Russian literature. A short introduction

To be sure, the twentieth century saw something of a rehabilitation of pre-Pushkinian poetry, with such important figures as Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and later Joseph Brodsky, inspired by the stubborn obscurity and exhilarating harshness of Derzhavin. But the Modernist emphasis on the pursuit of originality was not congenial to an understanding of the deliberate conventionalism of eighteenth-century writing. Typical was Vladimir Nabokov, whose commentary on Evgeny Onegin lambasted the insipidity of Karamzin and the unreadable dreariness of the epic poet Mikhail Kheraskov, and unwillingly allowed to Derzhavin only ‘touches of rough genius’. In poetry, the voice employed by Pushkin in his writings about the poet, allying ironical scepticism to a defiant assertion of the value of inspiration, became the definitive means of conveying artistic experience. The 1910s and 1920s saw a revival of ‘Pushkinian’ devices in prose too – the use of frame narratives, epigraphs, texts-within-texts, and other strategies marking the distance of a tale from reality, its contingency upon style rather than observation.

Despite the gesticulation on the part of writers towards Pushkin in terms of theme, and the borrowing of vocabulary and of forms with a ‘Pushkinian’ resonance, the work of later generations was by no means constrained by what Pushkin had done. Those genres in which Pushkin did not work were often to prove more productive than those in which he did. Though Andrey Sinyavsky described Pushkin’s poetry as ‘filled with a mass of personal material’, the amount of strictly ‘personal material’ in Pushkin’s lyric poetry, as opposed to his letters or notebook jottings, is actually rather limited, and this material always appears in transmuted form. Apparently confessional poems, written in the first person, are in fact ‘costumed confessions’ – that is, spoken in the words of some invented character. And the ‘costumes’ that Pushkin chose to put on, both in his lyric verse and in his drama and fiction, were bewilderingly varied. Pushkin’s essays and jottings make it clear that he was temperamentally akin both to Mozart and Salieri, the apparently antithetical heroes of one of his Little Tragedies;