Russian literature. A short introduction

The proud descendant of the Slavs, the Finn, the Tungus Who is now savage, and the steppe-loving Kalmyk.

And for long I shall remain loved by the people For awakening noble feelings with my lyre, Because in my cruel age I have celebrated freedom, And called for pity to the fallen.

O Muse, be obedient to the command of God, Do not be fearful of abuse, do not demand a crown, Accept both praise and slander with indifference, And don’t dispute with fools.

Even in English, ‘Monument’ (to adopt the title commonly, if incorrectly, attached to the poem) gives not only a feeling of ‘discovery’, but something equally important in a ‘classic’ text, what Calvino calls ‘the sense of rereading something we have read before’. This comes partly from the fact that Pushkin’s poem is itself a free translation, or imitation, of an ode by Horace, as the Latin quotation ‘Exegi monumentum’ makes clear. ‘Monument’ also plays on an earlier imitation of Horace by the great eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Derzhavin’s poem was both a literal version of Horace and a literal version of the statue motif: Derzhavin’s monument has nothing airy or mystical about it, but is ‘harder than all metals and taller than the Pyramids’. Pushkin’s poem, on the other hand, is teasingly insubstantial: a ‘monument not made by human hands’ is from some points of view not a monument at all.

In some ways, this idea of an art work about the impossibility of making an art work seems more characteristic of the twentieth century than of the early nineteenth century: it seems Modernist rather than Romantic. But many other themes and motifs in Pushkin’s poem – for instance, the idea of dignified survival in the face of a ‘cruel age’ – evoke the Enlightenment ideals of civilization in whose abstract existence Pushkin