Russian literature. A short introduction

(usually taken to mean the Alexander Column, the monument to Alexander I as leader of the Russian forces victorious over Napoleon) simply intended to contrast the miraculous verbal artefact with the inert monument, made to glorify a ruler for posterity, constructed with chisel, pulley, and trowel? (Because the usual term for the ‘Alexander Column’ is not used, it is possible that Pushkin was, through the term ‘Alexandrian Pillar’, also referring to the Pharos at Alexandria – and suggesting that his poetry would be the eighth wonder of the world.) And how is Pushkin’s pride in speaking to an entire nation compatible with the intense erudition of this poem, whose allusiveness continues to baffle learned commentary?

These questions can be answered in many different ways. A survey of how ‘Monument’ has been interpreted in different eras of Russian history – as a prophetic evocation in advance of Stalinist literary culture, as an anguished and angry protest by a martyred writer, as a coded message from poet to poet, even as a parody – would shed at least as much light on changing values in Russian culture as on the poem’s meaning in its own right. But the importance of ‘Monument’ goes beyond what it has meant to individual literary critics or even writers. In only five stanzas and twenty lines, the poem raises seven themes of universal resonance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian culture. These are: memorials to the famous as expressions of state power and cultural authority; a writer’s ‘monument’ in the sense of his posthumous reputation; other writers as a writer’s ideal readers; a writer’s role as teacher to his nation; the writer as a member of polite society; the part played by literature in colonizing, or civilizing, barbarian nations; the relationship between writing and religious experience. These ‘signposts’ to different themes in Russian literary culture, to ideas and issues that have been of lasting importance in the work of Pushkin’s successors, have been used to direct the journey taken in this book.

Following this itinerary does not mean taking on trust the belief,