Russian Literature (2 page)

name me’: Russian literature and ‘primitive culture’

117

8

‘O muse, be obedient to the command of God’: the spiritual and material worlds

138

Further reading

153

Index

157

List of illustrations

1

Portrait of Aleksandr

5

Graffiti showing Woland

Pushkin by Vasily Tropinin

from
The Master and

(1827)

2

Margarita
in ‘Margarita’s Novosti (London)

house’, Moscow

26

John Bushnell

2

Statue of Pushkin, Pushkin

Square, Moscow (A. M.

6

Double statue of Pushkin

Opekushin, 1880)

17

and Natalya, unveiled for

Catriona Kelly

the bicentenary in 1999,

Arbat, Moscow

31

3

Ilya Repin,
Pushkin Reciting
Novosti (London)

his Poem ‘Reminiscences of
Tsarskoe Selo’ at the Lyceum
7

Front cover of
Evgeny
Speech Day, 8 January 1815

Onegin: Chapter One

(1911)

20

(1825)

34

Art Collections of Prague Castle, Inv.

By permission of the Houghton

Nr. 0538

Library, Harvard University

4

A Pushkin-shaped bottle of

8

Front cover of
Apollo
, vodka

22

no. 6, 1913

37

S. Librovich,
Pushkin v portretakh:
Taylor Institution, Oxford

Istoriya izobrazheniya poeta v
zhivopisi, gravyure, i skul’pture
(St Petersburg, 1890); Taylor Institution,

Oxford

9

Pushkin, draft of
Tazit
15

Pushkin declaiming his

(1830), with scored-out

verses to ‘The Green Lamp’

self-portrait in laurel

literary society

101

wreath

39

Hulton Archive

10

Aleksey Remizov, ‘A Dream

16

Aleksandr Pushkin,

of Pushkin’ (1937)

44

self-portrait in female

dress

105

11

V. Klutsis, poster for the

Pushkin Jubilee of 1937

49

17

Igor Geitman,
Portrait of
David King Collection

Aleksandr Pushkin

121

12

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky,

18

A Circassian warrior

123

design for the final act of

W. Miller, The Costume of the

Tchaikovsky’s opera
The
Russian Empire (1803)

Queen of Spades

54

R. Fülöp-Miller and J. Gregor,
The
19

A Cossack soldier

125

Russian Theatre
(Harrap, 1930) Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman

Art Library (London)

13

Sergei Eisenstein’s staging

of Ostrovsky,
Too Clever By
20

‘Don’t Weep for Me,

Half
(1923)

66

Mother’: The Saviour not

R. Fülöp-Miller and J. Gregor,
The
Made by Human Hands

Russian Theatre
(Harrap, 1930) with Saints. Icon for Holy

Week

148

14

Cartoon of two writers by

State Russian Museum,

Yu. Gorokhov (
Krokodil
18, St Petersburg

1952)

97

Taylor Institution, Oxford

List of Maps

1

The Russian Empire, showing places with literary associations xiv

2

Central Moscow, showing some of the main monuments and museums xvi

Map 1
The Russian Empire, showing places with literary associations.

Map 2
Central Moscow, showing some of the main monuments and museums.

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Which of us can understand Pushkin? We knew Pushkin only in translation [ . . . ] and we liked his short stories much less than Nathaniel Hawthorne’s; and obviously, we were wrong, for because of limitations of language we were debarred from seeing something that is as obvious to unsealed eyes as the difference between a mule and a Derby winner.

(Rebecca West, 1941)

In 1925, the Anglo-Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky began
Modern
Russian Literature
, a pioneering ‘very short’ introduction published by Oxford University Press, by referring to Pushkin.

It is indeed difficult for the foreigner, perhaps impossible if he is ignorant of the language, to believe in the supreme greatness of Pushkin among Russian writers. Yet it is necessary for him to accept the belief, even if he disagrees with it. Otherwise every idea he may form of Russian literature and Russian civilization will be inadequate and out of proportion with reality.

Seven decades later, Pushkin is still acknowledged as ‘supremely great’

among Russian writers by his compatriots, and this is still likely to strike foreign readers as odd. Outside its home, Russian literature is associated first and foremost with prose, and particularly with prose that is rich in
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1. Portrait of Aleksandr Pushkin.

This 1827 portrait of Alexandr Pushkin (1799–1837) by Vasily Tropinin, done from life by an artist who was the favoured painter of Moscow’s ‘middling sort’ (successful merchants, civil servants, and respectable writers) is at first sight a workaday likeness. In contrast to a contemporary, Orest Kiprensky, who produced a full-blown Romantic portrait of Pushkin, eyes raised, arms folded, and statue of the Muse at his back, Tropinin gives the poet only one ‘writerly’ accessory, the sheaf of manuscript under his right arm. At the same time, Pushkin is handled rather differently from Tropinin’s other subjects. His fraying scarf, carelessly knotted at his badly ironed collar, and long dirty fingernails, suggest unconcern with trivialities such as grooming; his sideways gaze conveys abstraction; and his prominent astigmatism (barely noticeable in most portraits) implies internal conflict. The picture shows Pushkin at the pin-T

nacle of his lifetime fame. A byword for youthful brilliance even
estam

in an age where precocity was taken for granted (he had begun
ent

publishing while still at the Lyceum School in Tsarskoe Selo, and his early works included the sparkling mock-epic
Ruslan and
Ludmilla
, written in his late teens), Pushkin achieved still greater notoriety when he was exiled for political insubordination in 1820. Outside the capital until 1826, he remained at the centre of literary life:
The Prisoner of the Caucasus
(1822), the early chapters of
Evgeny Onegin
, and the lyric poems of 1820–5 had a huge popular and literary success and remained the benchmark of his achievement for many critics and ordinary readers. During the late 1820s and early 1830s, Pushkin’s circumstances were to become increasingly difficult, as a result of political surveillance, a troubled marriage, and a problematic relationship with his readers. Later works, such as the historical narrative poem
Poltava
(1828), received a relatively cool reception, and the last years of the poet’s life, culminating in his death
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in a duel in January 1837, saw mounting personal and artistic isolation. But between 1826 and 1830, he produced a run of masterpieces: many of his greatest lyric poems, his first published experiments in prose, and several outstanding narrative poems, as well as the later chapters of
Evgeny Onegin
.

ideas and devotes itself to the exploration of moral dilemmas. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the authors of vast novels of exactly this kind, who have been acknowledged, among Western readers, as the greatest writers of Russia. Tolstoy’s
War
and Peace
(1865–9), which argues that human beings can exercise control over events only if they recognize their own powerlessness, yet breathes individuality into a vast range of characters, appears regularly
ture
in lists of the ten most important books of all time. The ethical concerns
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Lit

set out by Dostoevsky, above all the question of whether morality is possible in a world without God, anticipated some of the most
ssian

Ru

important concerns of modern philosophy, from Nietzsche to Sartre.

Pushkin wrote no large novels, and he does not even seem particularly ‘Russian’ in other ways, not even as ‘Russian’ as Turgenev. Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
(1862) has a main character, Bazarov, whose obsession with social utility (he insists that the dissecting of frogs is superior to water-colour painting) seems satisfactorily strange because it is so hyperbolic. And the novel’s country estate setting is at once charming and exotic, with its serf mistress, its ribboned dogs, and its duel fought over an imagined matter of honour. It is easy to trace a line between
Fathers and Sons
and Chekhov’s plays, but far less easy to see how
Evgeny Onegin
– with its wayward digressions, its urbane and ironic tone, and its curious air of repressed emotion – might be a forerunner of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
(1875–7) or of Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot
(1868). The combination of wit with the melancholy appreciation that happiness
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may be most elusive when easiest to realize makes the book seem more like a successor to Jane Austen’s
Persuasion
. To be sure, it has some impressive English-language descendants – they include Nabokov’s
Lolita
and Vikram Seth’s verse novel about San Francisco,
The Golden
Gate
– but these arch and self-conscious texts simply enhance Western readers’ conviction that Pushkin is peculiar in terms of his own, supposedly immediate and spontaneous, culture.

Yet all the major Russian writers were avid readers of European literature; if they reacted against it, they also learned from it.
Anna
Karenina
may be at some level a riposte to
Madame Bovary
, but there is a direct connection between an image in the opening pages of Flaubert’s novel – Charles Bovary’s hideous hat standing for the inconsequential life remarked by the author alone – and the insignificant stubborn burdock that Tolstoy’s narrator notices at the beginning of
Hadji Murat
.

During the eighteenth century, Russians had been haunted by fears that
T

their literature was too imitative, too dominated by translations. Such
estam

fears were replaced during the nineteenth century by pride in native
ent

achievements, but receptivity to French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian literature continued. Even writers who had only a poor knowledge of Western languages absorbed foreign material avidly.

Dostoevsky’s novels were as indebted to Dickens as they were to Gogol.

Though the writer detested the real England when he visited in 1862, that only confirmed his adulation for Dickens. After 1917, love of foreign literature survived not only the bitterness of exile, but the cultural isolation endured by writers who stayed behind in the Soviet Union.

Anna Akhmatova’s admiration for T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, and Joseph Brodsky’s for John Donne, are only two of the better-known relationships with Western literature; a more unexpected instance is Marina Tsvetaeva’s enthusiasm for the best-selling American novelist Pearl S. Buck.

By no means all the commentators who shaped Anglophone readers’

views of Russian literature were unaware of the artistic affinity of
5

‘Russian’ and ‘Western’ traditions. Many were authors themselves – indeed, the most impressive English-language interpretations of Russian literature have tended to be literary rather than critical. The short stories of Chekhov, in particular, left marks on the work of writers in English such as Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and William Trevor. Chekhov’s stories were models of how to contrive small-scale narratives that almost evaded the onward drive of plot, and captured a character’s entire world in a few moments that were both exemplary and elusive. Chekhov’s writing accorded well with Anglophone admiration for unnoticeable virtuosity (it is not for nothing that the term ‘craft’ also means ‘stealth’). But if greatness in prose involves hardly seeming to write literature at all, then some of Pushkin’s narratives –
The Prisoner of the Caucasus
(1822),
Dubrovsky
(1832–3), or
The Captain’s Daughter
(1836) – are likely to disappoint.

Here, plot matters a great deal, and the need to provide a resolute
ture

ending seems uppermost. In addition, Pushkin’s closeness to French
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models (Chateaubriand’s
René
or Constant’s
Adolphe
, the poetry of Parny and Lamartine) does him no service in Anglophone culture,
ssian
Ru

which has traditionally equated ‘French’ with ‘trite, superficial, and pretentious’.

To be fair, Pushkin’s strangeness is not something felt only by foreigners. Russian commentators have remarked it too. Those of pro-Western sympathies have considered it a sign of Pushkin’s unique status as a truly civilized person in a society of shameful backwardness; for nationalists, on the other hand, it has been a signal tragedy, a symbol of the alienation of intellectuals from the ‘Russian people’. The philosopher Gustav Shpet, a late follower of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles (the movement that arose in the 1830s in order to lament the harm that had been done to Russian culture by Westernization), saw Pushkin as ‘an accident’. His writing was ‘precisely his writing, the writing of a genius who did not emerge from the Russian national spirit’. But whatever their feelings about Pushkin’s expression (or not)
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