Russian literature. A short introduction

exclusive rights to a text or collection of texts was rewarded by the sharing of profits between himself and the writer. In 1834, Pushkin entered into such an agreement with A. F. Smirdin for a book of whose commercial success both had high hopes, the historical novel The Captain’s Daughter. And in 1836 he started a literary journal, The Contemporary, which offered him, as well as the chance of commercial returns, a forum for his writings and direct control over the manner in which these appeared.

One thing that Pushkin took authorship to mean, then, was the careful regulation by individuals of the manner in which their utterances came before the public. He also saw writing as an occupation which, though not exactly gentlemanly, at any rate helped raise the income necessary to a gentleman’s existence. But writing was also understood by him as cultural leadership. That Russia needed a literature equal in standing to that of France, Germany, or England, and that there existed no native literary tradition worth the name, were defining assumptions for Pushkin and his generation of Russian writers. In their view, the Russian literary landscape resembled the ‘empty waves’, gloomy forests, and boggy lichen-covered shores of the unimproved North that Pushkin evoked in the prologue to The Bronze Horseman (1833). Monotony, rather than chaos, was the precedent and stimulus to creation. ‘We have neither a literature nor [good] books’, Pushkin grandly asserted in 1824. Though he allowed merit to various predecessors, including Derzhavin and Ivan Krylov (best-known for his lively and vigorous fables), it was clear none of these was a ‘natural genius’ (Naturgenie) in the Romantic sense, or for that matter a national genius. In an essay written a year later, Pushkin explicitly denied the right of the brilliant scientist and pioneering poet Mikhailo Lomonosov to be recognized in this capacity, presenting him instead as a mere craftsman: ‘For him poetic composition was a pastime, or, as more often, an exercise undertaken out of a stern sense of duty [ . . . ] In our first poet we would look in vain for flaming bursts of feeling or imagination.’