Subject
Pushkin Celebrations/NYT (fwd)
Date
Body
June 2, 1999
ARTS ABROAD
There's Poetic Justice in Russians' Rush to
Celebrate Pushkin's Bicentenary
By CELESTINE BOHLEN
Not all of me is dust. Within my song,
safe from the worm, my spirit will survive.
MOSCOW -- With days to go before the 200th anniversary of the
birth of Russia's
greatest and most beloved poet, it is a wonder that Russians
are not sick of
Alexander Pushkin.
Take Moscow, the city of his birth. Every
other billboard carries a picture of his
puckish face or sloping profile,
accompanied by his verse. Theaters and
concert halls are running back-to-back
productions either of his works or of
reworked interpretations of his life.
A national television program has been
marking off the days until the birth date
itself, on Sunday, June 6. Newspapers
and magazines delve daily into his
importance for Russia, its literature, its
culture, its troubled soul.
But if there is one thing that Russians
never tire of, it is Pushkin, no matter how
often his image has been used and
abused: by a czarist regime that glorified
him as a loyal son of imperial Russia, by
a Stalinist system that cast him as an
atheist and rebel, and now by a crass commercialization that
shamelessly puts his name on everything from chocolates to vodka.
There are some who fear that all this idolatry could kill
Russia's love for Pushkin,
just as Boris Pasternak once wrote that Vladimir Mayakovsky,
the bard of the
Russian Revolution, died a second death when Stalin issued a
decree declaring
him Russia's best poet.
Certainly overkill is a danger. "It always seems to us that by
accepting Alexander
Sergeyevich into our company, we are bestowing honor upon him,
but my God,
how vulgar all this makes him," wrote the literary critic
Stanislav Rassadin in a
recent article, "Our Privatization of Pushkin."
But Pushkin is too much part of the national psyche to risk
displacement or
debasement. By age 7, most Russian children already know at
least one of his
poems by heart, not just because his verse is part of the
national curriculum but
because it is so accessible, so clear and so human that it
slips effortlessly into
memory, like a child's prayer.
"Love for Pushkin -- not so easy for foreigners -- is a genuine
sign of a person
who is a bearer of Russian culture," Lydia Ginzburg, a Russian
philologist, wrote
recently. "Any other Russian writer may be loved or not -- it
is a matter of taste.
But Pushkin, as a phenomenon, is a must for us. Pushkin is the
backbone of
Russian culture, holding together all the previous and
subsequent links.
Remove the backbone -- all the links will collapse."
First and foremost, there are his writings, varied and
voluminous for one who
died at 37, starting with the early folkloric epics like
"Ruslan and Ludmilla," on
through the masterpiece of spurned love "Eugene Onegin" and in
his later years
prose, like the novel "The Captain's Daughter."
Then there is his life: the dashing young nobleman with African
lineage who, as
with so many Russian writers, was toyed with by the authorities
and picked at by
the censors, embraced one day by the Czar, pushed into internal
exile the next.
Finally there is his death: a duel fought in the snow over the
honor of his
beautiful, careless wife, then a lingering death scene at his
home in the imperial
capital of St. Petersburg, with mourners crowding the street
outside, keeping
vigil.
A Recurring Theme in Russian History
Stripped of its old-world romance -- the balls, the country
estates, the gambling
and that old Russian standby, aristocratic ennui -- the story
of Pushkin is one
that has recurred again and again in Russian history. The poet
loved by the
people (or at least those who love poetry), feared by the
authorities, is officially
adopted after death as a secular saint. It is a story line that
picks up again with
figures like Anna Akhmatova, and in a more populist vein
Vladimir Visotsky, the
actor-bard whose funeral in 1980 was a rare occasion when
Soviet citizens
could, by honoring a poet, show their disdain for his
tormentors.
Like Russian history, the Pushkin story has been pulled in
different directions by
different rulers. "The state model of Pushkin was introduced in
1899, on the
100th anniversary," said Sergei Fomichev, the resident Pushkin
scholar at the
Pushkin House museum in Moscow (not to be confused with the
memorial
Pushkin apartment or the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). "Then it
was explained
that he was a monarchist and a believer. In 1937, on the 100th
anniversary of his
death, the opposite model was given."
The year Stalin's great terror began, 1937, was an ominous one
for Russia and
for its intelligentsia, whose members were killed, exiled and
sent to labor camps
by the hundreds of thousands. It was also the year that the
communist
authorities, with perverse timing, laid claim to Pushkin by
marking the 100th
anniversary of his death with a gala ceremony and with
celebrations at his family
estate in the Pskov region.
It was also the year of "My Pushkin," the title of a poem by
Marina Tsvetayeva but
also a way of signifying the many varied and deeply private
interpretations of the
man and his works, kept safe from the state's crude grasp.
All this is enough to explain the extraordinary flood of
Pushkiniana that continues
to pour through Russian publishing houses into libraries and
bookstores.
Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of books by and about Pushkin
have been
readied for this year's anniversary.
Among them is "Pushkin's Hidden Love," a collection of
scholarly guesses about
the identity of the woman, known in Pushkin's notes only as
"N.N.," believed to
have been his one true and secret love.
Also new is yet another piece of historical detective work
about the origins of the
fateful duel with the man all Russians are brought up to hate,
the arrogant
Frenchman Georges d'Anthes, who never expressed regret for
firing the fatal
shot.
It is a Russian tradition to celebrate jubilees; by neat
historical symmetry, this
year also brought the 100th anniversary of the birth of
Vladimir Nabokov, a
Russian-born writer whose works were banned in his homeland
during his
lifetime.
By Tradition, a Last-Minute Rush
But for all the advance warning, the celebrations of the
Pushkin bicentenary have
the feel of a last-minute rush job, another Russian tradition.
Only in the last few
weeks did work pick up for the restoration of the lovely Church
of the Ascension
in Moscow, where Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova in 1831.
With the city's
gala celebrations just days away, the churchyard is still full
of building materials.
At Pushkinskiye Gory, the town in Pskov where Pushkin lived
alone and in exile
from 1824 to 1826 and lies buried at the Svyatgorsky monastery,
the authorities
are bracing for hundreds of thousands of visitors during the
official ceremonies.
Both President Boris Yeltsin and Aleksy II, the patriarch of
the Russian Orthodox
Church, are expected.
In the 1980s, the flow of visitors to the "Pushkin Places," a
trio of charming and
surprisingly modest wooden houses typical of the
early-19th-century Russian
gentry, peaked at 600,000 a year. (There is Mikhailovskoye,
where Pushkin lived;
Trigorskoye, the home of his friends and neighbors, the
Osipov-Wulfs, and
Petrovskoye, built by the son of Hannibal, Pushkin's maternal
great-grandfather,
the Ethiopian prince who was adopted and brought to Russia by
Peter the
Great.) Since the collapse of the communist system, which had
organized
tourism, the numbers have plunged to about 100,000 a year.
The struggle to preserve the Pushkin legacy while making it
appealing to a more
worldly Russian tourist is a challenge that the directors of
the Pushkin sites
share with the country as a whole.
Of the $5 million allocated this year for the restoration of
the various estates,
one-quarter had to be spent fixing up a museum built in the
center of town to
handle the overflow of Pushkin pilgrims. It looks more like a
North Korean
mausoleum than a shrine to a 19th-century Russian poet, and,
seven years after
its completion it is already falling apart.
The rest of the money has gone toward restoring the three
estates (one of them
is still closed) and their surrounding parks to a pristine
state that elicits a
shudder from Pushkin purists.
"The park was never so tidy as it is now," said Fomichev. "They
cleared away
everything. It looks good. But so many trees have been cut
down."
The Pushkinskiye Gory museum-park's director, Georgi
Vasilevich, stands his
ground, noting that the buildings have been destroyed and
rebuilt several times
since Pushkin's time, during the revolution and again during
World War II.
That anything was preserved at all, he said, is due only to
Russia's reverence for
its dead poets.
"After the revolution the estates of the Russian gentry were of
no interest to
anyone, and many were destroyed," he said. "It was only because
of names like
Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Turgenev that that part of our
history was saved
for us."