But the worst side-effect of a system that encouraged school graduates to see the narrow sampling of classic texts to which they had been 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 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.
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. Musorgsky’s tormented yet regal Boris Godunov is quite different from Pushkin’s ambitious, guilt-ridden version of the character; Tchaikovsky’s version of
Queen of Spades
dispenses with the ironic ending of the original story (in which Liza ends up purging her own humiliation as a ward by taking a ward of her own), inserting instead a scene in which Liza does away with herself, in suitably operatic style, by leaping into a canal. At the same time, these outrageous reinterpretations sometimes exposed motifs lying below the surface in the original text. Thus, Tchaikovsky’s
Queen of Spades
played 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.
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 growing diversity that was evident in the publication of literature and of translations began to make itself felt in literary criticism and in scholarship as well. A crucial event was the founding of the Tartu 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 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: though memoirs make it clear that child abuse, incest, rape, violence, as well as less spectacular misdemeanours such as vulgarity and rudeness, were as common in early nineteenth-century Russian society as in any other human community, discussion of such topics was not allowed to disrupt the view of the ‘Golden Age’ of Pushkin and his contemporaries as an aesthetic paradise. In other words, this was an interpretive tradition that, in seeking to trace the conventions of early nineteenth-century Russian life, often replicated the proprieties against which writers themselves had battled. Even to liberal Russian scholars of this kind, Richard Holmes’s life of Coleridge, showing the poet composing his aethereal works in a constant struggle with decidedly earthly afflictions such as constipation, would have seemed trivial and putrid tattle. In some ways, this was a reflection of writers’ own determination to transcend physicality. The poet Nikolay Klyuev, desperately sick, bedridden, and a victim of Stalinist persecution, comforted himself with the thought that ‘saints can be recognized by their endurance, ability to rise above suffering [ . . . ] some people’s souls are like trumpets, sounding only when catastrophe and the angel of torment blows into them’. Yet the refusal of scholars to interest themselves in personal pain – failed love affairs, divorces, sexual agony – could be obstructive to the study of writers preoccupied, in their work, with precisely these subjects. The Formalist theory that writers self-consciously shaped personal experience as art even while they were living it (termed in Russian zhiznetvorchestvo) ignored the fact that some writers were inspired precisely by life’s reluctance to subordinate itself to such reshaping (examples of this included some of the women writers discussed in Chapter 6 below).
Even once interest in the ‘distinguishing features’ of recognized writers proliferated, then, there was little concern with ‘faults’: rather than ‘biography’ in the Western sense, the writing of lives meant setting out an author’s ‘creative path’ (the authoritative life of Klyuev eschewed discussion of the poet’s homosexual love affairs and concentrated instead upon his artistic relationships with other writers and with journal editors). The essential task was to represent the life as a saintly path of suffering and triumph (podvig): deviations from this model provoked bitter debate, as in the case of the Russian-American critic Alexander Zholkovsky’s revisionist interpretation of Anna Akhmatova’s biography. Zholkovsky argued that Akhmatova saw her own suffering, political and personal, as a mark of distinction, and strove to emphasize and heighten it. She was not merely an inert and innocent victim, but actively sought out pain. She used others as the instruments of conflict (her history of relationships with men who were already attached to another woman is striking) and as a sounding-board for lamentation (Zholkovsky drew attention to Akhmatova’s compulsive desire for an audience, manifested in her repeated commands that her friends should drop everything and rush round to see her when she so required). In a furious response printed in Zvezda, the literary journal which had published Zholkovsky’s article, another Russian-American critic accused Zholkovsky of colluding in, and approving, Akhmatova’s oppression: ‘Only from a safe distance – whether geographical or chronological – can one write about history and literature with such unruffled alienation from human suffering.’ Life-writing was still widely seen as a genre demanding moral engagement and respect bordering on adulation, even when practised by scholars.