Russian literature. A short introduction

with Danthès, Pushkin himself remains perpetually just off-stage, becoming a creation in the minds of those who talk about him outside the door of his study and in the salons of St Petersburg, and also of the second audience watching beyond, in the auditorium.

Yet, as Bulgakov’s play also recognized, the absence of a great writer could be as powerful a cultural force as his presence. The avant-garde’s desire to ‘throw Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky off the steam-ship of modernity’, as expressed in the notorious Cubo-Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912), assaulted the status of great writers, but perpetuated this by seeing them as the central symbols of their age. And the equivocality of most assaults upon Pushkin and other famous writers of the past could only be increased by the occasional attacks in another key, such as those of the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev in the 1860s. Pisarev’s riposte to a line from Pushkin’s ‘The Poet and the Mob’, ‘They sell the Apollo Belvedere by weight’ had been to question the utility of art works in the first place. Addressing an anonymous and imaginary follower of Pushkin, he expostulated: ‘As for you, elevated cretin, son of the heavens, what do you heat your food in, a cooking-pot or the Apollo Belvedere?’ Here the statue, like Pushkin himself, became a metaphor for the inadequacy, in utilitarian terms, of artistic activity in general, an association that could only strengthen, among those in any sense committed to art, the widespread identification between cult and writer, monument and literary function.

The subject of this chapter has been the monuments of writers in the most literal sense – statues, museums, plaques on walls – and with the ways in which these are given meaning by governments, by spectators, and by other writers. In the next chapter, we will move on to look at writers’ monuments in another sense: their actual writings, and the ways in which these are presented to posterity, both by writers and by members of the literary establishment, publishers, critics, and censors, which last had such a vital, though obscured, role in the development of Russian literature.