Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

It took a century or so after War and Peace was published before any writer repudiated Pushkin as boldly, but also as creatively, as Tolstoy had. But by the 1960s, decades of force-fed patriotism had inspired – at least among some unofficial Soviet writers – a marked disaffection with the literary classics. Varlam Shalamov, for example, began one of his Kolyma Tales with a bitter parody of the first line of The Queen of Spades: ‘One day they were playing cards in the barracks residence of Naumov, one of the guards of the horses in the prison camp.’ The irrelevance of the original to Soviet life is cruelly underlined. A more extended repudiation of Pushkin was to be found in the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, whose personal canon of great Russian poets (Derzhavin, Baratynsky, Mandelstam) demonstratively side-stepped ‘the father of Russian literature’.

Brodsky’s important sequence, ‘Twenty Sonnets for Maria Stuart’ (1974), for example, distances itself from Pushkin in a variety of ways, overt and hidden. It selects a verse form (the sonnet) which Pushkin scarcely employed. Alliteration, which is a striking device throughout the cycle, is used far more obviously than in Pushkin’s works. Brodsky also makes clear from the outset that the ‘muse’ to whom ‘Maria Stuart’ is addressed is a fantasy, an invention, something that will ‘step down from the screen/and enliven the parks like a statue’ (sonnet no. 1). The addressee is both less and more real than the statues to which several of Pushkin’s late poems are addressed (and which are evoked in Brodsky’s simile). She is an emanation of a film that the lyric hero saw as a boy, where ‘Sarah/Leander walked click-click to the scaffold’ (sonnet no. 2). That is, she is an artistic vision of a kind far less substantial than a sculpture. Yet at the same time, the cycle insists on her actual, physical existence, as someone who is the object of a desire deserving consummation, so that ‘Scotland becomes our mattress’ (sonnet no. 8). And to mark his distance still further, Brodsky continually, and, from the point of view of conventional literary piety, impertinently, quotes from Pushkin’s love poems in order to undermine their emotional rhetoric, most particularly through glaring lexical dislocations that are utterly contrary to the spirit of Pushkin’s harmonious combinations of disparate poetic styles. A case in point is the wry parody, in the sixth sonnet, of Pushkin’s ‘I loved you’ (translated here by Peter France):

I loved you. And my love (or maybe

it’s only pain)

still stabs me through the brain.

The whole thing’s shattered into smithereens.

I tried to shoot myself – using a gun

isn’t so simple. And the temples: which one,

the right or left? Reflection, not the shakes,

kept me from acting. Jesus! what a mess!

I loved you with such strength, such hopelessness

may God send you in others

– not a chance!

He may be capable of many things,

but – with Parmenides – won’t reinspire

the fire in the blood, the bones’ crunching collapse,

swelling the lead in fillings with desire

to touch – ‘your hips’, I must delete – your lips.

Apart from the two direct quotations from Pushkin (italicized here – for the full text of the original poem, see Chapter 6), the poem’s parodistic relationship to its original is established by the use, in line 12 of the Russian, of the archaic article sei – ‘yonder fire’ would be correct in terms of register. But the original is used as a mere backing canvas for purely Brodskian (and twentieth-century) rhetorical embroidery. This includes the vulgarism byust (‘bust’, here rendered ‘hips’) in line 14 (Pushkin would have used the high-style persi, or ‘breasts’, in the context of a love poem), the reference to ‘the shakes’ in line 6, the throwaway mention of Parmenides (the fifth-century Greek rationalist philosopher who held that only what exists can be known) in line 11, and, especially, the ironic undermining of the allusion to God in line 9.

Such a direct, defiant repudiation of Pushkin qua Pushkin, based upon a thorough knowledge of his works, remained a rarity even in twentieth-century Russian literature. Far more common was the attempt to find an ‘alternative’ Pushkin to the ‘father of Russian literature’ or ‘Soviet patriot before his time’ by looking once more to Pushkin’s own works. Just as censorship fostered ‘Aesopian language’, so did the narrow, official image of ‘the greatest Russian writer’ foster an ‘Aesopian Pushkin’. From the mid-1930s, writing about Pushkin, a self-evidently ‘safe’ topic (unlike the late Dostoevsky, with his notorious loathing for the Russian revolutionary movement and devotion to the Orthodox Church), could allow writers to voice issues that would have been utterly taboo if touched upon directly.