Free Russian Literature by Catriona Kelly

titles. Even if every surviving text a writer e wi
    had ever penned actually appeared in some form or another, some ll go
    pieces had certainly been subjected to cuts, not all of which were out o
    necessarily as scrupulously signalled as with the asterisks (***** for ver
    ‘whore’ or **** for ‘arse’, for instance) that replaced words Pushkin all
    great
    himself had brazenly written in full. Piety was equally important in Ru
    biographical work. As late as 1963, a particularly well-read and s’
    reasonably liberal Soviet writer expressed relief that A. L. Rowse, distasteful as his biographical approach might be, had at least ‘completely cleared away any suspicion that Shakespeare was a homosexual’. The appropriate manner of writing up the lives of the famous was not unfairly satirized in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward (1968) as ‘exhaustive research about exactly which country path the great poet walked along in eighteen so-and-so’ – that is, reportage of events that might be deadly dull, but which were neither politically controversial nor examples of ‘salacious triviality’
    ( poshlyatina ).
    After ‘vulgar sociologism’ was denounced in the late 1930s, 51
    interpretations of Pushkin as ‘the poet of the youth of Russian bourgeois culture’ (as D. S. Mirsky had called him in 1934) were out of the question. But there was also an end to the intensive study of account books, private letters, diaries, memoirs, and minuscule archival data of all kinds that could have facilitated ‘thick description’ of writers in the context of their times. Conversely, the work of the Formalist scholars who had protested against ‘laundry list’ criticism, and against glib categorizations of writers in terms of social class, survived only in diluted form. Studies under titles such as The Mastery of Gogol (or any other writer recognized as ‘great’) acknowledged that at least some aspects of craft, as opposed to ideology, might carry weight. The most sacred literary texts were treated not unlike the speeches of Stalin, who himself was fond of displaying knowledge of the classics, referring, for instance, to supposed ‘enemies of the people’ as ‘Yudushkas’ (after Saltykov-Shchedrin’s creepy hypocrite Yudushka Golovlyov). They were supposed to be known to everyone, but to discuss them in depth, at any ture rate without the special licence of a scholar speaking to scholars in an rae
    Lit
    Academy of Sciences research institute, or to cite the wrong works, would have been decidedly imprudent.
    ssian
    Ru
    The effects of adulation for, and rote-learning of, the classics were not uniformly bad. For a start, learning by heart was not a Soviet invention, any more than literature as a secular religion was. Before the Revolution, schoolchildren had been made to recite authors such as Lomonosov, Pushkin, and Lermontov as part of the secondary-school programme. In the best of circumstances, this gave adult Russians an affectionate familiarity with literature that made it the common currency of cultivation. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian writers (and artists of all kinds) could expect the majority of their readers to recognize literary allusions, sometimes in substantially reworked form.
    (The importance of intertextuality, that is, direct or indirect quotation, as a subject of study among historians of Russian literature is intimately related to the mental world in which writers grew up.) And though a child who pointed out the relevance to Soviet life of Turgenev’s hymn to 52
    the ‘simple and magnificent Russian language’ as the sole domain of freedom in a repressive society (‘If you did not exist, how would I not despair?’) would have been expelled from the classroom if not the school, there was nothing to stop a pupil enjoying the subversive potential of the piece in private.
    Among unsophisticated readers, though, exposure to a ‘core curriculum’ does not seem to have done much more