Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

‘Monument’ envisaged that Pushkin’s name would be known not only in Europe, but in Asia. The poet predicted a readership from among Russia’s subject tribes: the Poles (‘proud descendants of the Slavs’), the Finns (the Grand Duchy of Finland had been added to Russia in 1800), the Tungus (now known as the Evenki, an indigenous people of Siberia), and the Kalmyks (from the area north of the Caucasus, on the shores of the Caspian Sea). Had Pushkin been gifted with the powers of geopolitical prophecy, he might have added the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, and the Kyrgyz, since during the Soviet period compulsory Russian teaching in schools throughout the Soviet Union meant that the vast majority of citizens, whatever their ethnic affiliation, had heard the name of Pushkin.

The fact that the peoples of Central Asia are not included in Pushkin’s list of ‘tribes’ is easy to explain: the first Russian conquests there took place only in the mid-nineteenth century, and the region was not fully subjugated until the 1880s. But the list was not exhaustive even in terms of the Russian Empire of Pushkin’s day. ‘The Finns’ stand also for the Balts (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians), and the Georgians and Armenians are not mentioned. This selection of ethnic groups is not at all accidental. Reference to the Georgians and the Armenians, literate peoples with a long history of Christianity, would have unsettled Pushkin’s representation of his poetry as a means of transmitting civilized values to savage peoples (the adjective ‘savage’ is in fact applied to the Tungus in ‘Monument’). Entertaining a Byronic fascination with Oriental exoticism in his early twenties, Pushkin had, from the point at which he wrote The Gypsies

(1824), taken an ironical view of this, seeking to play down picturesque differences of ethnicity. The conclusion of The Gypsies stresses the universality of moral problems:

And everywhere are fatal passions,

And there is no salvation from destiny.

An elder Gypsy proves an Enlightenment raisonneur who, quaintly, has even heard of Ovid (though not by name: he knows him only as a political exile banished from the Roman South to the Caucasian ‘North’). Still more striking is the muting of local colour through detail chosen for its relative mundanity. The Gypsy retinue includes a shackled dancing-bear such as might have been seen in many Russian villages; it is Aleko, the outsider, who is a wide-eyed idealist, his Gypsy wife Zemfira who acts out of practical self-interest. Similarly, in his travelogue Journey to Erzerum (1829), Pushkin wearily recorded the tedious difficulties of passing through the Caucasus: the unreliable transport and rapacious drivers; the dirty hotels and unattractive women; the sustained hostility of the Turks and the Caucasian tribesmen. The heroism and uprightness of the invading Russian forces can only emerge to advantage by comparison; the emphasis on the prospect of salvation through military intervention is the major difference between this text and Alexander William Kingslake’s Eothen

(1841), the jaded tone being common to both. In the words of the linguist and scholar Peter France, Journey to Erzerum ‘pulls the carpet from under the Romantic primitivism of much Caucasian writing [ . . . ] meant as a parody of Châteaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem, it mocks the clichés of such travel literature’. At the same time, the text was in tune with the official ideologies of expanding Russian imperialism, according to which, in the geographer Mark Bassin’s words, the ‘stagnation’ with which Asia was credited ‘appeared to offer a suitably backward contrast to the creative and progressive dynamism of the West, a dynamism which Russia now claimed as its own’.