Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

To be sure, the Russian Modernists did have salons of their own. But these were not remotely like the upper-class gatherings of the past, or like the grand St Petersburg and Moscow drawing-rooms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the household of Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, talk turned to spiritualism, the occult, and mystical religion; at the Wednesday assemblies held in the top-floor apartment of Vyacheslav Ivanov, known as ‘The Tower’, guests sprawled on velvet cushions in rooms draped with exotic fabrics. Extravagance of this kind did not long survive the Russian Revolution, but even in the Soviet Union there were some prominent writers who presided over gatherings not unlike alternative salons. Anna Akhmatova, for instance, bestowed on favoured visitors her aphoristic comments about literature, art, and the literary personalities of her day; the Socialist Realist writer Vera Panova, who held high office in the Union of Writers, was beset by guests wanting not only good sense and racy talk, but also – if they could get them – letters of introduction to publishing houses.

In the Modernist circles and artistic cabarets that proliferated in Moscow and St Petersburg during the 1910s, though, unconventionality was the main cultural value. Their very names – ‘The Wandering Dog’, ‘The Players’ Tavern’ – underlined the fashion for bohemian marginality. Like high society in the early nineteenth century, this was a culture where ‘all the world was a stage’, where people valued assured performance more than they did sincerity; but the roles enacted by artists were now considerably more extravagant than they had been in the 1820s and 1830s, when writers had been less cut off from the world of the court and the civil service, and when the standing of actual actors had been much lower. (The late nineteenth and early twentieth century had seen a number of players, notably the ‘Russian Eleonara Duse’ Vera Komissarzhevskaya, attain a considerable cultural authority in the literary world.) But above all, in a world where life was supposed to imitate art, it had become vital to express creativity through eccentric behaviour as well as through a contempt for artistic and linguistic formulae, for the ‘clichés’ that Russian Modernists despised as much as the French Modernists from whom many of their theoretical appreciations ultimately derived. In other words, it was idiosyncratic conduct that was now required, rather than the subordination to universally recognized ethical and aesthetic constraints that had been the central demand of participants in mixed literary gatherings during the early nineteenth century.

Pushkin, though, was writing in an era when the relationship between literature and polite culture was still taken for granted, even if it was beginning to break down. He was one of the last major Russian writers to participate in aristocratic salons of the kind organized by Zinaida Volkonskaya (just as she was one of the last female aristocrats who was at any level a serious artist). Several of Pushkin’s writings – Egyptian Nights,

Evgeny Onegin, the novel fragment ‘The Guests Assembled at the Dacha’ (1828–30) – use the aristocratic salon as a setting for central scenes. The urbane tone cultivated in polite society was one of the registers routinely employed by the poet (as is shown by ‘And don’t dispute with fools’). Some of his most famous poems have the brilliant conventionality required by the salon (an example is the famous love poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment:/You appeared before me/ Like a fleeting vision’, which was to have a long drawing-room afterlife as a romance set to music by Glinka). Pushkin followed Karamzin, too, in his intensive interest in the psychology and language of women: this can be seen not only in the prominence of female protagonists in his work, but also in the fact that some of his ‘costumed confessions’ were made in female dress (as with the last line of ‘Monument’, where the advice to avoid demeaning squabbles fits with contemporary expectations that ladies remain calm under all circumstances).

16. Pushkin, doodled self-portrait in female dress. The poet made no attempt to flatter his unladylike profile: the effect of seeing it emerge from the bun and ringlets is amusingly incongruous.

At the same time, though, the inspiration that the salon offered Pushkin was often fused with unease, or even irritation, at the limits of polite language, and particularly at the demand that strong emotion be voiced in a safely conventional way. This unease can be sensed in another very famous love poem, ‘I loved you’ (1829):

I loved you; love as yet, perhaps

Has not burned out in my heart;

But may it trouble you no longer,