Russian literature. A short introduction

the graveyard attached to the Alexander Nevsky monastery in Leningrad-St Petersburg.)

There is an obvious link between the treatment of writers’ remains and the ‘translation’, or removal to a new site, of relics that was a requisite step in the creation of the cult of an Orthodox saint. Reverence for writers was a form of secular religion, and the materialism that was a central dogma of Marxism-Leninism expressed itself in a literal-minded determination that memorials should actually enshrine the dust of the departed. The connection between religion and literature was also brought home by the arrangements for the 1937 jubilee, described in advance by the newspaper Izvestiya: ‘A gigantic portrait of Pushkin reading his poems will be installed at the top of the belfry of the former Strastnoy Convent. The façade of the convent will be covered with a magnificent panel depicting a Soviet youth demonstration, with the marchers shown carrying books by Pushkin and portraits of the leaders.’ The Convent of Christ’s Passion (the meaning of the name ‘Strastnoy’), was not chosen as a focus for the celebrations simply because of its convenient location next to the Pushkin statue, but because its dedication made it a suitable place for commemorating the life of Russia’s most important poetic martyr.

The blatancy with which literature was presented as an alternative religion (and the association of this, during the Stalin era, with the ruler’s own ‘cult of personality’) was perhaps the only peculiarly ‘Soviet’ aspect of post-revolutionary writers’ cults. In many other ways, these simply perpetuated the past. Literary museums as well as statues had begun to multiply before the Revolution: an example was Tolstoy’s Moscow house, opened to the public as early as 1911, a year after the writer’s death. And ‘museum apartments’ remained popular places for self-educating visits in the post-Soviet period too. Indeed, the years after 1991 saw the founding of numerous museums as the result of private initiative (for instance, in the apartment once inhabited by Anna Akhmatova in the Sheremetiev Palace, St Petersburg, or the house