Russian literature. A short introduction

The title page of Apollo (no. 6, 1913). Journals played an enormously important role in the publication of Russian literature from the late eighteenth century until the late twentieth. Pushkin’s The Contemporary, itself the successor to magazines such as The Drone and The European Herald, was followed by dozens of organs of all political hues. Soviet literary history naturally emphasized the role of radical journals, but conservative ones, such as The Russian Herald (which serialized works by both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) had at least equal distinction. The illustration here shows the frontispiece of one of the most important Modernist journals. At this period, literary magazines rebelled against the drab presentation formerly considered proper for serious publications. Beautifully designed and printed, and copiously illustrated, they, and their successors in the 1920s, are unique in Russian history as total works of art. From the early 1930s, Soviet magazines again reverted to the visual mediocrity current in the nineteenth century (and emphasized by the dreadful quality of paper and typefaces in use).

These observations proceeded from silent questions about Pushkin’s own place in Russian literary culture; they showed him moving to a comprehension that it might be possible to make himself the national poet whose lack was so strongly felt. Taking issue with a view expressed by a contemporary, according to which great poets came out of nowhere and vanished into nothing, their glory being followed by an inevitable decadence, Pushkin argued, rather, that an age of mediocrity might be the necessary preparation for the work of great writers. Had not Herodotus preceded Aeschylus, and Catullus Ovid? Though good manners precluded a direct statement of the appreciation that Derzhavin and Pushkin might stand in the same relation, after 1825