Russian literature. A short introduction

concentrated instead upon his artistic relationships with other writers and with journal editors). The essential task was to represent the life as a saintly path of suffering and triumph (podvig): deviations from this model provoked bitter debate, as in the case of the Russian-American critic Alexander Zholkovsky’s revisionist interpretation of Anna Akhmatova’s biography. Zholkovsky argued that Akhmatova saw her own suffering, political and personal, as a mark of distinction, and strove to emphasize and heighten it. She was not merely an inert and innocent victim, but actively sought out pain. She used others as the instruments of conflict (her history of relationships with men who were already attached to another woman is striking) and as a sounding-board for lamentation (Zholkovsky drew attention to Akhmatova’s compulsive desire for an audience, manifested in her repeated commands that her friends should drop everything and rush round to see her when she so required). In a furious response printed in Zvezda, the literary journal which had published Zholkovsky’s article, another Russian-American critic accused Zholkovsky of colluding in, and approving, Akhmatova’s oppression: ‘Only from a safe distance – whether geographical or chronological – can one write about history and literature with such unruffled alienation from human suffering.’ Life-writing was still widely seen as a genre demanding moral engagement and respect bordering on adulation, even when practised by scholars.

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If anything, defensiveness about writers’ biographies increased in the late 1990s, fuelled by anxiety that Russian literature had lost its traditional hold over Russian culture. In 1998, an essayist writing in the liberal literary journal Kontinent cited, as one of a list of accusations aimed at demonstrating the ‘unculturedness’ of the Russian media, the fact that Russian television had marked the occasion of ‘Pushkin Day’, an official festival instituted by Boris Yeltsin in that year, only by the showing of ‘some kind of parody ballet performed by half-naked avant-garde dancers’. The accusation against the media was strikingly unfair, given that the build-up to the bicentenary of the writer’s birth in 1999 was actually marked by dozens of reverential programmes. But it showed Pushkin becoming the figurehead of another kind of conservatism: this time that of a beleaguered intelligentsia who felt that culture was even more under threat in the post-Soviet era than it had been during Soviet rule. In Tatiana Tolstaya’s futurist novel The Mynx (2000), which shows the inhabitants of a post-nuclear holocaust Moscow condemned for ever to relive Soviet history as farce, an enthusiastic and unlearned book-lover sets up what he calls ‘a pushkin’, a wooden fetish to some half-forgotten god of the literature that had once existed. But at the same time that it mocks monumentalism, the novel represents knowledge of great writing as a measure of true culture: the perfidy of the post-holocaust dictator and the sterility of the neo-primitive culture he dominates are shown by the fact that he passes off famous poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Blok as his own. Once more, the integrity of writing and the writer stands for the moral probity of society at large.

This chapter has dwelled upon the question of the dissemination of literary works in Russia. It began with the issue of writers’ control over their own output, a control that was sometimes aided by censorship but more often frustrated by it. Censorship could sometimes act as a stimulus to literary production. More devastating was its effect upon the quality of readership, especially in the Soviet period, when education and publishing for the masses created a new class of

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self-confident, but rather intellectually limited, readers who took their restricted knowledge of the classics as a measure of aesthetic standards in the absolute. Academic criticism, while based on far broader knowledge of primary material, was itself subject to severe constraints, particularly before 1956. Not only politically explosive material had to be avoided, but also ‘vulgar’ or ‘trivial’ themes, a consideration that led to bowdlerization of authors’ writings and also to the avoidance of biographical treatments, except where these concentrated on a writer’s ‘creative path’, that is, on intellectual experiences that were relevant to the composition of individual literary texts.

The discussion here should not be taken as meaning that every Russian had to manifest the kind of piety that was expected by school-teachers and government officials in the presence of great writers. As we shall see in the next chapter, many individuals, particularly other writers, had a much bolder attitude to established reputations than that. However, even at the end of the twentieth century, the levels of reverence for classic authors were considerably higher in Russia than they were in Western Europe, let alone America, a situation that was fostered, as well as bedevilled, by the spread of explicitly commercially oriented values in Russian society generally, and in the press in particular.

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Chapter 4

‘I shall be famous as long as another poet lives’

Writers’ responses to Pushkin

Don’t hit me with Pushkin – I’ll use him to hit you!

(Marina Tsvetaeva, 1937)

Among commentators on Russian literary history, Pushkin’s boast that he would resonate for ever in the minds of poets was sometimes taken at face value, with the poet’s work seen as the ultimate source of everything valuable in the work of his successors. But the sense that Pushkin’s work was the alpha and omega of all literary endeavour was by no means limited to patriotic bureaucrats or pillars of the educational system. Rather, each successive generation of writers was able to convince itself that it alone had discovered ‘the real’ Pushkin. This conviction was enhanced by the fact that a great many of Pushkin’s writings were not ‘Pushkinian’ in the sense understood in the schoolroom, but undermined decent commonplaces about balance, restraint, and edification. For example, ‘The Drowned Man’, a quintessentially Romantic ballad about a revenant taking vengeance on a peasant who has selfishly failed to bury him, starkly evokes the appearance of the ghost:

The moon rolls out from the rain-clouds – What? Naked before him it stands, Water running from its beard,

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Glare bold and fixed, Each limb fearfully numb, And black crayfish fastened To its swollen body.

As each generation of theatre directors and audiences in the Anglophone world has constructed its particular Shakespeare (take the fashion for the so-called ‘problem plays’ of tortured sexual relationships, such as Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, in the 1960s and 1970s), so successive generations of Russian readers and critics have discovered ‘their’ Pushkin. For example, The Bronze Horseman, an evocation of St Petersburg as at once a supreme art work and a symbol of crushing authoritarianism, resonated in Petersburg Modernist texts such as Andrey Bely’s novel Petersburg, or in a poem by Innokenty Annensky in which the ‘yellow fog’ of Dostoevsky’s novels swirls around the statue hero of Pushkin’s poem.

Given the circumstances of early twentieth-century Russian history, it is hardly surprising that Pushkin was considered important for what the religious philosopher Simeon Frank called his ‘apprehension of life’s inherent tragedy’. But he was valued also as a writer who had emphasized the importance of the writer. It was the Romantic side of Pushkin to which many writers gave weight. The critic Mikhail Gershenzon felt that ‘Monument’ was to be interpreted as drawing a contrast between ‘genuine’ fame, ‘among people who understand poetry’, and ‘vulgar fame, among the mob, a muted kind of fame – mere celebrity’. This interpretation was entirely in the spirit of the times. Pushkin’s poem ‘The Prophet’, in which the poet was seen as a Promethean outcast gifted with a uniquely full understanding of his culture, spawned dozens of imitations between 1890 and 1940 as Modernist writers reasserted