thoughts’ as cognitive scientists would call it. The non-linear, peripatetic gathering provides an occasion for undisturbed walk and talk or mind-wandering, and opens a communicative space that is both inside and outside social norms and political regulation. How such digressive off-road trips may take a lyrical shape can be exemplified by Boris Pasternak’s poem Po griby from 1956, here in English translation by Eugene M. Kayden:

The highway. Ditches. Woods.
We wander off in light
After mushrooms, and we mark
The mileposts left and right.

We leave the open highway.
We scatter, ranging through
The forest gloom; we ramble
Ankle-deep in dew.

(…)

They hide among the stumps
Where birds alight to rest,
And when we lose ourselves,
The shadows guide our quest.

(…)

See the full text of the poem 

Boris Pasternak: Poems Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged
The Antioch Press, Yellow Springs, Ohio 1964, LCCN: 63-14379, Pages 244-245.