Russian literature. A short introduction

held the promise of eluding social control. Books might be purged from libraries, but in the words of Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Master and Margarita was one of the most famous manuscripts to survive the Stalin years (though Bulgakov himself did not), ‘manuscripts don’t burn’. What was more, with their doodled landscapes, portraits of salon beauties, ducks, devils, and chargers, Pushkin’s manuscripts had a liveliness, a physical presence (‘facture’) that had characterized the avant-garde publications of the 1910s and 1920s, but which began to disappear as control over print culture tightened in the 1930s. (Ill. 9.)

As Pushkin’s negligently scrawled self-portraits presented a welcome alternative view of the poet to the congealed bronze of statues, so, for 1960s Modernists, it was precisely the poet’s immateriality, his ‘emptiness’, his ‘chatter’, his amoralistic and slippery variability of style, his idiosyncratic undefinability, that appealed. There was a revival of interest in Pushkin as parodist, an identity that had also appealed to writers in the 1920s, when even the sacred notion of the poet as prophet had been subject to ironic appropriation (the writer Vikenty Veresaev had wondered in 1929 whether ‘Monument’, like the character of Evgeny Onegin, might not be a sardonic travesty of Romantic stereotype: ‘Is this poem maybe not just a parody?’). Soviet Socialist Realists had seen themselves, in all seriousness, as heirs to Tolstoy and Turgenev, and pontificated solemnly to readers about their approach to the ‘writer’s craft’. Underground or semi-official writers of the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, preferred to approach classic works of Russian literature via the ‘back door’ of irony. Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki was a reductio ad absurdum of the official practice of using citations from the classics as a way of displaying a text’s cultural credentials – texts from the Bible to the labels of tins of boot-polish appeared in a disorderly profusion, with no sense of relative importance. And in Dmitry Prigov’s mock-obituary in the style of Pravda, Pushkin’s essential frivolity was used to undermine the pomposity of official biography and of recognized writers: