Russian literature. A short introduction

flat in Leningrad from which he is not evicted in short order so that yet another ‘museum apartment’ can be set up.

Commemoration of other writers, while never as extensively developed as that of Pushkin, was also encouraged by the Soviet state. A museum in Chekhov’s Moscow house was opened in 1954; Leningrad acquired a Nekrasov museum in 1946 and a Dostoevsky museum in 1971 (the delay in establishing the last reflected the opprobrium in which the writer was held by the Soviet authorities from the late 1920s until the mid-1950s). A hierarchy of commemoration was established: plaques on the outside of former dwellings for all noteworthy writers, memorial flats for the top tier and second tier of writers, but statues for the top tier alone. In Moscow, for example, there were statues of Dostoevsky (1918), Gogol (1952, replacing an earlier statue), Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1929), Gorky (1951), and Tolstoy (1956). Soviet writers similarly honoured included Mayakovsky (1958), A. N. Tolstoy (the ‘Soviet count’, whose statue went up in 1957), and Aleksandr Fadeev (long-time General Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who committed suicide after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956; his monument was put in place in 1972). ‘Museum flats’ included those of, besides the writers already mentioned, the Soviet novelist Nikolay Ostrovsky, author of the factory novel How the Steel was Tempered (1935). The memorial plaques are too numerous to list.

Another and more macabre kind of honorific gesture – one emphasizing the importance of death cult for the Soviet state – was the exhumation of famous writers from their original resting places. Levered up from the graves of their families, they were reburied in pantheon-cemeteries for the famous, notably the ‘Literary Walks’ in Leningrad. (From this indignity, Pushkin, intriguingly, was spared, perhaps because of the resonant disgust for urban cemeteries that is expressed in some of his late poems. He remained in the Svyatogorsky Monastery near the family estate of Mikhailovskoe in northwestern Russia, while his wife Natalya was allowed to continue lying next to her second husband in