In 1937, an editorial in Pravda announced that “Pushkin is completely ours, Soviet, for the Soviet power inherited everything that is best in our people …. In the final analysis, Pushkin’s creation merged with the October socialist Revolution as a river flows into the ocean.”2
Compared with this ideological-political appropriation of the national poet, the spectacle of admirers overcome with grief at his funeral, or the marketing of numerous products with the name Pushkin (cigarettes, shoes, chocolate, vases) on the centenary of his birth in 1899, appears as no more than a naïve, homely carnival.
For a genuine dissident like Sinyavsky, courageous exposure of Soviet hypocrisy and terror (for which he suffered years of prison and then exile) needed to be supplemented with a critical examination of the “national emblems” that still provided the iconography for the idealization of Russian identity. The “Pushkin myth” has proved over more than 150 years to have had an enormous potential for mystification and manipulation, and to nullify this is the ultimate aim of Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin.
A huge hagiographic literature had depicted the national poet of Russia, and then of the Soviet Union, as a martyr, a man of the people, and a social model, ignoring his distinctive and truly great characteristics as an artist and human being. In the introduction to Sinyavsky’s book, the Russian scholar and translator Catherine T. Nepomnyashchy writes,
Pushkin had been sacralized, forged into the center of a secular cult which none the less drew its emotional force from the wellsprings of religious zeal. Around the figure of Pushkin an entire cosmology was cultivated, a black and white universe divided clearly between heroes and villains who were defined ethically by their relations with Pushkin and served to validate him politically through their own allegiances.3
It is easy to understand why not only a dissident, but also a great admirer of Pushkin such as Andrei Sinyavsky, could not accept the canonical legend of the poet’s life, or the metamorphosis of his work into a national ode. “What we might term ‘Pushkin for the mass reader,’ ” Nepomnyashchy writes,
was the most widely propagated version — the one most clearly implicated in the official mythology. This was the Pushkin whose verse every Soviet child began to memorize as soon as he or she began school, if not before, and whose biography, reduced to something of a simplistic catechism, was a standard part of the school curriculum. The emphasis here, as in virtually all Soviet humanities schooling, was on rote learning of canonical texts — favoring those of Pushkins works that could easily be made to support the official image — and canonical interpretations of those texts.4
To recover Pushkin as a great artist required restoration work to remove the numerous layers of cosmetics.
Sinyavsky is not shy about the truth, and it is this that lights up the exceptional personality of the great poet.
Pushkin gradually renounced, without exception, all the conceivable purposes that are generally imposed on art and opened up the way to an understanding of poetry — negative to its very core — according to which poetry, “by its very nature lofty and free, must have no other aim but poetry itself.” Precisely because this art is free and obeys only “the movement of momentary, free feeling” (as Pushkin called inspiration), it has a habit of slipping through the fingers that embrace it too tenaciously, even if they are fingers of those who worship the beautiful, and it does not fit into its own pure definition.5
Not by chance did Sinyavsky begin the iconoclastic “strolls” with his beloved Pushkin when he was serving seven years of hard labor for “anti-Soviet agitation.” He would transcribe fragments of his study in letters to his wife, and thus to the world outside his prison cell — real “anti-Soviet agitation,” and much more besides, as its impact in the post-Soviet period demonstrates.
In the West where, as Emil Cioran believed, people like to demolish all reputations, legitimate or not, Sinyavsky’s book was considered an original and scrupulous restoration of Pushkin’s true reputation as an artist. “Brilliant, stimulating, intriguing,” wrote Laurence Binyon in the London Review of Books. “An ardent and fastidious attack on philistinism in all its forms,” Susan Sontag declared on the dust jacket. “By our standards, there is nothing scandalous about Sinyavsky. His every sentence is full of discernment and common sense,” explained John Bayley in the Times Literary Supplement.
On the other hand, Russian standards, probably linked to the suffering and illusions that still make the writer both prophet and educator, have given rise to a different type of reaction. Take, for example, Igor Shafarevich, author of the scandalous volume Russophobia (1989) — a kind of anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic manifesto, in which the great Russian people are seen as besieged by an alien minority that, in alliance with the demonic West, is bent on subverting the people’s religious traditions and destroying the Russian nation. In an article entitled “A Phenomenon of the Emigration,” Shafarevich urged Russian readers to demand the outlawing of Sinyavsky, much as the Islamic fundamentalists outlawed Salman Rushdie.6 It was not quite a death sentence, as in Rushdie’s case, but Sinyavsky was compared to him and placed in the same category.
By taking the pen name of Abram Tertz, a once-famous Jewish pickpocket from Odessa, Sinyavsky had already issued a dual challenge: a Jewish name and the Pushkin critique. The name reminded people that the writer had been considered a criminal by the Soviet authorities, sentenced for reading and writing forbidden books. But it also recalled the age-old fate of the Jew in Russia, as alien, renegade, and apostate, so similar in many ways to that of the artist. (The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once said, “In this most Christian of worlds, poets are kikes.”) Referring to Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision of the art of the carnival — which Sinyavsky considers applicable in a broader sense to art in general — Sinyavsky maintains that the provocative name Abram Tertz was also in fact “an example of carnivalization,” of a clownish metamorphosis.7
Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw in the “childish playfulness” of Sinyavsky’s book a sacrilege specific to an émigré and “aesthetic nihilist” who, through Pushkin, was attacking authority itself, the foundation of society.8 Other writers, too, from Russia and the Russian emigration, thought it inadmissible that Sinyavsky should have challenged a literary icon on a par with the icons of the Orthodox Church.
Many of Sinyavsky’s violent critics have stressed the difficult circumstances of the moral crisis through which Russia and Eastern Europe have been passing since the end of communism. That he brought out his iconoclastic text in such ill-fated times seemed to many to add to his guilt. Thus, in January 1990, speaking on Soviet television, the conservative critic Vladimir Gusev argued that the scandal was not so much due to the text itself; “it was the context of the publication that was strange.”9 And what was the context? “Pushkin is one of the last saints left to our people in this spiritually tragic time.”
This was similar to the point of view expressed by Ernst Safonov, editor of Literaturnaya Rossiya, in a debate at Columbia University in May 1990: “When all of these holy things are trampled, when there are no more icons or very few, Pushkin is one of those icons. He is an icon equal to the icons of the Church.”10 For his part, the rural fiction writer Viktor Likhonosov said, “an attempt was once again made on Russia,” and he thought it perfectly natural and understandable that the publication of Sinyavsky’s study “was like a bomb exploding.”11