rural Russia (transformed by mass literacy, radio, and later television) was no longer the storehouse of ‘folk culture’ it once had been. But skaz of a Zoshchenkian kind (based on urban popular speech) began to enjoy some popularity again, particularly among writers not publishing in Soviet official sources (where prohibitions on use of ‘obscene language’, that is, the swear-words found in just about every sentence of real popular speech, meant that street language could appear only in bowdlerized form). It was employed not only in neo-Realist studies of the Soviet and post-Soviet underworld, but also in texts of greater literary and philosophical ambition, such as Yuz Aleshkovsky’s revenge narrative, The Hand (1980), in which the narrator’s disgust at the official who purged his family during collectivization juxtaposes the miraculous beauty of the man’s possessions to their owner, apostrophized as ‘you heap of shit’.
Much of the discussion in this book has emphasized the centredness of Russian literary tradition, as expressed in the demands made by generations of critics that writing should serve a serious purpose, and in the dominance of an enduring canon of great writers celebrated by memorials, informal commemorations, and by successive educational systems. In Chapter 6, I argued that this centredness placed women writers at the borders of their culture, made them provincials in terms of the literary heritage, as it were. This chapter has shown that centredness had its limits. To be sure, Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inhabited an imperial mindset, one in which
136 non-Russians were often seen as colourful ethnographical exhibits, as examples of quaint or amusing otherness. Yet at the same time, the geographical peripheries of empire, in particular ‘the East’, could serve to unsettle reflective Russians’ conviction of their own identity, leading them to question the nature of distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’. And in the second half of the nineteenth century, a search for the exotic inside Russian culture became common, with folklore now seen as a repository of attractively barbaric themes and language, rather than a store of material that had to be ‘genteelized’ before it could be admitted to polite culture. This transformation of the standing of folklore in turn allowed writers from beyond the educated male elite (peasants, women, ethnic minorities) to profit from their own marginality, to exploit a situation where ‘provincialism’ (in the transferred sense used above) became a mark of distinction, rather than a sign of inferiority.
Chapter 8
‘O Muse, be obedient to the command of God’
The spiritual and material worlds
Monuments don’t turn out well in Russia (the ones to Nikolay Gogol and so on). That’s because the only tolerable kind of monument we seem to be able to build is a chapel, with an icon lamp perpetually burning for ‘the servant of God Nikolay’.
(Vasily Rozanov, 1913)
In Pushkin’s writing generally, God is not usually as prominent as he is in ‘Monument’. Notable, for example, is the omission of any aspect of Christian belief or practice from Evgeny Onegin, including even the Lenten fasting and Easter feasting that would have been annual events in the household of a real-life Larin family. (In the 1850s, a British visitor to Russia described Holy Week as a time when ‘the only sound that from time to time broke the mournful stillness which reigned throughout the house was the monotonous voice of the priest’.) A carefree Voltairean in his early days, Pushkin was later embarrassed by his youthful godlessness (as is indicated by his attempts to remove his irreverent poem about the Virgin Mary, The Gabrieliad, from circulation). Yet he also belonged to a generation where the eighteenth-century mistrust of religious ‘enthusiasm’ was strong. Unlike his sister Olga, a fervent believer and the author of religious poetry in French, he did not incline to explicit statements of faith. To be sure, the theme of imminent death figured largely in his later poems, some of which, such as ‘Whether I wander along the noisy streets’ (1829), see choosing a resting-place as
138 the only way in which the will may be exercised. And several poems of 1836 juxtapose worldly power and religious feeling, which latter draws in the lyric hero despite his strong sense of personal sin (as the critic Sergey Davydov has argued, there is strong reason to suppose that these poems, including ‘Monument’, may have formed part of a poetic cycle round the theme of Holy Week).
Like most aspects of Pushkin’s creation, the question of the extent to which the writer was an active believer is controversial. It became particularly so once Soviet censorship disintegrated: at this point the patriots who had fulminated against Andrey Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin as a profanation of the writer’s memory began an all-out promotion of Pushkin’s Orthodox connections, using books, articles, pamphlets, and a specialized journal, The Pushkin Era in the Light of Christian Culture. It was above all Pushkin’s late poetry of repentance that was used as evidence here. But the desire for faith that these texts unquestionably did express is not the same thing as religious faith in a direct sense. There seems little to justify even the more moderate claim for Pushkin as an instance of how ‘theology in Russia [ . . . ] expressed itself through poetry’. Rather, he was a crucial figure in the creation of a secular Russian literature. His great poetic predecessors, Lomonosov and Derzhavin, were not only inspired directly by liturgical texts (as in Derzhavin’s remarkable paraphrases of the Psalms), but built their grandest poetic edifices on a foundation of the liturgical language, Church Slavonic (so, for example, in Derzhavin’s ‘The Waterfall’, a profoundly Christian meditation upon the transience of worldly power). Such magnificent sententiousness and theological self-declaration is not to be found in Pushkin’s writings; indeed, the extent to which he was an active believer is neither evident nor, in the end, relevant, except perhaps to those the leftist writer and critic Osip Brik termed ‘maniacs such as those passionately seeking the answer to the question “Did Pushkin smoke?”’. If Belinsky and his radical colleagues could consider Pushkin an ‘encyclopedia’ of Russian life, this was partly because spiritual matters were as marginal here as they were in the French
139 Encyclopedie. Bypassing Pushkin, the Russian tradition of metaphysical poetry was revived, after Derzhavin, by Pushkin’s contemporaries Evgeny Baratynsky and Fyodor Tyutchev; it then resurfaced again – after decades of dormancy – in the 1890s, most notably in the poetry of the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and his successor Vyacheslav Ivanov.
Pushkin’s prose was still less accommodating to mystical matters than his poetry. His great contemporary, Nikolay Gogol, was far more openly pious, as was reflected, for example, in his moralistic correspondence with his mother and sisters. Yet even Gogol’s beliefs remained curiously marginal to his works. To be sure, some of his
