Russian literature. A short introduction

If anything, defensiveness about writers’ biographies increased in the late 1990s, fuelled by anxiety that Russian literature had lost its traditional hold over Russian culture. In 1998, an essayist writing in the liberal literary journal Kontinent cited, as one of a list of accusations aimed at demonstrating the ‘unculturedness’ of the Russian media, the fact that Russian television had marked the occasion of ‘Pushkin Day’, an official festival instituted by Boris Yeltsin in that year, only by the showing of ‘some kind of parody ballet performed by half-naked avant-garde dancers’. The accusation against the media was strikingly unfair, given that the build-up to the bicentenary of the writer’s birth in 1999 was actually marked by dozens of reverential programmes. But it showed Pushkin becoming the figurehead of another kind of conservatism: this time that of a beleaguered intelligentsia who felt that culture was even more under threat in the post-Soviet era than it had been during Soviet rule. In Tatiana Tolstaya’s futurist novel The Mynx (2000), which shows the inhabitants of a post-nuclear holocaust Moscow condemned for ever to relive Soviet history as farce, an enthusiastic and unlearned book-lover sets up what he calls ‘a pushkin’, a wooden fetish to some half-forgotten god of the literature that had once existed. But at the same time that it mocks monumentalism, the novel represents knowledge of great writing as a measure of true culture: the perfidy of the post-holocaust dictator and the sterility of the neo-primitive culture he dominates are shown by the fact that he passes off famous poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Blok as his own. Once more, the integrity of writing and the writer stands for the moral probity of society at large.

This chapter has dwelled upon the question of the dissemination of literary works in Russia. It began with the issue of writers’ control over their own output, a control that was sometimes aided by censorship but more often frustrated by it. Censorship could sometimes act as a stimulus to literary production. More devastating was its effect upon the quality of readership, especially in the Soviet period, when education and publishing for the masses created a new class of