ABSTRACT
Authorial attitudes and allegiances, which are trumpeted forth in both standard Soviet fiction and the exposé branch of glasnost literature, are challengingly elusive in alternative prose. Ideology and social relevance, the hallmarks of socialist realism, remain the imperatives of Soviet literature, albeit reoriented in accordance with the devaluation of former truths and truisms and the concomitant valorization of erstwhile heterodoxy. The historical dimension of "alternative" literature involves transforming utterance into quotation. However innovative and unconventional Tblstaia and other representatives of "alternative" literature may be, they nonetheless subscribe to a mainstream cultural myth: That of Pushkin as supreme poet. As Henry James noted, "it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature," and freedom from political and cultural constraints offers no artistic guarantees. Andrei Bitov presupposes a reader with a recall of the span of Russian literature, whether in his intertextualized novel Pushkin House or in the superb story that could function as its epilogue, "Pushkin's Photograph."
