Russian literature. A short introduction

fervently believed, even if his own life gave him little chance to experience them in practice. And the theme of art’s endurance is common to this poem and to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, also written under a self-glorifying monarchy (‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme . . .’), while some phrases in ‘Monument’ play on the finale to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, hinting at Pushkin’s long devotion to Ovid, another poet exiled by a capricious ruler.

‘Monument’ is not only a quintessential classic, in Calvino’s terms, because of its teasing familiarity, but because it ‘comes to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations’. Most commonly, the poem is understood as Pushkin’s poetic testament. It is one of only a handful of complete poems surviving from 1836, the last year of Pushkin’s life, a time during which his existence was made almost unbearable by financial worries, by the struggles to launch his new literary journal The Contemporary, and by anxieties aroused by the persistent rumours of his wife Natalya’s infidelity – rumours that were to lead directly to Pushkin’s death in a duel in January 1837, at the age of only 37. The references to ‘dust’ and ‘putrefaction’ can be associated with the emotional contemplation of cemetery scenes that had recurred obsessively in Pushkin’s writings from the late 1820s. In this perspective, the fact that the icon of Christ known as ‘not made by human hands’ was traditionally placed upon Russian graves is certainly of significance.

Yet to see ‘Monument’ as a kind of ‘poetic suicide note’ begs the question of the extent to which Pushkin foresaw or willed his own imminent death. It also ignores his long fascination with the monument theme and, more abstractly, what the American Pushkinist David Bethea has termed his ‘potential for creative biography’, or the self-conscious creation of autobiographical myths. These myths were always elusive and many-faced, and ‘Monument’ is not at all a straightforward poem. Is Pushkin intending to suggest that only another poet will truly understand his writing? Is the reference to the ‘Alexandrian Pillar’