Constructing Identity in Pushkin’s Russia

Abstract

Luba Golburt, The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and Russian Cultural Imagination. 402 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0299298142. $29.95. Joe Peschio, The Poetics of Impudence and Intimacy in Age of Pushkin. 174 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0299290443. $29.95. In an alley somewhere in Kharkiv, two murals depict the duel of From one wall, a bevy of Hollywood characters come charging at viewer--Robocop, Superman, Batman, Darth Vader, Scrooge McDuck. Facing them on opposite wall, throwing off his top hat with his left while his right aims a pistol straight at us, stands a lone action hero in sideburns: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. (1) These murals provide evidence, if any was needed, that age of Pushkin remains central to never-ending debate about meaning of Russian Hence it seems fitting that Pushkin mural appears on cover of Joe Peschio's The Poetics of Impudence and Intimacy in Age of Pushkin. How Golden Age literature helped construct Russian identities, and in process undermined cultural hegemony of imperial regime, is subject both of Peschio's book and of Luba Golburt's The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and Russian Cultural Imagination. Peschio examines how literature subverted regime's control over public sphere. Crucial in this enterprise was what might be called playful side of Golden Age literature: Pushkin and his comrades engaged in shalosti--pranks, obscenities, and calculated displays of rudeness--to construct intimate social spaces that lay beyond reach of imperial Russia's authority structures. Golburt's book, a study of Russian authors from Lomonosov to Turgenev, deals with way literature of 19th century delegitimized regime through its treatment of 18th century. The paradox of period's court-centered culture, she argues, lies in twofold way in which it forms starting point of modern Russian culture--originally as a utopian project to construct enlightened Russia of future, and then, starting in Pushkin's time, as exotic and obsolete past against which Russia's ever-changing present was measured. The circumstances of 18th-century society, historians have long argued, made it difficult for Russians to develop a strong, coherent sense of individuality. John LeDonne emphasizes authoritarian implications of country's autocratic and communal traditions: in no area of Russian life, he argues, was there any room for assertion of individual freedom, economic initiative, and social autonomy. (2) Other authors, focusing specifically on nobility, see evidence that educated Russians were continually confronted with a choice among competing models of thought and behavior. For instance, Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman argues that high society encouraged girls to respond to emotional shocks by fainting or welling up in tears, while life on tradition-bound country estates taught those same girls to be stoic. (3) Andrei Zorin finds that when nobleman Mikhail Nikitich Murav'ev wrote about his stateservice career, he alternately described it as profoundly meaningful and as vain and meaningless. Murav'ev, Zorin writes, expressed with equal strength and clarity two different emotional paradigms that guided his reactions and behavior. This kind of double identity was rather typical for Russian Pre-Romantic culture. (4) This cultural model bolstered autocracy because it encouraged Russians to mold their inner selves to fit needs of sociopolitical hierarchy--not only in political matters but in all areas of life. Consequently, spread of individualistic ways of thinking even about ostensibly nonpolitical matters has drawn interest of scholars who study decline of Russia's old regime. In his study of one small town, Aleksandr Kamenskii finds that although the communal principle of social organization remained intact, there were already signs in mid-18th century of an individualization of consciousness and of [individual] personality detaching itself from collective. …