Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

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

To be sure, the means of cultural production, unlike those of industrial 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 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 flat in Leningrad from which he is not evicted in short order so that yet another ‘museum apartment’ can be set up.

4. A Pushkin-shaped bottle of vodka, produced to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth in 1899. The resemblance is, to put it politely, approximate, 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.

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 (1951), and Tolstoy (1956). Soviet writers similarly honoured included Mayakovsky (1958), A. N. Tolstoy (the ‘Soviet count’, whose statue went up in 1957), and Aleksandr Fadeev (long-time General Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who committed suicide after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956; his monument was put in place in 1972). ‘Museum flats’ included those of, besides the writers already mentioned, the Soviet novelist Nikolay Ostrovsky, author of the factory novel How the Steel was Tempered (1935). The memorial plaques are too numerous to list.