Russian literature. A short introduction

Hermann, the dogged, neurotic German protagonist of The Queen of Spades, and the effortlessly charming Tomsky, a prattling gossip from high society, are both authorial alter egos. Though the mode of ‘costumed confession’ is characteristic of Russian literature (it is found, for instance, in Lermontov’s Hero of our Time, or in Akhmatova’s early poetry), the sheer range of masks that Pushkin adopted was unique.

Nor was confessional poetry the only genre that was not anticipated in Pushkin’s work. As Lidiya Ginzburg argued in a classic history of nineteenth-century Russian literature, On Psychological Prose, it was Aleksandr Herzen, in My Past and Thoughts, who pioneered the genre of confessional prose, employing a searingly emotional rhetoric that would probably have embarrassed Pushkin. Conversely, Pushkin’s wonderfully vivid, playful, and self-deprecating letters have few successors in Russian tradition. Later masters of the epistolary form, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, inclined to literary-philosophical abstraction and to lamentation on the unfairness of fate rather than to concrete detail and teasing humour. So far as the theatre was concerned, Pushkin wrote no dramatic comedies, which both before and after his lifetime constituted the glory of the Russian theatre. (Gogol’s The Government Inspector, ensconced in the international repertory as a unique masterpiece, was the successor to eighteenth-century texts such as Fonvizin’s The Minor or Knyazhnin’s The Boaster, and the inspiration for Aleksandr Ostrovsky, the prolific mainstay of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian theatre.) Nor did Pushkin contribute to the extremely important genre of tragicomedy, as exemplified in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or Mayakovsky’s The Bed-Bug. His greatest achievements remained splendidly isolated. To be sure, Evgeny Onegin inspired imitations, but none of these were more than entertaining exercises in light verse. The psychological complexity of Boris Godunov was captured in Musorgsky’s operatic setting of the play, rather than in Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s trilogy of historical dramas about Boris, his predecessors and his successors,