Russian Literature (4 page)

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(usually taken to mean the Alexander Column, the monument to Alexander I as leader of the Russian forces victorious over Napoleon) simply intended to contrast the miraculous verbal artefact with the inert monument, made to glorify a ruler for posterity, constructed with chisel, pulley, and trowel? (Because the usual term for the ‘Alexander Column’ is not used, it is possible that Pushkin was, through the term ‘Alexandrian Pillar’, also referring to the Pharos at Alexandria – and suggesting that his poetry would be the eighth wonder of the world.) And how is Pushkin’s pride in speaking to an entire nation compatible with the intense erudition of this poem, whose allusiveness continues to baffle learned commentary?

These questions can be answered in many different ways. A survey of how ‘Monument’ has been interpreted in different eras of Russian history – as a prophetic evocation in advance of Stalinist literary culture, as an anguished and angry protest by a martyred writer, as a coded
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message from poet to poet, even as a parody – would shed at least as
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much light on changing values in Russian culture as on the poem’s meaning in its own right. But the importance of ‘Monument’ goes
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beyond what it has meant to individual literary critics or even writers. In only five stanzas and twenty lines, the poem raises seven themes of universal resonance in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian culture. These are: memorials to the famous as expressions of state power and cultural authority; a writer’s ‘monument’ in the sense of his posthumous reputation; other writers as a writer’s ideal readers; a writer’s role as teacher to his nation; the writer as a member of polite society; the part played by literature in colonizing, or civilizing, barbarian nations; the relationship between writing and religious experience. These ‘signposts’ to different themes in Russian literary culture, to ideas and issues that have been of lasting importance in the work of Pushkin’s successors, have been used to direct the journey taken in this book.

Following this itinerary does not mean taking on trust the belief,
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expressed whenever Russians are gathered together to celebrate some anniversary, that ‘Pushkin is our all’. Pushkin’s celebrated laconicism and lucidity represented only one orientation in literary culture. Many of his successors were inspired not by his finely honed precision, but by the different and in some respects antagonistic conventions of medieval sermons or eighteenth-century odic verse; some spurned written culture altogether in favour of folklore and popular culture. Yet a conscious consideration of how Pushkin worked (even if followed by a repudiation of this) was often or even usually the starting point for the efforts of later authors. And the very fact of the ‘Pushkin myth’, the obsessive commemoration of the writer in stone and bronze as well as in words, music, in the theatre, or on film, has made it next to impossible to avoid engaging with him. Pushkin is a relatively recent historical presence, and his life, unlike Shakespeare’s, is well documented in terms of events, if not in terms of motivation. Therefore, it has become difficult to separate the process of remembering personal
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history from the commemoration of Russia’s national poet, whose
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presence has dominated the childhood of educated Russians since the
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late nineteenth century. The best place to begin, then, is where they did: with a monument.

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‘I have raised myself a
monument’

Writer memorials and cults
How can I talk about Pushkin? A pygmy riding on a giant.

(Andrey Bely, 1925)

One Russian whose first contact with Pushkin was through a monument was the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. During her childhood in the 1890s, she was regularly taken for walks by her nurse ‘to Pushkin’s’, that is to the Pushkin statue situated on the inner circle of boulevards girding the old centre of Moscow. ‘A black man taller and blacker than anyone else’, he marked the ‘end and bound’ of all childhood walks.

The statue represents Pushkin with his head lowered and his hand on his heart, his pose and expression of fierce concentration suggesting he is gripped by inspiration. It is a quintessentially Romantic image, that of the ‘improviser’ and ‘dreamer’, which the poet himself evoked in his story ‘Egyptian Nights’ (1833). Here, a dishevelled and disreputable foreign visitor to St Petersburg has been asked to take part in a sort of literary parlour game. Ladies and gentlemen write down themes on slips, which are then thrown into an urn, and the visitor treats the urn as a sort of lucky dip, pulling out the bits of paper to see what he has to produce a poem about. The subject about which he needs to improvise turns out to be Cleopatra and her lovers:
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2. Statue of Pushkin, Pushkin Square, Moscow (A. M. Opekushin, 1880).

Much-loved by ordinary Russians, the statue is always decorated with flowers: Lev Tolstoy, who thought it made Pushkin look like a footman announcing ‘Dinner is served’, was, as usual, expressing an inflammatory view.

But now the improviser was feeling the approach of his god . . . He signed to the musicians to begin playing . . . His face went fearfully pale, and he began shaking as though he were in a fever; his eyes glittered with a strange fire; he ran a hand through his black hair, making them stand on end, and wiped beads of sweat from his high forehead . . . and then suddenly took a step forward and crossed his hands on his chest . . .

the music fell silent . . . The improvisation had begun.

Here we see an artist in the grip of an acute attack of Romantic inspiration.Yet it would be unwise to assume that this passage represents concealed autobiography. Certainly, there is no explicit invitation in ‘Egyptian Nights’ to apply this potent myth of divinely inspired composition to the biographical Pushkin. And the poet’s drafts indicate that his writings, so far from being dashed off at one go, were worked over intensively and repeatedly before they reached their finished form. The sophisticated sound effects for which Pushkin strove
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required effort, while the complex task of speaking directly and plainly,
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and at the same time avoiding excessive baldness, meant that articulation of a poem’s theme or argument became progressively more
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allusive in successive versions. But the poet-as-dreamer legend has deep appeal: Pushkin the painstaking worker has seemed less attractive than Pushkin the vivacious genius whose every idea was God-given. Later Russian writers, including Akhmatova and Nabokov, have often worked with pencil and eraser rather than pen, in order that their first, second, and forty-fourth thoughts should not become the property of posthumous disillusion and of meddlesome scholarly enquiry. In the words of the poet Elena Shvarts (b. 1948), ‘There aren’t any variants. I write a poem en bloc. I’m no drudge. Usually I do all the creative work in the bath’.

If the image chosen for the statue testifies to the lasting hold of Romanticism on Russian literary culture, the statue’s construction was one milestone in the institution of a Pushkin cult in many ways comparable with the Shakespeare cult in England. First reflected in
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celebrations for the seventieth anniversary of the poet’s birth in 1879–80, the cult gathered momentum with the centenary festivities of 1899, and with the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Pushkin’s school, the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, in 1911, resulting in the production not only of statues and plaques, but of poems, verbal tributes, and paintings. Among the last, remarkable is a vast effort by Ilya Repin, the premier historical painter of the day. It commemorates a famous occasion in 1815, when Pushkin’s declamation of his own poem ‘Remembrances at Tsarskoe Selo’ is said to have induced the elderly Neo-Classical poet Gavrila Derzhavin to hail him as successor. Repin represents the scene as nothing less than a secular icon. Pushkin’s pose, and the contrast between his young brilliance and the aged awe of Derzhavin, are based on pictures of the presentation of Christ in the temple, which show the young Jesus astonishing sages with his
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command of theological debate. But the masks of the listeners – with
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the exception of Derzhavin, who reaches out to Pushkin – are
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caricatures of greed, selfishness, and stupidity and are taken from
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Flemish and Dutch renderings of the mocking of Christ. They hint at the
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presence of another powerful myth, that of the destruction of artistic
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talent through the hostile incomprehension of the politically and
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socially powerful.

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Besides its significance in work by sculptors, writers, and painters, the Pushkin cult had, by the 1880s, a commercial undergrowth such as may be seen now at Stratford-upon-Avon or Haworth. To be sure, there were no Prisoner of the Caucasus table-mats, Evgeny and Tatiana mugs, or Bakhchisarai Fountain biscuits, but there were Pushkin pens, Pushkin chocolate-wrappers, Pushkin cigar-boxes, and even Pushkin vodka bottles. Many professional writers and critics, who preferred to see Russian literature as divorced from the marketplace, were shocked and disgusted by the marketing of Pushkin. It seemed one among many symptoms of a culture that was under threat from commercial values.

For Sigismund Librovich, who published an album of Pushkin portraits in the wake of the 1889 anniversary, the ‘profanation of the poet’s beloved
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3. Ilya Repin,
Pushkin Reciting his Poem ‘Reminiscences of Tsarskoe Selo’ at the Lyceum Speech Day, 8 January 1815.

features’ was an illustration of how, ‘in the words of Weile, advertising “knows no limits, no respect, honours neither friends nor relations and exploits anything and everything to its own ends” ’.

The antipathy of Russian writers to commercialism was a constant of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century culture; it was to reverberate, for instance, in Nabokov’s fulminations against jazz and magazine advertising, and, most creatively, in Humbert Humbert’s repelled fascination with American popular culture as represented in
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. Paradoxically, it was sometimes the most avant-garde and politically radical writers who reacted least allergically to commercial pressures. When Mayakovsky toured Russia giving poetry readings in the mid-1920s, he was quite prepared to harangue the managers of bookshops about their lackadaisical attitude to selling his publications.

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Cultural centralization in the Soviet Union after 1932 raised the
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association between commercial culture and low standards to the level
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of an official dogma. It became a matter of pride that cultural goods
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(books, paintings, concerts, ballets) were above marketplace values and
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were available to all at low prices.

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To be sure, the means of cultural production, unlike those of industrial
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production, were never fully nationalized. Publishers were state-owned, but typewriters, paper, pens, and notebooks still had to be purchased; journals accepted contributions from non-unionized writers; royalties continued to be paid, and copyright still existed, though in a restricted form. But the susceptibility of culture to market forces was severely reduced. Authors’ royalties depended on prestige (for which read congeniality to the Party authorities) rather than numbers of copies sold; sinecures were paid to established figures who were members of the Writer’s Union without regard to how well or even how much they wrote. And commemoration of important authors was always of a ‘cultured’ kind (to use the Soviet term) – that is, contrived in a manner that could be held to contribute to intellectual self-improvement on the part of the masses. A typical item was a set of post cards intended for
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