Russian literature. A short introduction

by Satan and the Angel Gabriel as well as God, which had circulated in manuscript during Pushkin’s lifetime and been published in full only after the Revolution, now attained canonical status. Preparation for the first ‘complete’ edition of Pushkin in the 1920s turned up quantities of private correspondence, rough drafts, jottings, and so on, which were equally helpful to the construction of a new, ‘intimate’ Pushkin. Most obviously, they explored subject matter uncongenial to the decorous image of a ‘national poet’. Here, Pushkin could be found boasting of having wiped his ‘sinful hole’ with pages torn from the prolific occasional poet Count Khvostov’s latest book, or comparing the ‘colon and comma’ that ornamented his loins with the mere ‘comma’ of a politically powerful, but sexually disadvantaged, grandee. But the new Pushkin materials offered more than such glimpses of the forbidden. They also contributed to a growing sense of the writer’s manuscript as a text in itself, not just an intermediate stage between inspiration and publication (as Pushkin himself, whatever his concerns about textual integrity, had certainly seen it). After 1928, as censorship became fiercer, and more and more writers practised ‘the genre of silence’, or composed texts for ‘the desk drawer’, it was the manuscript that alone

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held the promise of eluding social control. Books might be purged from libraries, but in the words of Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Master and Margarita was one of the most famous manuscripts to survive the Stalin years (though Bulgakov himself did not), ‘manuscripts don’t burn’. What was more, with their doodled landscapes, portraits of salon beauties, ducks, devils, and chargers, Pushkin’s manuscripts had a liveliness, a physical presence (‘facture’) that had characterized the avant-garde publications of the 1910s and 1920s, but which began to disappear as control over print culture tightened in the 1930s. (Ill. 9.)

As Pushkin’s negligently scrawled self-portraits presented a welcome alternative view of the poet to the congealed bronze of statues, so, for 1960s Modernists, it was precisely the poet’s immateriality, his ‘emptiness’, his ‘chatter’, his amoralistic and slippery variability of style, his idiosyncratic undefinability, that appealed. There was a revival of interest in Pushkin as parodist, an identity that had also appealed to writers in the 1920s, when even the sacred notion of the poet as prophet had been subject to ironic appropriation (the writer Vikenty Veresaev had wondered in 1929 whether ‘Monument’, like the character of Evgeny Onegin, might not be a sardonic travesty of Romantic stereotype: ‘Is this poem maybe not just a parody?’). Soviet Socialist Realists had seen themselves, in all seriousness, as heirs to Tolstoy and Turgenev, and pontificated solemnly to readers about their approach to the ‘writer’s craft’. Underground or semi-official writers of the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, preferred to approach classic works of Russian literature via the ‘back door’ of irony. Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow- Petushki was a reductio ad absurdum of the official practice of using citations from the classics as a way of displaying a text’s cultural credentials – texts from the Bible to the labels of tins of boot-polish appeared in a disorderly profusion, with no sense of relative importance. And in Dmitry Prigov’s mock-obituary in the style of Pravda, Pushkin’s essential frivolity was used to undermine the pomposity of official biography and of recognized writers:

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The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and the Soviet Government announce with the very deepest regret that on the 10 February (29 January, Old Style) 1837, as the result of a tragic duel, the course of the life of the great Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, aged 37, has come to a sudden and untimely end.

Comrade Pushkin was always distinguished by high principles, a sense of responsibility, and a demanding attitude towards himself and others. In every post that he was deputed to occupy he displayed boundless fidelity to the appointed task, a military valour and heroism, and all the elevated qualities of a patriot, a citizen, and a poet.

He will always remain in the hearts of his friends and those who knew him well as a rake, a joker, a tearaway, and a terrible boozer.

Pushkin’s name will live for ever in the memory of the Russian people as the eternal flame of Russian poetry.

From ‘the father of Russian literature’, Pushkin had become a jester, a participant at bachelor revels. He was even paid the dubious compliment of a pornographic forgery, his so-called Secret Memoirs of 1836 and 1837, which confessed, among other things, to three-in-a-bed frolics with his wife Natalya and her sister Aleksandra. And his key works now included, besides Evgeny Onegin (not as Belinsky’s ‘encyclopedia of Russian life’, but as a playful piece of eavesdropping on gossip and an example of ‘manipulation of plot’), The Little House at Kolomna, The Gabrieliad, and Count Nulin.

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Chapter 5

‘Awakening noble feelings with my lyre’

Writers as ‘masters of minds’

A literary sermon is freer and more independent than a treatise; it often looks above real phenomena, far beyond them, sketching out its prophetic words on the distant and empty horizon.

(Pavel Annenkov, 1858)

In the last chapter, we saw how the pomposity of the Pushkin cult provoked an understanding of Pushkin as jester, as homo ludens, a pleasant acquaintance to be ‘strolled’ with, rather than as a disdainful and frowning pedagogue. Pushkin became the herald of meaning as non-meaning, the poet above all of The Little House of Kolomna (1830), which concludes its bizarre and studiedly pointless saga of a transvestite cook with the following words:

Here’s a moral for you: in my view

It’s risky to hire a cook for free;

For a person born a man to dress up

In skirts, is curious and has no point;

After all, sooner or later he will be forced

To give himself a shave, which doesn’t quite agree

With a lady’s nature . . . But that’s the very most

That you’ll squeeze out of this slight tale.

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But frivolity of this kind is not the key to Pushkin’s entire output. Equally characteristic of him was the didactic view of literature expressed in ‘Monument’ – that a writer was responsible for ‘awakening the noble feelings’ of an entire nation. Even the ending of The Little House at Kolomna had a lesson to teach – that literature did not have to be taken seriously. It sprang from Pushkin’s frustration with Russian readers’ obsession with morals and messages, as powerfully expressed in ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828), a rebuke to those who, on hearing a ‘song’, were capable only of responding with stupid questions:

What is he strumming about? what is he teaching us?

Why is he exciting and tormenting hearts

Like a capricious wizard?

His song is free as the wind,

But also fruitless as the wind: