Russian literature. A short introduction

interpretation. But there were also other, less solemn, ‘alternative Pushkins’. Many preferred, in the words of Andrey Sinyavsky, to approach Pushkin ‘not by the grand front entrance lined with busts wearing expressions of unrelenting nobility on their faces, but with the help of the anecdotes and caricatures that have been dreamed up by street culture as a kind of response to, revenge for, Pushkin’s resounding fame’. To continue Sinyavsky’s own metaphor, writers approached Pushkin by the back door or ‘black entrance’ rather than the front or ‘parade’ one.

The smutty tone of the phrase ‘back door’ pointed to the fact that intimacy in all its forms was a governing trope of twentieth-century anti-establishment literature, which also led to an emphasis on Pushkin’s clandestine writings. The Gabrieliad, an irreverent romp depicting the insemination of the Virgin Mary by Satan and the Angel Gabriel as well as God, which had circulated in manuscript during Pushkin’s lifetime and been published in full only after the Revolution, now attained canonical status. Preparation for the first ‘complete’ edition of Pushkin in the 1920s turned up quantities of private correspondence, rough drafts, jottings, and so on, which were equally helpful to the construction of a new, ‘intimate’ Pushkin. Most obviously, they explored subject matter uncongenial to the decorous image of a ‘national poet’. Here, Pushkin could be found boasting of having wiped his ‘sinful hole’ with pages torn from the prolific occasional poet Count Khvostov’s latest book, or comparing the ‘colon and comma’ that ornamented his loins with the mere ‘comma’ of a politically powerful, but sexually disadvantaged, grandee. But the new Pushkin materials offered more than such glimpses of the forbidden. They also contributed to a growing sense of the writer’s manuscript as a text in itself, not just an intermediate stage between inspiration and publication (as Pushkin himself, whatever his concerns about textual integrity, had certainly seen it). After 1928, as censorship became fiercer, and more and more writers practised ‘the genre of silence’, or composed texts for ‘the desk drawer’, it was the manuscript that alone