Russian literature. A short introduction

features’ was an illustration of how, ‘in the words of Weile, advertising “knows no limits, no respect, honours neither friends nor relations and exploits anything and everything to its own ends” ’.

The antipathy of Russian writers to commercialism was a constant of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture; it was to reverberate, for instance, in Nabokov’s fulminations against jazz and magazine advertising, and, most creatively, in Humbert Humbert’s repelled fascination with American popular culture as represented in Lolita. Paradoxically, it was sometimes the most avant-garde and politically radical writers who reacted least allergically to commercial pressures. When Mayakovsky toured Russia giving poetry readings in the mid-1920s, he was quite prepared to harangue the managers of bookshops about their lackadaisical attitude to selling his publications. Cultural centralization in the Soviet Union after 1932 raised the association between commercial culture and low standards to the level of an official dogma. It became a matter of pride that cultural goods (books, paintings, concerts, ballets) were above marketplace values and were available to all at low prices.

To be sure, the means of cultural production, unlike those of industrial production, were never fully nationalized. Publishers were state-owned, but typewriters, paper, pens, and notebooks still had to be purchased; journals accepted contributions from non-unionized writers; royalties continued to be paid, and copyright still existed, though in a restricted form. But the susceptibility of culture to market forces was severely reduced. Authors’ royalties depended on prestige (for which read congeniality to the Party authorities) rather than numbers of copies sold; sinecures were paid to established figures who were members of the Writer’s Union without regard to how well or even how much they wrote. And commemoration of important authors was always of a ‘cultured’ kind (to use the Soviet term) – that is, contrived in a manner that could be held to contribute to intellectual self-improvement on the part of the masses. A typical item was a set of post cards intended for