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By now it is not so much Pushkin, our national poet, as our relationship to Pushkin that has become as it were our national characteristic.

ANDREY BITOV, 1986

‘PUSHKIN IS OUR ALL,’ declared the critic and poet Apollon Grigorev in 1854.¹ His famous remark is perhaps the best expression of Pushkin’s significance, not merely for Russian literature, or even for Russian culture, but for the Russian ethos generally and for Russia as a whole. At the time, however, his was a lone voice. Though Pushkin had been acclaimed as Russia’s greatest poet during his lifetime, his reputation had begun to sink during his last years. The decline continued after his death in 1837, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the 1850s. In 1855 a petition, noting that monuments to a number of other writers – Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Koltsov, Karamzin and Krylov – had been erected, called for Pushkin to be added to their number. It met with no response. In 1861 Pushkin’s school, the Lycée – which had moved from Tsarskoe Selo to St Petersburg and been renamed the Alexandrine Lycée – celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In conjunction with this a public subscription was opened to erect a statue to Pushkin in Tsarskoe Selo. Three years later less than a fifth of the necessary sum had been subscribed, and interest in the project had lapsed completely. However, by 1869, when the idea was revived by a group of former lycéens, Pushkin’s reputation was on the rise. This time the subscription was successful, raising over 100,000 roubles. The suggestion of Admiral Matyushkin, a schoolfellow of Pushkin, that the monument should be placed in Moscow, the poet’s native city, was accepted, and a site on Strastnaya Square, at the end of Tverskoy Boulevard, was chosen. After three competitions A.M. Opekushin’s design for a statue showing a meditating Pushkin emerged as the winner.

Only after eleven years of procrastination and preparation, however, was the project completed. The unveiling ceremony was planned for 26 May 1880, the eighty-first anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, but the death of Empress Mariya caused it to be postponed until Friday 6 June. At one o’clock that day, after a service in the Strastnoy monastery opposite the site of the monument, the statue was unveiled in the presence of an immense crowd. Cheers rang out, and many wept. ‘Where are the colours, where are the words to convey the intoxication of the triumphal moment?’ wrote one reporter. ‘Those who didn’t see it did not see the populace in one of its best moments of spiritual joyousness.’² That evening a banquet, given by the city duma, was followed by a literary-musical evening in the hall of the Noble Assembly. Overtures from operas based on Pushkin’s works were performed; congratulatory telegrams from Tennyson, Victor Hugo and others were read out; Dostoevsky, Turgenev and others gave readings from Pushkin: Turgenev especially being greeted with tumultuous applause.

The next day, 7 June, at a public meeting of the Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature, Turgenev gave an elegant and civilized speech. Pushkin was, he said, repeating Belinsky, Russia’s ‘first artist-poet’. ‘There is no doubt,’ he continued, ‘that he created our poetic, our literary language and that we and our descendants can only follow the path laid down by his genius.’ But in the end he had reluctantly to deny Pushkin the title of ‘a national poet in the sense of a universal poet’, as were Shakespeare, Goethe or Homer. Unlike them, he had had to perform two tasks simultaneously, ‘to establish a language and create a literature’. And, unlike them, he had had the misfortune to die young, without fulfilling his true potential. Turgenev ended his speech by apostrophizing the statue itself. ‘Shine forth, like him, thou noble bronze visage, erected in the very heart of our ancient capital, and announce to future generations our right to call ourselves a great nation, because this nation has given birth, among other great men, to such a man!’, a peroration which was greeted with enthusiasm and loud applause.³

Its reception, however, was completely overshadowed by that given to Dostoevsky’s long, passionate and emotional address the following morning, the third and last day of the celebrations. He began by quoting Gogol’s remark that Pushkin was ‘an extraordinary, and perhaps unique manifestation of the Russian spirit’, and added that he was, too, ‘a prophetic one’. Whereas Turgenev had been unable to rank Pushkin with poets such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky proclaimed his superiority to the ‘Shakespeares, Cervanteses and Schillers’, because of ‘something almost even miraculous’, his ‘universal responsiveness’, a characteristic which he shared with the Russian people. Whereas Shakespeare’s Italians are disguised Englishmen, Pushkin’s Spaniards are Spanish, his Germans German and his Englishmen English. ‘I can positively say that there has never been a poet with so universal a responsiveness as Pushkin, and it is not just his responsiveness, but its astounding depth, the reincarnation of his spirit in the spirit of foreign peoples, an almost complete, and hence miraculous reincarnation, because nowhere, in no poet of the entire world has this phenomenon been repeated.’ It is this national characteristic which will eventually enable Russia to save Europe and ‘to pronounce the final word of great, general harmony, of the final brotherly agreement of all nations in accordance with the law of Christ’s Gospel!’ If this seems a presumptuous claim for a land as poor as Russia, ‘we can already point to Pushkin, to the universality and panhumanity of his genius […] In art at least, in artistic creation, he undeniably manifested this universality of the aspiration of the Russian spirit.’ Had Pushkin lived longer his message would perhaps have been clearer. ‘But God decreed otherwise. Pushkin died in the full development of his powers, and undoubtedly carried to his grave a certain great mystery,’ Dostoevsky concluded. ‘And now we must solve this mystery without him.’⁴

Screams and cries were heard from the audience. A number of people fainted; a student burst through the throng and fell in hysterics at Dostoevsky’s feet where he lost consciousness. At the end of the session a hundred young women, pushing Turgenev aside, made their way on to the stage bearing a huge laurel wreath, nearly five feet in diameter, and placed it round the author’s neck. It bore the inscription ‘For the Russian woman, about whom you said so much that was good!’ Late that evening Dostoevsky took a cab to Tverskaya Square, placed the wreath at the foot of the granite pedestal on which the statue stood, and, stepping back a pace, bowed to the ground.⁵

Dostoevsky’s speech had little to do with the reality of Pushkin’s work: he had, rather, unscrupulously made use of the other’s reputation to propagate his own belief in Russia’s messianic mission. However, it came as a fitting conclusion to what one newspaper referred to as ‘days of a magically poetic fairy-tale’, and others as ‘days of holy ecstasy’ and ‘the “holy week” of the Russian intelligentsia’. Some witnesses experienced something akin to a religious conversion, one reporter writing, ‘It was as if the atmosphere surrounding the celebration caught fire and was lit by an iridescent radiance. One’s heart beat faster, more joyfully, one’s thoughts became bright and lucid, and one’s whole being opened up to impressions and emotions that would have been incomprehensible and strange given other less elevating circumstances. Some kind of moral miracle took place, a moral shock that stirred one’s innermost soul.’⁶ But it also established a new attitude to Pushkin: from now on he was not merely a poet superior to all others, but also was no longer a man; he had become a symbol, a myth, an icon.

By 1899, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the state had taken account of the potency of the poet’s image, and organized for the occasion an immense celebration throughout the Russian empire. Busts and portraits were mass-produced, and schoolchildren given free copies of his works, together with bars of chocolate stamped with his picture. The Pushkin of 1899 was far removed from the prophetic, miraculously responsive Pushkin of 1880; he was a solid, upright, moral citizen, a firm patriot and a loyal supporter of autocracy. In 1937 the Soviet state launched an even more massive celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death. His works were recruited to assist the drive towards universal literacy in the Soviet Union, while his image was tailored to fit Soviet ideology. ‘Pushkin is completely ours, Soviet, for the Soviet state inherited everything that is best in our people, and itself is the embodiment of the best aspirations of our people,’ wrote Pravda.⁷ The myth had now become the basis for a cult – at times uncomfortably close to the Stalin cult – and Pushkin himself a quasi-divine figure, not only ‘creator of the Russian literary language, father of new Russian literature, a genius who enriched humanity with his works’,⁸ but also a proto-Marxist who espoused the cause of liberty and of the common people; a man who gilded everything he touched and was without fault in every aspect of his life. Most recently, the celebrations of 1999 have enlisted Pushkin in the service of capitalism and commercial enterprise. The Bank of Russia brought out a number of commemorative silver and gold coins; the twenty-five-rouble silver has on its reverse ‘a picture of A.S. Pushkin holding a writing book and a goose-quill in his hands, in the background to the right – personages of his works of literature’.⁹ His portrait was to be seen in shop windows, on the sides of buses and trams, on billboards, boxes of matches, vodka bottles and T-shirts, while Coca-Cola ran an advertisement featuring lines from his most famous love lyric, ‘I recollect a wondrous moment’. And the Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, when condemning in language reminiscent of the Cold War western intervention in Yugoslavia, added that NATO had foolishly ignored Pushkin’s lessons on the Balkans – thus preserving the poet’s reputation, acquired in the Soviet era, for being a genius in every sphere.^*

Of course, in one sense the myth is justified: Pushkin is Russia’s greatest poet, the composer of a large body of magnificent lyrics, extraordinarily diverse both in theme and treatment; of a number of great narrative poems – Ruslan and Lyudmila, The Gypsies, Poltava and The Bronze Horseman – and of a unique novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. He reformed Russian poetic language: in his hands it became a powerful, yet flexible instrument, with a diapason stretching from the solemnly archaic to the cadences of everyday speech. The aim of this biography, however, is, in all humility, to free the complex and interesting figure of Pushkin the man from the heroic simplicity of Pushkin the myth. It concerns itself above all with the events of his life: though the appearance of his main works is noted, and the works themselves are commented on briefly, literary analysis has been eschewed, as being the province of the critic, rather than the biographer.

* He is presumably referring to Pushkin’s remarks on the Polish revolt of 1830, particularly the poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’.