Russian literature. A short introduction

poetry, but most definitely not in the ‘idealist’ works of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism. It was evident in radical periodicals of high principle but decidedly modest literary merit, such as The Spark, but not in the artistically ambitious (and politically liberal) Modernist journals of the early twentieth century, such as Apollo or The Scales. Accordingly, it was selections from the former journal, and not the latter two, that appeared in the ‘Poet’s Library’, the most prestigious series of retrospective editions of poetry, published by the leading house ‘The Soviet Writer’.

Emphasis upon ‘progressiveness’ had especially piquant results where eighteenth-century literature was concerned. That the reign of the ‘reactionary’ Catherine II (herself one of the first Russian women writers) had been a far more productive era for Russian letters than that of the ‘progressive’ Peter I was bad enough; far more embarrassing was the conservatism of most Russian writers themselves, who were much more likely to pen court odes celebrating autocracy than to attack

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serfdom. As a result, much eighteenth-century Russian literature was simply not republished between the early 1930s and the late 1980s, and treatments of the period for the mass market (unlike those published between the 1890s and the 1920s) concentrated on a bare handful of figures. Apart from Radishchev and Lomonosov, the rarefied company of acceptable writers included the literary journalist Nikolay Novikov (mythologized as a martyr of Catherine II’s political censorship). Nikolay Karamzin, on the other hand, was branded a ‘gentry sentimentalist’, and a good deal of his work remained under wraps: his masterful History of the Russian Empire (1818–29), for instance, was not republished in full until the late 1980s. To grasp the eccentricity of this, one might imagine a list of eighteenth-century English greats consisting of Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the early Wordsworth, but excluding Pope, Johnson, Fanny Burney, and Thomson on the grounds of their questionable politics, and Swift on the grounds of his questionable propriety. (As a matter of fact, in the Stalin years Gulliver’s Travels was published as a children’s book, in heavily abridged form.) So far as nineteenth-century English literature goes, it is not necessary to imagine a canon of ‘progressive’ writers, because one was actually constructed by the efforts of Soviet translators. It consisted of Shelley (the pioneering atheist and democrat), Burns (the ‘people’s poet’ of Scotland), William Blake (as the denouncer of ‘satanic mills’ rather than as visionary mystic), and – as the towering figure – Dickens. It most certainly did not include Jane Austen (translated only from the late 1950s), George Eliot (who had been extremely popular in nineteenth-century Russia), or Emily Bronte, let alone Gerald Manley Hopkins or Christina Rossetti.

The canon of ‘progressive’ writers was at once static and flexible. Some writers, such as Tolstoy, maintained their pre-eminence from the beginning to the end of Soviet power; others, such as Pushkin, underwent a marked change in status. The most crucial stage of reassessment came in the mid-1930s, when ‘class war’ was decreed to have ended and there was a move to conservatism in terms of family

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and educational policy (a set of changes collectively known as ‘the Great Retreat’). Along with structural changes went symbolic changes: with increasing emphasis on the fact that cultural values transcended social circumstances went a resurgence of ‘classic’ styles in architecture, music, and painting. Not coincidentally, too, the Lenin cult instituted upon the leader’s death in 1924 began to subside in favour of an emphasis upon ‘Soviet patriotism’, centred round figures whose glory reflected and enhanced that of the ‘coryphaeus of all knowledge’, Stalin himself. The centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937 came at a crucial stage in this set of processes, and was itself used in order to enforce a new, and entirely circular, identification of artistic merit and political progressiveness.

During the 1920s, Pushkin had been perceived as an artist of supreme talent but dubious opinions; from 1937, he began to be seen as an

10. Aleksey Remizov, ‘A Dream of Pushkin’ (1937).

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Aleksey Remizov, ‘A Dream of Pushkin’ (1937). For the different communities of Russian emigres forced to settle abroad after the Revolution, Pushkin and his works had poignant significance. Emigres wanted to defend the writer from the distastefully tendentious attention that he was receiving inside the Soviet Union, but were frustrated by lack of access to Pushkin’s manuscripts. However, B. L. Burtsev’s call in 1934 for ‘the publication abroad of a new edition of Pushkin’s Complete Works, or at the very least, of individual editions of his major works’ had a belated response in Vladimir Nabokov’s commentary on Evgeny Onegin, one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century interpretive scholarship. And anniversaries (particularly the centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937) were celebrated by conferences and exhibitions, while Pushkin’s writings remained, as always, an important inspiration for writers and artists. This fantasy sketch by the writer Aleksey Remizov shows Pushkin as a benevolently demonic presence, in tune with Symbolist emphasis on demonism in his writings.

artist of supreme talent and utterly sound opinions, a vehement opponent of serfdom and a thorn in the side of autocracy. His modest literary magazine, The Contemporary, was conflated with its successor, the politically committed journal run under that name by Nekrasov and others in the 1840s and 1850s. It became customary to emphasize the importance of his relations with the organizers of the Decembrist Rebellion in 1825, and to stress his admiration for dissident writers. With much pomp and ceremony, a draft version of ‘Monument’ was published in the journal of the Pushkin Commission in 1937. It inidcated that the original version of the final stanza had contained

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the line, ‘I followed Radishchev in hymning freedom’. This cancelled line had long been known to scholars, and is no less ambiguous than everything else in the poem (one possible interpretation, since Radishchev was a famous suicide, is that Pushkin was evoking the ‘freedom’ he had exercised in ending his own existence). The fact that it was cancelled, too, makes interpretations based solely upon it rather dubious. But, in pious evocations of the progressive Pushkin, it acquired the status of a last, rather than a first, word. As one commentator put it in 1962: ‘Only in 1937, upon the centenary of Pushkin’s tragic death, did the genuine meaning of his “testament” become clear.’

Nothing was allowed to disturb the presentation of Pushkin as a ‘forward-thinking’ figure. A popular edition of