1This article sets out to explore another disputed nineteenth-century landscape, namely the Russian classical canon, which largely comprises nineteenth-century authors. Although this field is less likely to be familiar to many readers than Western European literature, we believe that shifting our focus in this way allows us to better understand, regardless of context, why the 19th century, the golden age of the literary nation, can be problematic for some people today. In fact, the Russian 19th century and its literature are now regarded in a negative light. They are seen as a fundamental link in the chain of violence leading to the current conflict and the appalling acts of violence that have so far marked it. This is a situation that completely changes the task of teachers and researchers of the Russian 19th century, which until now has been considered the central object of Slavic literary studies, an object imbued with a double aura of literary value and philosophical or ethical relevance.

2By contrast, since 2022, in the West as well as in Ukraine and sometimes also in Russia, the 19th century has found itself in the dock: the first sign that the conflict that began on February 24, 2022, would spread to the cultural sphere was the cancellation or postponement of a series of lectures on Dostoevsky at a university in Milan, just a few days after the invasion. In March 2022, Netflix also canceled the broadcast of its completed mini-series based on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Since then, many intellectuals have sought to implicate the canon by tracing an imperialist continuum between Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov on the one hand and current Russian politics on the other, such as the critic Tetyana Ogarkova and the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko (Yermolenko, 2022, Ogarkova and Ermolenko, 2023, 2024). Others have refuted the ethical potential commonly attributed to Russian literature by re-reading a whole body of fiction traditionally considered humanist: for the Ukrainian philosopher and novelist Oksana Zabuzhko (Zabuzhko, 2022), on the contrary, Ivan Turgenev's short story “Mumu” (1854), in which a deaf-mute farmhand is forced by his masters to drown the only being he loves, a small dog, no longer reads as a plea to take into account the tragic fate of serfs deprived of their freedom, but rather as an illustration of blind submission that carries out the most brutal acts without flinching and on command; even Tolstoy, an apostle of non-violence, one of the first Russian anti-militarists and vegetarians, is no exception: his phrase “there are no guilty people in the world” seems to be an invitation to systematically forgive executioners while trampling on the plight of their unfortunate victims (the title of Zaboujko's article echoes Tolstoy's phrase, but in the form of a question). In the same vein, it is worth noting that the great writer's great-grandson, Pyotr Tolstoy, sits in the Russian parliament, where he regularly denies Ukraine's right to exist as an independent state. In this vast movement of protest and revision, we intend to focus on a single figure, who is both the most widespread and the most representative: Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era.

“Down with Pushkin!” or Ukraine at war with Russian literature

3Sure enough, the day after the start of the full-scale war in 2022, statues of Pushkin were damaged or dismantled across Ukraine, with the total number now standing at around 40. This movement has been dubbed “Pushkinopad,” in reference to the similar phenomenon known as “Leninopad,” which targeted statues of Lenin in 2015, the year the law on de-Sovietization of Ukrainian territory was passed, which had already been adopted in the context of the war with the neighboring country (Colas, 2023). Pushkinopad is the culmination of a vast movement that consists of erasing traces of Russian culture from public spaces, for example by renaming certain streets or buildings, and marginalizing it in private settings: a café in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, located on the formerly named Pushkin Street, invites its customers to bring in Russian classics from their personal libraries to be pulped, with the promise that the money raised will be reinvested in the war effort against the invader. As a bonus, customers who take part in the initiative receive a discount on their hot drinks (The Eastern Herald, 2023).

4There are three characteristics that stand out about Pouchkinopad: first, it is a recent thing—between 2014 and 2022, when Russia was already fighting a war and illegally taking over parts of Ukraine, the press only found one other example, a bust of Pushkin dismantled in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv in 2017 and later found in a garage (suggesting that it was more likely a theft with financial motives; Pinkham 2019, p. 280). Similarly, before 2022, Ukrainian writer and rock star Serhiy Zhadan used to post selfies in front of every statue of Pushkin he came across in Ukraine or abroad: since 2022, he has stopped doing so and has deleted all such photos from his Instagram account. The figure of Pushkin therefore stirs up a very sudden, hostile reaction, symptomatic of our non-linear experience of history, marked by jolts and spasms: in the same way that Péguy says that an event can “become historical” (Péguy, 1988, p. 1298), here we have an author who falls unexpectedly, without warning. The second characteristic is that this rejection is specific to Ukraine: in 2017, for example, we saw a completely symmetrical resurgence of Pushkin in Uzbekistan. The unfortunate Russian opposition candidate Alexei Navalny regretted on a TV show that no one outside Russia knew who Pushkin was, citing Uzbekistan as an obvious example of this decadence. This led to a viral flood of videos on social media of irate Uzbeks reciting Pushkin’s poems from memory (BBC, 2017). Finally, the third characteristic is that Pouchkinopad became public policy in Ukraine in May 3, 2023 when a law stipulated that “images, monuments, memorial artifacts, or inscriptions dedicated to individuals who have publicly (particularly in literary or artistic form) supported, glorified, or justified Russian imperial policy” must be removed from public spaces (Sukovata, 2022). As far as we are aware, there is no other legal measure that so radically transforms the relationship with literature, the role assigned to it, and therefore the ways in which it is interpreted: the aim is not to attack the symbol but the man himself, to impose an ideological stance on the writer that devalues his literary works, to turn a work into a conscious vehicle for politics. Neither the man nor the work can resist; everything is slated for demolition.

5What are we to make of this particularly striking and virulent episode in the culture wars that are raging in our contemporary world? Taking this extreme example as a starting point, we will attempt to highlight the hermeneutic opportunities lurking beneath a phenomenon that usually elicits condemnation and, at first glance, gives us a sense of loss.

The fall of an icon with multiple meanings

6After all, when you see a statue of a writer being toppled, you always feel a sense of loss—especially when it is Pushkin, an author who used the figure of the statue as a way to preserve power beyond death. He was also the first writer to have a statue erected in Russia, in 1880, a privilege previously reserved for princes and military figures. The only other time a monument to Pushkin was attacked was in 1944, when the German army mined the author's grave and threatened to blow it up. This historical parallel obviously adds a dramatic dimension to the Pushkinopad destruction.

7Going further, this suddenly disruptive character of Pushkin can be perceived as a form of impoverishment, particularly in the Slavic context, where the writer was highly valued, while offering a plurality of possible approaches, both collective and personal: Pushkin is an iconic figure in Russian culture (see in particular Pinkham, 2019), in the literal sense, since the Russian term “lik,” used for the face of Christ, was used to unveil his statue in 1880. This makes him the sacred object par excellence: sacred is his face; sacred is his life: one thinks of ultra-philological endeavors like that of Lazare Tchéréïski, who compiled a directory of all the people who ever crossed paths with Pushkin, such as the bourgeois Faddeï Abakoumov, who saw Pushkin once on May 26, 1830, the latter's birthday (Черейский, 1988, p. 9). And sacred are his works: in 1887, between 12 and 18% of books published in Russia were works by Pushkin. (It should be noted that this was the year his works entered the public domain.) The places where Pushkin lived were considered sacred and were turned into museums on the slightest pretext, to the point that in 1985, in his short story “Pushkin's Photograph,” the postmodern novelist Andrei Bitov imagined that humans would have to colonize another planet, as Earth had become an open-air museum dedicated to Pushkin. His voice is also sacred, heard as a collective hallucination by soldiers during the Great Patriotic War or by telephone operators in the USSR at the time of the space race, who thought they could hear Pushkin speaking to them from outer space: his memory is sacred, maintained by hordes of academics (including the author of this article) who, for two centuries have scrutinized his life, work, and cult following, which has become a subject in its own right in Slavic studies: he is the first author to have benefited from a dedicated caste of critics. Sacred too, in theory, are his statues.

8But the striking thing about this cult is that it retains a plurality of meanings, which is precisely what is lost in the current condemnation of the author. It is as if it were a flexible signifier, almost an empty form, and everyone could say “I have my Pushkin” (as Marina Tsvetaeva did): the statue erected in Moscow in 1880 is the first milestone of the “sticky love” (Dmitri Bykov; Batuman, 2023) of the Russian and Soviet authorities for Pushkin; but it was also at the foot of this statue that the dissident movement in the USSR was born, gathering for the first time in December 1965 on Pushkin Square, which became the meeting place for all political opponents wishing to express their disagreement with the authorities. The same duality exists between Pushkin (canonized as the father of Soviet literature) the writer who, despite his aristocratic origins, turned his back on decadent romanticism and took an important turn towards realism, and the Pushkin idolized by the avant-garde protesters of the 1980s, such as the Mitki artists or the poet Dmitri Prigov, who all considered themselves to have emerged from Pushkin's mantle rather than Gogol's (Mihailovic, 2018).

9What we are trying to convey in this mosaic of interpretations is that, traditionally, Pushkin has always spoken to everyone: this has been a recurring theme in Pushkin criticism since Belinsky and Gogol, but it is also quite unusual for an author who has undergone such a thorough process of pantheonization and patrimonialization. The American critic Yuri Slezkine, for example, notes the central role played by references to Pushkin in the assimilation of Jewish populations in the Russian Empire and the USSR, who were for a long time marginalized and ghettoized: drawing on Soviet authors such as Isaac Babel and Samuil Marshak, he shows how knowing Pushkin by heart is an adaptive advantage for young children from these backgrounds – this is what he calls the “Pushkin Street” phenomenon (Slezkine, 2004). The fact that everyone can have their own Pushkin, a personal and private Pushkin, different from the writer or his public meanings, explains a disturbing fact in 19th-century literary history: in 1880, at the unveiling of the famous statue of Pushkin in Moscow, Dostoevsky gave a very famous speech, which was met with wild enthusiasm from the crowd, with lots of shouting, fainting, and outbursts of excitement. However, once Dostoevsky's text was published, it was met with a barrage of criticism. The discrepancy between the reception of the oral and written versions can undoubtedly be explained by the fact that Dostoevsky spoke in front of around 100,000 people gathered for the occasion, with very limited technological resources, and that it is highly likely that each listener heard what they wanted to hear in his inevitably indiscernible speech. At that event, it was literally enough to utter the word “Pushkin” for everyone to get what they wanted, regardless of the objective content of the message (Stewart, 2014).

10However, the modern context is clearly eroding this plurality of possible meanings. The statue of Pushkin seems to be nothing more than a sign that the poet has been granted “knighthood” by the authorities and can no longer be used as a symbol of dissent or divergence. Similarly, “Pushkin Street”, as studied by Yuri Slezkine, has now become an expression used in Ukraine to denounce the presence of Russian culture on the country's current territory: in fact, in 2017, 594 streets in Ukraine were named after Pushkin, just behind Taras Shevchenko and Yuri Gagarin, but well ahead of national authors Lessia Ukrainka and Ivan Franko. A chatbot called @cancel_pushkin_bot has also been created, where you can enter the name of an author and the chatbot will tell you whether you can read them or not, and whether they supported Russian imperialism; as you might guess, few Russian authors pass muster. On the other side, there is the same rigidity that aligns Pushkin with Putin: the writer is used as a tool of war to Russify Ukrainian territory, while Russian critic Anna Narinskaya admits that intellectuals in her country have failed to protect Pushkin from these unambiguous political appropriations and to preserve his other, more liberal meaning (Наринская, 2022).

11This feeling of a reality that suddenly loses its dialogic character also corresponds to the transition from a post-era to a de-era: classical postcolonial studies have identified a diffuse presence of an imperialist imagination in nineteenth-century fiction, even in works that appear to be the most innocuous, such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, in which Edward Said saw the specter of the predation of Antigua (that is mentioned in the novel) contaminating the psyche of a heroine who is well-behaved in every respect but who, de facto, takes over an estate and seizes the wealth of a family, like a good colonizer. The postcolonial paradigm also made fiction economically dependent on the colonial apparatus, without which it could not have flourished in the 19th century (Said, 1994).

12But with Pouchkinopad, Russian literature is literally being toppled from its pedestal, as it is now being presented as intentionally complicit or guilty. “Pushkin is a true imperialist,” as Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, has said (quoted in Higgings, 2023); this position is not unanimous and is opposed to conceptions of culture that make it a realm distinct from the political sphere and which, in various forms, are still widespread in Europe and Russia. However, it remains the most significant challenge, in terms of its scope and the coherence of its discourse, that a 19th-century artist or thinker has faced, it seems to me, since Wagner or Nietzsche after the Second World War, and it raises de facto the specter of Trümmelsprache (a language in ruins) over a writer who has been one of the main subjects of nineteenth-century studies, Slavic studies, comparative literature, and sometimes French literature, through his relationship with Mérimée, for example.

Literary history reflected in its controversies

13In the face of this contemporary development, which has been portrayed as a significant departure from the past, we are confronted with a stark choice: either we stop studying an author deemed a “true imperialist”, as defined by the eminent Ukrainian studies scholar Serhii Plokhy, or we dismiss the desire to burn Pushkin as indicative of, at best, a lack of historical perspective and, at worst, barbarism, disregarding these harsh reinterpretations of the literary canon. Another path may be opened by taking this phenomenon seriously and using it as a prism to reveal an image of the nineteenth century in which literature participated in the construction of the empire. However, this image has been relatively obscured in the shaping of Russian literary history in favor of a retrospective discourse that emphasizes not the collaboration of authors with the authorities, but their aesthetic and moral resistance — sometimes at the cost of their lives — which enables the creation of a teleological history that links the 19th and 20th centuries. Destroying a statue of Pushkin does not necessarily indicate an inability to understand the context of the 19th century; it can also be a means of rediscovering it beyond its traditional interpretations.

14This destruction highlights the implications of the concept of the “literary nation” as used by the literary sociologist Boris Dubin for Russia (Aude, 2020), namely that the Russian Empire could not have been built without writers. Nineteenth-century Russia had to develop a “national cult of its culture” (Leerssen, 2006): first, at the beginning of the century, it was a minor country displaying its claims to autonomy and uniqueness, conveyed through cultural objects; then, it was a multi-ethnic empire whose conquest was complete, but whose unity remained to be demonstrated. While the rest of Europe was gripped by jubilee mania and the cult of writers in the 19th century, Russia was unique in that it was born an empire before it was a nation. It was the role of literature to produce national cohesion. In the West, the great writer symbolizes a nation that is already more or less established, whereas in Russia he is its creator

15Pushkin clearly played the role of a Romantic writer who was naturally inclined to highlight Russia's unique characteristics. However, it was mainly post mortem that he was entrusted with this mission, first through his statue and then through others: in the second half of the 19th century, the phrase “Pushkin is our everything” emerged. This refers not only to an emotional attachment (“Pushkin is everything to us”), but also to the fact that Pushkin acts as a unifying force (“Pushkin is what allows us to be one”). And, if we are to believe Katia Margolis, perhaps Pushkin also represents expansionism, showing that “everything is ours” (Margolis, 2024). Dostoevsky's speech in front of Pushkin's statue in 1880 is fundamental in this regard. It is this speech in particular that was remembered, but many other writers were also invited to give speeches that day. Dostoevsky's speech was a response to one given by Ivan Turgenev the day before. Turgenev is a writer who belongs to the category of “European Russians” (Schönle, Zorin, 2018). He lived in Paris for a long time and was one of the harshest critics of Russian culture, something for which Dostoyevsky never forgave him. For example, he famously declared that Russia had made no contribution to the world after visiting the 1867 Paris Exposition. In his speech on Pushkin, Turgenev gave a scathing critique of the renowned writer, denying him any universality. From a comparative perspective, unlike Italy with Dante or England with Shakespeare, Russia was still waiting for its national poet, said Turgenev, someone who would speak to all Russians. Once again, Russian culture was declared inferior and of little importance. Dostoevsky could not bear this and made Pushkin his champion – a task made all the easier by the fact that Pushkin himself during his lifetime had engaged in a similar polemic on the dignity of Russian culture with the thinker Pyotr Chaadaev. Dostoevsky therefore responded to Turgenev by shifting the perspective: to determine whether Pushkin was a national author, the question was not whether he appealed to everyone, but whether he was recognized everywhere; everyone recognized a distinctive Russian spirit in Pushkin's works, both in Russia and abroad, which meant that he was indeed a national poet, whose work proved the existence of the nation not as a close-knit social community (as Turgenev would have liked) but as a coherent geographical entity (as Dostoevsky wanted), a much more important issue in the dual context of colonial conquest and military setbacks during the Seventh Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878

16In his speech about Pushkin, Dostoevsky placed the writer's statue within the realm of these “invented traditions” that erased the upheavals of history and the geographical uncertainties of the Empire in order to foster a sense of commonality. This invented tradition was subsequently maintained through ritual and repetition — there were jubilees every fifty years — and the Russian Empire was filled with statues of Pushkin. His name was everywhere, adorning streets and buildings. If Pushkin was present, it signified the presence of the Empire and its cultural coherence. For the 1899 jubilee, the last in the Russian Empire, Sophie Pinkham noted a bicycle race in Pushkin's honor, declared as a “competition of all the Russias” (Pinkham, 2019, p. 30). In 1937, during the first Soviet jubilee which coincided with Stalin's return to a policy of nationalities similar to that of the Russian Empire, Pushkin became a unifying figure for all the peoples of the USSR. Where Pushkin was present, a diverse empire was transformed into a unified whole. Once again, the author ensured geographical continuity and thus a Russocentric projection. Demolishing these statues today is a perfectly symmetrical gesture, providing yet another way of performing history and ensuring national continuity by erasing traces of the Russian Empire. It is also a good starting point for tracing the history of Pushkin statues, highlighting the relationship between writers and the nation in the nineteenth century. It is this process of patrimonialization that establishes literature as a political object, and the “sticky love” that the authorities have for writers still resonates today.

Destruction as a counterpoint: rehabilitating an alternative perspective

17But, as we have said, behind the symbolism, lurking on the sidelines of Pouchkinopad, is the assertion that "Pushkin is a true imperialist": it is therefore Pushkin himself who is under attack. At first glance, this statement may seem naive and typical of reductive reading, unsupported by context and viewed through the prism of current events, especially for an author whose entire oeuvre is a declaration of the Romantic mage's independence from earthly authorities, especially political ones. In fact, it finds a striking parallel in the 19th century itself in the interpretation of another foreigner looking at Russian literature from the outside, in this case Adam Mickiewicz, who, in his lecture on the Slavs at the Collège de France, stressed that the main characteristic of this literature, which distinguished it from all other European romanticism, was that Russia literature “pushes the power-holders” (Mickiewicz, 1849, p. 26). Mickiewicz was clearly thinking of Pushkin when he remarked that the typical Russian writer was one who could perfectly emulate Western authors and pass himself off as a cosmopolitan, but who, when it came to national events, reverted to being a staunch and outspoken Russian - an obvious reference to Pushkin, who, in his younger years, was dubbed the “Russian Byron”, but who took up the cudgels for the Russian suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830, not only writing a jeeringly scolding poem entitled “To the Slanderers of Russia”, but also organizing an entire poetic tract in defense of Russian foreign policy, when the whole of Europe condemned its extreme violence.

18This type of reading is at odds with a history of Russian literature constructed from within, which places greater emphasis on the questioning of power, leading to heightened ethical demands: Russian literature would be defined by its exploration of the trauma of the onward march of modernization imposed on the community and individuals by Peter the Great in the 18th century, which naturally led it to explore the great philosophical questions that would become its hallmark when it became an export product in Europe and around the world from 1880 onwards. The success of this interpretation is well known, and led Edward Said to argue that Russian literature did not share the same disparaging Orientalist perspective as the contemporary literature of the colonizing countries. This benevolent interpretation stumbles, however, when it comes to Pushkin, who is said to have invented the Caucasus for nineteenth-century readers, but who actually depicted it as a colonized territory, anachronistically describing it as already conquered by the Russian army: literature is clearly at the forefront of imperial politics here. Pushkin is obviously not alone in this situation, which reflects less a personal political commitment than a Romantic way of understanding literature specific to Russia, where literature finds its worth in the fact that, to use Mickiewicz's phrase, it pushes the power-holders. But this shows once again that this image of the writer as an imperialist allows us to paint a different picture of Russian literature, albeit a marginal one, since it was produced from the outside, but one that has well and truly existed since the nineteenth century. While not every reception is fully in line with the potential of a literary text, there can be poor receptions and misunderstandings of works, especially in a transnational context. This reception has the merit of revealing a literary specificty of the period that has been gradually erased by the subsequent construction of the canon. It also questions the ease with which it has been appropriated by critics, including Western critics, who have been quick to accept the idea that Russian literature is inherently ethical and that its authors are essentially creators of opposition.

19Once again, taking into account the readings generated by Pouchkinopad gives us a three-dimensional image of literary history, a stereoscopic image in the truest sense of the word: we are reminded of the statue unveiled in 1880, which happens to bear two quotations from the poet on opposite sides of the pedestal - the first, the most famous, which enshrines him as a cultural hero who “sang of freedom in the age of tyranny”, and the second, on the other side, in which Pushkin evokes the spread of his poetry throughout the Empire, where every ethnic group will be able to chant it in their own language, but will de facto speak only of him, following an imperialist and Russocentric logic. In fact, the phrase “Pushkin is a true imperialist” does not erase the traditional view of Russian literature, but it can bring it into contrast, showing both sides of this statue at the same time: Pushkin as the first writer of opposition and, as a counterpoint, Pushkin as the first defender of imperial policy, which in turn uses him as an instrument for homogenizing the territory. It restores the possibility of taking an outside, transnational view of a perspective that has been constructed from within and is, to say the least, invasive: if Pushkin is an icon, he, like all Russian icons, obeys a system of inverted perspective, in which the object represented in the icon comes toward you as if you were the vanishing point and the image has a life of its own that imposes itself on you; the way we see it today contrasts this overwhelming life of the object with an inverse dynamic that allows us to view objects from a distance.

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20Finally, it is worth saying a few words about the heuristic relevance of thinking about literary objects from the perspective of the present, as demonstrated by the example of Pushkin's statues. First, the destruction of Pushkin's statues has undeniable pedagogical potential: there is hardly a better example to explain to students the relationship between literature and politics, and to show how literary history is not constructed in an objective and virtue-laden manner, but according to power structures. There is also theoretical potential, since we can see that there is no particular point in presenting this destruction as a historical error or a lack of perspective, which would obviate the need for a necessary recontextualization: in this respect, the example of Pushkin's statues shows that cancel culture (which generally refers to the criticism of attempts to re-examine figures or objects from the past through the prism of contemporary values) is also a culture - it allows us to construct a genealogy that is not simply a history in reverse or a “history of the present” but a critical history of the values of our time, in a context where new values are emerging. Finally, there is a methodological potential: this case reveals a way out of the current trap of Russian studies, which are torn between, on the one hand, the temptation to look elsewhere, to explore the post-imperial or post-Soviet sphere in order to continue studying its traces (which can be accused of neocolonialism), and, on the other, the risk of continuing to view Russia through a prism in which the “methodological nationalism” of our disciplines, i.e. their tendency to study their subject within national borders without questioning or relativizing them, may ultimately consolidate a nationalist discourse on literature (for example, that of ethical superiority, a literary variant of Russian exceptionalism). Pouchkinopad, on the other hand, offers a counterpoint, an opportunity to look elsewhere, starting from the challenges to the Russian canon, in order to reintroduce a sense of play and perspectivism into a discourse on Russian literature that is generally very Russocentric