Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 44 Article 7 Issue 1 Scottish-Russian Literary Relations Since 1900 12-1-2018 'Like Pushkin, I': Hugh MacDiarmid and Russia Patrick Crotty University of Aberdeen Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Russian Literature Commons Recommended Citation Crotty, Patrick (2019) "'Like Pushkin, I': Hugh MacDiarmid and Russia," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 44: Iss. 1, 47–89. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol44/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. “LIKE PUSHKIN, I”: HUGH MACDIARMID AND RUSSIA Patrick Crotty . I’m a poet (And you c’ud mak allowances for that!) “Second Hymn to Lenin” (1932)1 Hugh MacDiarmid has never enjoyed the canonical status his acolytes consider his due. Those acolytes have dwindled in number since the 1970s and ’80s, and, as the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century approaches, there is scant evidence of live interest in the poet’s achievement anywhere in the world, least of all his native Scotland. One reason for this is that MacDiarmid, as Seamus Heaney ruefully remarked, “gave his detractors plenty to work with”;2 quite apart from indulging in cultural and political opining sufficiently provocative for the public at large to dismiss him as a crank, he published a dismaying amount of slipshod and even banal verse, mainly in his later years.