Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Nor was confessional poetry the only genre that was not anticipated in Pushkin’s work. As Lidiya Ginzburg argued in a classic history of nineteenth-century Russian literature, On Psychological Prose, it was Aleksandr Herzen, in My Past and Thoughts, who pioneered the genre of confessional prose, employing a searingly emotional rhetoric that would probably have embarrassed Pushkin. Conversely, Pushkin’s wonderfully vivid, playful, and self-deprecating letters have few successors in Russian tradition. Later masters of the epistolary form, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, inclined to literary-philosophical abstraction and to lamentation on the unfairness of fate rather than to concrete detail and teasing humour. So far as the theatre was concerned, Pushkin wrote no dramatic comedies, which both before and after his lifetime constituted the glory of the Russian theatre. (Gogol’s

The Government Inspector, ensconced in the international repertory as a unique masterpiece, was the successor to eighteenth-century texts such as Fonvizin’s The Minor or Knyazhnin’s The Boaster

, and the inspiration for Aleksandr Ostrovsky, the prolific mainstay of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian theatre.) Nor did Pushkin contribute to the extremely important genre of tragicomedy, as exemplified in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or Mayakovsky’s The Bed-Bug. His greatest achievements remained splendidly isolated. To be sure,

Evgeny Onegin inspired imitations, but none of these were more than entertaining exercises in light verse. The psychological complexity of Boris Godunov was captured in Musorgsky’s operatic setting of the play, rather than in Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s trilogy of historical dramas about Boris, his predecessors and his successors, works of a painstaking dullness rather than the young Pushkin’s sketchy brilliance.

If Pushkin can be seen as a pioneer, it is of ‘mixed genre’ texts. The narrative poem with prose ‘frame’ in The Egyptian Nights

(1835) was, for instance, paralleled (though not imitated) in Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life (1844–7), a prose story using poetry to represent the thoughts and dreams of its protagonist, Cecilia. But given the preoccupation of Romantic literature throughout Europe with new and hybrid forms (take Heine’s ‘verse novel’ Atta Troll, or the use of song to represent Mignon’s imaginative world in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) it is difficult to argue that the intergeneric text in Russian literature derives wholly from Pushkin’s influence.

Even the conventional view of Pushkin’s centrality to the Russian literary language can only be partly endorsed. Much of Pushkin’s streamlining of syntax had been anticipated in the eighteenth century, not only in the writings of Nikolay Karamzin, traditionally seen as the pre-Pushkinian pioneer, but also in humbler sources, such as the memoirs of Princess Natalya Dolgorukaya, produced in 1767 as a private chronicle for her descendants, and in translations from the French of novels and of conduct books. Besides, as the scholar Boris Gasparov, among others, has argued, the Pushkinian/Karamzinian line was only one of many literary orientations in the early nineteenth century; other writers were as likely to react against it as they were to espouse it.