To be sure, the twentieth century saw something of a rehabilitation of pre-Pushkinian poetry, with such important figures as Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and later Joseph Brodsky, inspired by the stubborn obscurity and exhilarating harshness of Derzhavin. But the Modernist emphasis on the pursuit of originality was not congenial to an understanding of the deliberate conventionalism of eighteenth-century writing. Typical was Vladimir Nabokov, whose commentary on Evgeny Onegin lambasted the insipidity of Karamzin and the unreadable dreariness of the epic poet Mikhail Kheraskov, and unwillingly allowed to Derzhavin only ‘touches of rough genius’. In poetry, the voice employed by Pushkin in his writings about the poet, allying ironical scepticism to a defiant assertion of the value of inspiration, became the definitive means of conveying artistic experience. The 1910s and 1920s saw a revival of ‘Pushkinian’ devices in prose too – the use of frame narratives, epigraphs, texts-within-texts, and other strategies marking the distance of a tale from reality, its contingency upon style rather than observation.
Despite the gesticulation on the part of writers towards Pushkin in terms of theme, and the borrowing of vocabulary and of forms with a ‘Pushkinian’ resonance, the work of later generations was by no means constrained by what Pushkin had done. Those genres in which Pushkin did not work were often to prove more productive than those in which he did. Though Andrey Sinyavsky described Pushkin’s poetry as ‘filled with a mass of personal material’, the amount of strictly ‘personal material’ in Pushkin’s lyric poetry, as opposed to his letters or notebook jottings, is actually rather limited, and this material always appears in transmuted form. Apparently confessional poems, written in the first person, are in fact ‘costumed confessions’ – that is, spoken in the words of some invented character. And the ‘costumes’ that Pushkin chose to put on, both in his lyric verse and in his drama and fiction, were bewilderingly varied. Pushkin’s essays and jottings make it clear that he was temperamentally akin both to Mozart and Salieri, the apparently antithetical heroes of one of his Little Tragedies; Hermann, the dogged, neurotic German protagonist of The Queen of Spades, and the effortlessly charming Tomsky, a prattling gossip from high society, are both authorial alter egos. Though the mode of ‘costumed confession’ is characteristic of Russian literature (it is found, for instance, in Lermontov’s Hero of our Time, or in Akhmatova’s early poetry), the sheer range of masks that Pushkin adopted was unique.
Nor was confessional poetry the only genre that was not anticipated in Pushkin’s work. As Lidiya Ginzburg argued in a classic history of nineteenth-century Russian literature, On Psychological Prose, it was Aleksandr Herzen, in My Past and Thoughts, who pioneered the genre of confessional prose, employing a searingly emotional rhetoric that would probably have embarrassed Pushkin. Conversely, Pushkin’s wonderfully vivid, playful, and self-deprecating letters have few successors in Russian tradition. Later masters of the epistolary form, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, inclined to literary-philosophical abstraction and to lamentation on the unfairness of fate rather than to concrete detail and teasing humour. So far as the theatre was concerned, Pushkin wrote no dramatic comedies, which both before and after his lifetime constituted the glory of the Russian theatre. (Gogol’s The Government Inspector, ensconced in the international repertory as a unique masterpiece, was the successor to eighteenth-century texts such as Fonvizin’s The Minor or Knyazhnin’s The Boaster, and the inspiration for Aleksandr Ostrovsky, the prolific mainstay of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian theatre.) Nor did Pushkin contribute to the extremely important genre of tragicomedy, as exemplified in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or Mayakovsky’s The Bed-Bug. His greatest achievements remained splendidly isolated. To be sure, Evgeny Onegin inspired imitations, but none of these were more than entertaining exercises in light verse. The psychological complexity of Boris Godunov was captured in Musorgsky’s operatic setting of the play, rather than in Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s trilogy of historical dramas about Boris, his predecessors and his successors, works of a painstaking dullness rather than the young Pushkin’s sketchy brilliance.
If Pushkin can be seen as a pioneer, it is of ‘mixed genre’ texts. The narrative poem with prose ‘frame’ in The Egyptian Nights (1835) was, for instance, paralleled (though not imitated) in Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life (1844–7), a prose story using poetry to represent the thoughts and dreams of its protagonist, Cecilia. But given the preoccupation of Romantic literature throughout Europe with new and hybrid forms (take Heine’s ‘verse novel’ Atta Troll, or the use of song to represent Mignon’s imaginative world in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) it is difficult to argue that the intergeneric text in Russian literature derives wholly from Pushkin’s influence.
Even the conventional view of Pushkin’s centrality to the Russian literary language can only be partly endorsed. Much of Pushkin’s streamlining of syntax had been anticipated in the eighteenth century, not only in the writings of Nikolay Karamzin, traditionally seen as the pre-Pushkinian pioneer, but also in humbler sources, such as the memoirs of Princess Natalya Dolgorukaya, produced in 1767 as a private chronicle for her descendants, and in translations from the French of novels and of conduct books. Besides, as the scholar Boris Gasparov, among others, has argued, the Pushkinian/Karamzinian line was only one of many literary orientations in the early nineteenth century; other writers were as likely to react against it as they were to espouse it.
So far as prose fiction went, Pushkin’s heritage was similarly idiosyncratic. A sore point for advocates of Pushkin’s role as the ‘founding father of Russian literature’ has been the writer’s failure, among his many brilliant excursions into diverse genres, to provide models for the enormous psychological novels that have, since the late nineteenth century, been internationally regarded as Russia’s greatest contribution to world literature. Even so determinedly individual a Modernist as Nabokov, who held much Russian Realist prose to be as bogus in intention as it was garrulous in expression, and who detested psychological literalism, commented of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin that he is ‘fluid and flaccid as soon as he starts to feel, as soon as he departs from the existence he has acquired from his maker in terms of colorful parody and as a catchall for many irrelevant and immortal matters’. It was above all as a triumph of surface-painting that he admired the novel. To be sure, Evgeny Onegin is stylistically diverse and has a narrator who plays many parts (a friend of the characters, a mouthpiece for them, an ironic commentator upon folly, a sympathizer in time of grief). Yet even Tatiana remains a symbol rather than a counterfeit of lived reality, a creature of idealism rather than representation. She is as much a manifestation of the creative sensibility as a portrait of a provincial young lady. If her letter to Evgeny, written when awake, is a tissue of quotations from books she has read, her dream of Evgeny surrounded by strange creatures is narrated in the language of Pushkin’s own lyric ballads.