To be sure, the Russian Modernists did have salons of their own. But these were not remotely like the upper-class gatherings of the past, or like the grand St Petersburg and Moscow drawing-rooms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the household of Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, talk turned to spiritualism, the occult, and mystical religion; at the Wednesday assemblies held in the top-floor apartment of Vyacheslav Ivanov, known as ‘The Tower’, guests sprawled on velvet cushions in rooms draped with exotic fabrics. Extravagance of this kind did not long survive the Russian Revolution, but even in the Soviet Union there were some prominent writers who presided over gatherings not unlike alternative salons. Anna Akhmatova, for instance, bestowed on favoured visitors her aphoristic comments about literature, art, and the literary personalities of her day; the Socialist Realist writer Vera Panova, who held high office in the Union of Writers, was beset by guests wanting not only good sense and racy talk, but also – if they could get them – letters of introduction to publishing houses.
In the Modernist circles and artistic cabarets that proliferated in Moscow and St Petersburg during the 1910s, though, unconventionality was the main cultural value. Their very names – ‘The Wandering Dog’, ‘The Players’ Tavern’ – underlined the fashion for bohemian marginality. Like high society in the early nineteenth century, this was a culture where ‘all the world was a stage’, where people valued assured performance more than they did sincerity; but the roles enacted by artists were now considerably more extravagant than they had been in the 1820s and 1830s, when writers had been less cut off from the world of the court and the civil service, and when the standing of actual actors had been much lower. (The late nineteenth and early twentieth century had seen a number of players, notably the ‘Russian Eleonara Duse’ Vera Komissarzhevskaya, attain a considerable cultural authority in the literary world.) But above all, in a world where life was supposed to imitate art, it had become vital to express creativity through eccentric behaviour as well as through a contempt for artistic and linguistic formulae, for the ‘clichés’ that Russian Modernists despised as much as the French Modernists from whom many of their theoretical appreciations ultimately derived. In other words, it was idiosyncratic conduct that was now required, rather than the subordination to universally recognized ethical and aesthetic constraints that had been the central demand of participants in mixed literary gatherings during the early nineteenth century.
Pushkin, though, was writing in an era when the relationship between literature and polite culture was still taken for granted, even if it was beginning to break down. He was one of the last major Russian writers to participate in aristocratic salons of the kind organized by Zinaida Volkonskaya (just as she was one of the last female aristocrats who was at any level a serious artist). Several of Pushkin’s writings – Egyptian Nights, Evgeny Onegin, the novel fragment ‘The Guests Assembled at the Dacha’ (1828–30) – use the aristocratic salon as a setting for central scenes. The urbane tone cultivated in polite society was one of the registers routinely employed by the poet (as is shown by ‘And don’t dispute with fools’). Some of his most famous poems have the brilliant conventionality required by the salon (an example is the famous love poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment:/You appeared before me/ Like a fleeting vision’, which was to have a long drawing-room afterlife as a romance set to music by Glinka). Pushkin followed Karamzin, too, in his intensive interest in the psychology and language of women: this can be seen not only in the prominence of female protagonists in his work, but also in the fact that some of his ‘costumed confessions’ were made in female dress (as with the last line of ‘Monument’, where the advice to avoid demeaning squabbles fits with contemporary expectations that ladies remain calm under all circumstances).
16. Pushkin, doodled self-portrait in female dress. The poet made no attempt to flatter his unladylike profile: the effect of seeing it emerge from the bun and ringlets is amusingly incongruous.
At the same time, though, the inspiration that the salon offered Pushkin was often fused with unease, or even irritation, at the limits of polite language, and particularly at the demand that strong emotion be voiced in a safely conventional way. This unease can be sensed in another very famous love poem, ‘I loved you’ (1829):
I loved you; love as yet, perhaps
Has not burned out in my heart;
But may it trouble you no longer,
I do not wish to sadden you with anything.
I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,
Tormented now by timidity, now by jealousy;
I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,
As God grant you be loved by another.
This poem is quintessentially ‘Pushkinian’ in its dignified plainness and apparently self-explanatory directness; it is sometimes used (not wholly accurately) as an instance of the poet’s distaste for metaphor. But in fact, there is a good deal more here than first meets the eye or the ear. Among many buried associations is the point that the opening lines of the poem evoke ‘feminine language’ – the new language of the emotions that Sentimentalism had seen as women’s particular domain. Great rhythmic emphasis is placed on verbs such as ‘to trouble’ and ‘to sadden’, as well as on the metaphor of love as flame (this hackneyed image is delicately suggested through the verb ‘to burn out’, usually used of lamps or candles). The second half of the poem opposes to these conventional verbs and figures of speech a hyperbolic evocation of unutterable love, emotionally inarticulate, yet also the gift of a (masculine) Deity. The use of religious language in the final line is far from incidental, since this language stands both for sincerity and for ‘Russianness’ in the later Pushkin (as, for example, in one of his last poems, ‘Desert fathers and immaculate women’ (1836)). The effect is that ‘masculine’ sincerity displaces what can be seen, once the poem’s narrative is complete, as charming, ‘feminine’ artifice. The ‘feminine’ vocabulary of affect becomes the starting point rather than the end of inspiration. Its particularity is opposed to the universality of the ‘masculine’ religious text. Evoking feminine language, Pushkin at the same time refuses to be limited by it: ‘I loved you’ moves from ventriloquism of the beloved’s speech to assertion of another and very different set of linguistic values.
Pushkin was no misogynist. The writer would have been shocked to hear such a suggestion: in his day, the typical misogynist was a surly country squire or boorish merchant who thought that education would turn girls into bad wives, and believed it ‘unchristian for any grown man to sit at the feet of a female’. Traces of this attitude can be found in the work of some early nineteenth-century writers, including talents as brilliant as Gogol, but not in Pushkin’s own poetry or fiction, which is notable for its finely drawn and sympathetic portraits of women (the inspiration to women writers as well as men). But it is hard to argue with a historian who, after sifting through all the writer’s essays, reviews, and jottings, concluded that Pushkin (like many of his contemporaries) unreservedly admired only one woman author, Madame de Staël. There is a striking contrast, too, between the roles played by male and female addressees in his letters, verse epistles, and dedications to published works (the latter are the subjects of gallantry sometimes tinged with eroticism, while the former cover a far wider range, from confidants to debating partners, from rivals to confederates in debauchery).