Chapter Two. HISTORICAL CONTEXT ------Interest Groups and Voluntary Associations Were Seen As “The Progenitors of Subversion” (Ibid.)

------------------------------------------------------------------- References ------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------- Chapter Two ------------------------- HISTORICAL CONTEXT — 79 — ---------------------------------- Chapter One. COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION ---------------------------------- — 80 — ----------------------------------------------- Imperial Russia and the Golden Age ---------------------------------------------- Imperial Russia and the Golden Age The eighteenth century witnessed a remarkable ascendancy of Russia as a political power. During the reign of Catherine ii some 200,000 square miles were added to the country’s territory, and the population in creased from 19 million to 36 million. By the end of that century Russia was “a full-fl edged and, at times, leading member of the quarrelsome community of European states” (Florinsky 363). Despite these rapid developments, “there was no corresponding transformation in the fi eld of cultural en deavor” in the Russian Empire (Ibid.). The cultural infrastructure of the era was meager and uninspiring: a few pretentious institutions with important-sounding names, such as the Academy of Science, the Academy of Arts, and the University of Moscow (it had a small number of students and bore little resemblance to a higher education institution); a few literary journals were run by a handful of professional historians and men of letters. Music, painting, and architecture were dominated by Western European infl uences, and the exponents of these arts were predominantly foreigners (Ibid.). All of this began to change dramatically during the tense years of the Napoleonic Wars, which, in Russia as elsewhere, were notable for a surge of cultural creativity and artistic innovation. Indeed, the early decades of the nineteenth century (roughly 1810-30) have become known as the Golden Age of Russian culture. In the salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow, “poets, musicians, and intellectuals — most of whom were also offi cers in the imperial army — debated questions of literary form, translated the latest English and German romantic verse, and refl ected on the question of Russian history, all with unprecedented intensity” (Goldfrank et al. 26). Numerous journals emerged in the two capitals, each with its own personality and literary direction. One particular feature of this Russian development, especially after the Decembrist uprising in 1825 (which sought at a minimum to establish a constitutional monarchy), was that the authorities regarded any manifestation of civil society “with deep suspicion” (Hosking 291). Philanthropy, educational initiatives, the formation of public — 81 — -------------------------------------------- Chapter Two. HISTORICAL CONTEXT -------------------------------------------- interest groups and voluntary associations were seen as “the progenitors of subversion” (Ibid.). The government looked askance at literature too, especially since the literary community already possessed a network of printing presses and bookshops independent of the regime, and a good many enthusiastic customers. “Unlike music or painting, literature dealt in words and hence could comment directly on political or social matters; but at the same time its use of words was ambiguous and multi-layered” (Ibid.). Fiction posed tricky problems for the censorship apparatus: it was diffi cult for censors (who were themselves members of the educated public), “without appearing foolish before the educated public, to assign a single unambiguous meaning to a text and then in good conscience declare it unacceptable” (Ibid.). The innovations and ferment of the Golden Age were concentrated primarily in three fi elds — language, literature, and religion. The 1810s and 1820s were, above all, the Golden Age of poetry, from which the modern Russian language emerged. At the center of the poets’ circles, both in his years at the Lyceum and afterward, stood Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837). Pushkin is often considered a starting point in Russian literature. Born in Moscow, he was of African as well as Russian ancestry. Pushkin’s early liberal verse not only gave him notoriety, but also earned him considerable infl uence and great popularity in educated society. In Russia in the nineteenth century literature came to play the role of what can loosely be termed an “alternative government.” Given the lack of political democracy, “literature became the main forum for discussion of oppositional or even slightly critical ideas” (Andrew 9). Tsar Alexander I (1801-25) exiled Pushkin for writing revolutionary epigrams that had come to his attention in the same year when Pushkin’s fi rst major publication, Ruslan and Lyudmila, met with resounding success (1820). Pushkin spent the remaining part of Alexander’s reign moving constantly between the Caucasus, Bessarabia, and southern Ukraine, yet eventually coming to reside as an exile at his parents’ estate, Mikhailovskoe, in 1824. Only Alexander’s death and the accession of a new Emperor brought Pushkin back to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1826. The creator of modern literary Russian and the fi rst truly national writer, Pushkin set the standard for nineteenth-century literature. He belonged to the era of Romanticism: an early admirer of Byron, Pushkin then outgrew his Romantic sensibilities and moved to Realism in several of his later works. As a modern writer with deep classical instincts, Pushkin had a sense of responsibility to tradition and to society: Russia, he thought, needed “Shakespearean” drama, and the result was his play Boris Godunov. He also produced “the best novel Walter Scott never wrote,” The Captain’s Daughter (Milner-Gulland 122). The importance of his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, lay in its poetic creation of characters who were to become prototypes for the novels of Lermontov, Goncharov, and Turgenev. According to — 82 — ----------------------------------------------- Imperial Russia and the Golden Age ---------------------------------------------- Boris Gasparov it was Pushkin’s own literary evolution that eventually connected Russian literature to European Romanticism: Russian authors mastered the formal accomplishments of the newest literary schools at the turn of the nineteenth century quickly and brilliantly (the elegy, the historical ballad, the friendly epistle, and the Byronic poetic monologue), but the romantic “poetry of life,” the romantic struggle of thought with language, romantic refl exivity came signifi cantly later, in the 1830s (Gasparov 545). Pushkin did not go as far as most romantics in his break with literary convention in overcoming fi xed forms: “The reader himself is left to decide what lies concealed behind this faultless exterior. Peering into the smooth surface of Pushkin’s verse, one begins to take note of more and more layers of implied meanings and interpretations, entirely new directions of his hints and allusions, dizzying intersections and collisions of disparate perspectives,” reminiscent of a kaleidoscope (Ibid. 550). In a certain sense the complexity of Nabokov’s texts is modeled after that of Pushkin’s works. To use Gasparov’s analogy, they do not “play hide-and-go-seek” with the reader “but instead really do refrain from showing him much, without the slightest concern for whether or not the ‘right’ reader, or any other kind of reader, will succeed in seeing the invisible. On the textual surface the reader does not detect the slightest trace that his understanding might differ from the quite obvious meaning offered by the surface with such aphoristic clarity and elegance” (551). [Ill. 2-1] Nikolai Ge. “Pushkin in the village Mikhailovskoe” (1875, Th e Art Museum of Kharkiv collection) — 83 — -------------------------------------------- Chapter Two. HISTORICAL CONTEXT -------------------------------------------- The last decade of Pushkin’s life was tinged with tragedy: some of his friends were involved in the Decembrist conspiracy and were exiled to Siberia. This left Pushkin feeling extremely isolated as he would, most likely, have been involved himself in the revolt had he not been forced to live at Mikhailovskoe. Although Eugene Onegin was completed in 1831, the new generation of poets and writers was distant from Pushkin and saw him as a venerable relic of an earlier age. Finally, his marriage, in 1831, to the beautiful and frivolous Natalia Goncharova, soon became a source of unhappiness. In 1837 Pushkin challenged his wife’s admirer, Baron Georges D’Anthes (a French royalist in the Russian service) to a duel and was fatally wounded. The cult of Pushkin, originating in the late nineteenth century, has lasted through the Soviet period and beyond: his poetry has been memorized by every educated Russian and continues to constitute a touchstone for literature, ideas, and political views. As the acclaimed essayist and critic Andrei Sinyavsky writes, in his light-hearted manner, “all themes, like women, were accessible to [Pushkin], and running through them he marked out roads for Russian letters for centuries to come. No matter where we poke our noses — Pushkin is everywhere, which can be explained not so much by the infl uence of his genius on other talents, as by the fact that there isn’t a motif in the world he didn’t touch upon. Pushkin simply managed to write about everything for everyone. As a result he became the Russian Virgil, and in this role of teacher-guide he accompanies us in no matter which direction of history, cul ture, or life we go” (Tertz

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