Pushkin said that the point of salon conversation was to flirt (he once claimed that the point of life was to 'make oneself attractive to women'). Pushkin's friends testified that his conversation was just as memorable as his poetry, while his brother Lev maintained that his real genius was for flirting with women.102
The readership of literature in Pushkin's age was by and large female. In Eugene Onegin we first meet the heroine Tatiana with a French book in her hands. Russian literary language, which developed at this time, was consciously designed by poets such as Pushkin to reflect the female taste and style of the salon. Russia barely had a national literature until Pushkin appeared on the literary scene (hence his god-like status in that society). 'In Russia', wrote Madame de Stael in the early 1800s, 'literature consists of a few gentlemen.'103 By the 1830s, when Russia had a growing and vibrant literature, the persistence of attitudes like this had become a source of literary satire by patriotic writers such as Pushkin. In his story The Queen of Spades (1834), the old countess, a lady from the reign of Catherine the Great, is astonished when her grandson, whom she has requested to bring her a new novel, asks if she would like a Russian one. 'Are there any Russian novels?' the old lady asks.104 Yet at the time when de Stael was writing the absence of a major literary canon was a source of great embarrassment to literate Russians. In 1802 the poet and historian Nikolai Karamzin compiled a 'Pantheon of Russian Writers', beginning with the ancient bard Bojan and ending in the present day: it stretched to only twenty names. The literary high points of the eighteenth century - the satires of Prince Antioch Kantemir, the odes of Vasily Trediakovsky and Pavel Sumarokov, the tragedies of Yakov Kniazhnin and the comedies of Denis Fonvizin - hardly amounted to a national literature. All their works were derived from genres in the neoclassical tradition. Some were little more than translations of European works with Russian names assigned to the characters and the action transferred to Russia. Vladimir Lukin, Catherine's court playwright, Russified a large number of French plays. So did Fonvizin in the 1760s. In the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century some 500 works of literature were published in Russia. But only seven were of Russian origin.105
The absence of a national literature was to haunt Russia's young intelligentsia in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Karamzin explained it by the absence of those institutions (literary societies, journals, newspapers) that helped constitute European society.106 The Russian reading public was extremely small - a minuscule proportion of the total population in the eighteenth century - and publishing was
dominated by the Church and the court. It was very difficult, if not impossible, for a writer to survive from his writings. Most Russian writers in the eighteenth century were obliged, as noblemen, to serve as state officials, and those like the fabulist Ivan Krylov who turned their backs on the civil service and tried to make a living from their own writings nearly always ended up extremely poor. Krylov was obliged to become a children's tutor in the houses of the rich. He worked for some time at the Fountain House.107
But the biggest impediment to the development of a national literature was the undeveloped state of the literary language. In France or England the writer wrote largely as people spoke; but in Russia there was a huge divide between the written and the spoken forms of the language. The written language of the eighteenth century was a clumsy combination of archaic Church Slavonic, a bureaucratic jargon known as Chancery, and Latinisms imported by the Poles. There was no set grammar or orthography, and no clear definition of many abstract words. It was a bookish and obscure language, far removed from the spoken idiom of high society (which was basically French) and the plain speech of the Russian peasantry.
Such was the challenge that confronted Russia's poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century: to create a literary language that was rooted in the spoken language of society. The essential problem was that there were no terms in Russian for the sort of thoughts and feelings that constitute the writer's lexicon. Basic literary concepts, most of them to do with the private world of the individual, had never been developed in the Russian tongue: 'gesture', 'sympathy', 'privacy', 'impulsion' and 'imagination' - none could be expressed without the use of French.108 Moreover, since virtually the whole material culture of society had been imported from the West, there were, as Pushkin commented, no Russian words for basic things:
But pantaloons, gilet, and frock -These words are hardly Russian stock.109
Hence Russian writers were obliged to adapt or borrow words from the French to express the sentiments and represent the world of their readers in high society. Karamzin and his literary disciples (including
the young Pushkin) aimed to 'write as people speak' - meaning how the people of taste and culture spoke, and in particular the 'cultivated woman' of polite society, who was, they realized, their 'principal reader'.110 This 'salon style' derived a certain lightness and refinement from its Gallicized syntax and phraseology. But its excessive use of French loan words and neologisms also made it clumsy and verbose. And in its way it was just as far removed from the plain speech of the people as the Church Slavonic of the eighteenth century. This was the language of social pretension that Tolstoy satirized in the opening passages of War and Peace:
Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St Petersburg, used only by the elite.111
Yet this salon style was a necessary stage in the evolution of the literary language. Until Russia had a wider reading public and more writers who were willing to use plain speech as their literary idiom, there would be no alternative. Even in the early nineteenth century, when poets such as Pushkin tried to break away from the foreign hold on the language by inventing Russian words, they needed to explain these to their salon audience. Hence in his story 'The Peasant Girl', Pushkin had to clarify the meaning of the Russian word 'samobytnost" by adding in parenthesis its French equivalent, 'individualite'.112
5
In November 1779 the Hermitage court theatre in St Petersburg staged the premiere of Kniazhnin's comic opera Misfortune from a Carriage. It was an ironic venue for this hilarious satire on the slavish imitation of foreign ways. The sumptuous theatre, recently constructed by the Italian Quarenghi in the Winter Palace, was the home of the French Opera, the most prestigious of the foreign companies. Its elite public was impeccably turned out in the latest French clothes and hairstyles. Here was precisely the sort of Gallomania that Kniazhnin's opera blamed for the moral corruption of society. The opera tells the story
of a pair of peasant lovers, Lukian and Anyuta, who are prevented from getting married by their master's jealous bailiff, Klimenty, who desires Anyuta for himself. As serfs, the pair belong to a foolish noble couple called the Firiulins (the 'Ninnies') whose only aim in life is to ape the newest fashions in Paris. The Firiulins decide that they must have a new coach that is all the rage. To raise the cash they instruct Klimenty to sell some of their serfs into military service. Klimenty picks Lukian. It is only when the lovers plead with their owners in the sentimental language of the Gallicized salon that Lukian is finally released. Until then, the Firiulins had regarded them as simply Russian serfs, and hence, they assumed, entirely unaffected by such emotions as love. But everything is put into a different perspective once Lukian and Anyuta speak in French cliches.113