Russian literature. A short introduction

includes the vulgarism byust (‘bust’, here rendered ‘hips’) in line 14 (Pushkin would have used the high-style persi, or ‘breasts’, in the context of a love poem), the reference to ‘the shakes’ in line 6, the throwaway mention of Parmenides (the fifth-century Greek rationalist philosopher who held that only what exists can be known) in line 11, and, especially, the ironic undermining of the allusion to God in line 9.

Such a direct, defiant repudiation of Pushkin qua Pushkin, based upon a thorough knowledge of his works, remained a rarity even in twentieth-century Russian literature. Far more common was the attempt to find an ‘alternative’ Pushkin to the ‘father of Russian literature’ or ‘Soviet patriot before his time’ by looking once more to Pushkin’s own works. Just as censorship fostered ‘Aesopian language’, so did the narrow, official image of ‘the greatest Russian writer’ foster an ‘Aesopian Pushkin’. From the mid-1930s, writing about Pushkin, a self-evidently ‘safe’ topic (unlike the late Dostoevsky, with his notorious loathing for the Russian revolutionary movement and devotion to the Orthodox Church), could allow writers to voice issues that would have been utterly taboo if touched upon directly.

A case in point was Anna Akhmatova’s essays on Pushkin. These emphasized Pushkin’s talent for ‘encryptation’ – at a point when Akhmatova herself was evolving a protective obscurity in response to institutionalized oppression. Equally, Akhmatova’s emphasis on Pushkin’s struggle for dignity in a world reduced to moral squalor by authoritarianism articulated her view of the position of the Soviet writer. Exactly so did Shostakovich use citations from his own setting of Pushkin’s poem ‘The barbarian painter with his somnolent brush’ in order to weave the theme of posthumous artistic justification into his Fifth Symphony, his first major public work after the vicious vilification that had greeted Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936.

To be sure, the emphasis here on the writer’s sacred role made these unofficial views of Pushkin close to official views, in terms of tone if not