Russian Literature (5 page)

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4. A Pushkin-shaped bottle of vodka, produced to mark the centenary of
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the poet’s birth in 1899. The resemblance is, to put it politely, approximate,
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but using Pushkin’s famous features to brand consumable items enraged earnest admirers of the poet, even if (in the case of the item shown here) the poet himself would have consumed them with enthusiasm.

school-leavers, and showing the poet alongside a globe, an array of Pioneer and Komsomol badges, and the complete works of Lenin. It was possible to buy a Pushkin bust, a miniature of the Pushkin monument, or a Tales of Pushkin brand chocolate, but T-shirts with Pushkin on them, or comic-book versions of
Evgeny Onegin
, were emphatically not on sale. On the other hand, cheap editions of Pushkin’s works were produced for private reading and for class-teaching, and statues were set up all over the Soviet Union – anywhere that Pushkin had visited for an afternoon had, at the very least, a portrait bust. Museums proliferated everywhere: the practice was gently satirized in Mikhail Zoshchenko’s story ‘Pushkin’ (1927), whose narrator is unable to find a
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flat in Leningrad from which he is not evicted in short order so that yet another ‘museum apartment’ can be set up.

Commemoration of other writers, while never as extensively developed as that of Pushkin, was also encouraged by the Soviet state. A museum in Chekhov’s Moscow house was opened in 1954; Leningrad acquired a Nekrasov museum in 1946 and a Dostoevsky museum in 1971 (the delay in establishing the last reflected the opprobrium in which the writer was held by the Soviet authorities from the late 1920s until the mid-1950s). A hierarchy of commemoration was established: plaques on the outside of former dwellings for all noteworthy writers, memorial flats for the top tier and second tier of writers, but statues for the top tier alone. In Moscow, for example, there were statues of Dostoevsky (1918), Gogol (1952, replacing an earlier statue), Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1929), Gorky
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(1951), and Tolstoy (1956). Soviet writers similarly honoured included
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Mayakovsky (1958), A. N. Tolstoy (the ‘Soviet count’, whose statue went
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up in 1957), and Aleksandr Fadeev (long-time General Secretary of the
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Soviet Writers’ Union, who committed suicide after Khrushchev’s
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denunciation of Stalin in 1956; his monument was put in place in 1972).

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‘Museum flats’ included those of, besides the writers already
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mentioned, the Soviet novelist Nikolay Ostrovsky, author of the factory
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novel
How the Steel was Tempered
(1935). The memorial plaques are too numerous to list.

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
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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
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leaders.’ The Convent of Christ’s Passion (the meaning of the name
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‘Strastnoy’), was not chosen as a focus for the celebrations simply because of its convenient location next to the Pushkin statue, but
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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
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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
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place during later statue-toppling frenzies as well. Dostoevsky’s effigy
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remained in its position outside his birthplace throughout the Stalin
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years; A. N. Tolstoy, an instrument and beneficiary of literary Stalinism,
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was spared from the post-1961 monument purge that rid Soviet cities of
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images of his master; Fadeev, an assiduous signer of arrest-warrants
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during the Great Terror, went on standing on his pedestal when the
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memorial to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police,
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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.

The commemorative efforts of twentieth-century British lovers of literature (discreet blue plaques on London houses and the like) pale into insignificance before Russian ones. Different, too, is the place of the memorials in popular culture. It would be, to put it mildly, unusual if a couple decided to begin their honeymoon with a visit to Stratford (as a Russian couple might with a visit to Pushkin’s estate in Mikhailovskoe);
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even the most famous writers’ museums (for instance, the Brontë house in Haworth) attract a less socially diverse group of visitors than their Russian equivalents. What is more, the existence of commemorative cults has, since the late nineteenth century, been what the Formalist scholar Yury Tynyanov termed a ‘literary fact’, that is, a point in real life that is of significance to literary composition.

Writers varied considerably in their attitudes to the memorialization of their predecessors, and to the possibility that they might one day themselves be memorialized. For some early twentieth-century poets, for example Innokenty Annensky and Anna Akhmatova, evoking a statue was a way of emphasizing continuity between past and present.

Both poets imagined Pushkin’s bronzes coming back to life, walking among the avenues of Tsarskoe Selo that he had celebrated in his poetry. Later, Akhmatova was to conclude her poetic commemoration of the Great Terror,
Requiem
, with a reference to the time when the
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poet’s own memorial might be placed outside the Leningrad central
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5. Graffiti showing Woland from
The Master and Margarita
in ‘Margarita’s house’, Moscow. An instance where literary characters have become part of popular culture.

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prison, Kresty. The statue would be a perpetual admonition to the city’s population of the tragedy that
Requiem
itself commemorated: And let the melted snow stream

Off the immobile, bronze eyelids,

And let the prison dove coo in the distance, And the ships peacefully sail down the Neva.

Akhmatova was also to allude in some of her work to the custom of naming streets after famous writers, as a way of raising the question of what traces her life would leave in the future. So too was the poet Osip Mandelstam in the bleak days of exile in 1935, when physical survival came to seem more and more unlikely:
‘I ha

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Whichever street is this?

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Mandelstam Street.

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What sort of damn name is that?

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However you turn it about

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It sounds crooked, not straight.

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The street was crooked, not straight,

And he was black, not white, in his ways,

That’s why this street,

Or, rather, this pit –

Has its name:

After that Mandelstam.

The fictional Mandelstam Street has acquired its name by a grotesque reversal of the usual process by which such names were assigned. A side-street instead of a main one has been picked, and instead of conferring immortality and transcendence, it recalls death and constriction. The word ‘pit’ (
yama
) is used for a communal grave, such as those in which prisoners in labour camps were buried, and is also a
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colloquial term for the prison itself. The street is an alley in hell, not a thoroughfare in the socialist heaven. The only detail that mimics official procedure is that the course of the street stands for the life-course of the person commemorated, but as both are ‘crooked’, the result is improper in two ways at once.

Yet if Mandelstam’s poem travestied the idea of street-naming to suggest the marginal place of this particular writer in his culture, it still took as a given the link between the monument and the artistic biography. It was only at less forbidding points of Soviet history that writers could afford to distance themselves from the idea of a physical afterlife. In a poem from his last collection,
When the Sky Clears
(1956–9), written during the so-called ‘Thaw’ era that followed the death of Stalin, Boris Pasternak was to repudiate the notion of turning oneself into a piece of living heritage:
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