Russian Literature (9 page)

The interpretation of great writers was as limited as the selection of
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their works offered for study. Pupils had to write moralistic character
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studies, commenting on Pushkin’s Dubrovsky, say, ‘He was accustomed to giving free rein to all the stirrings of his fiery spirit’. They had to
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answer examination questions on ‘the significance of Chekhov’, which required them to eulogize the writer’s prescience in anticipating the Bolshevik Revolution (an event that took place more than 13 years after his death). Formula, rather than independent thought, was essential.

As the critic and children’s writer Korney Chukovsky observed of Soviet school essays in 1963:

Every single one, every single one of the classic writers is always described as follows: 1) he loves his motherland; 2) he loves his nation and people; 3) he expostulates against the social abuses of his time; he (like every other classic writer) is 4) a humanist, 5) a realist, 6) an optimist, 7) has no faults and all in all no distinguishing features whatsoever.

Between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, these observations were
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true by no means only of school essays (of which they continued to be true right up to the collapse of Soviet power), but of writings for a popular auditorium by recognized professional critics and literary historians as well.

Alongside adulation went the suppression of any biographical details that might have proved disruptive, such as Pushkin’s fondness for drinking, fornication, gambling, and gooseberry jam, or Tolstoy’s predilection for at least three of those four. Gorky’s embarrassingly long spell in emigration was also a taboo subject (writers who left Russia after 1917, like other Russian citizens who had gone into exile, were considered by definition to have displayed insufficient ‘love of the motherland’). Sexual misdemeanours were an even more prickly point.

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The lavishly appointed and copiously annotated ‘Complete Works’

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published in the Soviet Union as tribute to the status of first-rank writers
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rarely quite lived up to their titles. Even if every surviving text a writer
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had ever penned actually appeared in some form or another, some
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pieces had certainly been subjected to cuts, not all of which were
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necessarily as scrupulously signalled as with the asterisks (***** for
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‘whore’ or **** for ‘arse’, for instance) that replaced words Pushkin
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himself had brazenly written in full. Piety was equally important in
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biographical work. As late as 1963, a particularly well-read and
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reasonably liberal Soviet writer expressed relief that A. L. Rowse, distasteful as his biographical approach might be, had at least ‘completely cleared away any suspicion that Shakespeare was a homosexual’. The appropriate manner of writing up the lives of the famous was not unfairly satirized in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel
Cancer Ward
(1968) as ‘exhaustive research about exactly which country path the great poet walked along in eighteen so-and-so’ – that is, reportage of events that might be deadly dull, but which were neither politically controversial nor examples of ‘salacious triviality’

(
poshlyatina
).

After ‘vulgar sociologism’ was denounced in the late 1930s,
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interpretations of Pushkin as ‘the poet of the youth of Russian bourgeois culture’ (as D. S. Mirsky had called him in 1934) were out of the question. But there was also an end to the intensive study of account books, private letters, diaries, memoirs, and minuscule archival data of all kinds that could have facilitated ‘thick description’ of writers in the context of their times. Conversely, the work of the Formalist scholars who had protested against ‘laundry list’ criticism, and against glib categorizations of writers in terms of social class, survived only in diluted form. Studies under titles such as
The Mastery of Gogol
(or any other writer recognized as ‘great’) acknowledged that at least some aspects of craft, as opposed to ideology, might carry weight. The most sacred literary texts were treated not unlike the speeches of Stalin, who himself was fond of displaying knowledge of the classics, referring, for instance, to supposed ‘enemies of the people’ as ‘Yudushkas’ (after Saltykov-Shchedrin’s creepy hypocrite Yudushka Golovlyov). They were supposed to be known to everyone, but to discuss them in depth, at any
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rate without the special licence of a scholar speaking to scholars in an
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Academy of Sciences research institute, or to cite the wrong works, would have been decidedly imprudent.

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The effects of adulation for, and rote-learning of, the classics were not uniformly bad. For a start, learning by heart was not a Soviet invention, any more than literature as a secular religion was. Before the Revolution, schoolchildren had been made to recite authors such as Lomonosov, Pushkin, and Lermontov as part of the secondary-school programme. In the best of circumstances, this gave adult Russians an affectionate familiarity with literature that made it the common currency of cultivation. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian writers (and artists of all kinds) could expect the majority of their readers to recognize literary allusions, sometimes in substantially reworked form.

(The importance of intertextuality, that is, direct or indirect quotation, as a subject of study among historians of Russian literature is intimately related to the mental world in which writers grew up.) And though a child who pointed out the relevance to Soviet life of Turgenev’s hymn to
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the ‘simple and magnificent Russian language’ as the sole domain of freedom in a repressive society (‘If you did not exist, how would I not despair?’) would have been expelled from the classroom if not the school, there was nothing to stop a pupil enjoying the subversive potential of the piece in private.

Among unsophisticated readers, though, exposure to a ‘core curriculum’ does not seem to have done much more than perpetuate a sort of literary folklore. It stimulated the circulation of grotesque anecdotes about writers’ lives, parodied in the 1930s by the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms, whose ‘Anegdotes [
sic
] about Pushkin’ contained such pearls of irrelevance as ‘Pushkin used to love throwing stones . . .’.

Documents such as diaries or letters indicate that the citation of
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‘winged words’, or set phrases, was much more common than the
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informed reading of classic texts. A young woman who misquoted
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Lermontov in a letter to her sweetheart (‘It is boring and sad, and I have
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no one’s hand to stroke’, rather than ‘who my hand might take’)
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perhaps did not even know the poem that she was abusing. The tag may
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have reached her via an intermediate source, such as a popular song.

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But the worst side-effect of a system that encouraged school graduates
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to see the narrow sampling of classic texts to which they had been
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exposed as the pinnacle of literary endeavour, and to judge every form of writing by that yardstick, was that it promoted aggressive aesthetic conservatism. Rather than knowing nothing about art but knowing what they liked, Soviet philistines thought they knew a good deal about art, and had every right to impose what they liked on others. Large numbers of pupils left school familiar only with what Marina Tsvetaeva called ‘Pushkin the perpetual jubiland, whose sole achievement in life was to die’, and whose only works were
Evgeny Onegin
,
The Captain’s
Daughter
, and two or three lyric poems. It is therefore not surprising that the more adventurous texts that did get through censorship often provoked full postbags from a kind of reader one might call ‘Disgusted of Tambov’ – a provincial school-teacher, engineer, or other member of
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12. Design for
The Queen of Spades.

Design by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky for Stanislavsky’s production of Tchaikovsky’s opera
The Queen of Spades
. Not only writers but artists of all kinds have been able to take familiarity with Pushkin’s work for granted in their audiences. It was quite natural for Eisenstein, in his 1943 book
The Film Sense
, to explain his theories about creative inter-cutting in cinema (‘montage’) in terms of analogies with Pushkin’s poetry. And the fact that film directors, composers, and playwrights could rely on detailed knowledge of Pushkin’s plots (or, at any rate, those of his most famous works), much as their British counterparts could in the cases of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Jane Austen, lent them a high degree of freedom when adapting these in new forms. Musorg-

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sky’s tormented yet regal Boris Godunov is quite different from
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Pushkin’s ambitious, guilt-ridden version of the character;
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Tchaikovsky’s version of
Queen of Spades
dispenses with the
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ironic ending of the original story (in which Liza ends up pur-go
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ging her own humiliation as a ward by taking a ward of her
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own), inserting instead a scene in which Liza does away with
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herself, in suitably operatic style, by leaping into a canal. At the
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same time, these outrageous reinterpretations sometimes
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exposed motifs lying below the surface in the original text.

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Thus, Tchaikovsky’s
Queen of Spades
play ed on the demonic theme that was kept at one remove by humour and irony in Pushkin. The oversized proportions and looming patterns of Dobuzhinsky’s design for the final act are in tune with the composer’s intentions.

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the Soviet ‘petty intelligentsia’ appalled that something inimical to the spirit of ‘classic Russian literature’ in the crippled form that he or she knew it had been published.

The Stalin era, then, saw the development of an exceptionally restrictive canon, not only in the sense that few works were included, but because the manner of discussing these was regulated with extraordinary severity. The cultural liberalization that began in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death, was, in this area as in so many others, haphazard and incomplete. It affected, in the main, the scholarly interpretation of Pushkin, but even that only partially. ‘Pushkin House’, the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, retained a privileged position with regard to Pushkin publications that has been described by one hostile commentator, not altogether unjustly, as ‘a narrow circle of Pushkin priests making monopolistic decisions about whether a particular article served their own ends’. To be sure, the
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growing diversity that was evident in the publication of literature and
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of translations began to make itself felt in literary criticism and in scholarship as well. A crucial event was the founding of the Tartu
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University series
Semiotike
(Studies in Sign Systems), under the leadership of the scholar and critic Yury Lotman in 1965. The concentration of semioticians upon the question of meaning within a given culture at a set time, rather than upon the significance of texts for later generations, mounted a covert challenge to the traditional Marxist-Leninist emphasis upon progressiveness. (It was significant that some of Lotman’s best work was devoted to the so-called ‘gentry sentimentalist’ Karamzin.) The immersion in the past that was required by the semiotic approach also meant that material such as writers’

letters and diaries was once again accorded value in itself, as a genre of literary or sub-literary composition, rather than regarded simply as a repository for information about when a writer was doing what to the drafts of his novels, plays, and poems.

However, both in the work of Russian scholars, such as Lotman, and in
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the work of their Western associates, the material that was considered suitable for investigation was still strictly denominated in some respects. Pushkin’s letters to his literary associates were exhaustively analysed, and their playful and watchful crafting of alternative selves recorded, but the writer’s letters to his wife and other close relations were not discussed in detail because of the sense the material was ‘useful for the biographer’ but not for the literary historian, since it had not been meant for publication. The elite world of Russian society was exhaustively analysed: taking their cue from two lines of
Evgeny
Onegin
, ‘One may be a worthwhile person/And think about having clean nails’, semioticians analysed dozens of areas that had been elided by Marxism-Leninism’s emphasis on intellectual life, from the ‘language of flowers’ to the conventions of the duel. Yet gentility was pervasive:
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though memoirs make it clear that child abuse, incest, rape, violence,
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