Russian literature. A short introduction

But frivolity of this kind is not the key to Pushkin’s entire output. Equally characteristic of him was the didactic view of literature expressed in ‘Monument’ – that a writer was responsible for ‘awakening the noble feelings’ of an entire nation. Even the ending of The Little House at Kolomna had a lesson to teach – that literature did not have to be taken seriously. It sprang from Pushkin’s frustration with Russian readers’ obsession with morals and messages, as powerfully expressed in ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828), a rebuke to those who, on hearing a ‘song’, were capable only of responding with stupid questions:

What is he strumming about? what is he teaching us?

Why is he exciting and tormenting hearts

Like a capricious wizard?

His song is free as the wind,

But also fruitless as the wind:

What is the use of it to us?

And in The Queen of Spades (1834), any moralizing ambitions that might have been expected in a tale of compulsive gambling are undercut because story-telling and writing are shown within the story itself as frivolous, unreliable, deceptive, no more than ‘chatter to spin out a mazurka’.

But moral commentary is not avoided altogether. When Hermann appears in Liza’s room to undeceive her about the reasons behind his long-distance courtship (he has in fact been writing her passionate letters so he can inveigle himself inside the house to confront her guardian, the Countess), the narrator observes: ‘She wept bitterly, seized by belated and painful repentance.’ Had Pushkin opted for moral neutrality, he could have used a different phrase (for example, ‘seized by sudden, painful understanding’). But the narrator is made to espouse Christian moral vocabulary (‘repentance’), and the adjective ‘belated’ passes explicit judgement (Liza’s feelings are appropriate, but she has