time exposing the illusions upon which the ideals and aspirations of those surrounding him were based.
The uniqueness of Russian literature (and Russian culture more generally) has been held by many Western observers to lie in precisely this ability to embrace spiritual and material worlds. As the classicist and Russophile Jane Harrison declared in 1919, ‘The Russian stands for the complexity and concreteness of life – felt whole, unanalysed, unjudged, lived into . . .’. But as I come to the end of this short tour along pathways suggested by Pushkin’s ‘Monument’, I would not want to leave you with the impression that this chapter has spoken ‘the last word’, that we have reached the heart of the maze. Rather, there is no such heart: we have met the beginning of a path leading backward. For Pushkin, the last word was not ‘O Muse, be obedient to the command of God’, but ‘Don’t dispute with fools’: which leads back to the discussion of