Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The theme rose to the height of a trumpet blast at the 150th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth in 1949, which coincided with the onset of the Cold War and the beginning of an anti-Semitic and xenophobic campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. Two lectures (also published as booklets) by a member of the Academy of Sciences represented the writer as a figure who, while ‘soaking up everything that was best in preceeding culture, both Russian and foreign’, had been filled with ‘national pride’ and had presciently ‘lambasted cosmopolitanism’, as well as ‘aestheticism and formalism’. Naturally, the appreciation that ‘cosmopolitanism’ was shameful was to be a powerful impediment to analysis of such issues as Pushkin’s vexed but intimate relationship with Western Romantic literature. So, too, the belief that Russian literature was of particular and extraordinary value and character impeded analysis of the Russian contribution to European-wide movements such as the cult of sensibility or Modernism. Between 1948 and 1956, there was little or no serious discussion of such topics. The admiration of the Russian radicals for Evgeny Onegin, which Belinsky grandly, if inaccurately, held to have ‘exhausted the whole of Russian life’, was adduced as proof positive of Pushkin’s mature appreciation of Romanticism’s limitations. The fact that the novel’s ambivalent treatment of Romantic emotions and character types was perfectly in accordance with the practices of ‘Romantic irony’ (compare the work of Byron or Heinrich Heine) was ignored. And the resemblance of Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter to Walter Scott’s

Redgauntlet, where rebellion by the oppressed succeeds only in substituting an unreliable tyranny for an authoritarianism in which reason plays some part, was overlooked in interpretations which made the novel into an unambiguous critique of Catherine II’s ‘bestial’ suppression of the peasant rebel Pugachev.

The other important ambition of the Stalinist regime, apart from presenting Pushkin as an ancestor of Soviet literature and instrument of national suprematism, was to present him as a ‘national writer’ in the sense of ‘national-popular’: a writer for the entire nation. Already in the 1920s, there had been a wide-ranging drive aimed at giving new readers a chance to make their first acquaintance with the Russian classics. Reader surveys anxiously monitored the reactions of proletarians and peasants to these. The surveys themselves produced very diverse responses, but analyses of them generally boiled the material down to make a straightforward case: Modernism was incomprehensible to ordinary people, while the classics were accessible to everyone. As a Russian peasant woman was said to have commented in a survey of 1926, ‘And “Monument”? How could you not feel something after that?’.

Statements of this kind were meant not just to report opinion, but to shape it. This was the kind of reaction that Soviet ‘mass readers’ were supposed

to have when reading great literature. Accordingly, the authorities made sure to provide them with the kind of literature likely to induce such responses. From the mid-1930s, the Russian classics again became the core of literature teaching in schools, and instruction focused on material that was both accessible and morally uplifting. Pupils had to learn by heart Tatiana’s letter from Evgeny Onegin (Tatiana was considered a role-model for Soviet womanhood), and Turgenev’s prose poem to ‘the great and magnificent Russian language’. Rather than the psychologically complex and embittered verse that Lermontov had written in his final years, or the scathing poems in which the writer complained that it was ‘painful to survey his generation’ and bid an unfond farewell to ‘unwashed Russia’, textbooks included emblematic nature poems evoking the momentous size of the Russian Empire, or such rousing patriotic pieces as ‘Two Giants’, in which the Russian giant defeats his foreign rival, and ‘Borodino’, evoking the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812. The result was that from childhood, Russian readers carried round a treasured mental anthology of poems such as these, and a knowledge of prose classics taught in the classroom (for example, Gogol’s 1841 tale of the miserable civil servant Akaky Akakievich, The Overcoat).

11. V. Klutsis, poster for the Pushkin Jubilee of 1937. The poem in the open book appears to be ‘Monument’.