Russian literature. A short introduction

the only way in which the will may be exercised. And several poems of 1836 juxtapose worldly power and religious feeling, which latter draws in the lyric hero despite his strong sense of personal sin (as the critic Sergey Davydov has argued, there is strong reason to suppose that these poems, including ‘Monument’, may have formed part of a poetic cycle round the theme of Holy Week).

Like most aspects of Pushkin’s creation, the question of the extent to which the writer was an active believer is controversial. It became particularly so once Soviet censorship disintegrated: at this point the patriots who had fulminated against Andrey Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin as a profanation of the writer’s memory began an all-out promotion of Pushkin’s Orthodox connections, using books, articles, pamphlets, and a specialized journal, The Pushkin Era in the Light of Christian Culture. It was above all Pushkin’s late poetry of repentance that was used as evidence here. But the desire for faith that these texts unquestionably did express is not the same thing as religious faith in a direct sense. There seems little to justify even the more moderate claim for Pushkin as an instance of how ‘theology in Russia [ . . . ] expressed itself through poetry’. Rather, he was a crucial figure in the creation of a secular Russian literature. His great poetic predecessors, Lomonosov and Derzhavin, were not only inspired directly by liturgical texts (as in Derzhavin’s remarkable paraphrases of the Psalms), but built their grandest poetic edifices on a foundation of the liturgical language, Church Slavonic (so, for example, in Derzhavin’s ‘The Waterfall’, a profoundly Christian meditation upon the transience of worldly power). Such magnificent sententiousness and theological self-declaration is not to be found in Pushkin’s writings; indeed, the extent to which he was an active believer is neither evident nor, in the end, relevant, except perhaps to those the leftist writer and critic Osip Brik termed ‘maniacs such as those passionately seeking the answer to the question “Did Pushkin smoke?”’. If Belinsky and his radical colleagues could consider Pushkin an ‘encyclopedia’ of Russian life, this was partly because spiritual matters were as marginal here as they were in the French