Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

However, both in the work of Russian scholars, such as Lotman, and in the work of their Western associates, the material that was considered suitable for investigation was still strictly denominated in some respects. Pushkin’s letters to his literary associates were exhaustively analysed, and their playful and watchful crafting of alternative selves recorded, but the writer’s letters to his wife and other close relations were not discussed in detail because of the sense the material was ‘useful for the biographer’ but not for the literary historian, since it had not been meant for publication. The elite world of Russian society was exhaustively analysed: taking their cue from two lines of Evgeny Onegin

, ‘One may be a worthwhile person/And think about having clean nails’, semioticians analysed dozens of areas that had been elided by Marxism-Leninism’s emphasis on intellectual life, from the ‘language of flowers’ to the conventions of the duel. Yet gentility was pervasive: though memoirs make it clear that child abuse, incest, rape, violence, as well as less spectacular misdemeanours such as vulgarity and rudeness, were as common in early nineteenth-century Russian society as in any other human community, discussion of such topics was not allowed to disrupt the view of the ‘Golden Age’ of Pushkin and his contemporaries as an aesthetic paradise. In other words, this was an interpretive tradition that, in seeking to trace the conventions of early nineteenth-century Russian life, often replicated the proprieties against which writers themselves had battled. Even to liberal Russian scholars of this kind, Richard Holmes’s life of Coleridge, showing the poet composing his aethereal works in a constant struggle with decidedly earthly afflictions such as constipation, would have seemed trivial and putrid tattle. In some ways, this was a reflection of writers’ own determination to transcend physicality. The poet Nikolay Klyuev, desperately sick, bedridden, and a victim of Stalinist persecution, comforted himself with the thought that ‘saints can be recognized by their endurance, ability to rise above suffering [ . . . ] some people’s souls are like trumpets, sounding only when catastrophe and the angel of torment blows into them’. Yet the refusal of scholars to interest themselves in personal pain – failed love affairs, divorces, sexual agony – could be obstructive to the study of writers preoccupied, in their work, with precisely these subjects. The Formalist theory that writers self-consciously shaped personal experience as art even while they were living it (termed in Russian

zhiznetvorchestvo

) ignored the fact that some writers were inspired precisely by life’s reluctance to subordinate itself to such reshaping (examples of this included some of the women writers discussed in Chapter 6 below).

Even once interest in the ‘distinguishing features’ of recognized writers proliferated, then, there was little concern with ‘faults’: rather than ‘biography’ in the Western sense, the writing of lives meant setting out an author’s ‘creative path’ (the authoritative life of Klyuev eschewed discussion of the poet’s homosexual love affairs and concentrated instead upon his artistic relationships with other writers and with journal editors). The essential task was to represent the life as a saintly path of suffering and triumph (podvig): deviations from this model provoked bitter debate, as in the case of the Russian-American critic Alexander Zholkovsky’s revisionist interpretation of Anna Akhmatova’s biography. Zholkovsky argued that Akhmatova saw her own suffering, political and personal, as a mark of distinction, and strove to emphasize and heighten it. She was not merely an inert and innocent victim, but actively sought out pain. She used others as the instruments of conflict (her history of relationships with men who were already attached to another woman is striking) and as a sounding-board for lamentation (Zholkovsky drew attention to Akhmatova’s compulsive desire for an audience, manifested in her repeated commands that her friends should drop everything and rush round to see her when she so required). In a furious response printed in Zvezda, the literary journal which had published Zholkovsky’s article, another Russian-American critic accused Zholkovsky of colluding in, and approving, Akhmatova’s oppression: ‘Only from a safe distance – whether geographical or chronological – can one write about history and literature with such unruffled alienation from human suffering.’ Life-writing was still widely seen as a genre demanding moral engagement and respect bordering on adulation, even when practised by scholars.