Russian literature. A short introduction

By a staggering lapse in historical diplomacy, a particularly absurd and tasteless bronze Esenin was set up in 1995 (the centenary of the writer’s birth) not far away from the central Moscow Pushkin statue. So ‘the raising of monuments’ to writers, in the teeth of opposition from writers, went on.

Perhaps ‘staggering’ is the wrong word, given that the poem the constructors of the Pushkin statue in Moscow had the gall to inscribe upon its pedestal was, of all poems, ‘Monument’, which, after all, precisely opposes the living memorial of poetry and the dead weight of stone. It turns out to be the iconoclastic Mayakovsky who wrote most in Pushkin’s own spirit, then, recognizing that the elevation of statues to writers was unlikely to be compatible with an appreciation of the dynamic force in their writing. In a culture where the physical presence of the monument can seem extraordinarily daunting, it has been vital to tear Pushkin free from stone and turn him into an airy space for imaginative fantasy. Thus, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s play The Last Days (1934–5), a representation of the events leading to Pushkin’s fatal duel