Russian literature. A short introduction

The theme rose to the height of a trumpet blast at the 150th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth in 1949, which coincided with the onset of the Cold War and the beginning of an anti-Semitic and xenophobic campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. Two lectures (also published as

booklets) by a member of the Academy of Sciences represented the writer as a figure who, while ‘soaking up everything that was best in preceeding culture, both Russian and foreign’, had been filled with ‘national pride’ and had presciently ‘lambasted cosmopolitanism’, as well as ‘aestheticism and formalism’. Naturally, the appreciation that ‘cosmopolitanism’ was shameful was to be a powerful impediment to analysis of such issues as Pushkin’s vexed but intimate relationship with Western Romantic literature. So, too, the belief that Russian literature was of particular and extraordinary value and character impeded analysis of the Russian contribution to European-wide movements such as the cult of sensibility or Modernism. Between 1948 and 1956, there was little or no serious discussion of such topics. The admiration of the Russian radicals for Evgeny Onegin, which Belinsky grandly, if inaccurately, held to have ‘exhausted the whole of Russian life’, was adduced as proof positive of Pushkin’s mature appreciation of