Russian Literature (10 page)

as well as less spectacular misdemeanours such as vulgarity and
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rudeness, were as common in early nineteenth-century Russian society
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as in any other human community, discussion of such topics was not
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allowed to disrupt the view of the ‘Golden Age’ of Pushkin and his
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contemporaries as an aesthetic paradise. In other words, this was an
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interpretive tradition that, in seeking to trace the conventions of early
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nineteenth-century Russian life, often replicated the proprieties against
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which writers themselves had battled. Even to liberal Russian scholars
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of this kind, Richard Holmes’s life of Coleridge, showing the poet composing his aethereal works in a constant struggle with decidedly earthly afflictions such as constipation, would have seemed trivial and putrid tattle. In some ways, this was a reflection of writers’ own determination to transcend physicality. The poet Nikolay Klyuev, desperately sick, bedridden, and a victim of Stalinist persecution, comforted himself with the thought that ‘saints can be recognized by their endurance, ability to rise above suffering [ . . . ] some people’s souls are like trumpets, sounding only when catastrophe and the angel of torment blows into them’. Yet the refusal of scholars to interest themselves in personal pain – failed love affairs, divorces, sexual agony – could be obstructive to the study of writers preoccupied, in
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their work, with precisely these subjects. The Formalist theory that writers self-consciously shaped personal experience as art even while they were living it (termed in Russian
zhiznetvorchestvo
) ignored the fact that some writers were inspired precisely by life’s reluctance to subordinate itself to such reshaping (examples of this included some of the women writers discussed in Chapter 6 below).

Even once interest in the ‘distinguishing features’ of recognized writers proliferated, then, there was little concern with ‘faults’: rather than ‘biography’ in the Western sense, the writing of lives meant setting out an author’s ‘creative path’ (the authoritative life of Klyuev eschewed discussion of the poet’s homosexual love affairs and concentrated instead upon his artistic relationships with other writers and with journal editors). The essential task was to represent the life as a saintly path of suffering and triumph (
podvig
): deviations from this model provoked bitter debate, as in the case of the Russian-American critic
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Alexander Zholkovsky’s revisionist interpretation of Anna Akhmatova’s
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biography. Zholkovsky argued that Akhmatova saw her own suffering, political and personal, as a mark of distinction, and strove to emphasize
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and heighten it. She was not merely an inert and innocent victim, but actively sought out pain. She used others as the instruments of conflict (her history of relationships with men who were already attached to another woman is striking) and as a sounding-board for lamentation (Zholkovsky drew attention to Akhmatova’s compulsive desire for an audience, manifested in her repeated commands that her friends should drop everything and rush round to see her when she so required). In a furious response printed in
Zvezda
, the literary journal which had published Zholkovsky’s article, another Russian-American critic accused Zholkovsky of colluding in, and approving, Akhmatova’s oppression: ‘Only from a safe distance – whether geographical or chronological – can one write about history and literature with such unruffled alienation from human suffering.’ Life-writing was still widely seen as a genre demanding moral engagement and respect bordering on adulation, even when practised by scholars.

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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 avant-garde 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
‘Tidin
culture was even more under threat in the post-Soviet era than it had
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been during Soviet rule. In Tatiana Tolstaya’s futurist novel
The Mynx
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(2000), which shows the inhabitants of a post-nuclear holocaust
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Moscow condemned for ever to relive Soviet history as farce, an
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enthusiastic and unlearned book-lover sets up what he calls ‘a pushkin’,
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a wooden fetish to some half-forgotten god of the literature that had
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once existed. But at the same time that it mocks monumentalism, the
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novel represents knowledge of great writing as a measure of true
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culture: the perfidy of the post-holocaust dictator and the sterility of
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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
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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,
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even at the end of the twentieth century, the levels of reverence for
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classic authors were considerably higher in Russia than they were in Western Europe, let alone America, a situation that was fostered, as well
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as bedevilled, by the spread of explicitly commercially oriented values in Russian society generally, and in the press in particular.

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‘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,

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Glare bold and fixed,

Each limb fearfully numb,

And black crayfish fastened

To its swollen body.

As each generation of theatre directors and audiences in the Anglophone world has constructed its particular Shakespeare (take the fashion for the so-called ‘problem plays’ of tortured sexual relationships, such as
Measure for Measure
and
Troilus and Cressida
, in the 1960s and 1970s), so successive generations of Russian readers and critics have discovered ‘their’ Pushkin. For example,
The
Bronze Horseman
, an evocation of St Petersburg as at once a supreme art work and a symbol of crushing authoritarianism, resonated in Petersburg Modernist texts such as Andrey Bely’s novel
Petersburg
, or in a poem by Innokenty Annensky in which the ‘yellow fog’ of Dostoevsky’s novels swirls around the statue hero of
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Pushkin’s poem.

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Given the circumstances of early twentieth-century Russian history, it is
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hardly surprising that Pushkin was considered important for what the religious philosopher Simeon Frank called his ‘apprehension of life’s inherent tragedy’. But he was valued also as a writer who had emphasized the importance of the writer. It was the Romantic side of Pushkin to which many writers gave weight. The critic Mikhail Gershenzon felt that ‘Monument’ was to be interpreted as drawing a contrast between ‘genuine’ fame, ‘among people who understand poetry’, and ‘vulgar fame, among the mob, a muted kind of fame – mere celebrity’. This interpretation was entirely in the spirit of the times. Pushkin’s poem ‘The Prophet’, in which the poet was seen as a Promethean outcast gifted with a uniquely full understanding of his culture, spawned dozens of imitations between 1890 and 1940 as Modernist writers reasserted the primacy of art and with it the Romantic understanding of the artist as hero, sacred madman, and prophet.

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To be sure, the twentieth century saw something of a rehabilitation of pre-Pushkinian poetry, with such important figures as Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and later Joseph Brodsky, inspired by the stubborn obscurity and exhilarating harshness of Derzhavin. But the Modernist emphasis on the pursuit of originality was not congenial to an understanding of the deliberate conventionalism of eighteenth-century writing. Typical was Vladimir Nabokov, whose commentary on
Evgeny
Onegin
lambasted the insipidity of Karamzin and the unreadable dreariness of the epic poet Mikhail Kheraskov, and unwillingly allowed to Derzhavin only ‘touches of rough genius’. In poetry, the voice employed by Pushkin in his writings about the poet, allying ironical scepticism to a defiant assertion of the value of inspiration, became the
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definitive means of conveying artistic experience. The 1910s and 1920s
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saw a revival of ‘Pushkinian’ devices in prose too – the use of frame
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narratives, epigraphs, texts-within-texts, and other strategies marking
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the distance of a tale from reality, its contingency upon style rather
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than observation.

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Despite the gesticulation on the part of writers towards Pushkin in
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terms of theme, and the borrowing of vocabulary and of forms with a
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‘Pushkinian’ resonance, the work of later generations was by no means constrained by what Pushkin had done. Those genres in which
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Pushkin did not work were often to prove more productive than those in which he did. Though Andrey Sinyavsky described Pushkin’s poetry as ‘filled with a mass of personal material’, the amount of strictly ‘personal material’ in Pushkin’s lyric poetry, as opposed to his letters or notebook jottings, is actually rather limited, and this material always appears in transmuted form. Apparently confessional poems, written in the first person, are in fact ‘costumed confessions’ – that is, spoken in the words of some invented character. And the ‘costumes’

that Pushkin chose to put on, both in his lyric verse and in his drama and fiction, were bewilderingly varied. Pushkin’s essays and jottings make it clear that he was temperamentally akin both to Mozart and Salieri, the apparently antithetical heroes of one of his
Little Tragedies
;
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Hermann, the dogged, neurotic German protagonist of
The Queen of
Spades
, and the effortlessly charming Tomsky, a prattling gossip from high society, are both authorial alter egos. Though the mode of ‘costumed confession’ is characteristic of Russian literature (it is found, for instance, in Lermontov’s
Hero of our Time
, or in Akhmatova’s early poetry), the sheer range of masks that Pushkin adopted was unique.