Russian literature. A short introduction

is the only line in the final three stanzas that was set down straight away in the form that it has in the final text. And the view of the poet as associated not only with the transcendent world of religious and mystical appearance, but also with the banalities of high society, comes up again and again in Pushkin’s later poetry. ‘The Poet’ (1827), for example, is structured round an opposition between ‘the concerns of the empty-headed monde’ (that is, of high society) and ‘the divine word’ (that is, of poetic inspiration), an opposition spanned by the poet himself, who lives alternately in each domain. Appealing to the Romantic myth of artists as socially isolated, Pushkin also invokes another and contradictory myth of the artist as honnête homme, well-spoken man of the world. This myth had been introduced to Russian culture in the late eighteenth century by Nikolay Karamzin, who had asserted, in a famous article, ‘Why Russia Has So Few Literary Talents’ (1802), that without proper access to polite society it was hard for a writer to educate his taste, however learned he might be.

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia, the reading of literature was an obligatory polite accomplishment for both men and women; indeed, writing itself was perceived as an agreeable social skill. Large numbers of women in the aristocracy and gentry kept an al’bom, a mixture of a scrap-book and a commonplace book, in which friends inscribed flattering verses (madrigaly), metrical tokens of love and friendship, and comic rhymes, next to sketched portraits and water-colour landscapes. Magazines and manuals gave models of appropriate pieces for albums (not having something ready to contribute when asked would have looked gauche). In such circumstances, the writing of poetry became an extension of polite conversation, a kind of refined game. Social convention demanded that verse offerings should in the main come from men and be addressed to women, and that the former should offer the latter flowery recognition of their beauty, intelligence, wit, and taste. For Karamzin, who had eulogized women’s percipience and spiritual profundity in his Epistle to