Russian Literature (7 page)

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for Pushkin and his generation of Russian writers. In their view, the Russian literary landscape resembled the ‘empty waves’, gloomy
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forests, and boggy lichen-covered shores of the unimproved North that Pushkin evoked in the prologue to
The Bronze Horseman
(1833).

Monotony, rather than chaos, was the precedent and stimulus to creation. ‘We have neither a literature nor [good] books’, Pushkin grandly asserted in 1824. Though he allowed merit to various predecessors, including Derzhavin and Ivan Krylov (best-known for his lively and vigorous fables), it was clear none of these was a ‘natural genius’ (
Naturgenie
) in the Romantic sense, or for that matter a national genius. In an essay written a year later, Pushkin explicitly denied the right of the brilliant scientist and pioneering poet Mikhailo Lomonosov to be recognized in this capacity, presenting him instead as a mere craftsman: ‘For him poetic composition was a pastime, or, as more often, an exercise undertaken out of a stern sense of duty [ . . . ]

In our first poet we would look in vain for flaming bursts of feeling or imagination.’

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8. Front cover of
Apollo
, no. 6, 1913.

The title page of
Apollo
(no. 6, 1913). Journals played an enormously important role in the publication of Russian literature from the late eighteenth century until the late twentieth.

Pushkin’s
The Contemporary
, itself the successor to magazines such as
The Drone
and
The European Herald
, was followed by dozens of organs of all political hues. Soviet literary history naturally emphasized the role of radical journals, but conservative ones, such as
The Russian Herald
(which serialized works by both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) had at least equal distinction.

The illustration here shows the frontispiece of one of the most important Modernist journals. At this period, literary magazines rebelled against the drab presentation formerly considered proper for serious publications. Beautifully designed and printed, and copiously illustrated, they, and their successors in the 1920s, are unique in Russian history as total works
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of art. From the early 1930s, Soviet magazines again reverted
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to the visual mediocrity current in the nineteenth century (and
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emphasized by the dreadful quality of paper and typefaces in
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use).

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

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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’.

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Interpretations of this kind naturally came to the forefront at the
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various Pushkin jubilees. The speeches made by writers at the raising
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out over all

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9. Pushkin, draft of
Tazit
(1830), with scored-out self-portrait in laurel wreath.

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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.

Turgenev’s national triumphalism had shaky foundations in terms of fact. The role played by Goethe in Germany, Mickiewicz in Poland, or Vuk Karadz

ˇic 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
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part of a writer who spent most of his later life abroad, chattering in
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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
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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
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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
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Onegin
.

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These scruples had a powerful institutional weight during the first
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years after the Russian Revolution, when literary-historical scholarship
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was dominated by the official ideology of ‘class war’. For those
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committed to fighting that war, Pushkin was no more than a
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supremely gifted member of a reactionary cultural elite. Most
all

great

so-called ‘leftists’, too, were admirers of fiction (especially Realist
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fiction), not of ‘rhyming blether’. Significantly, the first writers whose
s’

biographies appeared in
The Lives of Famous People
, an uplifting series for the mass market that began publication at the instigation of Gorky in 1933, were Chekhov, Gogol, the eighteenth-century radical dissident Aleksandr Radishchev, and the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, scourge of the privileged classes, rather than Pushkin. Similarly, the keynote speeches at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers emphasized the pre-eminence, alongside the Realist fiction of Gorky and of Tolstoy, of ‘progressive’ critics such as Belinsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and Nikolay Dobrolyubov. As late as 1949, a list of required reading for the Soviet masses put forward by the Party leader, Old Bolshevik, and former worker Mikhail Kalinin consisted of Lomonosov (as an example of the supreme auto-didact and
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scientific genius), the ‘revolutionary moralist’ Radishchev, Belinsky, and Dobrolyubov, with the radical poet Nikolay Nekrasov the sole example of an imaginative writer.

Right until the end of the Soviet era, ‘progressiveness’ – which is to say, the holding of views that could be represented as foreshadowing Soviet ones – was the primary criterion by which work by dead writers was judged as fitting, or not, for acknowledgement as ‘classic literature’.

‘Progressiveness’ was to be found in Chernyshevsky’s plodding, formulaic novel of women’s liberation,
What is to be Done
? (1863), but not in Dostoevsky’s
The Devils
(1871–2), which the second edition of
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia
labelled a ‘virulent slur upon the Russian movement for political liberation’. It was to be found in Tolstoy’s
War
and Peace
, but only to a much more limited degree in
Anna Karenina
(decidedly a novel of the second rank, from an official Soviet point of view, because of the unfortunate prominence in it of adulterous
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passion). It was evident in Nekrasov’s socially critical poetry, but
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most definitely not in the ‘idealist’ works of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism. It was evident in radical periodicals of high principle
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but decidedly modest literary merit, such as
The Spark
, but not in the artistically ambitious (and politically liberal) Modernist journals of the early twentieth century, such as
Apollo
or
The Scales
. Accordingly, it was selections from the former journal, and not the latter two, that appeared in the ‘Poet’s Library’, the most prestigious series of retrospective editions of poetry, published by the leading house ‘The Soviet Writer’.

Emphasis upon ‘progressiveness’ had especially piquant results where eighteenth-century literature was concerned. That the reign of the ‘reactionary’ Catherine II (herself one of the first Russian women writers) had been a far more productive era for Russian letters than that of the ‘progressive’ Peter I was bad enough; far more embarrassing was the conservatism of most Russian writers themselves, who were much more likely to pen court odes celebrating autocracy than to attack
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serfdom. As a result, much eighteenth-century Russian literature was simply not republished between the early 1930s and the late 1980s, and treatments of the period for the mass market (unlike those published between the 1890s and the 1920s) concentrated on a bare handful of figures. Apart from Radishchev and Lomonosov, the rarefied company of acceptable writers included the literary journalist Nikolay Novikov (mythologized as a martyr of Catherine II’s political censorship). Nikolay Karamzin, on the other hand, was branded a ‘gentry sentimentalist’, and a good deal of his work remained under wraps: his masterful
History
of the Russian Empire
(1818–29), for instance, was not republished in full until the late 1980s. To grasp the eccentricity of this, one might imagine a list of eighteenth-century English greats consisting of Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the early Wordsworth, but excluding
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Pope, Johnson, Fanny Burney, and Thomson on the grounds of their
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