O comrade, believe me, the future shall unfold
An ever-enchanting and happy dawn,
Russia shall be awake, and behold:
Our names shall be written upon –
The splinters of Autocracy in gold.13
On 10 February 1937, around 25,000 people gathered in the square. They had marched there in columns and had assembled in a semi-circle around the monument, which was festooned with marguerites. The first to speak was Comrade Andrei Bubnov, the chairman of the All-Union Pushkin Committee. He was followed by Comrade Mikhail Kul'kov, secretary of the Party Committee of the City of Moscow, and then by Nikolai Filatov, chairman of the Moscow Region Party Committee. They were followed by the writer Vsevolod Ivanov, who spoke about Pushkin’s struggle with Tsar Nicholas’s reaction. He was followed by Butuzov, a Stakhanovite worker from the Frunze Works, and a Moscow schoolboy: ‘We study you, Pushkin, because our tribe must master the entire treasury of human culture. We study you because our tribe shall and will build a communist society under the leadership of the Party of Lenin and Stalin. Honour to you, great Pushkin!’ The strains of the Internationale wafted over the square, and above the heads of the throng the portraits of Pushkin, Lenin, Stalin and Yezhov could be seen.14
The participants were well aware that they were not only celebrating a centenary but were also witnesses to a major revaluation of a representative of Russian culture who had always been an outstanding figure. In his speech in front of the monument, Nikolai Filatov proudly reminded his audience that it had been the Communist Party that had arranged for Pushkin’s original text to be restored in the fourth stanza on the plinth of the statue, thus displacing the bowdlerized version that had been inserted by the tsarist poet and censor Vasilii Zhukovskii:
And long will I my people’s heart engage,
For kind feelings I aroused with my lyre,
For of Liberty I sang in my cruel age
And mercy for the fall’n did inspire.15
One of the spectators of the theatrical performance in the square was the writer Lev Nikulin, old enough to remember that the statue had been festooned with red flags in the October days of 1917. He recalled that, before the Revolution, the statue had been used to advertise the famous Moscow confectionery factory Abrikozov, whereas now it was being addressed by Butuzov, the Stakhanovite worker from the Frunze Works.16
The Academy of Sciences had invited a huge contingent of important experts and commentators. They shed light on Pushkin’s works from every conceivable angle. Professor Nina Neshkina spoke about ‘Pushkin and the Decembrists’, Professor Nikolai Brodskii about ‘Pushkin and the European revolutionary movement’, while others spoke on ‘The fate of Pushkin’s manuscripts’, ‘Pushkin as founder of modern Russian literature’, ‘Pushkin and world literature’, and ‘Pushkin as creator of the Russian literary language’. In the closing session on 15 February, there were papers on ‘Pushkin in the history of the Russian social movement’, ‘Pushkin’s world view’, and ‘Pushkin in Georgian literature’.17
But the general tenor of the centennial activities was not formulated by Pushkin experts. On the contrary, the jubilee was explicitly designed to counter the real or alleged dominance of experts, to undermine the discursive monopoly of the Pushkinists and to call for Pushkin’s work to be dusted down and given back to the people.18 In the course of preparations, Boris Babochkin, who was no Pushkin specialist but a popular film actor, had shown the direction to be taken. Pushkin, he said, was beloved by the nations and ordinary people of the USSR ‘because his writings are full of the common touch and because he is clear, simple and straightforward, and accessible to the broadest masses’.19 Contemporary Soviet writers could not match his achievement. The jubilee should be used to liberate Pushkin from the Pushkinists. ‘Volume 7 of the Collected Works of A. S. Pushkin appeared recently in the edition published by the Academy of Sciences. I found the book depressing. The long-winded commentaries of the experts literally kill Pushkin stone-dead.’ It is as if Babochkin could see wreckers at work.
On the other hand, it is cause for astonishment that the Academy of Sciences waited until the eve of the jubilee to publish volume 7 of his writings. When can we expect the remainder? … And it seems to me that the extremely slow pace of publication and the fact that, criminally, they are only starting to appear now means that there are actual, concrete human beings sitting in the publishing houses who are responsible for this state of affairs.20
And a caricature in the satirical magazine Krokodil attacked the clichés of ‘vulgar’ Pushkin scholarship, according to which Pushkin appears as a ‘liberal noble’, a ‘petty landowner’, ‘a déclassé feudal lord’ and a ‘bourgeois nobleman’.21
The general line for the reinterpretation of Pushkin was articulated in a leading article in Pravda, ‘The fame of the Russian people’, on the day of the jubilee itself.
The tone of this appreciation of Pushkin is indicated by the first sentence: ‘A hundred years have passed since the greatest of all Russian poets was killed by the hand of a foreign, aristocratic scoundrel and tsarist hireling.’ But Pushkin, the article continued, belongs entirely to us and to our times; he is still alive and will live on in future generations. Pushkin, the glory and pride of the great Russian people, will never die. His influence on the development of our country’s culture is boundless. His immortal creations are the foundation of our culture. Thanks to him hundreds of millions of people have been given a voice for the first time. ‘He elevated our language, which is by nature rich and flexible, to unheard of heights, making it the most expressive language in the world.’
Pushkin has never been as popular and beloved as he is now. This is due first of all to the simple fact that never before have so many people been able to read and write. But that is not the only reason. Now, for the first time, readers have become acquainted with the real Pushkin, without the egotistic interference of countless distorters, without the reactionary censor, and without the petty, mediocre commentators, who have tried to tidy up this unruly Pushkin with their bourgeois brushes and combs. Pushkin now stands revealed to the people in his true form as a poet and a citizen … Pushkin was always thinking about the people and created his works in their name. In many of the poet’s works, it is possible to see his appeal to future generations. Pushkin is entirely ours, entirely Soviet, insofar as it is Soviet power that has inherited all of the best in our people, and that is, itself, the realization of the people’s best hopes … Pushkin’s creativity has, in the final analysis, merged with the October Socialist Revolution as a river empties into the ocean.
In his day, the article continued, Pushkin still pinned his hopes on the appearance of an ‘enlightened monarch’. But he soon became convinced that ‘only a single, terrifying explosion can eliminate the entrenched slavery in Russia.’ He was sympathetic to the Decembrists’ rebellion, but only now has it been possible to make a reality of his dream to abolish classes in our country. ‘This fact has given rise to a great deal of anxiety, cursing and slander in our enemies’ camp! The despicable crimes of the Trotskyist bandits are, of course, the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie’s direct response to our liquidation of the exploiters in this country. But across the span of a century, Pushkin offers us a friendly hand in a sign of solidarity.’ Pushkin belonged to the gentry, but, ‘unlike the foolish vulgarizers’, we should not infer from this that he cannot be a true poet of the people. ‘And his dreams have been realized! No longer are there ethnic groups in our vast country that do not have a written language. And, with literacy, this multitude of peoples has come to know Pushkin’s glorious poetry. Pushkin is equally dear to the hearts of the Russian and the Ukrainian, the Georgian and the Kalmyk; he is dear to the hearts of all the ethnicities of the Soviet Union.’ Moreover, his fame has spread beyond our frontiers. All the peoples of the world find ‘an inexhaustible source of profound thought and noble feelings’ in the treasure house of his poetry. Against the darkening horizon of a looming war and
the threat to the cultural values of humanity by fascist barbarians who are oppressing reason, science and culture, Pushkin’s works, so full of optimism and humanity, serve as an indictment of this scum who would strangle liberty.
The Russian people have given the world the genius of Pushkin. Under the leadership of the great party of Lenin and Stalin, the Russian people brought about the Socialist Revolution and will follow it through to its conclusion. The Russian people have a right to take pride in their role in history as well as their writers and poets. Pushkin is the glory of our people and with their actions the people multiply this glory.22
A feast in the time of plague: coded discourses
Pushkin as freedom fighter and sympathizer with the Decembrists, Pushkin banished and exiled, Pushkin the secret rebel, Pushkin the victim of a court intrigue and a foreign agent – all that fits in well with the official version. But texts also lead a life of their own. And, in this instance, a certain ambiguity, a certain ambivalence can be discerned in the entire discourse about the jubilee – the Writers’ Union had devoted its annual conference to the subject of Pushkin – an ambivalence that could not remain hidden from the attentive contemporary. The reinterpretation of Pushkin and his integration into the Soviet context was of interest not just to the editors of Pravda but also to writers with very different backgounds – writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Daniil Kharms and the émigrés who had returned from exile, such as the Marxist literary scholar Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky and the patriotic Nikolai Ustrialov.
The differences of approach emerged most clearly in the controversy with rival and parallel Pushkin interpretations in the centres where Russian exiles congregated. The Pushkin discourse of the year 1937 was indeed no respecter of frontiers. The Russian diaspora revolved around Pushkin too, around its Pushkin. There were celebrations in Belgrade, Prague and Paris, where scholars appeared on the scene who thought of themselves as the true, competent guardians of Russian culture and its Holy of Holies.23 In contrast to the Soviet version of a Pushkin as a revolutionary democrat, Semyon Frank, for example, proposed a Pushkin who was a moderate, conservative-leaning constitutionalist. According to Frank, Pushkin issued no prescriptions relevant to current politics; he was no party politician who could provide recipes for action, but of course one might ‘boldly declare that he was the greatest Russian political thinker of the nineteenth century’.24 Frank too posed the question of why Pushkin did not join his rebellious friends on Senate Square and came to the conclusion that he did not identify with his friends’ political passions. He cites a letter from Pushkin to Viazemskii: ‘Uprising and revolution have never been to my taste.’ Later, Pushkin was said to have regarded Nicholas I even as a kind of successor to the work of Peter the Great. ‘The general foundation of Pushkin’s political world view was a national and patriotic attitude that assumed the form of a political consciousness.’25 He insisted on personal independence and on the freedom of intellectual and cultural activity. Pushkin, Frank believed, was a convinced monarchist who was ready to criticize the Russian monarchy because of its revolutionary attitude. It was Robespierre and Napoleon rolled into one, by which he understood the ‘revolution from above’ of Peter the Great – and doubtless also that of Lenin and even Stalin. But Pushkin erred, since the Russian monarchy did not ally itself with the common people against the aristocracy. Instead the monarchy, and with it the entire educated Russian class, had been swept away by the masses and so perished.26
The dramatist Mikhail Bulgakov had been working on a play about Pushkin since 1934. When the Pushkin festivities approached, his wife noted on 7 February 1937, in a resigned tone: ‘Now the days of the Pushkin jubilee which I once yearned for are under way. But it’s all up with [our] “Pushkin” and we are sitting in front of the shattered pieces.’27 This situation did not change over the coming years. Bulgakov’s Pushkin play, The Last Days, is a reconstruction of the events culminating in Pushkin’s death in the duel with d’Anthès, in which an informer plays the lead role while Pushkin is simply present as the third, always absent, character. Bulgakov’s Pushkin play is essentially a drama about a writer in a system of unfreedom, intrigue, a presentation of the practices of the secret police and assuredly also a protest against the official Pushkin industry of 1937.28
In the same vein, Andrei Platonov also intervened in the struggle for a contemporary appropriation of Pushkin. His first text bears the title ‘Pushkin – our Comrade’, his second provides an appreciation of Gorky as the Pushkin of our time.29 Platonov shares the reverence for Pushkin but turns it on its head. He transforms an affirmative reading into a critical one. Platonov admires Pushkin for having lived his entire life on the edge of imprisonment, banishment and ‘en route to catastrophe’. What he succeeded in doing was to react to the ‘cruel beast’ of autocracy not with anger and resignation but with mockery and laughter. Platonov too pursues the question of Pushkin’s failure to take part in the rebellion in Senate Square. Did his sense of history tell him that the time was not yet ripe? Pushkin had hoped for a ‘second Peter’, but neither the Decembrists nor Pugachev represented a continuation of that line – someone quite different emerged. ‘Would not the so often melancholy Pushkin have been pleased if he had known that the meaning of his writings – a universal, wise and manly humanity – coincides with the goal of socialism, and has become reality in his homeland, in Pushkin’s own home?’ He who had dreamed of the return of Peter the Great, ‘the miraculous architect’, what would he say now that all Peter’s building projects are finished within a month? ‘If Peter were living now, his works would be the source of universal socialist enthusiasm. Long live Pushkin – our contemporary.’30 A new Pushkin was necessary; ‘Communism, let us say it openly, is unimaginable without “Pushkin”, who has been killed once, and without his heirs who have not yet been born. Great poetry is an essential component of communism.’ His baton must be carried on. But all of them taken together – Lermontov, Gogol, Goncharov, Chernyshevskii, Shchedrin, Dostoievskii, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov – could not have replaced Pushkin. How would Pushkin have behaved if he had been born fifty years later? He has had no successor of equal stature, but the flame that burned within him has been passed on to others – ‘to Lenin, who became the prophet in action, but Pushkin’s light has not yet been extinguished in literature either. Embodied in the figure of Gorky, great literature has been saved from succumbing to the lethal poison of imperialism.’31 Pushkin and Gorky may have had little in common at the formal level, but they possessed the same way of thinking and the same passion. ‘He, Gorky, did everything in his power to become a new Pushkin, a Pushkin of socialism, a Pushkin for the whole world, for the universe, who instinctively and perfectly understood what his task consisted in … In the midst of life and in our midst the “mysterious bard” may be hidden who will fall short of the expectations of neither Pushkin nor Gorky.’32
The discourse around Pushkin evidently did not revolve around literature and interpretation. It was the depersonalized, cryptic talk of writers about themselves, an encoded discourse concerned with all the issues that had traditionally exercised the Russian intelligentsia: the role of the poet, the writer, the intellectual, their relation to the people and to power, and the question of social responsibility. Perhaps the poem written in the Lubianka by the imprisoned Bukharin on 15 July 1937 may be seen as a late echo of the agitated debate about the dead Pushkin.33
But it is above all Pushkin’s texts that begin to speak for themselves in February 1937. The uncovered and restored passage in the inscription on the plinth of the statue – ‘For of Liberty I sang in my cruel age / And mercy for the fall’n did inspire’ – is eloquence itself in the light of the openly stigmatized victims who had been condemned to death. But the same thing may be said about other passages in Pushkin’s writings, for example, his poem ‘A Feast in the City of the Plague’, a very independent translation and adaptation of ‘The City of the Plague’ (1816) by the
Scottish poet John Wilson. The title of Pushkin’s poem had long since become a set phrase and can almost be understood as a precise description of the Pushkin jubilee itself in the year of terror. Its subject matter, which dates from 1830, is straightforward: a group of people gather for a feast, in remembrance of one of their number who is no longer alive. They recall a time destroyed by the plague and nevertheless react defiantly to the mortal threat of a new epidemic, by joining in an encomium to the plague. It begins with an evocation of happier times:
There was a time, our land
flourished in peace.
Every Sunday
God’s church was filled with people.
Our school was loud
with children’s ringing voices,
and in the bright field
flashed the sickle and the rapid scythe.
The next stanzas depict the incursion of a great calamity:
Now the church is empty,
the school door is locked fast,
the ripe field lies neglected,
the shady grove deserted,
and all the village seems
a burnt-out homestead.
All’s quiet, only the graveyard
isn’t empty, isn’t silent.
A desolate landscape of death becomes visible:
Minute by minute they bring
the dead, and with moans the living
fearfully pray to God
for peace unto their souls!
Minute by minute they need
more places there; the graves
Moscow, 1937 Page 23