Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Another and more macabre kind of honorific gesture – one emphasizing the importance of death cult for the Soviet state – was the exhumation of famous writers from their original resting places. Levered up from the graves of their families, they were reburied in pantheon-cemeteries for the famous, notably the ‘Literary Walks’ in Leningrad. (From this indignity, Pushkin, intriguingly, was spared, perhaps because of the resonant disgust for urban cemeteries that is expressed in some of his late poems. He remained in the Svyatogorsky Monastery near the family estate of Mikhailovskoe in northwestern Russia, while his wife Natalya was allowed to continue lying next to her second husband in the graveyard attached to the Alexander Nevsky monastery in Leningrad-St Petersburg.)

There is an obvious link between the treatment of writers’ remains and the ‘translation’, or removal to a new site, of relics that was a requisite step in the creation of the cult of an Orthodox saint. Reverence for writers was a form of secular religion, and the materialism that was a central dogma of Marxism-Leninism expressed itself in a literal-minded determination that memorials should actually enshrine the dust of the departed. The connection between religion and literature was also brought home by the arrangements for the 1937 jubilee, described in advance by the newspaper Izvestiya: ‘A gigantic portrait of Pushkin reading his poems will be installed at the top of the belfry of the former Strastnoy Convent. The façade of the convent will be covered with a magnificent panel depicting a Soviet youth demonstration, with the marchers shown carrying books by Pushkin and portraits of the leaders.’ The Convent of Christ’s Passion (the meaning of the name ‘Strastnoy’), was not chosen as a focus for the celebrations simply because of its convenient location next to the Pushkin statue, but because its dedication made it a suitable place for commemorating the life of Russia’s most important poetic martyr.

The blatancy with which literature was presented as an alternative religion (and the association of this, during the Stalin era, with the ruler’s own ‘cult of personality’) was perhaps the only peculiarly ‘Soviet’ aspect of post-revolutionary writers’ cults. In many other ways, these simply perpetuated the past. Literary museums as well as statues had begun to multiply before the Revolution: an example was Tolstoy’s Moscow house, opened to the public as early as 1911, a year after the writer’s death. And ‘museum apartments’ remained popular places for self-educating visits in the post-Soviet period too. Indeed, the years after 1991 saw the founding of numerous museums as the result of private initiative (for instance, in the apartment once inhabited by Anna Akhmatova in the Sheremetiev Palace, St Petersburg, or the house where Marina Tsvetaeva lived in the Arbat district of Moscow). The bicentenary of Pushkin’s birth in 1999 may have had commercial spin-offs of a kind not witnessed for a hundred years (such as the reappearance of Pushkin vases and Pushkin matchboxes) as well as some never seen before (for instance, an Internet ‘postcard’ showing Pushkin kicking Danthès in the nether regions and then kissing Natalya). But it was also marked by a crop of entirely conventional monuments – such as a hideous gilded statue of Pushkin and his wife in the Moscow Arbat, with the poet shown slightly taller than Natalya, rather than a head shorter, as he was in reality. (Ill. 6.)

The capacity of writer cults to withstand historical vicissitude has been striking. Monuments and memorials to authors not only survived the revolutionary iconoclasm of the first decade of Soviet rule, but stayed in place during later statue-toppling frenzies as well. Dostoevsky’s effigy remained in its position outside his birthplace throughout the Stalin years; A. N. Tolstoy, an instrument and beneficiary of literary Stalinism, was spared from the post-1961 monument purge that rid Soviet cities of images of his master; Fadeev, an assiduous signer of arrest-warrants during the Great Terror, went on standing on his pedestal when the memorial to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, was torn down by Muscovites protesting against the coup by hardline Communists in August 1991. The only exception to the general rule of conservation was the museum flat of Nikolay Ostrovsky, part of which was turned in the late 1990s into an exhibition of waxworks. But this one instance most certainly did not point to a decline in reverence for literary figures in general.