Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard by Jonathan Brooks Platt (review)

Among all manifestations of cultural mythology and praise related to national poets, jubilees and other memorable dates are among the best studied. Until recently, the only celebration of the cult of Alexander Pushkin in Russia that got a booklength study were the Pushkin days in Moscow in early June 1880, when his famous monument was unveiled. In his now classical work on the Pushkin celebration in relation to Russian literary politics, Marcus C. Levitt explored the motives of the intelligentsia who organized the celebration, as well as the extraordinary contribution of Dostoevsky, and the aftermath of the poet’s not yet mass appropriation by the (then highly elitist) crowd.¹ Since Levitt’s book, the story of Pushkin and the people was closely bound to the state’s appropriating the poet for its needs.

The yearlong celebration of the centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937, an apogee of Stalinist cultural politics in the midst of the Great Purge, has long surpassed any other Pushkin celebration as a subject of scholarly interest. It served as a pillar for building an argument in the works of Timasheff, Brandenberger, Levitt, Petrone, Sandler, and others.² However, as stated on the back cover of the book under review, no in-depth (or book-length) study of this distinguished event has been published so far. Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard by Jonathan Brooks Platt reverses this state of the art not only by introducing an accurate and rigorous study of the jubilee but also by developing a new methodological framework for interpreting it.

The introduction announces the book’s concept, and the first chapter provides a historiographic survey of the ways Pushkin’s cultural legacy was used within the aesthetic of the Soviet literary tradition and politics. The chapter also reconstructs the mechanisms that made the unprecedented scale of celebration possible and reflects on the involvement of high-ranking authorities in the ideological design of the jubilee. One cannot but notice that the study is focused predominantly on developments in Moscow and Leningrad at the expense of the situation at the peripheries. This unevenness in analyses of the Pushkin cult has long been noted in historiography but, with a few exceptions, is reproduced in Platt’s book as well.

Subsequent chapters can be divided into two parts. The first part (chapters 2 and 3) deals with the ways Pushkin’s personality and legacy were addressed by various actors (education officials, pedagogues, and literary critics) on the occasion of the jubilee. The second part (chapters 4 and 5) analyzes various cultural products (literary texts and works of art) that were inspired by the jubilee. Platt’s main concern here is with the chronotopic strategies demonstrated by each author, and specifically the general impulse toward chronotopic hybridity.

Accordingly, chapter 2 is dedicated to pedagogical texts and practices centered around the figure of Pushkin. Platt extensively studies high school curricula, textbooks, and various jubilee activities at schools. Surprisingly, this complex analysis of the pedagogic sphere omits the “hidden curriculum” – the forging and disseminating of a new “correct” interpretation of the body of Pushkin’s work as a compulsory cultural and political canon.

Chapter 3 looks into critical and scholarly writing on the eve, during, and after the jubilee. Its main focus – the critics’ answer to “the central ideological question of the jubilee – why is the Russian national poet relevant today”? (P. 133). Platt concludes that for the Soviet critics of the late 1930s, the poet’s political views were as important as his creative achievements. It is this aspect of Pushkin’s personality that became a subject of fierce manipulations.

The tentatively identified second part of the book opens with the somewhat discouraging statement: “despite the tremendous resources expended, the jubilee failed colossally to achieve one of its central goals: demonstrating Pushkin’s ‘harmony’ with the...