Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The interpretation of great writers was as limited as the selection of their works offered for study. Pupils had to write moralistic character studies, commenting on Pushkin’s Dubrovsky, say, ‘He was accustomed to giving free rein to all the stirrings of his fiery spirit’. They had to answer examination questions on ‘the significance of Chekhov’, which required them to eulogize the writer’s prescience in anticipating the Bolshevik Revolution (an event that took place more than 13 years after his death). Formula, rather than independent thought, was essential. As the critic and children’s writer Korney Chukovsky observed of Soviet school essays in 1963:

Every single one, every single one of the classic writers is always described as follows: 1) he loves his motherland; 2) he loves his nation and people; 3) he expostulates against the social abuses of his time; he (like every other classic writer) is 4) a humanist, 5) a realist, 6) an optimist, 7) has no faults and all in all no distinguishing features whatsoever.

Between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, these observations were true by no means only of school essays (of which they continued to be true right up to the collapse of Soviet power), but of writings for a popular auditorium by recognized professional critics and literary historians as well.

Alongside adulation went the suppression of any biographical details that might have proved disruptive, such as Pushkin’s fondness for drinking, fornication, gambling, and gooseberry jam, or Tolstoy’s predilection for at least three of those four. Gorky’s embarrassingly long spell in emigration was also a taboo subject (writers who left Russia after 1917, like other Russian citizens who had gone into exile, were considered by definition to have displayed insufficient ‘love of the motherland’). Sexual misdemeanours were an even more prickly point. The lavishly appointed and copiously annotated ‘Complete Works’ published in the Soviet Union as tribute to the status of first-rank writers rarely quite lived up to their titles. Even if every surviving text a writer had ever penned actually appeared in some form or another, some pieces had certainly been subjected to cuts, not all of which were necessarily as scrupulously signalled as with the asterisks (***** for ‘whore’ or **** for ‘arse’, for instance) that replaced words Pushkin himself had brazenly written in full. Piety was equally important in biographical work. As late as 1963, a particularly well-read and reasonably liberal Soviet writer expressed relief that A. L. Rowse, distasteful as his biographical approach might be, had at least ‘completely cleared away any suspicion that Shakespeare was a homosexual’. The appropriate manner of writing up the lives of the famous was not unfairly satirized in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward

(1968) as ‘exhaustive research about exactly which country path the great poet walked along in eighteen so-and-so’ – that is, reportage of events that might be deadly dull, but which were neither politically controversial nor examples of ‘salacious triviality’ (poshlyatina).

After ‘vulgar sociologism’ was denounced in the late 1930s, interpretations of Pushkin as ‘the poet of the youth of Russian bourgeois culture’ (as D. S. Mirsky had called him in 1934) were out of the question. But there was also an end to the intensive study of account books, private letters, diaries, memoirs, and minuscule archival data of all kinds that could have facilitated ‘thick description’ of writers in the context of their times. Conversely, the work of the Formalist scholars who had protested against ‘laundry list’ criticism, and against glib categorizations of writers in terms of social class, survived only in diluted form. Studies under titles such as The Mastery of Gogol (or any other writer recognized as ‘great’) acknowledged that at least some aspects of craft, as opposed to ideology, might carry weight. The most sacred literary texts were treated not unlike the speeches of Stalin, who himself was fond of displaying knowledge of the classics, referring, for instance, to supposed ‘enemies of the people’ as ‘Yudushkas’ (after Saltykov-Shchedrin’s creepy hypocrite Yudushka Golovlyov). They were supposed to be known to everyone, but to discuss them in depth, at any rate without the special licence of a scholar speaking to scholars in an Academy of Sciences research institute, or to cite the wrong works, would have been decidedly imprudent.