Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

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 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 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.’

10. Aleksey Remizov, ‘A Dream of Pushkin’ (1937).

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

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 this chapter appeared. The piece was made available only in more ambitious editions, such as Pisarev’s Works of 1955–6. Equally, Pushkin’s unmistakable turn to political conservatism after 1830 – his defence of 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: