Pushkin, Part I

Half Milord, half middle class,
Half wise man and half jackass,
Half rogue, but it may come to pass
He’ll become a whole at last.

- Epigram on Governor-General Vorontsov, 1824
[the silly translation is mine]

A weird thing happened when I sat down to start writing about Pushkin. I got stuck. This is particularly weird, because when I wrote about Lermontov two weeks ago I had absolutely no problem referring to Pushkin every five minutes. Clearly I don’t have any actual, deep-rooted aversion to talking about Pushkin.

The idea of sitting down and writing an entire piece on Pushkin, though, is terrifying. Why? Well, for one thing there’s the scale of it all. Pushkin had a short life (1799-1837) but a vast output. He published his first poem at 14 and kept on going. The man simply dripped words. The (formerly) standard Russian edition of his complete works runs to 10 volumes, and that’s with censorship. (Oh, yes, the censorship problem: my own copies of Pushkin are second-hand and published before it became acceptable to include the rude bits, so they are full of rows and rows of bashful little dots.) Then there’s the variety of Pushkin’s output: verse, epic poems, dramas, fables, short stories, novellas, letters, essays, epigrams, a novel and even history. Then there’s the formidable reputation he has within Russia; writing a piece “about Pushkin” is roughly equivalent to writing a piece “about Shakespeare”. Add to that the further complication of my deep and wide and burning love for Pushkin and you can perhaps see why writing a simple piece has become such a vast ordeal.

In view of this, I have agreed with my fellow foxes that Pushkin will be allocated several slots – not consecutive ones, but distributed over the next few months – so that I can provide at least some insight into different aspects of his work and life. In the meantime, today I want to present a personal response to this remarkable author.

The first thing of Pushkin’s I ever read was a Penguin Classics collection of his short stories. I was perhaps seventeen at the time, and I don’t think I took much away from the experience; the strongest impression was made by the brief biography of the translator, Rosemary Edmonds, who seemed inexpressibly cool (five languages including Old Church Slavonic, degrees from universities in three countries, former translator to General De Gaulle). I knew I liked Pushkin though. Or perhaps it was more that I thought it would be a good, individual sort of thing to do, liking Pushkin, so I set about liking him. I kept reading whatever I could find of his in translation, and I liked it more and more. This may have influenced my otherwise entirely random decision to study Russian at University.

I never have regretted that random decision. My first year was a revelation. After a term of almost nothing but Russian grammar (I nearly died), we were given The Queen of Spades to read in Russian, and then the set of short plays called Little Tragedies. I kept reading Pushkin, and finding ever more fascinating things. Pushkin was compelling, and almost as compelling were people’s responses to Pushkin. Every Russian author or cultural figure has some kind of relationship to Pushkin, often a strong one. From the sycophantic (Gogol), to the admirative (Lermontov), to the scholarly (Akhmatova) to the outright antipathetic (Mayakovsky, who wanted to “throw Pushkin from the steamboat of modernity”), these relationships permeate all Russian literature. And no wonder, because it was Pushkin who first made colloquial Russian a literary language, and who deemed “ordinary” Russian themes to be worthy subject material. The creation, some time later, of a uniquely Russian opera was also heavily rendolent of Pushkin. Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka and Cui all wrote major works based on Pushkin’s texts. You can’t escape Pushkin, even if you want to. Luckily, I did not want to, and I still don’t.

What makes Pushkin so fascinating, his primacy aside? I suspect there are as many answers to that question as there are readers of Pushkin. But I can give you my answer.

As a man, Pushkin appears dissolute, passionate, well-meaning. He was a dilettante, a social butterfly; he was politically engaged, but fought with words rather than deeds, and was accordingly strictly censored; many works never saw publication in his lifetime. According to some sources, it was his utter lack of discretion that kept him from the inner circles of the movements he espoused. Pushkin loved gossip and affairs and the theatre. He fought, or tried to fight, a ridiculous number of duels before he finally died in one he himself had instigated in response to a deliberate campaign of provocation at Court. The Pushkin we see in his letters and in the accounts of his contemporaries is endearing, if temperamental. He is also frequently naughty, and sometimes rather silly. The naughtiness has become more evident in recent years with revised publications including previously censored material, and it enrages some, but as naughtiness goes it’s quite elegant. Above all, Pushkin is a very intelligent man, although his common sense is sometimes in question.

As an author, however, Pushkin’s complexity far surpasses even this fairly intricate picture. He has an extraordinary quality of empathy that enables him to assume a wide variety of characters and voices. There is nothing of the puppet in Pushkin’s characters. The same man who wrote the epigram at the head of this piece also wrote Boris Godunov’s soliloquy, in which the infanticidal tsar bemoans his guilt:

But if [in your soul] there is one stain/ A single, accidental one… Your soul catches fire and your heart fills with poison/ The reproach beats in your ears like a hammer/ And you feel sick, and dizzy/ And the bloody child is before your eyes…

And the poet Lenskii’s death scene in Evgenii Onegin, with its fine parody of Romantic verse (of which I feel I really ought to attempt a rhyming translation):

And he is gone. The poet in bloom/ Has met his end untimely soon!/ The storm is quiet, the wondrous flower/ Has faded with the light of day/ The altar flame has died away!

And the scene in the historical novel The Captain’s Daughter in which the kindly Captain Mironov, who has been like a father to the young officer protagonist, tortures an elderly Bashkir who has come with a communique from the rebels:

“Well then,” said the captain, “I’ll make you talk! Boys, take off that stupid furry coat of his and give his back a thrashing. Good and hard, now, Iulai!”
The two veterans began to strip the Bashkir. The unfortunate man looked worried. He looked all around him, like an animal captured by children. When one of the veterans took his arms and placed them around his own neck, lifting the old man onto his shoulders, and Iulai took the whip and began to swing it – then the Bashkir groaned in a weak, pleading voice and, throwing back his head, opened his mouth in which we saw a short stump in place of a tongue.

The Captain’s Daughter highlights another striking characteristic in Pushkin’s work, a characteristic which is arguably very modern. This novel, set during the Pugachev uprising in the reign of Catherine the Great, does not have a clear cut moral scheme. The protagonist, Grinev, is sympathetic enough, but rather weak and with definite foibles; Captain Mironov, for all his kindness, is quite capable of torture; and as for the “enemy” himself, the runaway Cossack and Pretender Emelian Pugachev, he is hardly a painted devil. Through Grinev’s eyes, we see how such a man could inspire not only fear, but respect; sometimes it even seems that he has a more rigid code of ethics than anyone. Above all, Pushkin himself keeps out of it. There is no authorial voice. There is no didacticism at work here. There is no one moral to the story.

His barnstorming political poetry aside, Pushkin often paints a complex, challenging moral picture. Who is the hero of Evgenii Onegin: is it Onegin himself, who may be interesting and romantic and complicated, but who kills his best friend in a duel, breaks the heart of a young girl, then suffers when she marries another? Or is it Lenskii, who is by all accounts well-meaning, but shallow and pretentious? And what about Boris Godunov? Is there a clear good-evil dichotomy here? Boris has acceded to the throne by killing a young boy, the son of Ivan the Terrible. But while he sweats and hallucinates and finally dies under the burden of his own guilt, a young monk achieves power by claiming to be the dead tsarevich, and his violent and successful assault on the throne means death for Boris’ own wife and children. Meanwhile, the people go on suffering, the usual trials of peasant life exacerbated by famines and fires, war and repression. And when it is all over and the Pretender is proclaimed Tsar, does Pushkin show us scenes of jubilation or anger? No, just this stage direction:

The people are silent.

I love Pushkin.

The Queen of Spades and Other Stories translated by Rosemary Edmonds, Penguin Classics, paperback 320 pp., ISBN-13 978-0140441192