In her recent book, Alexandra Smith aims to bind Pushkin and his work more closely to the age of modernism. Many other scholars, including Smith herself in her previous book, The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Work of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994), have explored the ways in which twentieth-century authors and poets drew on Pushkin for inspiration, interacted with Pushkin’s works, and strove to enter into dialogue with the poet. In the present study Smith details the reasons she finds Pushkin to be particularly interesting and important for the twentieth century and how his work opens up in the new creative efforts by his descendents. Thus, although the topic of “Pushkin in the twentieth century” is not new, readers of Montaging Pushkin will find much more. Smith’s knowledge of both Pushkin himself and his twentieth-century admirers is vast, and readers should expect a book that in some ways is about both. She does not simply remind us   about Pushkin’s era in order to paint a backdrop for her true interest; instead, she explores the two eras with a voice that is both well-informed and perceptive.

The main argument of the book, laid out in an extensive introduction, is that manifestations of montage thinking in Pushkin make him a precursor to Russian modernist aesthetics. Smith believes that embedded in Pushkin’s narrative poems and lyrics is a particular “consciousness of counterviolence.” In turn, visions of modernity reproduced and reinforced that consciousness, and twentieth-century poets (such as Annenskii, Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mandel’shtam, Brodsky, etc.) mimicked and improved on Pushkin’s irony and parodic gesturing in their work. Seeing Pushkin as a precursor to Baudelaire, Smith argues that Pushkin’s own parody and burlesque represented a love of modernity and urban space and the desire to enjoy urban spectacle.

Chapter 1, “From Pushkin’s Poetics of Exile to the Concept of Writing as Dwelling,” begins by identifying the age of modernity as characterized by an “orientation toward performance” and thus the reinvention of the self. Organizing the chapter around a detailed discussion of Pushkin’s “To the Sea,” Smith argues that Pushkin’s vision of poetry created a space which she constructs as an “imaginary dwelling.” Through Tsvetaeva and Brodsky’s engagement with exile and with Pushkin, the chapter strives to compare their experiences and poetic outpourings with Pushkin’s own presentation of “private space” as a place where one might escape into the realm of creativity. In the end, the Romantic image of “children of the sea” serves these poets to ground their exile experiences in the past and move them into the future.

Chapter 2, “Pushkin’s Petersburg as Comic Apocalypse,” is devoted to Pushkin’s role in the construction of the Petersburg myth, utilizing both Pushkin’s texts and his effect on twentieth-century poets such as Briusov and Blok. Smith introduces details precisely her idea about Pushkin and montage, arguing through Tynianov that The Bronze Horseman and Eugene Onegin feature elements of visual montage that prefigure twentieth-century film techniques. The “house myth” in Russian culture (van Baak, 1994) also comes into the discussion of The Bronze Horseman and ties in with Smith’s ideas of private versus public space. Here, as in Baudelaire, it helps to consider   Pushkin’s Petersburg as a “theatrical space,” both site of visual engagement and flâneur behavior (“urban spectatorship”) and performance venue, where individual and state representations such as Falconet’s statue of Peter I were “staged” and the richness of the urban cityscape (especially in Moscow as seen in Eugene Onegin0 presented to viewers. In this chapter the twentieth century is represented by Blok, Briusov, and Tynianov, as described above, as well as by Brodsky, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva in her statements about Pushkin, Petersburg, and Peter the Great.

Chapter 3 focuses more directly on the twentieth century as well as on “montage thinking,” Eisenstein’s term for creating “an illusion of spatial and temporal continuity between objects unrelated in reality” (165–66). In this chapter (“20th-century Pushkinian Poetic Responses to Modernity and Urban Spectatorship”) Smith discusses poems that employ this montage principle. She also argues that if montage is traditionally creative editing (in the language of 1920s Russian cinema), the next step is “intellectual montage,” a form of  polyphony. Through a desire to be associated with Pushkin, poets engaged in intellectual montage in creating their poetic responses. Specific poems Smith analyzes include Blok’s “Vozmezdie,” Gippius’s “Peterburg,” Pasternak’s “Vozmozhnost',” Reisner’s “Mednomu vsadniku,” Maiakovskii’s “Posledniaia peterburgskaia skazka,” Khodasevich’s “Iz okna: 1” and “Pereshagni, pereskochi,” and Akhmatova’s Poema bez geroia and Rekviem. Montage construction in these poems and others can be explained by the necessary creative and interpretive activity of the reader/spectator; “what is not told” is filled in by the other interlocutor in poetic/cinematic perception (206).

Chapter 4, “Modernity as Writing: Pushkin Readers and the Pushkin Myth,” argues that while reading is a creative but anonymous act, singular and unique, writing is an act of dwelling, of creating a permanent space for self and others to inhabit. In this final chapter Smith argues that creative reading and rewriting of Pushkin’s texts can and has rebalanced the “one-sided approach to Pushkin’s legacy,” crediting readers as well as text (258). For her examples, Smith relies on émigré poets such as Adamovich, Tsvetaeva, Eisenshtadt, Nabokov, Tyrkova-Williams, and Vera Zubareva, as well as the Leningrad authors of the 1950s and 1960s (Kushner, Bitov, Brodsky, and Ginzburg), to develop the idea of the modernist idle flâneur changing into a picaro, a homeless half-outsider.

As I hope the above chapter summaries demonstrate, Smith’s book Montaging Pushkin is erudite and eclectic, filled with engaged and informed readings of original texts as well as scholarly and theoretical arguments. Its denseness, however, keeps the book from being very readable and makes this reader wish Smith had spread her insights out over several studies. Smith suggests, with help from Heidegger, that “many Russian twentieth-century poems that allude to Pushkin’s texts help uncover a new mode of communication that can loosely be defined as polyphonic lyric” (28). This book, too, is polyphonic, and in that fact lie both its strengths and its weaknesses. Suitable for graduate and undergraduate students and scholars of Russian poetry, culture and history, it includes an extensive (although not all-inclusive) bibliography.

Angela Brintlinger
Ohio State University

Citation:
Brintlinger, Angela. Rev. of Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry, by Alexandra Smith. Pushkin Review 10 (2007): 167 - 69. <http://www.pushkiniana.org/component/content/article/100-vol10reviews/129-brintlinger-review10.html>

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