Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

If anything, defensiveness about writers’ biographies increased in the late 1990s, fuelled by anxiety that Russian literature had lost its traditional hold over Russian culture. In 1998, an essayist writing in the liberal literary journal Kontinent cited, as one of a list of accusations aimed at demonstrating the ‘unculturedness’ of the Russian media, the fact that Russian television had marked the occasion of ‘Pushkin Day’, an official festival instituted by Boris Yeltsin in that year, only by the showing of ‘some kind of parody ballet performed by half-naked avantgarde dancers’. The accusation against the media was strikingly unfair, given that the build-up to the bicentenary of the writer’s birth in 1999 was actually marked by dozens of reverential programmes. But it showed Pushkin becoming the figurehead of another kind of conservatism: this time that of a beleaguered intelligentsia who felt that culture was even more under threat in the post-Soviet era than it had been during Soviet rule. In Tatiana Tolstaya’s futurist novel The Mynx (2000), which shows the inhabitants of a post-nuclear holocaust Moscow condemned for ever to relive Soviet history as farce, an enthusiastic and unlearned book-lover sets up what he calls ‘a pushkin’, a wooden fetish to some half-forgotten god of the literature that had once existed. But at the same time that it mocks monumentalism, the novel represents knowledge of great writing as a measure of true culture: the perfidy of the post-holocaust dictator and the sterility of the neo-primitive culture he dominates are shown by the fact that he passes off famous poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Blok as his own. Once more, the integrity of writing and the writer stands for the moral probity of society at large.

This chapter has dwelled upon the question of the dissemination of literary works in Russia. It began with the issue of writers’ control over their own output, a control that was sometimes aided by censorship but more often frustrated by it. Censorship could sometimes act as a stimulus to literary production. More devastating was its effect upon the quality of readership, especially in the Soviet period, when education and publishing for the masses created a new class of self-confident, but rather intellectually limited, readers who took their restricted knowledge of the classics as a measure of aesthetic standards in the absolute. Academic criticism, while based on far broader knowledge of primary material, was itself subject to severe constraints, particularly before 1956. Not only politically explosive material had to be avoided, but also ‘vulgar’ or ‘trivial’ themes, a consideration that led to bowdlerization of authors’ writings and also to the avoidance of biographical treatments, except where these concentrated on a writer’s ‘creative path’, that is, on intellectual experiences that were relevant to the composition of individual literary texts.

The discussion here should not be taken as meaning that every Russian had to manifest the kind of piety that was expected by school-teachers and government officials in the presence of great writers. As we shall see in the next chapter, many individuals, particularly other writers, had a much bolder attitude to established reputations than that. However, even at the end of the twentieth century, the levels of reverence for classic authors were considerably higher in Russia than they were in Western Europe, let alone America, a situation that was fostered, as well as bedevilled, by the spread of explicitly commercially oriented values in Russian society generally, and in the press in particular.

Chapter 4

‘I shall be famous as long as another poet lives’

Writers’ responses to Pushkin

Don’t hit me with Pushkin –

I’ll use him to hit you!

(Marina Tsvetaeva, 1937)

Among commentators on Russian literary history, Pushkin’s boast that he would resonate for ever in the minds of poets was sometimes taken at face value, with the poet’s work seen as the ultimate source of everything valuable in the work of his successors. But the sense that Pushkin’s work was the alpha and omega of all literary endeavour was by no means limited to patriotic bureaucrats or pillars of the educational system. Rather, each successive generation of writers was able to convince itself that it alone had discovered ‘the real’ Pushkin. This conviction was enhanced by the fact that a great many of Pushkin’s writings were not ‘Pushkinian’ in the sense understood in the schoolroom, but undermined decent commonplaces about balance, restraint, and edification. For example, ‘The Drowned Man’, a quintessentially Romantic ballad about a revenant taking vengeance on a peasant who has selfishly failed to bury him, starkly evokes the appearance of the ghost:

The moon rolls out from the rain-clouds –

What? Naked before him it stands,

Water running from its beard,

Glare bold and fixed,