Russian literature. A short introduction

4. A Pushkin-shaped bottle of vodka, produced to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth in 1899. The resemblance is, to put it politely, approximate, but using Pushkin’s famous features to brand consumable items enraged earnest admirers of the poet, even if (in the case of the item shown here) the poet himself would have consumed them with enthusiasm.

school-leavers, and showing the poet alongside a globe, an array of Pioneer and Komsomol badges, and the complete works of Lenin. It was possible to buy a Pushkin bust, a miniature of the Pushkin monument, or a Tales of Pushkin brand chocolate, but T-shirts with Pushkin on them, or comic-book versions of Evgeny Onegin, were emphatically not on sale. On the other hand, cheap editions of Pushkin’s works were produced for private reading and for class-teaching, and statues were set up all over the Soviet Union – anywhere that Pushkin had visited for an afternoon had, at the very least, a portrait bust. Museums proliferated everywhere: the practice was gently satirized in Mikhail Zoshchenko’s story ‘Pushkin’ (1927), whose narrator is unable to find a