Russian Literature (6 page)

To be famous is unattractive.

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That is not what elevates.

One should not start up an archive,

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Fuss over one’s manuscripts.

The end of creation is self-surrender,

Not noise, and not success.

It is disgraceful to be worthless,

Yet a name in everyone’s mouth.

By the late Soviet period, the greatest reward that a recognized writer such as Pasternak could imagine was being allowed to live out his life in decent obscurity. But what one of Pasternak’s biographers has termed his ‘choreographed self-effacement’, the elusiveness that he shared with Western Modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, or Elizabeth Bishop, was relatively rare in a culture where writers risked being effaced whether they wished it or not. A much more customary strategy was the grandiose rejection of official commemoration and the
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substitution of a magnificently egotistical alternative cult of self.

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s superb elegy for the poet Sergey Esenin, composed after the latter committed suicide in 1925, and one of the greatest poems written in Russian in the twentieth century, contains an extraordinary passage that at once repudiates the official construction of monuments and builds a monument before the reader’s eyes: They haven’t even built you a memorial,

No bronze rings out,

no stone lies hewn in hunks,

But the rails of memory

are ornamented

With tributes and with memoirs –

‘I ha

all that junk.

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By a staggering lapse in historical diplomacy, a particularly absurd and
my

tasteless bronze Esenin was set up in 1995 (the centenary of the writer’s
self

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birth) not far away from the central Moscow Pushkin statue. So ‘the
mon

raising of monuments’ to writers, in the teeth of opposition from
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writers, went on.

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Perhaps ‘staggering’ is the wrong word, given that the poem the constructors of the Pushkin statue in Moscow had the gall to inscribe upon its pedestal was, of all poems, ‘Monument’, which, after all, precisely opposes the living memorial of poetry and the dead weight of stone. It turns out to be the iconoclastic Mayakovsky who wrote most in Pushkin’s own spirit, then, recognizing that the elevation of statues to writers was unlikely to be compatible with an appreciation of the dynamic force in their writing. In a culture where the physical presence of the monument can seem extraordinarily daunting, it has been vital to tear Pushkin free from stone and turn him into an airy space for imaginative fantasy. Thus, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s play
The Last Days
(1934–5), a representation of the events leading to Pushkin’s fatal duel
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with Danthès, Pushkin himself remains perpetually just off-stage, becoming a creation in the minds of those who talk about him outside the door of his study and in the salons of St Petersburg, and also of the second audience watching beyond, in the auditorium.

Yet, as Bulgakov’s play also recognized, the absence of a great writer could be as powerful a cultural force as his presence. The avant-garde’s desire to ‘throw Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky off the steam-ship of modernity’, as expressed in the notorious Cubo-Futurist manifesto
A
Slap in the Face of Public Taste
(1912), assaulted the status of great writers, but perpetuated this by seeing them as the central symbols of their age. And the equivocality of most assaults upon Pushkin and other famous writers of the past could only be increased by the occasional attacks in another key, such as those of the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev in the 1860s. Pisarev’s riposte to a line from Pushkin’s ‘The Poet and the Mob’, ‘They sell the Apollo Belvedere by weight’ had been to question
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the utility of art works in the first place. Addressing an anonymous and
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imaginary follower of Pushkin, he expostulated: ‘As for you, elevated cretin, son of the heavens, what do you heat your food in, a cooking-pot
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or the Apollo Belvedere?’ Here the statue, like Pushkin himself, became a metaphor for the inadequacy, in utilitarian terms, of artistic activity in general, an association that could only strengthen, among those in any sense committed to art, the widespread identification between cult and writer, monument and literary function.

The subject of this chapter has been the monuments of writers in the most literal sense – statues, museums, plaques on walls – and with the ways in which these are given meaning by governments, by spectators, and by other writers. In the next chapter, we will move on to look at writers’ monuments in another sense: their actual writings, and the ways in which these are presented to posterity, both by writers and by members of the literary establishment, publishers, critics, and censors, which last had such a vital, though obscured, role in the development of Russian literature.

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6. Double statue of Pushkin and Natalya, unveiled for the bicentenary in 1999, Arbat, Moscow.

‘Tidings of me will go
out over all great Rus’

Pushkin and the Russian
literary canon

He embraced the entire world with his soul, both East and West.

(Vera Panova,
A Writer’s Notes
, 1972) The idea that his writings would be his ‘monument’ was not something that Pushkin regarded merely as a soothing fantasy in the midst of unbearable isolation. It was also something that he tried to ensure in a practical way. He was one of the first Russian writers to assemble his scattered publications into a
Collected Works
, whose content and layout he planned carefully, revising some of his early poems for inclusion. In Russia, such care over the dissemination of one’s poems was decidedly new. Until the late seventeenth century, textual production was dominated by the Orthodox Church, and writers fulfilled much the same function as icon-painters. Many texts (for example, prayers) circulated anonymously, and authors had no control over copying procedures or over the use of their materials in compilations. It was the saintliness or theological expertise of writers that gave their work value, even if rhetorical force played a part in establishing this. Things did not change immediately with the introduction of print in the seventeenth century, given that the new technology was at first used for the production of religious books. Once a secular print culture did come
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into being, during the eighteenth century, titles were at first more important than authors: translated texts were regularly published anonymously, or wrongly credited, and plagiarism and book piracy were rife.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though, a number of changes came about. Book censorship, tightened up successively under Catherine II, Paul I, Alexander I, and Nicholas I, underlined the concept of individual authorship. This was not only because authors were held responsible for what they wrote and anonymity was strongly discouraged (the publication of unsigned journal articles was expressly forbidden in 1848). It was also because, alongside their punitive role, censorship boards were responsible for
‘Tidin
enforcing copyright. In the words of an official edict, they were
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supposed to ‘prevent publishers from the unauthorized and
of

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capricious publication of books by authors with whom those
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publishers have no connection’. At the same time, the growth of
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self-consciousness was fostered by the emergence of the censor as a
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reader who was assumed to be both hostile and artistically literate
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(several prominent nineteenth-century censors, including Ivan
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great

Goncharov, the author of
Oblomov
, the famous novel about a
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character who can’t get out of bed, were themselves writers). The
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need for writers to keep ahead of censors stimulated authors into different forms of allegorical writing. For instance, a tale would be set at the Spanish court, when the Russian one was meant, or references to
Hamlet
and the rottenness of the state of Denmark would be used to suggest somewhere much closer to home. This use of what was termed ‘Aesopian language’ by writers also encouraged readers (and, of course, censors) to read between the lines of texts, searching for hidden meanings.

Also in the early nineteenth century, booksellers became aware of the value of authorial ‘brand names’ in the marketplace. They began to enter into contracts according to which the grant to a publisher of
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7. Front cover of
Evgeny Onegin: Chapter One.

The front cover of the first chapter of
Evgeny Onegin
, first published in 1825. Pushkin’s ‘novel in verse’ is widely regarded as his highest achievement; some, such as Vladimir Nabokov, have considered it the greatest novel in Russian literature. The haunt-ing tale of how Tatiana, an imaginative young woman from a family of small landowners in the Russian provinces, falls in love with Evgeny, a sophisticated, blasé St Petersburger with Byronic aspirations, but finds her feelings reciprocated only when she is no longer able or willing to return them, has alternately provoked and enraptured readers by its simultaneous defiance and assertion of convention, its combination of deep emotion and ironic non-committal. Evgeny and Tatiana, especially the latter,
‘Tidin
were precursors of many later characters in Russian novels,
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from Turgenev’s Liza in
Nest of Gentlefolk
to Tolstoy’s Anna
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Karenina and Nabokov’s Ada. The book also has at least two
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other niches in literary history. As a text set in a time before
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that in which it was actually written, it is, in a sense, the first
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great Russian historical novel. It was also a pioneering example
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of the serial novel, published chapter by chapter over seven
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years (1825–32) and appearing in complete form only in 1833.

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This piecemeal method of publication was later to be used for
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many other famous works, among them
War and Peace
and
Crime and Punishment
(though the instalments of these novels came out in journals, rather than in book form). In the course of serial publication, writers’ views of characters sometimes changed; they, and their readers, tended to see this positively, feeling that it gave their fictional creations the inconsistency and inscrutability of real people. It was rare for writers to make major changes to individual episodes before the book version came out: as Pushkin put it in the first chapter of
Evgeny Onegin
, ‘There are many contradictions/But I don’t want to correct them’.

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exclusive rights to a text or collection of texts was rewarded by the sharing of profits between himself and the writer. In 1834, Pushkin entered into such an agreement with A. F. Smirdin for a book of whose commercial success both had high hopes, the historical novel
The
Captain’s Daughter
. And in 1836 he started a literary journal,
The
Contemporary
, which offered him, as well as the chance of commercial returns, a forum for his writings and direct control over the manner in which these appeared.

One thing that Pushkin took authorship to mean, then, was the careful regulation by individuals of the manner in which their utterances came before the public. He also saw writing as an occupation which, though not exactly gentlemanly, at any rate helped raise the income necessary to a gentleman’s existence. But writing was also understood by him as cultural leadership. That Russia needed a literature equal in standing to that of France, Germany, or England, and that there existed no
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native literary tradition worth the name, were defining assumptions
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