Russian literature. A short introduction

But now the improviser was feeling the approach of his god . . . He signed to the musicians to begin playing . . . His face went fearfully pale, and he began shaking as though he were in a fever; his eyes glittered with a strange fire; he ran a hand through his black hair, making them stand on end, and wiped beads of sweat from his high forehead . . . and then suddenly took a step forward and crossed his hands on his chest . . . the music fell silent . . . The improvisation had begun.

Here we see an artist in the grip of an acute attack of Romantic inspiration.Yet it would be unwise to assume that this passage represents concealed autobiography. Certainly, there is no explicit invitation in ‘Egyptian Nights’ to apply this potent myth of divinely inspired composition to the biographical Pushkin. And the poet’s drafts indicate that his writings, so far from being dashed off at one go, were worked over intensively and repeatedly before they reached their finished form. The sophisticated sound effects for which Pushkin strove required effort, while the complex task of speaking directly and plainly, and at the same time avoiding excessive baldness, meant that articulation of a poem’s theme or argument became progressively more allusive in successive versions. But the poet-as-dreamer legend has deep appeal: Pushkin the painstaking worker has seemed less attractive than Pushkin the vivacious genius whose every idea was God-given. Later Russian writers, including Akhmatova and Nabokov, have often worked with pencil and eraser rather than pen, in order that their first, second, and forty-fourth thoughts should not become the property of posthumous disillusion and of meddlesome scholarly enquiry. In the words of the poet Elena Shvarts (b. 1948), ‘There aren’t any variants. I write a poem en bloc. I’m no drudge. Usually I do all the creative work in the bath’.

If the image chosen for the statue testifies to the lasting hold of Romanticism on Russian literary culture, the statue’s construction was one milestone in the institution of a Pushkin cult in many ways comparable with the Shakespeare cult in England. First reflected in