Russian literature. A short introduction

Chapter 7

‘Every tribe and every tongue will name me’

Russian literature and ‘primitive culture’

The ‘Russians’ are no more than a group of specialists in the Russian language.

(M. L. Gasparov, 2000)

‘Monument’ envisaged that Pushkin’s name would be known not only in Europe, but in Asia. The poet predicted a readership from among Russia’s subject tribes: the Poles (‘proud descendants of the Slavs’), the Finns (the Grand Duchy of Finland had been added to Russia in 1800), the Tungus (now known as the Evenki, an indigenous people of Siberia), and the Kalmyks (from the area north of the Caucasus, on the shores of the Caspian Sea). Had Pushkin been gifted with the powers of geopolitical prophecy, he might have added the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, and the Kyrgyz, since during the Soviet period compulsory Russian teaching in schools throughout the Soviet Union meant that the vast majority of citizens, whatever their ethnic affiliation, had heard the name of Pushkin.

The fact that the peoples of Central Asia are not included in Pushkin’s list of ‘tribes’ is easy to explain: the first Russian conquests there took place only in the mid-nineteenth century, and the region was not fully subjugated until the 1880s. But the list was not exhaustive even in terms