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An Invitation to Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House EKATERINA SUKHANOVA

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An Invitation to Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House EKATERINA SUKHANOVA With Pushkin in the Background: An Invitation to Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House EKATERINA SUKHANOVA Kak obaiatel’ny (dlia tekh, kto ponimaet) Vse nashi gluposti i melkie zlodejstva Na fone Pushkina . How charming (for those in the know) Is all our nonsense and petty mischief With Pushkin in the background —B. Okudzhava Pushkin? Ochen’ ispugali! Pushkin? Nothing to be feared! —M. Tsvetaeva Pushkin House, a multilayered, unpredictable, and challenging work has something of a Petersburgian fantom about it—which means, among other things, that it is here to stay. Indeed, the fate of the novel is rather unusual: finished in 1971 after some seven years of work (and some glimpses of it in various journals) and first published by Ardis in Russian in 1978, it was considered “must” reading in the inevitably “narrow circles” in Russia long before an official edition in book format saw the light in 1989. Perestroika temporarily sparked the public taste for all literary works suddenly allowed by the magnanimous Soviet government; it is hard to judge, however, whether the circles in which Bitov is read and fought over have really widened as a result. I am told that a clerk in a major bookstore in St. Petersburg recently tried to search for the book under “Travel Guides.” An English 2 • CASEBOOK STUDY: PUSHKIN HOUSE translation appeared only in 1987, after the Swedish and German ones; other major and minor European languages followed later. The novel’s translator, Susan Brownsberger, mentions that the book was once mistakenly shelved under criticism instead of fiction (360); she does not specify what country this shelf was in. While the difficulties with publishing the novel in the Soviet Union hardly deserve explanation, the delayed reaction time on the part of Western publishers is more perplexing. One reviewer has defined Pushkin House as “relentlessly opaque” (Savitsky 468), another as “very Russian” (Complete Review on-line). These remarks go hand in hand, it seems, but the latter is perhaps more damaging: it means a kiss of death as far as the nonspecialist reader is concerned. The image conjures up novels where characters are referred to by half a dozen different names, most of them unpronounceable, nannies call their charges “my little dove,” and most people get drunk in order to have an excuse to speak of life and death. All of this accompanied by a mix of “The Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairies” and “Lara’s Theme.” Why does the reading public need another Russian novel, and why would it be of interest to anyone but inveterate Slavicists? First of all, perhaps this casebook may convince you that there are sufficient grounds to justify Marina von Hirsch’s statement that, “if there is a writer who can represent Russian contemporary metafiction on the international level, it is undoubtedly Andrei Bitov.” In addition, the parochial notion that literature (real literature, that is, not propaganda skits) exists in order to serve the interests of a particular exclusive group of people—be it social or even linguistic groups—begs to be reconsidered. The danger of confining works of art to the categories of domestic and import product is becoming especially apparent now, with the number of publishers accepting works in translation steadily decreasing. In his Lectures on Russian Literature Nabokov remembers, “The EKATERINA SUKHANOVA • 3 Russian reader in old cultured Russia was certainly proud of Pushkin and of Gogol, but he was just as proud of Shakespeare or Dante, of Baudelaire or of Edgar Allan Poe, of Flaubert or of Homer, and this was the Russian reader’s strength” (11). This was an achievement of Russian modernism and also the foundation on which Pushkin House is built. Readers who possess this strength will always be found. So will writers. Nietzsche once said that anyone wishing to know what’s in store for Europe has to look at St. Petersburg. Looking back at twentieth-century history, this seems to have been a dire prediction; nevertheless, Petersburg and its text(s) still make a good case study in modernity (Put a check mark next to courses on twentieth-century literature and on the development of the novel!). Russian modern literature and language are commonly considered to begin with Pushkin, whose heritage was a crash course in Western European civilization for the emerging Russian secular literature. St. Petersburg, older than its first poet only by a hundred years, became at once the setting and a leading character of the new Russian literature. “Pushkin House” is an informal title for the State Institute for Russian Literature in St. Petersburg. Pushkin House is an edifice of Russian modernism—Bitov attempts to take stock of modern Russian literary history in the widest application of the term. One of the books Bitov clearly keeps within reach on his desk is Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the first Russian novel in verse, a book full of irreverence toward conventions both social and literary and one that some have found to anticipate modernism (or even postmodernism, according to the critic’s persuasion). Generations of Soviet schoolchildren learned that Eugene Onegin is an encyclopedia of Russian life. By the same token, Pushkin House may fairly be called an encyclopedia of Soviet life. It could be incorporated into an Urban Studies course (for the section on St. Petersburg) or into a course on Russian History and Thought, not to mention any course encompassing Russian literature of the nineteenth and 4 • CASEBOOK STUDY: PUSHKIN HOUSE twentieth centuries. And yet the novel is not just for Ph.D. candidates in Russian literature—although Slavic Departments in English-speaking countries ought to compete with each other in bestowing doctorates honoris causa to the translator, Susan Brownsberger, since all the difficulties in translating Eugene Onegin that Nabokov enumerated apply equally to translating Pushkin House. Yes, Bitov has endless modernist tricks up his sleeve. Some of these tricks seem to have actually managed to confuse editors both in Russia and in the U.S.—as Ellen Chances points out, there have been many editions where Bitov’s “Commentaries” have been left out, perhaps considered to be part of the optional scholarly apparatus rather than an integral part of the work. Hidden and open allusions to literary works abound. With three generations of literary scholars represented, literature inevitably permeates the novel. If Pasternak added to Doctor Zhivago some poems ascribed to the protagonist, Bitov goes one step further: he incorporates within the text a critical article purportedly written by L. Odoevtsev. There is no denying that knowing at least some of the works referred to in the novel, both Russian and non- Russian, allows the reader to explore different layers in the novel and to engage in a deeper dialogue with the text. The four essays in this casebook present a thoughtful and absorbing analysis of the manifold links that connect this metafictional novel to different traditions, archetypes, and topoi, and of the new meanings that are constantly generated through these contacts. “A quotation is like a cicada: going on and on” (Mandelstam 2:218). Bitov’s text functions as a semiotic structure working at full speed. Nevertheless, it needs to be said that previous familiarity with Russian literary history is not a prerequisite for the appreciation of the novel. Can Pushkin House truly be more opaque than some of the venerated classics traditionally offered in the Great Books curricula? Yet a sufficient number of readers EKATERINA SUKHANOVA • 5 continue to benefit from the “nourishing elements necessary for the spirit,” to use an expression of Borges’s, which are contained in literary works outside of many a reader’s expertise. This is what makes literature possible, for, sad as this may seem at times, it does not exist for philologists’ sake. Literature may be the building blocks of the Pushkin House, but is not its raison d’être. As a prominent critic has put it, “What I look for in literature is not entertainment, but breaking through literature, overcoming literature. In this regard, Pushkin House is an event for me” (Savitsky 468). Pushkin House is a great intellectual playground that grows with the reader and where the reader is made to grow very fast, as in Eugene Onegin. At the core of work, also as in Eugene Onegin, is a portrayal of the modern man “. With something of his true complexion—/ With his immoral soul disclosed,/ His arid vanity exposed,/ His endless bent for deep reflection,/ His cold, embittered mind that seems/ To waste himself in empty schemes” (Pushkin 176). The protagonist’s last name, Odoevtsev, sounds almost like that of a Pushkin contemporary, a minor poet and a Decembrist (member of a movement formed by a group of Russian aristocrats and advocating radical political changes, such as adoption of a constitution in Russia and abolition of serfdom). On the day that will prove fatal for him, Odoevtsev walks over to the very square where the Decembrists’ uprising was crushed in 1825. It is just another nonevent in the series of many in this novel. The day being a holiday, Odoevtsev, like many people around him, is drunk, and the city appears to him unreal, like a theater decoration. He sees no faces, just a throng that does not know what to do with itself once the official part of the festivities is over. This almost-but-not-quite quality becomes definitive for Odoevtsev, who shares his name and patronymic (Lev Nikolaevich) with Leo Tolstoy. Bitov actually endows his 6 • CASEBOOK STUDY: PUSHKIN HOUSE protagonist with a hereditary link to Russian nobility, making him entitled to the rank of a prince. This seems to be a metaphor making Odoevtsev a legitimate heir to the Russian literary tradition.
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