Russian literature. A short introduction

celebrations for the seventieth anniversary of the poet’s birth in 1879–80, the cult gathered momentum with the centenary festivities of 1899, and with the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Pushkin’s school, the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, in 1911, resulting in the production not only of statues and plaques, but of poems, verbal tributes, and paintings. Among the last, remarkable is a vast effort by Ilya Repin, the premier historical painter of the day. It commemorates a famous occasion in 1815, when Pushkin’s declamation of his own poem ‘Remembrances at Tsarskoe Selo’ is said to have induced the elderly Neo-Classical poet Gavrila Derzhavin to hail him as successor. Repin represents the scene as nothing less than a secular icon. Pushkin’s pose, and the contrast between his young brilliance and the aged awe of Derzhavin, are based on pictures of the presentation of Christ in the temple, which show the young Jesus astonishing sages with his command of theological debate. But the masks of the listeners – with the exception of Derzhavin, who reaches out to Pushkin – are caricatures of greed, selfishness, and stupidity and are taken from Flemish and Dutch renderings of the mocking of Christ. They hint at the presence of another powerful myth, that of the destruction of artistic talent through the hostile incomprehension of the politically and socially powerful.

Besides its significance in work by sculptors, writers, and painters, the Pushkin cult had, by the 1880s, a commercial undergrowth such as may be seen now at Stratford-upon-Avon or Haworth. To be sure, there were no Prisoner of the Caucasus table-mats, Evgeny and Tatiana mugs, or Bakhchisarai Fountain biscuits, but there were Pushkin pens, Pushkin chocolate-wrappers, Pushkin cigar-boxes, and even Pushkin vodka bottles. Many professional writers and critics, who preferred to see Russian literature as divorced from the marketplace, were shocked and disgusted by the marketing of Pushkin. It seemed one among many symptoms of a culture that was under threat from commercial values. For Sigismund Librovich, who published an album of Pushkin portraits in the wake of the 1889 anniversary, the ‘profanation of the poet’s beloved