Pushkin Is Our Everything

The most embarrassing memory of my childhood is of my mother having a meltdown at the Pushkin Apartment Museum in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known back in the USSR. I was 10, and this was to be our farewell trip to Russia’s cultural capital, an excursion from Moscow, where we lived. Farewell because Mother and I were about to emigrate to America, which in those Iron Curtain days meant abandoning all hope of return. So on this sad visit, Mom and I retraced the murderous route of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, reread Gogol’s phantasmagoric St. Petersburg tales, wandered among the statuary in the imperial Summer Garden, which Pushkin considered his living room. And it goes without saying that we paid our respects to the apartment-museum on the Moika Canal where on January 29, 1837, the 37-year-old Pushkin expired in agony after being shot in a duel.

Such is our national Pushkin cult that the details of his final days make every Russian eye well up. But by the time our young tour guide was recounting Alexander Sergeyevich’s very last hours, my usually reserved mother wasn’t just shedding a tear. No, she sobbed and she wailed—like a pagan Slav at a funeral. The guide broke down herself, and as if on cue, the whole group joined in. Uzbeks with gold teeth, collective farmworkers, literary old ladies—they all began weeping in Pushkin’s airy, book-filled study. I don’t know why Mother then decided to announce that in fact she was crying because we (Jews) were emigrating from Russia. I can still see the disgust on people’s faces as they fled the building. She might as well have said we were lepers. For the rest of the trip, I just sulked.

Now, almost 30 years later, back in the city once more called St. Petersburg, I’m sobbing myself—by the communal apartments where the great 20th-century poet Anna Akhmatova lived during Stalin’s terrors. Maybe it’s the sight of the little bronze ashtray in which Akhmatova furtively burned the manuscript pages of Requiem, her unbearably tragic poem dedicated to the victims of purges. Or perhaps, as the rain pours, the brutality of the culture that murdered and tormented its writers finally comes down on my boyfriend, Barry, and me with full force. Russia, the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam once declared, was the only country in the world where a poem could get you killed. To tour St. Petersburg’s literary shrines, as we’ve set out to do, is to visit stations of heartbreak.

Modern Russian poetry and prose were born here, in this European-style capital founded by Peter the Great in 1703 in chill Baltic swamplands upon the bones of serfs who perished constructing it. St. Petersburg’s sheer newness, its artificiality (the world’s most abstract and premeditated city, said Dostoyevsky), its stony geometry, not to mention the marriage of brutality and grandeur that marked its inception, have haunted the Russian literary imagination since, well, Pushkin. St. Petersburg’s cobblestones and canals are so entwined with the city’s literary mythology that, in the words of Joseph Brodsky, “you can’t distinguish the fictional from the real.

Which is why, before shedding tears for Akhmatova, I stand beside the hulking statue of the great Peter on horseback and lecture Barry on the fundamental importance of our national poet. Grandeur versus squalor and tyrants versus superfluous men. The ur-Russian leitmotifs of doom, death, and revenge. Pushkin set out all these classic St. Petersburg tropes for all time in his late narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, in which this very statue breaks loose and chases a poor, mad clerk through city streets.

“I’m going mad, too, with all your Pushkin, Pushkin already!” Barry says, as I drag him past pastel-colored facades and along stately embankments toward the poet’s apartment.

“How dare you!” I retort. I guess Russia’s Pushkin idolatry can seem pretty baffling to a foreigner. But Pushkin is our Byron and our Beatles rolled into one. Scratch that: Pushkin is our everything, as another poet declared. We love the vitality of his poems and prose, the way he flung open the treasury of the Russian language to us when our educated classes used only French. Even more, we adore Pushkin the man, who gambled and womanized while tossing off the luminous verses that can deliver a profound meditation on death and an ironic discourse on dandyism—all in one stanza. “He just gives Russians a great image of themselves—and, man, they need it,” Barry declares as we reach the museum on Moika Canal. He’s right, but I glare at him anyway.