As Pushkin’s negligently scrawled self-portraits presented a welcome alternative view of the poet to the congealed bronze of statues, so, for 1960s Modernists, it was precisely the poet’s immateriality, his ‘emptiness’, his ‘chatter’, his amoralistic and slippery variability of style, his idiosyncratic undefinability, that appealed. There was a revival of interest in Pushkin as parodist, an identity that had also appealed to writers in the 1920s, when even the sacred notion of the poet as prophet had been subject to ironic appropriation (the writer Vikenty Veresaev had wondered in 1929 whether ‘Monument’, like the character of Evgeny Onegin, might not be a sardonic travesty of Romantic stereotype: ‘Is this poem maybe not just a parody?’). Soviet Socialist Realists had seen themselves, in all seriousness, as heirs to Tolstoy and Turgenev, and pontificated solemnly to readers about their approach to the ‘writer’s craft’. Underground or semi-official writers of the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, preferred to approach classic works of Russian literature via the ‘back door’ of irony. Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki was a reductio ad absurdum of the official practice of using citations from the classics as a way of displaying a text’s cultural credentials – texts from the Bible to the labels of tins of boot-polish appeared in a disorderly profusion, with no sense of relative importance. And in Dmitry Prigov’s mock-obituary in the style of Pravda, Pushkin’s essential frivolity was used to undermine the pomposity of official biography and of recognized writers:
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and the Soviet Government announce with the very deepest regret that on the 10 February (29 January, Old Style) 1837, as the result of a tragic duel, the course of the life of the great Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, aged 37, has come to a sudden and untimely end.
Comrade Pushkin was always distinguished by high principles, a sense of responsibility, and a demanding attitude towards himself and others. In every post that he was deputed to occupy he displayed boundless fidelity to the appointed task, a military valour and heroism, and all the elevated qualities of a patriot, a citizen, and a poet.
He will always remain in the hearts of his friends and those who knew him well as a rake, a joker, a tearaway, and a terrible boozer.
Pushkin’s name will live for ever in the memory of the Russian people as the eternal flame of Russian poetry.
From ‘the father of Russian literature’, Pushkin had become a jester, a participant at bachelor revels. He was even paid the dubious compliment of a pornographic forgery, his so-called Secret Memoirs of 1836 and 1837, which confessed, among other things, to three-in-a-bed frolics with his wife Natalya and her sister Aleksandra. And his key works now included, besides Evgeny Onegin (not as Belinsky’s ‘encyclopedia of Russian life’, but as a playful piece of eavesdropping on gossip and an example of ‘manipulation of plot’), The Little House at Kolomna, The Gabrieliad, and Count Nulin.
Chapter 5
‘Awakening noble
feelings with my lyre’
Writers as ‘masters of minds’
A literary sermon is freer and more independent than a treatise; it often looks above real phenomena, far beyond them, sketching out its prophetic words on the distant and empty horizon.
(Pavel Annenkov, 1858)
In the last chapter, we saw how the pomposity of the Pushkin cult provoked an understanding of Pushkin as jester, as homo ludens, a pleasant acquaintance to be ‘strolled’ with, rather than as a disdainful and frowning pedagogue. Pushkin became the herald of meaning as non-meaning, the poet above all of The Little House of Kolomna (1830), which concludes its bizarre and studiedly pointless saga of a transvestite cook with the following words:
Here’s a moral for you: in my view
It’s risky to hire a cook for free;
For a person born a man to dress up
In skirts, is curious and has no point;
After all, sooner or later he will be forced
To give himself a shave, which doesn’t quite agree
With a lady’s nature . . . But that’s the very most
That you’ll squeeze out of this slight tale.
But frivolity of this kind is not the key to Pushkin’s entire output. Equally characteristic of him was the didactic view of literature expressed in ‘Monument’ - that a writer was responsible for ‘awakening the noble feelings’ of an entire nation. Even the ending of The Little House at Kolomna had a lesson to teach – that literature did not have to be taken seriously. It sprang from Pushkin’s frustration with Russian readers’ obsession with morals and messages, as powerfully expressed in ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828), a rebuke to those who, on hearing a ‘song’, were capable only of responding with stupid questions:
What is he strumming about? what is he teaching us?
Why is he exciting and tormenting hearts
Like a capricious wizard?
His song is free as the wind,
But also fruitless as the wind:
What is the use of it to us?
And in The Queen of Spades (1834), any moralizing ambitions that might have been expected in a tale of compulsive gambling are undercut because story-telling and writing are shown within the story itself as frivolous, unreliable, deceptive, no more than ‘chatter to spin out a mazurka’.
But moral commentary is not avoided altogether. When Hermann appears in Liza’s room to undeceive her about the reasons behind his long-distance courtship (he has in fact been writing her passionate letters so he can inveigle himself inside the house to confront her guardian, the Countess), the narrator observes: ‘She wept bitterly, seized by belated and painful repentance.’ Had Pushkin opted for moral neutrality, he could have used a different phrase (for example, ‘seized by sudden, painful understanding’). But the narrator is made to espouse Christian moral vocabulary (‘repentance’), and the adjective ‘belated’ passes explicit judgement (Liza’s feelings are appropriate, but she has ignored the voice of conscience too long). Equally, there is no doubt that the duel between Evgeny Onegin and Lensky is to be understood as a form of homicide licensed by civilization, though this point is conveyed indirectly, through a comically embittered disquisition upon the joys of revenge:
It is pleasant to enrage an obtuse enemy
With an impudent epigram [ . . . ]