Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The effects of adulation for, and rote-learning of, the classics were not uniformly bad. For a start, learning by heart was not a Soviet invention, any more than literature as a secular religion was. Before the Revolution, schoolchildren had been made to recite authors such as Lomonosov, Pushkin, and Lermontov as part of the secondary-school programme. In the best of circumstances, this gave adult Russians an affectionate familiarity with literature that made it the common currency of cultivation. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian writers (and artists of all kinds) could expect the majority of their readers to recognize literary allusions, sometimes in substantially reworked form. (The importance of intertextuality, that is, direct or indirect quotation, as a subject of study among historians of Russian literature is intimately related to the mental world in which writers grew up.) And though a child who pointed out the relevance to Soviet life of Turgenev’s hymn to the ‘simple and magnificent Russian language’ as the sole domain of freedom in a repressive society (‘If you did not exist, how would I not despair?’) would have been expelled from the classroom if not the school, there was nothing to stop a pupil enjoying the subversive potential of the piece in private.

Among unsophisticated readers, though, exposure to a ‘core curriculum’ does not seem to have done much more than perpetuate a sort of literary folklore. It stimulated the circulation of grotesque anecdotes about writers’ lives, parodied in the 1930s by the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms, whose ‘Anegdotes [sic] about Pushkin’ contained such pearls of irrelevance as ‘Pushkin used to love throwing stones . . .’. Documents such as diaries or letters indicate that the citation of ‘winged words’, or set phrases, was much more common than the informed reading of classic texts. A young woman who misquoted Lermontov in a letter to her sweetheart (‘It is boring and sad, and I have no one’s hand to stroke’, rather than ‘who my hand might take’) perhaps did not even know the poem that she was abusing. The tag may have reached her via an intermediate source, such as a popular song.

But the worst side-effect of a system that encouraged school graduates to see the narrow sampling of classic texts to which they had been exposed as the pinnacle of literary endeavour, and to judge every form of writing by that yardstick, was that it promoted aggressive aesthetic conservatism. Rather than knowing nothing about art but knowing what they liked, Soviet philistines thought they knew a good deal about art, and had every right to impose what they liked on others. Large numbers of pupils left school familiar only with what Marina Tsvetaeva called ‘Pushkin the perpetual jubiland, whose sole achievement in life was to die’, and whose only works were Evgeny Onegin, The Captain’s Daughter, and two or three lyric poems. It is therefore not surprising that the more adventurous texts that did get through censorship often provoked full postbags from a kind of reader one might call ‘Disgusted of Tambov’ – a provincial school-teacher, engineer, or other member of the Soviet ‘petty intelligentsia’ appalled that something inimical to the spirit of ‘classic Russian literature’ in the crippled form that he or she knew it had been published.

12. Design for

The Queen of Spades.

Design by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky for Stanislavsky’s production of Tchaikovsky’s opera

The Queen of Spades

. Not only writers but artists of all kinds have been able to take familiarity with Pushkin’s work for granted in their audiences. It was quite natural for Eisenstein, in his 1943 book

The Film Sense

, to explain his theories about creative inter-cutting in cinema (‘montage’) in terms of analogies with Pushkin’s poetry. And the fact that film directors, composers, and playwrights could rely on detailed knowledge of Pushkin’s plots (or, at any rate, those of his most famous works), much as their British counterparts could in the cases of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Jane Austen, lent them a high degree of freedom when adapting these in new forms. Musorgsky’s tormented yet regal Boris Godunov is quite different from Pushkin’s ambitious, guilt-ridden version of the character; Tchaikovsky’s version of

Queen of Spades

dispenses with the ironic ending of the original story (in which Liza ends up purging her own humiliation as a ward by taking a ward of her own), inserting instead a scene in which Liza does away with herself, in suitably operatic style, by leaping into a canal. At the same time, these outrageous reinterpretations sometimes exposed motifs lying below the surface in the original text. Thus, Tchaikovsky’s

Queen of Spades