Russian literature. A short introduction

the ‘simple and magnificent Russian language’ as the sole domain of freedom in a repressive society (‘If you did not exist, how would I not despair?’) would have been expelled from the classroom if not the school, there was nothing to stop a pupil enjoying the subversive potential of the piece in private.

Among unsophisticated readers, though, exposure to a ‘core curriculum’ does not seem to have done much more than perpetuate a sort of literary folklore. It stimulated the circulation of grotesque anecdotes about writers’ lives, parodied in the 1930s by the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms, whose ‘Anegdotes [sic] about Pushkin’ contained such pearls of irrelevance as ‘Pushkin used to love throwing stones . . .’. Documents such as diaries or letters indicate that the citation of ‘winged words’, or set phrases, was much more common than the informed reading of classic texts. A young woman who misquoted Lermontov in a letter to her sweetheart (‘It is boring and sad, and I have no one’s hand to stroke’, rather than ‘who my hand might take’) perhaps did not even know the poem that she was abusing. The tag may have reached her via an intermediate source, such as a popular song.

But the worst side-effect of a system that encouraged school graduates to see the narrow sampling of classic texts to which they had been exposed as the pinnacle of literary endeavour, and to judge every form of writing by that yardstick, was that it promoted aggressive aesthetic conservatism. Rather than knowing nothing about art but knowing what they liked, Soviet philistines thought they knew a good deal about art, and had every right to impose what they liked on others. Large numbers of pupils left school familiar only with what Marina Tsvetaeva called ‘Pushkin the perpetual jubiland, whose sole achievement in life was to die’, and whose only works were Evgeny Onegin, The Captain’s Daughter, and two or three lyric poems. It is therefore not surprising that the more adventurous texts that did get through censorship often provoked full postbags from a kind of reader one might call ‘Disgusted of Tambov’ – a provincial school-teacher, engineer, or other member of