Excerpt from Catharine Theimer Nepomnyaschy's introduction to Sinyavsky's Strolls with Pushkin

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(pushkinskie mesta) have proliferated, and virtually every locale linked with the poet’s life, from the estate at Mikhailovskoe to the apartment where he died, was painstakingly restored and transformed into a museum, serving as a place of pilgrimage for the poet’s admirers.77 Seen in this light, the various incarnations of the official Pushkin exist in a cultural space separate from the irreverent manifestations of the anecdotal Pushkin, and an invisible but no less absolute boundary lies between them—a boundary that may be crossed only at one’s peril.

ɷɸɷ It is precisely the boundary between the revered and the irreverent Pushkins that Sinyavsky transgresses from the very beginning of his Strolls with Pushkin. He sets off on his meanderings through the “sacred verses” of the poet with the Pushkin of pushkinskie anekdoty as his companion in hopes of circumventing the “wreaths and busts” that enshrine the canonic Pushkin and finding the “beautiful original.” This initial border violation defines the course of Sinyavsky’s strolls throughout. At every step he challenges accepted dividing lines—between writer and critic, author and character, sacred and profane, art and life—in order to undermine the commonplaces of the Pushkin myth as well as the understanding of literature as a reflection of reality that the myth entails. His project, moreover, rests on an internal contradiction. If strolling is by definition aimless motion, how can one stroll in search of something? This paradox is ultimately resolved when Sinyavsky reaches his goal only to discover that it is “zero,” that it lies in the very imposture embodied in the anecdotal Pushkin with whom he began. His strolls have both attained their object and gone nowhere and thus become a paradigm for “pure art”—art that transcends purposes external to it and becomes an end in itself. As Sinyavsky observes, “Art strolls.”

Thus, as much as it is about Pushkin, Strolls with Pushkin is also about the free play of language in the literary text, and the metaphor of strolling is enacted in the idiom and structure of the work itself. Sinyavsky constantly breaches critical decorum, mixing lyrical effusions with colloquialisms and labor camp slang, playing havoc with chronology, and allowing his narrative to be carried along by the flow of metaphors that stand the clichés of the Pushkin cult on their heads.

The unorthodox gambols of Sinyavsky’s language have sometimes bewildered and more often enraged Russian readers. Marya Rozanova, in a recent article on the response to Strolls with Pushkin, gives as a case in point two rather ludicrous reactions to what has become the most notorious line in the work: “Pushkin ran into high poetry on thin erotic legs and created a commotion”: It began, of course, with the thin erotic legs. “Marya Vasilevna,” a respected old doctor, stopped me one day in a Russian bookstore in Paris. “Where did Andrei Donatovich get the idea that Pushkin had thin erotic legs? After all, even in the notorious book Pushkin’s Don Juan List there are no instructions to the effect that his legs were erotic.” And I explained at length that since he was not running into a drawing room, but into poetry, these were not literal legs, but what is called a metaphor, and I consoled myself with rationalizations: well, he’s old, well, he forgot. . . . But then not long ago the remarkable Russian writer Georgy Nikolaevich Vladimov asked: “Andrei Donatovich,” he said, “where did you get the idea that Pushkin had thin legs? After all, it is well known that he was a very athletic person.” It is some kind of sorcery: the man wrote a whole novel-metaphor and stumbled over those legs.78

Rozanova concludes that “the Russian people have unlearned how to read,” that “after seventy years of realism—socialist or not Introduction

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socialist—many people have begun to read by syllables and only literally.”

Even more disturbing, as the controversy over Strolls with Pushkin has revealed, is the extent to which Russian culture’s investment in a realist aesthetic is tied to a deep-seated allegiance to language control. Two émigré articles published in the wake of the appearance of Sinyavsky’s work in the West express the anger and even fear that language given free reign evokes in Russian readers.

The title of one early review of Strolls with Pushkin, “A Boor’s Strolls with Pushkin,” by Roman Gul, the editor of the New York— based New Journal (Novy zhurnal) vents the critic’s disgust with Sinyavsky’s book while also suggesting the deeper issues at stake.

Gul plays throughout on the dual meaning of the Russian word kham, which signifies both “boor” and the biblical name Ham. In Genesis Ham sees his father’s nakedness and tells his brothers, who rush to cover what he has seen. Gul writes, “I am using the word kham in the biblical sense—as the cynicism of man and mockery of that which in human society should not be mocked if society does not want to turn into a herd of orangutans.”79 Inveighing against Sinyavsky’s “Smerdyakovish style” taken “directly out of the thieves’ barracks at Dubrovlag,” Gul maintains that it is not “what Abram Tertz wrote about Pushkin” but “how he writes about Pushkin”80 that is so offensive. The crux of Gul’s argument, then, lies in the accusation that Sinyavsky’s use of language in Strolls with Pushkin is inappropriate to its subject, for “true art is holy, . . . the name . . . of Pushkin . . . for me is holy.”81 The violation of linguistic decorum thus becomes a threat to society, because it challenges authority by revealing what should remain covered.

Solzhenitsyn’s 1984 article on Strolls with Pushkin, “. . . Shakes Your Sacrificial Altar,” draws its title from the concluding lines of Pushkin’s famous 1830 lyric “To the Poet,” in which Pushkin warns the poet to pay no heed to the fickle tastes of the crowd: “Are you

satisfied with your work? Then no matter if the crowd abuses it/ And spits on the altar where your fire burns,/And in childish playfulness shakes your sacrificial altar.” It is Sinyavsky’s “childish playfulness,” which Solzhenitsyn views as sacrilegious in relation to the sacred person of the poet, that disturbs the writer. He repeatedly refers to Strolls with Pushkin as a “dance” that lacks a logical structure and leads nowhere. Observing darkly that it was only to be expected that once in emigration, and therefore freed from censorship, such “aesthetic nihilists” as Sinyavsky would immediately attack Pushkin in their attempt “to represent this universal irony, play, and license as a self-sufficient New Word,”82 Solzhenitsyn insists that an attack on Pushkin is an attack on all authority. Language unrestrained thus becomes for Solzhenitsyn, as for Gul, a threat to the very foundations of society.

Following the publication of an excerpt from Strolls with Pushkin in the Soviet Union in 1989, Sinyavsky and his book became a symbolic focus for the anxieties and rancor unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet system. Strolls with Pushkin was perceived by Sinyavsky’s detractors as an assault on one of the most fundamental legitimizing symbols of Russian national identity. When asked why Sinyavsky’s work created such a furor in the author’s homeland, one conservative critic told the following story in response: Not long ago I was in my native village, and I was standing in front of a church that had been destroyed. An old woman came up to me and I asked her when the church had been destroyed. She told me in 1932. She had still been a little girl and now she was an old woman and obviously the offense had festered in her soul for such a long time that she told me, a stray passerby, who happened to have gotten out of a car and gone up to the church. . . . She told me, “I was a little girl and when they were destroying everything, I grabbed an icon and ran away with it, but when I was almost home, a man with Introduction

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a bag and with a revolver in his belt, tore the icon away from me and trampled it before my eyes.” . . . When all of these holy things are trampled, when there are no more icons or very few, Pushkin is one of those icons. He is an icon equal to the icons of the church.83

So thoroughly had Pushkin become sacralized over the century and a half since his death, so profoundly had he become a symbol of Russia’s national worth, that trampling the icon of Pushkin appeared tantamount to destroying Russia’s culture and spiritual heritage.

Strolls with Pushkin is not an attack on Pushkin. It is, however, an assault on a particular image of Pushkin that is inextricably linked with the solemn and formulaic language of the Pushkin cult. The effect of Strolls with Pushkin might best be likened to the play of language in the Pushkin joke that runs: “I am washing, washing my Pushkin places.”84 Though the bawdy play on the conflation of “Pushkin places” and “private parts” comes through only weakly in English, we can nonetheless catch an echo of the linguistic subversion, the spice of which originates in the collapse of the boundary between sacred and profane. Strolls with Pushkin, like the joke, aims to shock, entertain, unsettle, and ultimately beguile the reader into a new, livelier appreciation of Pushkin and of the liberating potential of language.