To be sure, the Pushkin cult did not develop unopposed. Tolstoy’s famous tract What is Art? (1898), for example, poured scorn on the idea of turning a dandy and womanizer such as Pushkin into a national saint. Well before this, in the 1860s, radical critics such as Dmitry Pisarev made Pushkin the spearhead of their assault on Romantic poetry in favour of politically engaged prose. Pisarev used Pushkin’s magnificent poem ‘19 October 1825’, with its moving evocation of the literary friendship between the poet and his classmate Wilhelm Küchelbecker, as an illustration of his point that verse was the statement of shallow ideas in unnecessarily complex form: ‘If all this rhyming blether is paraphrased as simple and clear prose, then the following thin and pallid message remains: “You and I both used to scribble verses; I used to print mine, and you didn’t; and now I’m not going to print mine either.”’ A fair number of radically minded readers, particularly self-taught intellectuals from the working classes, shared Pisarev’s reservations. ‘Your Onegin and your Lensky [ . . . ] should have been sent to a factory to fit cylinders to a vice’, one memoirist recalled his workmates saying in the 1910s. For readers of this kind, Maxim Gorky’s propaganda novel The Mother (1906), about a simple woman brought to political enlightenment by the cruelty of the Tsarist authorities, was a great deal more moving than Evgeny Onegin.
These scruples had a powerful institutional weight during the first years after the Russian Revolution, when literary-historical scholarship was dominated by the official ideology of ‘class war’. For those committed to fighting that war, Pushkin was no more than a supremely gifted member of a reactionary cultural elite. Most so-called ‘leftists’, too, were admirers of fiction (especially Realist fiction), not of ‘rhyming blether’. Significantly, the first writers whose biographies appeared in The Lives of Famous People, an uplifting series for the mass market that began publication at the instigation of Gorky in 1933, were Chekhov, Gogol, the eighteenth-century radical dissident Aleksandr Radishchev, and the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, scourge of the privileged classes, rather than Pushkin. Similarly, the keynote speeches at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers emphasized the pre-eminence, alongside the Realist fiction of Gorky and of Tolstoy, of ‘progressive’ critics such as Belinsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and Nikolay Dobrolyubov. As late as 1949, a list of required reading for the Soviet masses put forward by the Party leader, Old Bolshevik, and former worker Mikhail Kalinin consisted of Lomonosov (as an example of the supreme auto-didact and scientific genius), the ‘revolutionary moralist’ Radishchev, Belinsky, and Dobrolyubov, with the radical poet Nikolay Nekrasov the sole example of an imaginative writer.
Right until the end of the Soviet era, ‘progressiveness’ – which is to say, the holding of views that could be represented as foreshadowing Soviet ones – was the primary criterion by which work by dead writers was judged as fitting, or not, for acknowledgement as ‘classic literature’. ‘Progressiveness’ was to be found in Chernyshevsky’s plodding, formulaic novel of women’s liberation, What is to be Done? (1863), but not in Dostoevsky’s The Devils (1871–2), which the second edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia labelled a ‘virulent slur upon the Russian movement for political liberation’. It was to be found in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but only to a much more limited degree in Anna Karenina (decidedly a novel of the second rank, from an official Soviet point of view, because of the unfortunate prominence in it of adulterous passion). It was evident in Nekrasov’s socially critical poetry, but most definitely not in the ‘idealist’ works of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism. It was evident in radical periodicals of high principle but decidedly modest literary merit, such as The Spark, but not in the artistically ambitious (and politically liberal) Modernist journals of the early twentieth century, such as Apollo or The Scales. Accordingly, it was selections from the former journal, and not the latter two, that appeared in the ‘Poet’s Library’, the most prestigious series of retrospective editions of poetry, published by the leading house ‘The Soviet Writer’.
Emphasis upon ‘progressiveness’ had especially piquant results where eighteenth-century literature was concerned. That the reign of the ‘reactionary’ Catherine II (herself one of the first Russian women writers) had been a far more productive era for Russian letters than that of the ‘progressive’ Peter I was bad enough; far more embarrassing was the conservatism of most Russian writers themselves, who were much more likely to pen court odes celebrating autocracy than to attack serfdom. As a result, much eighteenth-century Russian literature was simply not republished between the early 1930s and the late 1980s, and treatments of the period for the mass market (unlike those published between the 1890s and the 1920s) concentrated on a bare handful of figures. Apart from Radishchev and Lomonosov, the rarefied company of acceptable writers included the literary journalist Nikolay Novikov (mythologized as a martyr of Catherine II’s political censorship). Nikolay Karamzin, on the other hand, was branded a ‘gentry sentimentalist’, and a good deal of his work remained under wraps: his masterful History of the Russian Empire (1818–29), for instance, was not republished in full until the late 1980s. To grasp the eccentricity of this, one might imagine a list of eighteenth-century English greats consisting of Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the early Wordsworth, but excluding Pope, Johnson, Fanny Burney, and Thomson on the grounds of their questionable politics, and Swift on the grounds of his questionable propriety. (As a matter of fact, in the Stalin years Gulliver’s Travels was published as a children’s book, in heavily abridged form.) So far as nineteenth-century English literature goes, it is not necessary to imagine a canon of ‘progressive’ writers, because one was actually constructed by the efforts of Soviet translators. It consisted of Shelley (the pioneering atheist and democrat), Burns (the ‘people’s poet’ of Scotland), William Blake (as the denouncer of ‘satanic mills’ rather than as visionary mystic), and – as the towering figure – Dickens. It most certainly did not include Jane Austen (translated only from the late 1950s), George Eliot (who had been extremely popular in nineteenth-century Russia), or Emily Brontë, let alone Gerald Manley Hopkins or Christina Rossetti.
The canon of ‘progressive’ writers was at once static and flexible. Some writers, such as Tolstoy, maintained their pre-eminence from the beginning to the end of Soviet power; others, such as Pushkin, underwent a marked change in status. The most crucial stage of reassessment came in the mid-1930s, when ‘class war’ was decreed to have ended and there was a move to conservatism in terms of family and educational policy (a set of changes collectively known as ‘the Great Retreat’). Along with structural changes went symbolic changes: with increasing emphasis on the fact that cultural values transcended social circumstances went a resurgence of ‘classic’ styles in architecture, music, and painting. Not coincidentally, too, the Lenin cult instituted upon the leader’s death in 1924 began to subside in favour of an emphasis upon ‘Soviet patriotism’, centred round figures whose glory reflected and enhanced that of the ‘coryphaeus of all knowledge’, Stalin himself. The centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937 came at a crucial stage in this set of processes, and was itself used in order to enforce a new, and entirely circular, identification of artistic merit and political progressiveness.