Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The commemorative efforts of twentieth-century British lovers of literature (discreet blue plaques on London houses and the like) pale into insignificance before Russian ones. Different, too, is the place of the memorials in popular culture. It would be, to put it mildly, unusual if a couple decided to begin their honeymoon with a visit to Stratford (as a Russian couple might with a visit to Pushkin’s estate in Mikhailovskoe); even the most famous writers’ museums (for instance, the Brontë house in Haworth) attract a less socially diverse group of visitors than their Russian equivalents. What is more, the existence of commemorative cults has, since the late nineteenth century, been what the Formalist scholar Yury Tynyanov termed a ‘literary fact’, that is, a point in real life that is of significance to literary composition.

Writers varied considerably in their attitudes to the memorialization of their predecessors, and to the possibility that they might one day themselves be memorialized. For some early twentieth-century poets, for example Innokenty Annensky and Anna Akhmatova, evoking a statue was a way of emphasizing continuity between past and present. Both poets imagined Pushkin’s bronzes coming back to life, walking among the avenues of Tsarskoe Selo that he had celebrated in his poetry. Later, Akhmatova was to conclude her poetic commemoration of the Great Terror, Requiem, with a reference to the time when the poet’s own memorial might be placed outside the Leningrad central prison, Kresty. The statue would be a perpetual admonition to the city’s population of the tragedy that Requiem itself commemorated:

5. Graffiti showing Woland from

The Master and Margarita

in ‘Margarita’s house’, Moscow. An instance where literary characters have become part of popular culture.

And let the melted snow stream

Off the immobile, bronze eyelids,

And let the prison dove coo in the distance,

And the ships peacefully sail down the Neva.

Akhmatova was also to allude in some of her work to the custom of naming streets after famous writers, as a way of raising the question of what traces her life would leave in the future. So too was the poet Osip Mandelstam in the bleak days of exile in 1935, when physical survival came to seem more and more unlikely:

Whichever street is this?

Mandelstam Street.

What sort of damn name is that?

However you turn it about

It sounds crooked, not straight.

The street was crooked, not straight,

And he was black, not white, in his ways,

That’s why this street,

Or, rather, this pit –

Has its name:

After that Mandelstam.

The fictional Mandelstam Street has acquired its name by a grotesque reversal of the usual process by which such names were assigned. A side-street instead of a main one has been picked, and instead of conferring immortality and transcendence, it recalls death and constriction. The word ‘pit’ (yama) is used for a communal grave, such as those in which prisoners in labour camps were buried, and is also a colloquial term for the prison itself. The street is an alley in hell, not a thoroughfare in the socialist heaven. The only detail that mimics official procedure is that the course of the street stands for the life-course of the person commemorated, but as both are ‘crooked’, the result is improper in two ways at once.

Yet if Mandelstam’s poem travestied the idea of street-naming to suggest the marginal place of this particular writer in his culture, it still took as a given the link between the monument and the artistic biography. It was only at less forbidding points of Soviet history that writers could afford to distance themselves from the idea of a physical afterlife. In a poem from his last collection, When the Sky Clears (1956–9), written during the so-called ‘Thaw’ era that followed the death of Stalin, Boris Pasternak was to repudiate the notion of turning oneself into a piece of living heritage:

To be famous is unattractive.

That is not what elevates.

One should not start up an archive,

Fuss over one’s manuscripts.

The end of creation is self-surrender,

Not noise, and not success.

It is disgraceful to be worthless,

Yet a name in everyone’s mouth.