Russian Literature (8 page)

questionable politics, and Swift on the grounds of his questionable
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propriety. (As a matter of fact, in the Stalin years
Gulliver’s Travels
was
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published as a children’s book, in heavily abridged form.) So far as
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nineteenth-century English literature goes, it is not necessary to
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imagine a canon of ‘progressive’ writers, because one was actually
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constructed by the efforts of Soviet translators. It consisted of Shelley
all

great

(the pioneering atheist and democrat), Burns (the ‘people’s poet’ of
Ru

Scotland), William Blake (as the denouncer of ‘satanic mills’ rather than
s’

as visionary mystic), and – as the towering figure – Dickens. It most certainly did not include Jane Austen (translated only from the late 1950s), George Eliot (who had been extremely popular in nineteenth-century Russia), or Emily Brontë, let alone Gerald Manley Hopkins or Christina Rossetti.

The canon of ‘progressive’ writers was at once static and flexible. Some writers, such as Tolstoy, maintained their pre-eminence from the beginning to the end of Soviet power; others, such as Pushkin, underwent a marked change in status. The most crucial stage of reassessment came in the mid-1930s, when ‘class war’ was decreed to have ended and there was a move to conservatism in terms of family
43

and educational policy (a set of changes collectively known as ‘the Great Retreat’). Along with structural changes went symbolic changes: with increasing emphasis on the fact that cultural values transcended social circumstances went a resurgence of ‘classic’ styles in architecture, music, and painting. Not coincidentally, too, the Lenin cult instituted upon the leader’s death in 1924 began to subside in favour of an emphasis upon ‘Soviet patriotism’, centred round figures whose glory reflected and enhanced that of the ‘coryphaeus of all knowledge’, Stalin himself. The centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937 came at a crucial stage in this set of processes, and was itself used in order to enforce a new, and entirely circular, identification of artistic merit and political progressiveness.

During the 1920s, Pushkin had been perceived as an artist of supreme talent but dubious opinions; from 1937, he began to be seen as an
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10. Aleksey Remizov, ‘A Dream of Pushkin’ (1937).

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Aleksey Remizov, ‘A Dream of Pushkin’ (1937). For the different communities of Russian émigrés forced to settle abroad after the Revolution, Pushkin and his works had poignant significance. Émigrés wanted to defend the writer from the distastefully tendentious attention that he was receiving inside the Soviet Union, but were frustrated by lack of access to Pushkin’s manuscripts. However, B. L. Burtsev’s call in 1934

for ‘the publication abroad of a new edition of Pushkin’s
Complete Works
, or at the very least, of individual editions of his major works’ had a belated response in Vladimir Nabokov’s commentary on
Evgeny Onegin
, one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century interpretive scholarship.

‘Tidin

And anniversaries (particularly the centenary of Pushkin’s death
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in 1937) were celebrated by conferences and exhibitions, while
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Pushkin’s writings remained, as always, an important inspir-will ation for writers and artists. This fantasy sketch by the writer
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Aleksey Remizov shows Pushkin as a benevolently demonic
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presence, in tune with Symbolist emphasis on demonism in his
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writings.

great

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artist of supreme talent and utterly sound opinions, a vehement opponent of serfdom and a thorn in the side of autocracy. His modest literary magazine,
The Contemporary
, was conflated with its successor, the politically committed journal run under that name by Nekrasov and others in the 1840s and 1850s. It became customary to emphasize the importance of his relations with the organizers of the Decembrist Rebellion in 1825, and to stress his admiration for dissident writers.

With much pomp and ceremony, a draft version of ‘Monument’ was published in the journal of the Pushkin Commission in 1937. It inidcated that the original version of the final stanza had contained
45

the line, ‘I followed Radishchev in hymning freedom’. This cancelled line had long been known to scholars, and is no less ambiguous than everything else in the poem (one possible interpretation, since Radishchev was a famous suicide, is that Pushkin was evoking the ‘freedom’ he had exercised in ending his own existence). The fact that it was cancelled, too, makes interpretations based solely upon it rather dubious. But, in pious evocations of the progressive Pushkin, it acquired the status of a last, rather than a first, word. As one commentator put it in 1962: ‘Only in 1937, upon the centenary of Pushkin’s tragic death, did the genuine meaning of his “testament”

become clear.’

Nothing was allowed to disturb the presentation of Pushkin as a ‘forward-thinking’ figure. A popular edition of Pisarev’s essays on literature published in 1940 simply omitted the essay ‘Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry’ in which the quotation about ‘rhyming blether’ cited earlier in
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this chapter appeared. The piece was made available only in more
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ambitious editions, such as Pisarev’s
Works
of 1955–6. Equally, Pushkin’s unmistakable turn to political conservatism after 1830 – his defence of
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serfdom and growing conviction that autocratic rule was essential to the dissemination of enlightenment – was not an acceptable subject of discussion for Soviet specialists. And in its turn, the fact that Pushkin was now deemed ‘the founding father of magnificent Russian literature’, a kind of literary equivalent to Peter I, contributed to the eclipse of the eighteenth century: founding fathers have by definition no need of ancestors.

Another aspect of the ‘founding father’ cult was that Pushkin increasingly became the subject of overt chauvinism. The theme of ‘Pushkin as ultimate genius’ was already an undertone in the Pushkin jubilee of 1937. It made itself felt in transition policy. A table published in 1945 set out the following tally of languages into which various great writers had been rendered before and after the Revolution:
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Writer

Languages into

After 1917

which translated

before 1917

Pushkin

9

66

Tolstoy

10

54

Chekhov

5

53

Lermontov

5

26

Saltykov-Shchedrin

1

24

Nekrasov

1

21

Romain Rolland

1

13

Goethe

1

6

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The theme rose to the height of a trumpet blast at the 150th anniversary
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of Pushkin’s birth in 1949, which coincided with the onset of the Cold
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War and the beginning of an anti-Semitic and xenophobic campaign
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against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. Two lectures (also published as
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booklets) by a member of the Academy of Sciences represented the
all

great

writer as a figure who, while ‘soaking up everything that was best in
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preceeding culture, both Russian and foreign’, had been filled with
s’

‘national pride’ and had presciently ‘lambasted cosmopolitanism’, as well as ‘aestheticism and formalism’. Naturally, the appreciation that ‘cosmopolitanism’ was shameful was to be a powerful impediment to analysis of such issues as Pushkin’s vexed but intimate relationship with Western Romantic literature. So, too, the belief that Russian literature was of particular and extraordinary value and character impeded analysis of the Russian contribution to European-wide movements such as the cult of sensibility or Modernism. Between 1948 and 1956, there was little or no serious discussion of such topics. The admiration of the Russian radicals for
Evgeny Onegin
, which Belinsky grandly, if inaccurately, held to have ‘exhausted the whole of Russian life’, was adduced as proof positive of Pushkin’s mature appreciation of
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Romanticism’s limitations. The fact that the novel’s ambivalent treatment of Romantic emotions and character types was perfectly in accordance with the practices of ‘Romantic irony’ (compare the work of Byron or Heinrich Heine) was ignored. And the resemblance of Pushkin’s novel
The Captain’s Daughter
to Walter Scott’s
Redgauntlet
, where rebellion by the oppressed succeeds only in substituting an unreliable tyranny for an authoritarianism in which reason plays some part, was overlooked in interpretations which made the novel into an unambiguous critique of Catherine II’s ‘bestial’ suppression of the peasant rebel Pugachev.

The other important ambition of the Stalinist regime, apart from presenting Pushkin as an ancestor of Soviet literature and instrument of national suprematism, was to present him as a ‘national writer’ in the sense of ‘national-popular’: a writer for the entire nation. Already in the 1920s, there had been a wide-ranging drive aimed at giving new readers
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a chance to make their first acquaintance with the Russian classics.

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Reader surveys anxiously monitored the reactions of proletarians and peasants to these. The surveys themselves produced very diverse
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responses, but analyses of them generally boiled the material down to make a straightforward case: Modernism was incomprehensible to ordinary people, while the classics were accessible to everyone. As a Russian peasant woman was said to have commented in a survey of 1926, ‘And “Monument”? How could you not feel something after that?’.

Statements of this kind were meant not just to report opinion, but to shape it. This was the kind of reaction that Soviet ‘mass readers’ were
supposed
to have when reading great literature. Accordingly, the authorities made sure to provide them with the kind of literature likely to induce such responses. From the mid-1930s, the Russian classics again became the core of literature teaching in schools, and instruction focused on material that was both accessible and morally uplifting.

Pupils had to learn by heart Tatiana’s letter from
Evgeny Onegin
(Tatiana
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11. V. Klutsis, poster for the Pushkin Jubilee of 1937. The poem in the open book appears to be ‘Monument’.

was considered a role-model for Soviet womanhood), and Turgenev’s prose poem to ‘the great and magnificent Russian language’. Rather than the psychologically complex and embittered verse that Lermontov had written in his final years, or the scathing poems in which the writer complained that it was ‘painful to survey his generation’ and bid an unfond farewell to ‘unwashed Russia’, textbooks included emblematic nature poems evoking the momentous size of the Russian Empire, or such rousing patriotic pieces as ‘Two Giants’, in which the Russian giant defeats his foreign rival, and ‘Borodino’, evoking the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812. The result was that from childhood, Russian readers carried round a treasured mental anthology of poems such as these, and a knowledge of prose classics taught in the classroom (for example, Gogol’s 1841 tale of the miserable civil servant Akaky Akakievich,
The
Overcoat
).