consider art a distraction from the main business of the day – contriving a lucrative match.
As Pavlova’s story indicates, by the 1840s polite culture and literary culture were seen as more or less completely incompatible, a shift in taste to which the rise of the heavyweight literary journal (or ‘fat journal’, as it was affectionately known in Russian) made a significant contribution. The editorial boards of such journals were invariably made up of individuals with strong political views, whether radical or conservative; literary texts appeared alongside political commentary (or were themselves a form of disguised political commentary). Genres such as the ‘madrigal’, or the ‘society tale’, representing the difficulties of expressing feeling while observing propriety, did not suit the new era. Tastes ran more to ballads of working-class Russian life, stirring tales of women’s liberation, and depictions of peasant suffering. Poetry of emotional attachment became a marginal genre. Both Aleksey Tolstoy and Karolina Pavlova composed fine poems dedicated to the
theme of ‘forbidden love’, but from the 1850s such material was generally the prerogative of the drawing- room romance, a genre whose cultural authority, such as it was, came from its musical setting rather than its literary connections. By the early twentieth century, those whose verses made their way into romance tradition were minor figures, such as ‘G. Galina’ (pen-name of Glafira Mamoshina), or ‘K. R.’ (pen-name of Grand Duke K. K. Romanov). Though their work was very popular, the standing of such individuals with the literary establishment was low. In 1915, Marietta Shaginyan (later a Socialist Realist novelist, but then a minor Modernist poet) rebuked her friend, the composer Rachmaninov, for his dreadful taste in poems (his early song-cycles had set work by, for instance, Galina), and persuaded him to use material of more literary ambition in his next cycle of songs.
To be sure, the Russian Modernists did have salons of their own. But these were not remotely like the upper-class gatherings of the past, or like the grand St Petersburg and Moscow drawing-rooms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the household of Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, talk turned to spiritualism, the occult, and mystical religion; at the Wednesday assemblies held in the top-floor apartment of Vyacheslav Ivanov, known as ‘The Tower’, guests sprawled on velvet cushions in rooms draped with exotic fabrics. Extravagance of this kind did not long survive the Russian Revolution, but even in the Soviet Union there were some prominent writers who presided over gatherings not unlike alternative salons. Anna Akhmatova, for instance, bestowed on favoured visitors her aphoristic comments about literature, art, and the literary personalities of her day; the Socialist Realist writer Vera Panova, who held high office in the Union of Writers, was beset by guests wanting not only good sense and racy talk, but also – if they could get them – letters of introduction to publishing houses.
In the Modernist circles and artistic cabarets that proliferated in Moscow and St Petersburg during the 1910s, though, unconventionality
was the main cultural value. Their very names – ‘The Wandering Dog’, ‘The Players’ Tavern’ – underlined the fashion for bohemian marginality. Like high society in the early nineteenth century, this was a culture where ‘all the world was a stage’, where people valued assured performance more than they did sincerity; but the roles enacted by artists were now considerably more extravagant than they had been in the 1820s and 1830s, when writers had been less cut off from the world of the court and the civil service, and when the standing of actual actors had been much lower. (The late nineteenth and early twentieth century had seen a number of players, notably the ‘Russian Eleonara Duse’ Vera Komissarzhevskaya, attain a considerable cultural authority in the literary world.) But above all, in a world where life was supposed to imitate art, it had become vital to express creativity through eccentric behaviour as well as through a contempt for artistic and linguistic formulae, for the ‘cliches’ that Russian Modernists despised as much as the French Modernists from whom many of their theoretical appreciations ultimately derived. In other words, it was idiosyncratic conduct that was now required, rather than the subordination to universally recognized ethical and aesthetic constraints that had been the central demand of participants in mixed literary gatherings during the early nineteenth century.
Pushkin, though, was writing in an era when the relationship between literature and polite culture was still taken for granted, even if it was beginning to break down. He was one of the last major Russian writers to participate in aristocratic salons of the kind organized by Zinaida Volkonskaya (just as she was one of the last female aristocrats who was at any level a serious artist). Several of Pushkin’s writings –
16. Pushkin, doodled self-portrait in female dress. The poet made no attempt to flatter his unladylike profile: the effect of seeing it emerge from the bun and ringlets is amusingly incongruous.
poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment:/You appeared before me/ Like a fleeting vision’, which was to have a long drawing-room afterlife as a romance set to music by Glinka). Pushkin followed Karamzin, too, in his intensive interest in the psychology and language of women: this can be seen not only in the prominence of female protagonists in his work, but also in the fact that some of his ‘costumed confessions’ were made in female dress (as with the last line of ‘Monument’, where the advice to avoid demeaning squabbles fits with contemporary expectations that ladies remain calm under all circumstances).
At the same time, though, the inspiration that the salon offered Pushkin was often fused with unease, or even irritation, at the limits of polite language, and particularly at the demand that strong emotion be voiced in a safely conventional way. This unease can be sensed in another very famous love poem, ‘I loved you’ (1829):
I loved you; love as yet, perhaps
Has not burned out in my heart;
But may it trouble you no longer,
I do not wish to sadden you with anything.
I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,
Tormented now by timidity, now by jealousy;
I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,
As God grant you be loved by another.
This poem is quintessentially ‘Pushkinian’ in its dignified plainness and apparently self-explanatory directness; it is sometimes used (not wholly accurately) as an instance of the poet’s distaste for metaphor. But in fact, there is a good deal more here than first meets the eye or the ear. Among many buried associations is the point that the opening lines of the poem evoke ‘feminine language’ – the new language of the emotions that Sentimentalism had seen as women’s particular domain. Great rhythmic emphasis is placed on verbs such as ‘to trouble’ and ‘to sadden’, as well as on the metaphor of love as flame (this hackneyed
image is delicately suggested through the verb ‘to burn out’, usually used of lamps or candles). The second
