Russian literature. A short introduction

even the most famous writers’ museums (for instance, the Brontë house in Haworth) attract a less socially diverse group of visitors than their Russian equivalents. What is more, the existence of commemorative cults has, since the late nineteenth century, been what the Formalist scholar Yury Tynyanov termed a ‘literary fact’, that is, a point in real life that is of significance to literary composition.

Writers varied considerably in their attitudes to the memorialization of their predecessors, and to the possibility that they might one day themselves be memorialized. For some early twentieth-century poets, for example Innokenty Annensky and Anna Akhmatova, evoking a statue was a way of emphasizing continuity between past and present. Both poets imagined Pushkin’s bronzes coming back to life, walking among the avenues of Tsarskoe Selo that he had celebrated in his poetry. Later, Akhmatova was to conclude her poetic commemoration of the Great Terror, Requiem, with a reference to the time when the poet’s own memorial might be placed outside the Leningrad central

5. Graffiti showing Woland from The Master and Margarita in ‘Margarita’s house’, Moscow. An instance where literary characters have become part of popular culture.