Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

By the late Soviet period, the greatest reward that a recognized writer such as Pasternak could imagine was being allowed to live out his life in decent obscurity. But what one of Pasternak’s biographers has termed his ‘choreographed self-effacement’, the elusiveness that he shared with Western Modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, or Elizabeth Bishop, was relatively rare in a culture where writers risked being effaced whether they wished it or not. A much more customary strategy was the grandiose rejection of official commemoration and the substitution of a magnificently egotistical alternative cult of self. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s superb elegy for the poet Sergey Esenin, composed after the latter committed suicide in 1925, and one of the greatest poems written in Russian in the twentieth century, contains an extraordinary passage that at once repudiates the official construction of monuments and builds a monument before the reader’s eyes:

They haven’t even

built you a memorial,

No bronze rings out,

no stone lies hewn in hunks,

But the rails of memory

are ornamented

With tributes and with memoirs –

all that junk.

By a staggering lapse in historical diplomacy, a particularly absurd and tasteless bronze Esenin was set up in 1995 (the centenary of the writer’s birth) not far away from the central Moscow Pushkin statue. So ‘the raising of monuments’ to writers, in the teeth of opposition from writers, went on.

Perhaps ‘staggering’ is the wrong word, given that the poem the constructors of the Pushkin statue in Moscow had the gall to inscribe upon its pedestal was, of all poems, ‘Monument’, which, after all, precisely opposes the living memorial of poetry and the dead weight of stone. It turns out to be the iconoclastic Mayakovsky who wrote most in Pushkin’s own spirit, then, recognizing that the elevation of statues to writers was unlikely to be compatible with an appreciation of the dynamic force in their writing. In a culture where the physical presence of the monument can seem extraordinarily daunting, it has been vital to tear Pushkin free from stone and turn him into an airy space for imaginative fantasy. Thus, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s play The Last Days (1934–5), a representation of the events leading to Pushkin’s fatal duel with Danthès, Pushkin himself remains perpetually just off-stage, becoming a creation in the minds of those who talk about him outside the door of his study and in the salons of St Petersburg, and also of the second audience watching beyond, in the auditorium.

Yet, as Bulgakov’s play also recognized, the absence of a great writer could be as powerful a cultural force as his presence. The avant-garde’s desire to ‘throw Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky off the steam-ship of modernity’, as expressed in the notorious Cubo-Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912), assaulted the status of great writers, but perpetuated this by seeing them as the central symbols of their age. And the equivocality of most assaults upon Pushkin and other famous writers of the past could only be increased by the occasional attacks in another key, such as those of the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev in the 1860s. Pisarev’s riposte to a line from Pushkin’s ‘The Poet and the Mob’, ‘They sell the Apollo Belvedere by weight’ had been to question the utility of art works in the first place. Addressing an anonymous and imaginary follower of Pushkin, he expostulated: ‘As for you, elevated cretin, son of the heavens, what do you heat your food in, a cooking-pot or the Apollo Belvedere?’ Here the statue, like Pushkin himself, became a metaphor for the inadequacy, in utilitarian terms, of artistic activity in general, an association that could only strengthen, among those in any sense committed to art, the widespread identification between cult and writer, monument and literary function.

The subject of this chapter has been the monuments of writers in the most literal sense – statues, museums, plaques on walls – and with the ways in which these are given meaning by governments, by spectators, and by other writers. In the next chapter, we will move on to look at writers’ monuments in another sense: their actual writings, and the ways in which these are presented to posterity, both by writers and by members of the literary establishment, publishers, critics, and censors, which last had such a vital, though obscured, role in the development of Russian literature.

6. Double statue of Pushkin and Natalya, unveiled for the bicentenary in 1999, Arbat, Moscow.

Chapter 3

‘Tidings of me will go

out over all great Rus’

Pushkin and the Russian literary canon

He embraced the entire world with his soul, both East and West.

(Vera Panova,

A Writer’s Notes

, 1972)