‘It is unseemly to be famous’: Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and the melodramatic dynamics of the myth of the Russian poet in Russia and the West

Abstract

Russian literary celebrity of the Soviet era is conditioned by specific factors that challenge key assumptions in scholarship focused on western culture. These factors (which include stringent censorship, doctrinaire cultural policy, and samizdat) and the problems they pose in relation to literary celebrity are explored here through an examination of the careers of poets Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and Boris Pasternak (1890–1960). Both poets experienced popular adulation, but were also subject to official anathematisation that conferred notoriety. Political repression rendered them crucial role models for the Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia, engendering hagiographic representations based on their own self-fashioning in both Russia and the West, against the background of Cold War politics. Akhmatova’s melodramatic self-presentation has recently formed the basis for attempts to challenge her cultural authority, considered here in relation to gender and the paradoxical notion of posthumous celebrity. Finally, the cases of Akhmatova and Pasternak offer a useful prism for considering literary fame in relation to neo-Darwinist meme theory, because they illustrate the extent to which making an impact on public consciousness involves insistent repetition of culturally ingrained, recognisable patterns and models of authorship and fame. Overall, this article demonstrates that apprehension of the specificities of Soviet literary culture makes a significant contribution to understanding literary fame and celebrity more broadly.