Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

These observations proceeded from silent questions about Pushkin’s own place in Russian literary culture; they showed him moving to a comprehension that it might be possible to make himself the national poet whose lack was so strongly felt. Taking issue with a view expressed by a contemporary, according to which great poets came out of nowhere and vanished into nothing, their glory being followed by an inevitable decadence, Pushkin argued, rather, that an age of mediocrity might be the necessary preparation for the work of great writers. Had not Herodotus preceded Aeschylus, and Catullus Ovid? Though good manners precluded a direct statement of the appreciation that Derzhavin and Pushkin might stand in the same relation, after 1825 Pushkin occasionally began to represent himself as Poet rather than poet – as the priest chosen by Apollo in a famous poem of 1827, for example. But his view of himself was always ambivalent (as suggested by a doodle in the margin of a draft of his Oriental poem Tazit (1830): a self-portrait bust with a laurel wreath has been fiercely scored out in thick black ink). It was other commentators who, especially after Pushkin’s tragic death in 1837, were with growing confidence to claim for him the greatness to which he had tentatively aspired. A signal moment was when the prolific and influential critic Vissarion Belinsky declared in 1838, ‘Every educated Russian must have a complete Pushkin, otherwise he has no right to be considered either educated or Russian’.

Interpretations of this kind naturally came to the forefront at the various Pushkin jubilees. The speeches made by writers at the raising of the Moscow Pushkin monument in 1880, for example, included not only a famous patriotic tirade by Dostoevsky, but also an oration by Turgenev in which he praised Pushkin for combining two achievements that in other countries had occurred at different times and been carried out by different individuals: the creation of a new language and the initiation of a literary tradition. Pushkin’s achievement was part of Russia’s greatness and a constituent of the country’s unique identity.

9. Pushkin, draft of

Tazit

(1830), with scored-out self-portrait in laurel wreath.

Turgenev’s national triumphalism had shaky foundations in terms of fact. The role played by Goethe in Germany, Mickiewicz in Poland, or Vuk Karadžic in Serbia, was at least as important as that played by Pushkin. Russia’s literary upsurge, so far from being unique, was part of a Europe-wide surge into the intellectual mainstream of countries where culture had earlier run in isolated channels. But neither the fragility of Turgenev’s case, nor its eccentricity on the part of a writer who spent most of his later life abroad, chattering in French to his famous visitors, discredited his articulation of an idea that was gaining weight as time went on. At the jubilee of 1899, the cult of ‘Pushkin as national poet’ proved much to the taste of the conservative and nationalist government of Nicholas II. The sponsorship of street renamings and distribution of souvenirs to schoolchildren harnessed Russian writers to official patriotism, and also to the late Imperial Russian government’s new-found commitment to educating the Russian masses.

To be sure, the Pushkin cult did not develop unopposed. Tolstoy’s famous tract What is Art? (1898), for example, poured scorn on the idea of turning a dandy and womanizer such as Pushkin into a national saint. Well before this, in the 1860s, radical critics such as Dmitry Pisarev made Pushkin the spearhead of their assault on Romantic poetry in favour of politically engaged prose. Pisarev used Pushkin’s magnificent poem ‘19 October 1825’, with its moving evocation of the literary friendship between the poet and his classmate Wilhelm Küchelbecker, as an illustration of his point that verse was the statement of shallow ideas in unnecessarily complex form: ‘If all this rhyming blether is paraphrased as simple and clear prose, then the following thin and pallid message remains: “You and I both used to scribble verses; I used to print mine, and you didn’t; and now I’m not going to print mine either.”’ A fair number of radically minded readers, particularly self-taught intellectuals from the working classes, shared Pisarev’s reservations. ‘Your Onegin and your Lensky [ . . . ] should have been sent to a factory to fit cylinders to a vice’, one memoirist recalled his workmates saying in the 1910s. For readers of this kind, Maxim Gorky’s propaganda novel The Mother (1906), about a simple woman brought to political enlightenment by the cruelty of the Tsarist authorities, was a great deal more moving than Evgeny Onegin.