Russian literature. A short introduction

the line, ‘I followed Radishchev in hymning freedom’. This cancelled line had long been known to scholars, and is no less ambiguous than everything else in the poem (one possible interpretation, since Radishchev was a famous suicide, is that Pushkin was evoking the ‘freedom’ he had exercised in ending his own existence). The fact that it was cancelled, too, makes interpretations based solely upon it rather dubious. But, in pious evocations of the progressive Pushkin, it acquired the status of a last, rather than a first, word. As one commentator put it in 1962: ‘Only in 1937, upon the centenary of Pushkin’s tragic death, did the genuine meaning of his “testament” become clear.’

Nothing was allowed to disturb the presentation of Pushkin as a ‘forward-thinking’ figure. A popular edition of Pisarev’s essays on literature published in 1940 simply omitted the essay ‘Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry’ in which the quotation about ‘rhyming blether’ cited earlier in this chapter appeared. The piece was made available only in more ambitious editions, such as Pisarev’s Works of 1955–6. Equally, Pushkin’s unmistakable turn to political conservatism after 1830 – his defence of serfdom and growing conviction that autocratic rule was essential to the dissemination of enlightenment – was not an acceptable subject of discussion for Soviet specialists. And in its turn, the fact that Pushkin was now deemed ‘the founding father of magnificent Russian literature’, a kind of literary equivalent to Peter I, contributed to the eclipse of the eighteenth century: founding fathers have by definition no need of ancestors.

Another aspect of the ‘founding father’ cult was that Pushkin increasingly became the subject of overt chauvinism. The theme of ‘Pushkin as ultimate genius’ was already an undertone in the Pushkin jubilee of 1937. It made itself felt in transition policy. A table published in 1945 set out the following tally of languages into which various great writers had been rendered before and after the Revolution:

Writer

Languages into which translated before 1917

After 1917

Pushkin

9

66

Tolstoy

10

54

Chekhov

5

53

Lermontov

5

26

Saltykov-Shchedrin

1

24

Nekrasov

1

21

Romain Rolland

1

13

Goethe

1

6