Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

In Pushkin’s writing generally, God is not usually as prominent as he is in ‘Monument’. Notable, for example, is the omission of any aspect of Christian belief or practice from Evgeny Onegin

, including even the Lenten fasting and Easter feasting that would have been annual events in the household of a real-life Larin family. (In the 1850s, a British visitor to Russia described Holy Week as a time when ‘the only sound that from time to time broke the mournful stillness which reigned throughout the house was the monotonous voice of the priest’.) A carefree Voltairean in his early days, Pushkin was later embarrassed by his youthful godlessness (as is indicated by his attempts to remove his irreverent poem about the Virgin Mary, The Gabrieliad

, from circulation). Yet he also belonged to a generation where the eighteenth-century mistrust of religious ‘enthusiasm’ was strong. Unlike his sister Olga, a fervent believer and the author of religious poetry in French, he did not incline to explicit statements of faith. To be sure, the theme of imminent death figured largely in his later poems, some of which, such as ‘Whether I wander along the noisy streets’ (1829), see choosing a resting-place as the only way in which the will may be exercised. And several poems of 1836 juxtapose worldly power and religious feeling, which latter draws in the lyric hero despite his strong sense of personal sin (as the critic Sergey Davydov has argued, there is strong reason to suppose that these poems, including ‘Monument’, may have formed part of a poetic cycle round the theme of Holy Week).

Like most aspects of Pushkin’s creation, the question of the extent to which the writer was an active believer is controversial. It became particularly so once Soviet censorship disintegrated: at this point the patriots who had fulminated against Andrey Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin

as a profanation of the writer’s memory began an all-out promotion of Pushkin’s Orthodox connections, using books, articles, pamphlets, and a specialized journal, The Pushkin Era in the Light of Christian Culture

. It was above all Pushkin’s late poetry of repentance that was used as evidence here. But the desire for faith that these texts unquestionably did express is not the same thing as religious faith in a direct sense. There seems little to justify even the more moderate claim for Pushkin as an instance of how ‘theology in Russia [ . . . ] expressed itself through poetry’. Rather, he was a crucial figure in the creation of a secular Russian literature. His great poetic predecessors, Lomonosov and Derzhavin, were not only inspired directly by liturgical texts (as in Derzhavin’s remarkable paraphrases of the Psalms), but built their grandest poetic edifices on a foundation of the liturgical language, Church Slavonic (so, for example, in Derzhavin’s ‘The Waterfall’, a profoundly Christian meditation upon the transience of worldly power). Such magnificent sententiousness and theological self-declaration is not to be found in Pushkin’s writings; indeed, the extent to which he was an active believer is neither evident nor, in the end, relevant, except perhaps to those the leftist writer and critic Osip Brik termed ‘maniacs such as those passionately seeking the answer to the question “Did Pushkin smoke?” ’. If Belinsky and his radical colleagues could consider Pushkin an ‘encyclopedia’ of Russian life, this was partly because spiritual matters were as marginal here as they were in the French Encyclopédie. Bypassing Pushkin, the Russian tradition of metaphysical poetry was revived, after Derzhavin, by Pushkin’s contemporaries Evgeny Baratynsky and Fyodor Tyutchev; it then resurfaced again – after decades of dormancy – in the 1890s, most notably in the poetry of the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and his successor Vyacheslav Ivanov.