Russian literature. A short introduction

Chapter 2

‘I have raised myself a monument’

Writer memorials and cults

How can I talk about Pushkin? A pygmy riding on a giant. (Andrey Bely, 1925)

One Russian whose first contact with Pushkin was through a monument was the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. During her childhood in the 1890s, she was regularly taken for walks by her nurse ‘to Pushkin’s’, that is to the Pushkin statue situated on the inner circle of boulevards girding the old centre of Moscow. ‘A black man taller and blacker than anyone else’, he marked the ‘end and bound’ of all childhood walks.

The statue represents Pushkin with his head lowered and his hand on his heart, his pose and expression of fierce concentration suggesting he is gripped by inspiration. It is a quintessentially Romantic image, that of the ‘improviser’ and ‘dreamer’, which the poet himself evoked in his story ‘Egyptian Nights’ (1833). Here, a dishevelled and disreputable foreign visitor to St Petersburg has been asked to take part in a sort of literary parlour game. Ladies and gentlemen write down themes on slips, which are then thrown into an urn, and the visitor treats the urn as a sort of lucky dip, pulling out the bits of paper to see what he has to produce a poem about. The subject about which he needs to improvise turns out to be Cleopatra and her lovers: