Free Russian Literature by Catriona Kelly Page B

liberalization that began in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death, was, in this area as in so many others, haphazard and incomplete. It affected, in the main, the scholarly interpretation of Pushkin, but even that only partially. ‘Pushkin House’, the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, retained a privileged position with regard to Pushkin publications that has been described by one hostile commentator, not altogether unjustly, as ‘a narrow circle of Pushkin priests making monopolistic decisions about whether a particular article served their own ends’. To be sure, the ture growing diversity that was evident in the publication of literature and rae
    Lit
    of translations began to make itself felt in literary criticism and in scholarship as well. A crucial event was the founding of the Tartu ssian
    Ru
    University series Semiotike (Studies in Sign Systems), under the leadership of the scholar and critic Yury Lotman in 1965. The concentration of semioticians upon the question of meaning within a given culture at a set time, rather than upon the significance of texts for later generations, mounted a covert challenge to the traditional Marxist-Leninist emphasis upon progressiveness. (It was significant that some of Lotman’s best work was devoted to the so-called ‘gentry sentimentalist’ Karamzin.) The immersion in the past that was required by the semiotic approach also meant that material such as writers’
    letters and diaries was once again accorded value in itself, as a genre of literary or sub-literary composition, rather than regarded simply as a repository for information about when a writer was doing what to the drafts of his novels, plays, and poems.
    However, both in the work of Russian scholars, such as Lotman, and in 56
    the work of their Western associates, the material that was considered suitable for investigation was still strictly denominated in some respects. Pushkin’s letters to his literary associates were exhaustively analysed, and their playful and watchful crafting of alternative selves recorded, but the writer’s letters to his wife and other close relations were not discussed in detail because of the sense the material was ‘useful for the biographer’ but not for the literary historian, since it had not been meant for publication. The elite world of Russian society was exhaustively analysed: taking their cue from two lines of Evgeny Onegin , ‘One may be a worthwhile person/And think about having clean nails’, semioticians analysed dozens of areas that had been elided by Marxism-Leninism’s emphasis on intellectual life, from the ‘language of flowers’ to the conventions of the duel. Yet gentility was pervasive: ‘Tidin though memoirs make it clear that child abuse, incest, rape, violence, gs
    as well as less spectacular misdemeanours such as vulgarity and of
    m
    rudeness, were as common in early nineteenth-century Russian society e wi
    as in any other human community, discussion of such topics was not ll go
    allowed to disrupt the view of the ‘Golden Age’ of Pushkin and his out o
    contemporaries as an aesthetic paradise. In other words, this was an ver
    interpretive tradition that, in seeking to trace the conventions of early all
    great
    nineteenth-century Russian life, often replicated the proprieties against Ru
    which writers themselves had battled. Even to liberal Russian scholars s’
    of this kind, Richard Holmes’s life of Coleridge, showing the poet composing his aethereal works in a constant struggle with decidedly earthly afflictions such as constipation, would have seemed trivial and putrid tattle. In some ways, this was a reflection of writers’ own determination to transcend physicality. The poet Nikolay Klyuev, desperately sick, bedridden, and a victim of Stalinist persecution, comforted himself with the thought that ‘saints can be recognized by their endurance, ability to rise above suffering [ . . . ] some people’s souls