Russian literature. A short introduction

Glare bold and fixed, Each limb fearfully numb, And black crayfish fastened To its swollen body.

As each generation of theatre directors and audiences in the Anglophone world has constructed its particular Shakespeare (take the fashion for the so-called ‘problem plays’ of tortured sexual relationships, such as Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, in the 1960s and 1970s), so successive generations of Russian readers and critics have discovered ‘their’ Pushkin. For example, The Bronze Horseman, an evocation of St Petersburg as at once a supreme art work and a symbol of crushing authoritarianism, resonated in Petersburg Modernist texts such as Andrey Bely’s novel Petersburg, or in a poem by Innokenty Annensky in which the ‘yellow fog’ of Dostoevsky’s novels swirls around the statue hero of Pushkin’s poem.

Given the circumstances of early twentieth-century Russian history, it is hardly surprising that Pushkin was considered important for what the religious philosopher Simeon Frank called his ‘apprehension of life’s inherent tragedy’. But he was valued also as a writer who had emphasized the importance of the writer. It was the Romantic side of Pushkin to which many writers gave weight. The critic Mikhail Gershenzon felt that ‘Monument’ was to be interpreted as drawing a contrast between ‘genuine’ fame, ‘among people who understand poetry’, and ‘vulgar fame, among the mob, a muted kind of fame – mere celebrity’. This interpretation was entirely in the spirit of the times. Pushkin’s poem ‘The Prophet’, in which the poet was seen as a Promethean outcast gifted with a uniquely full understanding of his culture, spawned dozens of imitations between 1890 and 1940 as Modernist writers reasserted the primacy of art and with it the Romantic understanding of the artist as hero, sacred madman, and prophet.