The Soviet Pushkin: Pushkin's Substratum of Aleksey N. Tolstoy's Self-Mythmaking of the 1930s

The aim of this article is to review Aleksey N. Tolstoy's self-projections on the figure of Pushkin, seen as the most important classic author in the USSR during the 1930s. The material for the study was the writer's journalism and program speeches - it was in them that he most actively appealed to the Pushkin myth. Such appeals allowed Tolstoy to assert his special status in the Soviet literary hierarchy. In his articles and public speeches, the writer actually declared himself the heir of Pushkin, since both, each in his own era, created a “new literary language” based on historical documents. The category of language was important since the discussion about it became one of the key ones in determining the main aesthetic features of the emerging socialist realism. Pushkin, relying on folk speech, created a new “living” literary language opposing the “academic” elegant phrase of nobility (works by Turgenev, in Tolstoy's opinion, later became the peak of this style). Tolstoy, in turn, also saw his own merit in the discovery of a “new” language - the language of Soviet literature in his case. According to Tolstoy, both Pushkin and himself, relied on historical documents that reflected “authentic common people's” language in the process of creation. When writing, e.g., The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin used documents about Pugachev's Rebellion; while Tolstoy, creating Peter the Great, employed torture protocols of Peter's era, the so-called “Slovo i Delo”. As a result, the succession scheme was built in the following way: “common people's language” with almost a thousand years of history - Pushkin (the creator of a “new” literary language based on common people's language) - Tolstoy (the author who modernized these traditions and created a normative Soviet literary language based on them). These rhetorical techniques allowed the Comrade Count to increase his status in the Soviet literary hierarchy. On the one hand, he used the symbolic potential inherent in the Pushkin myth (the culmination of the poet's canonization was the commemoration of 1937); on the other hand, the figure of Pushkin, in relation to whom the word “great” was used, was constantly projected on Stalin. In the end, even despite a biography which was dubious from the point of view of the authorities, by the mid-1930s, Tolstoy, indeed, received the status of the main Soviet author. This situation was evidenced, for example, by a cartoon where the writer alone was depicted on the upper deck of the “steamship of Soviet literature”. Besides, at the funeral of Gorky, Tolstoy, along with Stalin, carried the coffin of the “proletarian writer”, as if occupying the “empty” place after the death of his predecessor. The important role in obtaining this status was played by Tolstoy's regular and consistent efforts to create his own writer's reputation based on the figure of Pushkin.