Authors

Daria SINICHKINA¹;  ¹ Faculté des Lettres Sorbonne Université, France

Discussion

After being elaborated simultaneously by representatives of political power and the poets themselves during the 18^th century, the definition of the poet’s public role became part of a broader discourse on Russian literature in the first half of the 19^th century, in which writers, poets and literary critics alike participated with great enthusiasm. Pushkin’s death in 1837 brought forth a new element that would prove crucial to the further reflection on Russian literature. His tragic death in duel initiated a new tradition of literary funeral practices that stem from the popular love the poet was the subject of: not only did his funeral attract a massive crowd, but his funeral masks were sold in libraries, and five post mortem portraits were drawn by close friends, some of which were available for sale. At the same time, his literary reputation, in which his death plays a major role, would become a stepping stone for the creation of the classical canon later on. Indeed, the famous inauguration of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in Moscow in 1880 was a turning point in the “classics industry” (Abram Reitblat, Marcus Levitt), as the life-size statue celebrated the “eternal” quality of his works. Actually, by the end of the century, both official recognition and more democratic memorial practices (like deathbed portraits distributed to a very large audience in the cases of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy) participate in consolidating writer’s celebrity and saint-like worship. Alongside these practices, the writer’s grave also becomes the center of artistic and social attention, starting in the 1860’s. In order to add to the existing studies on literary reputations of Russian 19^th century writers, I would like to propose a detailed analysis of these “literary” funeral practices, concentrating on the writer’s graves, their coexistence with the space of the living and their correspondence with the landscape, sometimes natural, sometimes urban. What cultural space do writer’s graves occupy? What is their relationship to monuments erected to writers and poets all through Russia in the 19^th century? By mapping this specific funeral network and by interrogating the interaction between the writer’s graves and their visual representations in the 1860’s art journal Russkiy Khudozhestvennyi Listok, I would like to argue that the burial spot of a writer transforms a natural landscape into a cultural one by “infusing it with literature”. On the one hand, the “open-air museum” that the writer’s grave often becomes participate in the institutionalized writer’s cult. But writer’s graves and sometimes whole cemeteries also function as cultural and political counter-spaces, since writer’s deaths often result from the opposition to the state. This study would allow me to add a new meaning to the definition of literature in 19^th century R