Russian literature. A short introduction

Chapter 5

‘Awakening noble feelings with my lyre’

Writers as ‘masters of minds’

A literary sermon is freer and more independent than a treatise; it often looks above real phenomena, far beyond them, sketching out its prophetic words on the distant and empty horizon.

(Pavel Annenkov, 1858)

In the last chapter, we saw how the pomposity of the Pushkin cult provoked an understanding of Pushkin as jester, as homo ludens, a pleasant acquaintance to be ‘strolled’ with, rather than as a disdainful and frowning pedagogue. Pushkin became the herald of meaning as non-meaning, the poet above all of The Little House of Kolomna (1830), which concludes its bizarre and studiedly pointless saga of a transvestite cook with the following words:

Here’s a moral for you: in my view

It’s risky to hire a cook for free;

For a person born a man to dress up

In skirts, is curious and has no point;

After all, sooner or later he will be forced

To give himself a shave, which doesn’t quite agree

With a lady’s nature . . . But that’s the very most

That you’ll squeeze out of this slight tale.