The art and ideology of commemorating Aleksandr Pushkin has by now become a field in its own right, to which Jonathan Brooks Platt's book makes a valuable contribution. Unlike most of his predecessors, Platt's approach is theoretical rather than historical. Platt sees the massive 1937 celebration of the 100th anniversary of Pushkin's death as an event inherently paradoxical in its temporality: “while the Soviet capital of Moscow was being reconstructed to reflect the approaching glory of communism, the newspapers proudly displayed an aristocrat walking the cobbled streets of tsarist Petersburg in a top hat” (5). Here, the glorified future co-existed with the presumably-wretched past within the “total present” (12). To untangle this paradox, Platt employs the notion of “chronotopic hybridity,” a trade-off between two diametrically opposed chronotopic categories: monumentalism and eschatology. “Monumentalist chronotopes … tend more naturally toward an orientation on tradition and continuity, while [eschatological ones] valorize novelty and revolt” (19). None can fully achieve its goal in the “conceptual conundrum of modernity” (21); as a result, a chronotopic hybridity emerged that made the colossal jubilee possible.
This theoretical framework is employed consistently throughout the six chapters of the book: in the series of insightful close readings, Platt walks us through every possible contribution to the Pushkin celebration: the (amusing and frightening) innovations in the school curriculum, critical and scholarly works, visual art, literature, film, and drama, finding almost everywhere the same complex mix of eschatology and monumentalism. In the Conclusion, Platt discusses the legacy of the jubilee as it relates to chronotopic hybridity and shows its relative lack of success: artists and writers tended to either present absurd and naïve “makeshift assemblages of different elements” (278) in lieu of engaging with chronotopic hybridity in a meaningful way, or “obviate the central political questions of the day and reject the impulse to chronotopic hybridity” (279), as do both Viktor Vinogradov in his monumental Pushkin's Language and Iurii Tynianov in his unfinished novel Pushkin, “the most enduring works left by the jubilee” (279).
One wonders if it was their refusal to succumb to chronotopic hybridity that make Vinogradov's and Tynianov's works enduring. Neither of the two engaged with the question Platt posits as self-evident when one deals with the past: why is the past relevant today? Nor did their colleague Iulian Oksman, sentenced to five years in 1936 (plus another five on a separate charge in 1941) for hampering the work on the Pushkin academic edition and thus obstructing the jubilee celebration. Rather than rushing to meet the anniversary deadline, Oksman kept doing what he was best at: a meticulous study of Pushkin's manuscripts and published works needed for the edition's critical apparatus. Oksman's arrest was not the first sign of trouble for the edition: the pilot volume (probnyi tom) published in 1935 with excellent and extensive notes by leading scholars caused, as the legend goes, Stalin's sarcastic remark: “Whom do we publish: Pushkin or the Pushkinists?” As a result of such brutal intrusions on the part of the 1930s “today,” the edition we still use in our academic work came out crippled, with many questionable textological decisions and no explanatory notes, despite the twelve years it took the seventeen volumes to appear in print.
A less than delicate imposition of the “total present” into the past and the future was, no question, one of the main features of Stalinist culture. The barbarity of Stalin's Pushkin policies aside, this imposition simply didn't work with Pushkin. As Platt shows, the only way of implanting the Soviet present into Pushkin were awkward attempts to have him walk around the Soviet land and admire the Pravda-celebrated achievements in lame iambic tetrameters. Why? In the final note of his Introduction, Platt explains that he is not going to analyze the begging connection between the 1937 Pushkin celebration and the Great Purge “in great detail, as I believe it is peripheral to the actual content of the celebration” (25). In times like those, however, how can one tell the peripheral from the central? Is it conceivable that the nagging thought constantly present at the periphery of everyone's mind—if I get it wrong, will they arrest me?—never affected the creative imagination (or lack thereof) of the artists and writers portrayed in Platt's book? Then, the question left to us is this: when looking at the cultural output of the 1930s, can we afford to leave aside the barbarity of Stalin's policies?
Todays come and go; Pushkin stays. Despite all the damage of the jubilee, Pushkin survived. The 1937 jubilee poster used on the cover of Platt's book shows smiling Soviet citizens parading with flowers, portraits of their leaders (Stalin's head), and the giant book-models displaying the names of the beloved authors: Pushkin, Maksim Gor΄kii, Vladimir Maiakovskii. One cannot help noticing: of the three, Pushkin is the only one who came out alive from the debilitating Stalinist deification and whose name, when used in speech, continues to refer to poems and stories, not only to subway stations. Presently, two new Pushkin editions are in the works, slowly but surely. Both have extensive and excellent notes.
