into being, during the eighteenth century, titles were at first more important than authors: translated texts were regularly published anonymously, or wrongly credited, and plagiarism and book piracy were rife.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though, a number of changes came about. Book censorship, tightened up successively under Catherine II, Paul I, Alexander I, and Nicholas I, underlined the concept of individual authorship. This was not only because authors were held responsible for what they wrote and anonymity was strongly discouraged (the publication of unsigned journal articles was expressly forbidden in 1848). It was also because, alongside their punitive role, censorship boards were responsible for enforcing copyright. In the words of an official edict, they were supposed to ‘prevent publishers from the unauthorized and capricious publication of books by authors with whom those publishers have no connection’. At the same time, the growth of self-consciousness was fostered by the emergence of the censor as a reader who was assumed to be both hostile and artistically literate (several prominent nineteenth-century censors, including Ivan Goncharov, the author of Oblomov, the famous novel about a character who can’t get out of bed, were themselves writers). The need for writers to keep ahead of censors stimulated authors into different forms of allegorical writing. For instance, a tale would be set at the Spanish court, when the Russian one was meant, or references to Hamlet and the rottenness of the state of Denmark would be used to suggest somewhere much closer to home. This use of what was termed ‘Aesopian language’ by writers also encouraged readers (and, of course, censors) to read between the lines of texts, searching for hidden meanings.
Also in the early nineteenth century, booksellers became aware of the value of authorial ‘brand names’ in the marketplace. They began to enter into contracts according to which the grant to a publisher of
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7. Front cover of Evgeny Onegin: Chapter One.
The front cover of the first chapter of Evgeny Onegin, first published in 1825. Pushkin’s ‘novel in verse’ is widely regarded as his highest achievement; some, such as Vladimir Nabokov, have considered it the greatest novel in Russian literature. The haunting tale of how Tatiana, an imaginative young woman from a family of small landowners in the Russian provinces, falls in love with Evgeny, a sophisticated, blase St Petersburger with Byronic aspirations, but finds her feelings reciprocated only when she is no longer able or willing to return them, has alternately provoked and enraptured readers by its simultaneous defiance and assertion of convention, its combination of deep emotion and ironic non-committal. Evgeny and Tatiana, especially the latter, were precursors of many later characters in Russian novels, from Turgenev’s Liza in Nest of Gentlefolk to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Nabokov’s Ada. The book also has at least two other niches in literary history. As a text set in a time before that in which it was actually written, it is, in a sense, the first great Russian historical novel. It was also a pioneering example of the serial novel, published chapter by chapter over seven years (1825–32) and appearing in complete form only in 1833. This piecemeal method of publication was later to be used for many other famous works, among them War and Peace and Crime and Punishment (though the instalments of these novels came out in journals, rather than in book form). In the course of serial publication, writers’ views of characters sometimes changed; they, and their readers, tended to see this positively, feeling that it gave their fictional creations the inconsistency and inscrutability of real people. It was rare for writers to make major changes to individual episodes before the book version came out: as Pushkin put it in the first chapter of Evgeny Onegin, ‘There are many contradictions/But I don’t want to correct them’.
exclusive rights to a text or collection of texts was rewarded by the sharing of profits between himself and the writer. In 1834, Pushkin entered into such an agreement with A. F. Smirdin for a book of whose commercial success both had high hopes, the historical novel The Captain’s Daughter. And in 1836 he started a literary journal, The Contemporary, which offered him, as well as the chance of commercial returns, a forum for his writings and direct control over the manner in which these appeared.
One thing that Pushkin took authorship to mean, then, was the careful regulation by individuals of the manner in which their utterances came before the public. He also saw writing as an occupation which, though not exactly gentlemanly, at any rate helped raise the income necessary to a gentleman’s existence. But writing was also understood by him as cultural leadership. That Russia needed a literature equal in standing to that of France, Germany, or England, and that there existed no native literary tradition worth the name, were defining assumptions for Pushkin and his generation of Russian writers. In their view, the Russian literary landscape resembled the ‘empty waves’, gloomy forests, and boggy lichen-covered shores of the unimproved North that Pushkin evoked in the prologue to The Bronze Horseman (1833). Monotony, rather than chaos, was the precedent and stimulus to creation. ‘We have neither a literature nor [good] books’, Pushkin grandly asserted in 1824. Though he allowed merit to various predecessors, including Derzhavin and Ivan Krylov (best-known for his lively and vigorous fables), it was clear none of these was a ‘natural genius’ (Naturgenie) in the Romantic sense, or for that matter a national genius. In an essay written a year later, Pushkin explicitly denied the right of the brilliant scientist and pioneering poet Mikhailo Lomonosov to be recognized in this capacity, presenting him instead as a mere craftsman: ‘For him poetic composition was a pastime, or, as more often, an exercise undertaken out of a stern sense of duty [ . . . ] In our first poet we would look in vain for flaming bursts of feeling or imagination.’
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8. Front cover of Apollo, no. 6, 1913.
The title page of Apollo (no. 6, 1913). Journals played an enormously important role in the publication of Russian literature from the late eighteenth century until the late twentieth. Pushkin’s The Contemporary, itself the successor to magazines such as The Drone and The European Herald, was followed by dozens of organs of all political hues. Soviet literary history naturally emphasized the role of radical journals, but conservative ones, such as The Russian Herald (which serialized works by both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) had at least equal distinction. The illustration here shows the frontispiece of one of the most important Modernist journals. At this period, literary magazines rebelled against the drab presentation formerly considered proper for serious publications. Beautifully designed and printed, and copiously illustrated, they, and their successors in the 1920s, are
