Russian literature. A short introduction

true by no means only of school essays (of which they continued to be true right up to the collapse of Soviet power), but of writings for a popular auditorium by recognized professional critics and literary historians as well.

Alongside adulation went the suppression of any biographical details that might have proved disruptive, such as Pushkin’s fondness for drinking, fornication, gambling, and gooseberry jam, or Tolstoy’s predilection for at least three of those four. Gorky’s embarrassingly long spell in emigration was also a taboo subject (writers who left Russia after 1917, like other Russian citizens who had gone into exile, were considered by definition to have displayed insufficient ‘love of the motherland’). Sexual misdemeanours were an even more prickly point. The lavishly appointed and copiously annotated ‘Complete Works’ published in the Soviet Union as tribute to the status of first-rank writers rarely quite lived up to their titles. Even if every surviving text a writer had ever penned actually appeared in some form or another, some pieces had certainly been subjected to cuts, not all of which were necessarily as scrupulously signalled as with the asterisks (***** for ‘whore’ or **** for ‘arse’, for instance) that replaced words Pushkin himself had brazenly written in full. Piety was equally important in biographical work. As late as 1963, a particularly well-read and reasonably liberal Soviet writer expressed relief that A. L. Rowse, distasteful as his biographical approach might be, had at least ‘completely cleared away any suspicion that Shakespeare was a homosexual’. The appropriate manner of writing up the lives of the famous was not unfairly satirized in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward (1968) as ‘exhaustive research about exactly which country path the great poet walked along in eighteen so-and-so’ – that is, reportage of events that might be deadly dull, but which were neither politically controversial nor examples of ‘salacious triviality’ (poshlyatina).

After ‘vulgar sociologism’ was denounced in the late 1930s,