THE NEW AGE--PUSHKIN
The value of Russian literature, its peculiar and unique message to the
world, would not be sensibly diminished, had everything it produced
from the twelfth to the beginning of the nineteenth century perished,
with the exception of _The Raid of Prince Igor_. With the beginning of
the nineteenth century, and the accession of Alexander I, the New Age
began, and the real dawn of Russian literature broke. It was soon to be
followed by a glorious sunrise. The literature which sprang up now and
later, was profoundly affected by public events; and public events
during this epoch were intimately linked with the events which were
happening in Western Europe. It was the epoch of the Napoleonic wars,
and Russia played a vital part in that drama. Public opinion, after
enthusiasm had been roused by the deeds of Suvorov, was exasperated
and humiliated by Napoleon's subsequent victories over Russian arms.
But when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, a wave of patriotism swept
over the country, and the struggle resulted in an increased sense of
unity and nationality. Russia emerged stronger and more solid from the
struggle. As far as foreign affairs were concerned, the Emperor
Alexander I--on whom everything depended--played his national part
well, and he fitly embodied the patriotic movement of the day. At the
beginning of his reign he raised great hopes of internal reform which
were never fulfilled. He was a dreamer of dreams born out of his due
time; a pupil of La Harpe, the Swiss Jacobin, who instilled into him
aspirations towards liberty, truth and humanity, which throughout
remained his ideals, but which were too vague to lead to anything
practical or definite. His reign was thus a series of more or less
undefined and fitful struggles to put the crooked straight. He desired
to give Russia a constitution, but the attempts he made to do so proved
fruitless; and towards the end of his life he is said to have been
considerably influenced by Metternich. It is at any rate a fact that
during these years reaction once more triumphed.
Nevertheless windows had been opened which could not be shut, and the
light which had streamed in produced some remarkable fruits.
When Alexander I came to the throne, the immediate effect of his
accession was the ungagging of literature, and the first writer of
importance to take advantage of this new state of things was KARAMZIN
(1726-1826). In 1802 he started a new review called the _Messenger of
Europe_. This was not his _début_. In the reign of Catherine, Karamzin
had been brought to Moscow from the provinces, and initiated into
German and English literature. In 1789-90 he travelled abroad and
visited Switzerland, London and Paris. On his return, he published his
impressions in the shape of "Letters of a Russian Traveller" in the
_Moscow Journal_, which he founded himself. His ideals were
republican; he was an enthusiastic admirer of England and the Swiss,
and the reforms of Peter the Great. But his importance in Russian
literature lies in his being the first Russian to write unstudied,
simple and natural prose, Russian as spoken. He published two
sentimental stories in his _Journal_, but the reign of Catherine II
which now came to an end (1796) was followed by a period of
unmitigated censorship, which lasted throughout the reign of the
Emperor Paul, until Alexander I came to the throne. The new review
which Karamzin then started differed radically from all preceding
Russian reviews in that it dealt with politics and made _belles
lettres_ and criticism a permanent feature. As soon as Karamzin had
put this review on a firm basis, he devoted himself to historical
research, and the fruit of his work in this field was his _History of
the Russian Dominion_, in twelve volumes; eight published in 1816, the
rest in 1821-1826. The Russian language was, as has been said, like an
instrument waiting for a great player to play on it, and to make use
of all its possibilities. Karamzin accomplished this, in the domain of
prose. He spoke to the Russian heart by speaking Russian, pure and
unmarred by stilted and alien conventionalisms.
The publication of Karamzin's history was epoch-making. In the first
place, the success of the work was overwhelming. It was the first
time in Russian history that a prose work had enjoyed so immense a
success. Not only were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian language
revealed to the Russians in the style, but the subject-matter came as
a surprise. Karamzin, as Pushkin put it, revealed Russia to the
Russians, just as Columbus discovered America. He made the dry bones
of history live, he wrote a great and glowing prose epic. His
influence on his contemporaries was enormous. His work received at
once the consecration of a classic, and it inspired Pushkin with his
most important if not his finest achievement in dramatic verse (_Boris
Godunov_).
The first Russian poet of national importance belongs likewise to this
epoch, namely KRYLOV (1769[2]-1844), although he had written a great
deal for the stage in the preceding reigns, and continued to write for
a long time after the death of Alexander I. Krylov is also a Russian
classic, of quite a different kind. The son of an officer of the line,
he started by being a clerk in the provincial magistrature. Many of
his plays were produced with success, though none of them had any
durable qualities. But it was not until 1805 that he found his
vocation which was to write fables. The first of these were published
in 1806 in the _Moscow Journal_; from that time onward he went on
writing fables until he died in 1844.
His early fables were translations from La Fontaine. They imitate La
Fontaine's free versification and they are written in iambics of
varying length. They were at once successful, and he continued to
translate fables from the French, or to adapt from Æsop or other
sources. But as time went on, he began to invent fables of his own;
and out of the two hundred fables which he left at his death, forty
only are inspired by La Fontaine and seven suggested by Æsop: the
remainder are original. Krylov's translations of La Fontaine are not
so much translations as re-creations. He takes the same subject, and
although often following the original in every single incident, he
thinks out each _motif_ for himself and re-creates it, so that his
translations have the same personal stamp and the same originality as
his own inventions.
This is true even when the original is a masterpiece of the highest
order, such as La Fontaine's _Deux Pigeons_. You would think the
opening lines--
"Deux pigeons s'amoient d'amour tendre,
L'un d'eux s'ennuyant au logis
Fut assez fou pour entreprendre
Un voyage en lointain pays"--
were untranslatable; that nothing could be subtracted from them, and
that still less could anything be added; one ray the more, one shade
the less, you would think, would certainly impair their nameless
grace. But what does Krylov do? He re-creates the situation, expanding
La Fontaine's first line into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps
on it the impress of his personality and his nationality. Here is a
literal translation of the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously
trying a third English version.)
"Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother.
Neither would eat nor drink without the other;
Where you see one, the other's surely near,
And every joy they halved and every tear;
They never noticed how the time flew by,
They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh."
This gives the sense of Krylov's poem word for word, except for what
is the most important touch of all in the last line. The trouble is
that Krylov has written six lines which are as untranslatable as La
Fontaine's four; and he has made them as profoundly Russian as La
Fontaine's are French. Nothing could be more Russian than the last
line, which it is impossible to translate; because it should run--
"They were sometimes sad, but they never felt _ennui_"--
literally, "it was never _boring_ to them." The difficulty is that the
word for _boring_ in Russian, _skuchno_, which occurs with the utmost
felicity in contradistinction to _sad_, _grustno_, cannot be rendered
in English in its poetical simplicity. There are no six lines more
tender, musical, wistful, and subtly poetical in the whole of Russian
literature.
Krylov's fables, like La Fontaine's, deal with animals, birds, fishes
and men; the Russian peasant plays a large part in them; often they
are satirical; nearly always they are bubbling with humour. A writer
of fables is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is sometimes to
convey pregnant sense, keen mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled
manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human foibles, or to express
wisdom in the form of wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. But
Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in remaining a poet. It has been
said that his images are conventional and outworn--that is to say, he
uses the machinery of Zephyrs, Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,--and that
his conceptions are antiquated. But what splendid use he makes of this
machinery! When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is a Zephyr blowing,
for instance, as when the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze.
Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse he conveys a picture, and
more than a picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and the Mole, in the
first lines of which he makes you see and hear the eagle and his mate
sweeping to the dreaming wood, and swooping down on to the oak-tree.
Or again, in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, he gives in a
few words the sense of height and space, as if you were looking down
from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over the mountains of the
Caucasus, sees the end of the earth, the rivers meandering in the
plains, the woods, the meadows in all their spring glory, and the
angry Caspian Sea, darkling like the wing of a raven in the distance.
But his greatest triumph, in this respect, is the fable of the Ass and
the Nightingale, in which the verse echoes the very trills of the
nightingale, and renders the stillness and the delighted awe of the
listeners,--the lovers and the shepherd. Again a convention, if you
like, but what a felicitous convention!
The fables are discursive like La Fontaine's, and not brief like
Æsop's; but like La Fontaine, Krylov has the gift of summing up a
situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect by the sudden evocation
of a whole picture in a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable
of the Peasants and the River: the peasants go to complain to the
river of the conduct of the streams which are continually overflowing
and destroying their goods, but when they reach the river, they see
half their goods floating on it. "They looked at each other, and
shaking their heads," says Krylov, "went home." The two words "went
home" in Russian (_poshli domoi_) express their hopelessness more
than pages of rhetoric. This is just one of those terse effects such
as La Fontaine delights in.
Krylov in his youth lived much among the poor, and his language is
peculiarly native, racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the
language of the people and of the peasants, and it abounds in humorous
turns. He is, moreover, always dramatic, and his fables are for this
reason most effective when read aloud or recited. He is dramatic not
only in that part of the fable which is narrative, but in the
prologue, epilogue, or moral--the author's commentary; he adapts
himself to the tone of every separate fable, and becomes himself one
of the _dramatis personæ_. Sometimes his fables deal with political
events--the French Revolution, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the
Congress of Vienna; the education of Alexander I by La Harpe, in the
well-known fable of the Lion who sends his son to be educated by the
Eagle, of whom he consequently learns how to make nests. Sometimes
they deal with internal evils and abuses: the administration of
justice, in fables such as that of the peasant who brings a case
against the sheep and is found guilty by the fox; the censorship is
aimed at in the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing in the cat's
claws; the futility of bureaucratic regulations in the fable of the
sheep who are devoured by their superfluous watchdogs, or in that of
the sheep who are told solemnly and pompously to drag any offending
wolf before the nearest magistrate; or, again, in that of the high
dignitary who is admitted immediately into paradise because on earth
he left his work to be done by his secretaries--for being obviously a
fool, had he done his work himself, the result would have been
disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they deal merely with human
follies and affairs, and the idiosyncrasies of men.
Krylov's fables have that special quality which only permanent
classics possess of appealing to different generations, to people of
every age, kind and class, for different reasons; so that children can
read them simply for the story, and grown-up people for their
philosophy; their style pleases the unlettered by its simplicity, and
is the envy and despair of the artist in its supreme art. Pushkin
calls him "le plus national et le plus populaire de nos poètes" (this
was true in Pushkin's day), and said his fables were read by men of
letters, merchants, men of the world, servants and children. His work
bears the stamp of ageless modernity just as _The Pilgrim's Progress_
or Cicero's letters seem modern. It also has the peculiarly Russian
quality of unexaggerated realism. He sees life as it is, and writes
down what he sees. It is true that although his style is finished and
polished, he only at times reaches the high-water mark of what can be
done with the Russian language: his style, always idiomatic, pregnant
and natural, is sometimes heavy, and even clumsy; but then he never
sets out to be anything more than a fabulist. In this he is supremely
successful, and since at the same time he gives us snatches of
exquisite poetry, the greater the praise to him. But, when all is said
and done, Krylov has the talisman which defies criticism, baffles
analysis, and defeats time: namely, charm. His fables achieved an
instantaneous popularity, which has never diminished until to-day.
Internal political events proved the next factor in Russian
literature; a factor out of which the so-called romantic movement was
to grow.
During the Napoleonic wars a great many Russian officers had lived
abroad. They came back to Russia after the Congress of Vienna in 1815,
teeming with new ideas and new ideals. They took life seriously, and
were called by Pushkin the Puritans of the North. Their aim was
culture and the public welfare. They were not revolutionaries; on the
contrary, they were anxious to co-operate with the Government. They
formed for their purpose a society, in imitation of the German
_Tugendbund_, called _The Society of Welfare_: its aims were
philanthropic, educational, and economic. It consisted chiefly of
officers of the Guard, and its headquarters were at St. Petersburg.
All this was known and approved of by the Emperor. But when the
Government became reactionary, this peaceful progressive movement
changed its character. The Society of Welfare was closed in 1821, and
its place was taken by two new societies, which, instead of being
political, were social and revolutionary. The success of the
revolutionary movements in Spain and in Italy encouraged these
societies to follow their example.
The death of Alexander I in 1825 forced them to immediate action. The
shape it took was the "Decembrist" rising. Constantine, the Emperor's
brother, renounced his claim to the throne, and was succeeded by his
brother Nicholas. December 14 (O.S.) was fixed for the day on which
the Emperor should receive the oath of allegiance of his troops. An
organized insurrection took place, which was confined to certain
regiments. The Emperor was supported by the majority of the Guards
regiments, and the people showed no signs of supporting the rising,
which was at once suppressed.
One hundred and twenty-five of the conspirators were condemned. Five
of them were hanged, and among them the poet RYLEEV (1795-1826). But
although the political results of the movement were nil, the effect of
the movement on literature was far-reaching. Philosophy took the place
of politics, and liberalism was diverted into the channel of
romanticism; but out of this romantic movement came the springtide of
Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the soul of the Russian
people found adequate expression. And the very fact that politics
were excluded from the movement proved, in one sense, a boon to
literature: for it gave Russian men of genius the chance to be
writers, artists and poets, and prevented them from exhausting their
whole energy in being inefficient politicians or unsuccessful
revolutionaries. I will dwell on the drawbacks, on the dark side of
the medal, presently.
As far as the actual Decembrist movement is concerned, its concrete
and direct legacy to literature consists in the work of Ryleev, and
its indirect legacy in the most famous comedy of the Russian stage,
_Gore ot Uma_, "The Misfortune of being Clever," by GRIBOYEDOV
(1795-1829).
Ryleev's life was cut short before his poetical powers had come to
maturity. It is idle to speculate what he might have achieved had he
lived longer. The work which he left is notable for its pessimism, but
still suffers from the old rhetorical conventions of the eighteenth
century and the imitation of French models; moreover he looked on
literature as a matter of secondary importance. "I am not a poet," he
said, "I am a citizen." In spite of this, every now and then there are
flashes of intense poetical inspiration in his work; and he struck
one or two powerful chords--for instance, in his stanzas on the vision
of enslaved Russia, which have a tense strength and fire that remind
one of Emily Brontë. He was a poet as well as a citizen, but even had
he lived to a prosperous old age and achieved artistic perfection in
his work, he could never have won a brighter aureole than that which
his death gained him. The poems of his last days in prison breathe a
spirit of religious humility, and he died forgiving and praying for
his enemies. His name shines in Russian history and Russian
literature, as that of a martyr to a high ideal.
Griboyedov, the author of _Gore ot Uma_, a writer of a very different
order, although not a Decembrist himself, is a product of that period.
His comedy still remains the unsurpassed masterpiece of Russian
comedy, and can be compared with Beaumarchais' _Figaro_ and Sheridan's
_School for Scandal_.
Griboyedov was a Foreign Office official, and he was murdered when
Minister Plenipotentiary at Teheran, on January 30, 1829. He conceived
the plot of his play in 1816, and read aloud some scenes in St.
Petersburg in 1823-24. They caused a sensation in literary circles,
and the play began to circulate rapidly in MSS. Two fragments of the
drama were published in one of the almanacs, which then took the place
of literary reviews. But beyond this, Griboyedov could neither get his
play printed nor acted. Thousands of copies circulated in MSS., but
the play was not produced on the stage until 1831, and then much
mutilated; and it was not printed until 1833.
_Gore ot Uma_ is written in verse, in iambics of varying length, like
Krylov's fables. The unities are preserved. The action takes place in
one day and in the same house--that of Famusov, an elderly gentleman
of the Moscow upper class holding a Government appointment. He is a
widower and has one daughter, Sophia, whose sensibility is greater
than her sense; and the play opens on a scene where the father
discovers her talking to his secretary, Molchalin, and says he will
stand no nonsense. Presently, the friend of Sophia's childhood,
Chatsky, arrives after a three years' absence abroad; Chatsky is a
young man of independent ideas whose misfortune it is to be clever. He
notices that Sophia receives him coldly, and later on he perceives
that she is in love with Molchalin,--a wonderfully drawn type, the
perfect climber, time-server and place-seeker, and the incarnation of
convention,--who does not care a rap for Sophia. Chatsky declaims to
Famusov his contempt for modern Moscow, for the slavish worship by
society of all that is foreign, for its idolatry of fashion and
official rank, its hollowness and its convention. Famusov, the
incarnation of respectable conventionality, does not understand one
word of what he is saying.
At an evening party given at Famusov's house, Chatsky is determined to
find out whom Sophia loves. He decides it is Molchalin, and lets fall
a few biting sarcasms about him to Sophia; and Sophia, to pay him back
for his sarcasm, lets it be understood by one of the guests that he is
mad. The half-spoken hint spreads like lightning; and the spreading of
the news is depicted in a series of inimitable scenes. Chatsky enters
while the subject is being discussed, and delivers a long tirade on
the folly of Moscow society, which only confirms the suspicions of the
guests; and he finds when he gets to the end of his speech that he is
speaking to an empty room.
In the fourth act we see the guests leaving the house after the
party. Chatsky is waiting for his carriage. Sophia appears on the
staircase and calls Molchalin. Chatsky, hearing her voice, hides
behind a pillar. Liza, Sophia's maid, comes to fetch Molchalin, and
knocks at his door. Molchalin comes out, and not knowing that Sophia
or Chatsky are within hearing, makes love to Liza and tells her that
he only loves Sophia out of duty. Then Sophia appears, having heard
everything. Molchalin falls on his knees to her: she is quite
inexorable. Chatsky comes forward and begins to speak his mind--when
all is interrupted by the arrival of Famusov, who speaks his. Chatsky
shakes the dust of the house and of Moscow off his feet, and Sophia is
left without Chatsky and without Molchalin.
The _Gore ot Uma_ is a masterpiece of satire rather than a masterpiece
of dramatic comedy. That is to say that, as a satire of the Moscow
society of the day and of the society of yesterday, and of to-morrow,
it is immortal, and forms a complete work: but as a comedy it does
not. Almost every scene separately is perfect in itself, but
dramatically it does not group itself round one central idea or one
mainspring of action. Judged from the point of view of dramatic
propriety, the behaviour of the hero is wildly improbable throughout;
there is no reason for the spectator to think he should be in love
with Sophia; if he is, there is no reason for him to behave as he
does; if a man behaved like that, declaiming at an evening party long
speeches on the decay of the times, the most frivolous of societies
would be justified in thinking him mad.
Pushkin hit on the weak point of the play as a play when he wrote: "In
_The Misfortune of being Clever_ the question arises, Who is clever?
and the answer is Griboyedov. Chatsky is an honourable young man who
has lived for a long time with a clever man (that is to say with
Griboyedov), and learnt his clever sarcasms; but to whom does he say
them? To Famusov, to the old ladies at the party. This is
unforgivable, because the first sign of a clever man is to know at
once whom he is dealing with."
But what makes the work a masterpiece is the naturalness of the
characters, the dialogue, the comedy of the scenes which represent
Moscow society. It is extraordinary that on so small a scale, in four
short acts, Griboyedov should have succeeded in giving so complete a
picture of Moscow society, and should have given the dialogue, in
spite of its being in verse, the stamp of conversational familiarity.
The portraits are all full-length portraits, and when the play is
produced now, the rendering of each part raises as much discussion in
Russia as a revival of one of Sheridan's comedies in England.
As for the style, nearly three-quarters of the play has passed into
the Russian language. It is forcible, concise, bitingly sarcastic, it
is as neat and dry as W. S. Gilbert, as elegant as La Fontaine, as
clear as an icicle, and as clean as the thrust of a sword. But perhaps
the crowning merit of this immortal satire is its originality. It is a
product of Russian life and Russian genius, and as yet it is without a
rival.
Outside the current of politics and political aspirations, there
appeared during this same epoch a poet who exercised a considerable
influence over Russian literature, and who devoted himself exclusively
to poetry. This was BASIL ZHUKOVSKY (1783-1852). He opened the door
of Russian literature on the fields of German and English poetry. The
first poem he published in 1802 was a translation of Gray's _Elegy_;
this, and an imitation of Bürger's _Leonore_, which affected all Slav
literatures, brought him fame. Later, he translated Schiller's _Maid
of Orleans_, his ballads, some of the lyrics of Uhland, Goethe,
Hebbel, and a great quantity of other foreign poems. His translations
were faithful, but in spite of this he gave them the stamp of his own
dreamy personality. He was made tutor to the Tsarevitch
Alexander--afterwards Alexander II,--and for a time his production
ceased; but when this task was finished, he braced himself in his old
age to translate _The Odyssey_, and this translation appeared in
1848-50. In this work he obeyed the first great law of translation,
"Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one." He produced a
beautiful work; but he also did what all other translators of Homer
have done; he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky, and with it
something sentimental, elegiac, and didactic.
Zhukovsky's greatest service to Russian literature consisted in his
exploding the superstition that the literature of France was the only
literature that counted, and introducing literary Russia to the poets
of England and Germany rather than of France. But apart from this, he
is the first and best translator in European literature, for what
Krylov did with some of La Fontaine's fables, he did for all the
literature he touched--he re-created it in Russian, and made it his
own. In his translation of Gray's _Elegy_, for instance, he not only
translates the poet's meaning into musical verse, but he conveys the
intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape, and the poignant accent
which makes that poem the natural language of grief. It is
characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years after he translated the
poem, he visited Stoke Poges, re-read Gray's _Elegy_ there, and made
another translation, which is still more faithful than the first.
The Russian language was by this time purified from all outward
excrescences, released from the bondage of convention and the
pseudo-classical, open to all outside influences, and only waiting,
like a ready-tuned instrument, on which Krylov and Zhukovsky had
already sounded sweet notes and deep tones, and which Karamzin had
proved to be a magnificent vehicle for musical and perspicuous prose,
for a poet of genius to come and sound it from its lowest note to the
top of its compass, for there was indeed much music and excellent
voice to be plucked from it. At the appointed hour the man came. It
was PUSHKIN. He arrived at a time when a battle of words was raging
between the so-called classical and romantic schools. The
pseudo-classical, with all its mythological machinery and conventional
apparatus, was totally alien to Russia, and a direct and slavish
imitation of the French. On the other hand, the utmost confusion
reigned as to what constituted romanticism. To each single writer it
meant a different thing: "Enfonçez Racine," and the unities, in one
case; or ghosts, ballads, legends, local colour in another; or the
defiance of morality and society in another. Zhukovsky, in introducing
German romanticism into Russia, paved the way for its death, and for
the death of all exotic fashions and models; for he paved the way for
Pushkin to render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating models of his
own and by founding a national literature.
Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, at Moscow. He was of ancient
lineage, and inherited African negro blood on his mother's side, his
mother's grandmother being the daughter of Peter the Great's negro,
Hannibal. Until he was nine years old, he did not show signs of any
unusual precocity; but from then onwards he was seized with a passion
for reading which lasted all his life. He read Plutarch's _Lives_, the
_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ in a translation. He then devoured all the
French books he found in his father's library. Pushkin was gifted with
a photographic memory, which retained what he read immediately and
permanently. His first efforts at writing were in French,--comedies,
which he performed himself to an audience of his sisters. He went to
school in 1812 at the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St.
Petersburg. His school career was not brilliant, and his leaving
certificate qualifies his achievements as mediocre, even in Russian.
But during the six years he spent at the Lyceum, he continued to read
voraciously. His favourite poet at this time was Voltaire. He began to
write verse, first in French and then in Russian; some of it was
printed in 1814 and 1815 in reviews, and in 1815 he declaimed his
_Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_ in public at the Lyceum examination,
in the presence of Derzhavin the poet.
The poems which he wrote at school afterwards formed part of his
collected works. In these poems, consisting for the greater part of
anacreontics and epistles, although they are immature, and imitative,
partly of contemporary authors such as Derzhavin and Zhukovsky, and
partly of the French anacreontic school of poets, such as Voltaire,
Gresset and Parny, the sound of a new voice was unmistakable. Indeed,
not only his contemporaries, but the foremost representatives of the
Russian literature of that day, Derzhavin, Karamzin and Zhukovsky,
made no mistake about it. They greeted the first notes of this new
lyre with enthusiasm. Zhukovsky used to visit the boy poet at school
and read out his verse to him. Derzhavin was enthusiastic over the
recitation of his _Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_. Thus fame came to
Pushkin as easily as the gift of writing verse. He had lisped in
numbers, and as soon as he began to speak in them, his contemporaries
immediately recognized and hailed the new voice. He did not wake up
and find himself famous like Byron, but he walked into the Hall of
Fame as naturally as a young heir steps into his lawful inheritance.
If we compare Pushkin's school-boy poetry with Byron's _Hours of
Idleness_, it is easy to understand how this came about. In the _Hours
of Idleness_ there is, perhaps, only one poem which would hold out
hopes of serious promise; and the most discerning critics would have
been justified in being careful before venturing to stake any great
hopes on so slender a hint. But in Pushkin's early verse, although the
subject-matter is borrowed, and the style is still irregular and
careless, it is none the less obvious that it flows from the pen of
the author without effort or strain; and besides this, certain coins
of genuine poetry ring out, bearing the image and superscription of a
new mint, the mint of Pushkin.
When the first of his poems to attract the attention of a larger
audience, _Ruslan and Ludmila_, was published, in 1820, it was greeted
with enthusiasm by the public; but it had already won the suffrages of
that circle which counted most, that is to say, the leading men of
letters of the day, who had heard it read out in MSS. For as soon as
Pushkin left school and stepped into the world, he was received into
the literary circle of the day on equal terms. After he had read aloud
the first cantos of _Ruslan and Ludmila_ at Zhukovsky's literary
evenings, Zhukovsky gave him his portrait with this inscription: "To
the pupil, from his defeated master"; and BATYUSHKOV, a poet who,
after having been influenced, like Pushkin, by Voltaire and Parny, had
gone back to the classics, Horace and Tibullus, and had introduced the
classic anacreontic school of poetry into Russia, was astonished to
find a young man of the world outplaying him without any trouble on
the same lyre, and exclaimed, "Oh! how well the rascal has started
writing!"
The publication of _Ruslan and Ludmila_ sealed Pushkin's reputation
definitely, as far as the general public was concerned, although some
of the professional critics treated the poem with severity. The
subject of the poem was a Russian fairy-tale, and the critics blamed
the poet for having recourse to what they called Russian folk-lore,
which they considered to be unworthy of the poetic muse. One review
complained that Pushkin's choice of subject was like introducing a
bearded unkempt peasant into a drawing-room, while others blamed him
for dealing with national stuff in a flippant spirit. But the curious
thing is that, while the critics blamed him for his choice of subject,
and his friends and the public defended him for it, quoting all sorts
of precedents, the poem has absolutely nothing in common, either in
its spirit, style or characterization, with native Russian folk-lore
and fairy-tales. Much later on in his career, Pushkin was to show what
he could do with Russian folk-lore. But _Ruslan and Ludmila_, which,
as far as its form is concerned, has a certain superficial resemblance
to Ariosto, is in reality the result of the French influence, under
which Pushkin had been ever since his cradle, and which in this poem
blazes into the sky like a rocket, and bursts into a shower of sparks,
never to return again.
There is no passion in the poem and no irony, but it is young, fresh,
full of sensuous, not to say sensual images, interruptions,
digressions, and flippant epigrams. Pushkin wondered afterwards that
nobody noticed the coldness of the poem; the truth was that the eyes
of the public were dazzled by the fresh sensuous images, and their
ears were taken captive by the new voice: for the importance of the
poem lies in this--that the new voice which the literary pundits had
already recognized in the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo was now speaking to
the whole world, and all Russia became aware that a young man was
among them "with mouth of gold and morning in his eyes." _Ruslan and
Ludmila_ has just the same sensuous richness, fresh music and
fundamental coldness as Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. After finishing
the poem, Pushkin added a magnificent and moving Epilogue, written
from the Caucasus in the year of its publication (1820); and when the
second edition was published in 1828, he added a Prologue in his
finest manner which tells of Russian fairy-land.
After leaving school in 1817, until 1820, Pushkin plunged into the gay
life of St. Petersburg. He wanted to be a Hussar, but his father could
not afford it. In default he became a Foreign Office official; but he
did not take this profession seriously. He consorted with the
political youth and young Liberals of the day; he scattered stinging
epigrams and satirical epistles broadcast. He sympathized with the
Decembrists, but took no part in their conspiracy. He would probably
have ended by doing so; but, luckily for Russian literature, he was
transferred in 1820 from the Foreign Office to the Chancery of General
Inzov in the South of Russia; and from 1820 to 1826 he lived first at
Kishinev, then at Odessa, and finally in his own home at Pskov. This
enforced banishment was of the greatest possible service to the poet;
it took him away from the whirl and distractions of St. Petersburg; it
prevented him from being compromised in the drama of the Decembrists;
it ripened and matured his poetical genius; it provided him, since it
was now that he visited the Caucasus and the Crimea for the first
time, with new subject-matter.
During this period he learnt Italian and English, and came under the
influence of André Chénier and Byron. André Chénier's influence is
strongly felt in a series of lyrics in imitation of the classics; but
these lyrics were altogether different from the anacreontics of his
boyhood. Byron's influence is first manifested in a long poem _The
Prisoner of the Caucasus_. It is Byronic in the temperament of the
hero, who talks in the strain of the earlier Childe Harold; he is
young, but feels old; tired of life, he seeks for consolation in the
loneliness of nature in the Caucasus. He is taken prisoner by mountain
tribesmen, and set free by a girl who drowns herself on account of her
unrequited love. Pushkin said later that the poem was immature, but
that there were verses in it that came from his heart. There is one
element in the poem which is by no means immature, and that is the
picture of the Caucasus, which is executed with much reality and
simplicity. Pushkin annexed the Caucasus to Russian poetry. The Crimea
inspired him with another tale, also Byronic in some respects, _The
Fountain of Baghchi-Sarai_, which tells of a Tartar Khan and his
Christian slave, who is murdered out of jealousy by a former
favourite, herself drowned by the orders of the Khan. Here again the
descriptions are amazing, and Pushkin draws out a new stop of rich and
voluptuous music.
In speaking of the influence of Byron over Pushkin it is necessary to
discriminate. Byron helped Pushkin to discover himself; Byron
revealed to him his own powers, showed him the way out of the French
garden where he had been dwelling, and acted as a guide to fresh woods
and pastures new. But what Pushkin took from the new provinces to
which the example of Byron led him was entirely different from what
Byron sought there. Again, the methods and workmanship of the two
poets were radically different. Pushkin is never imitative of Byron;
but Byron opened his eyes to a new world, and indeed did for him what
Chapman's _Homer_ did for Keats. It frequently happens that when a
poet is deeply struck by the work of another poet he feels a desire to
write something himself, but something different. Thus Pushkin's
mental intercourse with Byron had the effect of bracing the talent of
the Russian poet and spurring him on to the conquest of new worlds.
Pushkin's six years' banishment to his own country had the effect of
revealing to him the reality and seriousness of his vocation as a
poet, and the range and strength of his gifts. It was during this
period that besides the works already mentioned he wrote some of his
finest lyrics, _The Conversation between the Bookseller and the
Poet_--perhaps the most perfect of his shorter poems--it contains four
lines to have written which Turgenev said he would have burnt the
whole of his works--a larger poem called _The Gypsies_; his dramatic
chronicle _Boris Godunov_, and the beginning of his masterpiece
_Onegin_; several ballads, including _The Sage Oleg_, and an
unfinished romance, the _Robber Brothers_.
Not only is the richness of his output during this period remarkable,
but the variety and the high level of art maintained in all the
different styles which he attempted and mastered. _The Gypsies_
(1827), which was received with greater favour by the public than any
of his poems, either earlier or later, is the story of a disappointed
man, Aleko, who leaves the world and takes refuge with gypsies. A
tragically ironical situation is the result. The anarchic nature of
the Byronic misanthrope brings tragedy into the peaceful life of the
people, who are lawless because they need no laws. Aleko loves and
marries the gypsy Zemfira, but after a time she tires of him, and
loves a young gypsy. Aleko surprises them and kills them both. Then
Zemfira's father banishes him from the gypsies' camp. He, too, had
been deceived. When his wife Mariula had been untrue and had left him,
he had attempted no vengeance, but had brought up her daughter.
"Leave us, proud man," he says to Aleko. "We are a wild people; we
have no laws, we torture not, neither do we punish; we have no use for
blood or groans; we will not live with a man of blood. Thou wast not
made for the wild life. For thyself alone thou claimest licence; we
are shy and good-natured; thou art evil-minded and presumptuous.
Farewell, and peace be with thee!"
The charm of the poem lies in the descriptions of the gypsy camp and
the gypsy life, the snatches of gypsy song, and the characterization
of the gypsies, especially of the women. It is not surprising the poem
was popular; it breathes a spell, and the reading of it conjures up
before one the wandering life, the camp-fire, the soft speech and the
song; and makes one long to go off with "the raggle-taggle gypsies O!"
Byron's influence soon gave way to that of Shakespeare, who opened a
still larger field of vision to the Russian poet. In 1825 he writes:
"Quel homme que ce Shakespeare! Je n'en reviens pas. Comme Byron le
tragique est mesquin devant lui! Ce Byron qui n'a jamais conçu qu'un
seul caractère et c'est le sien ... ce Byron donc a partagé entre ses
personages tel et tel trait de son caractère: son orgeuil à l'un, sa
haine à l'autre, sa mélancolie au troisième, etc., et c'est ainsi d'un
caractère plein, sombre et énergique, il a fait plusieurs caractères
insignifiants; ce n'est pas là de la tragédie. On a encore une manie.
Quand on a conçu un caractère, tout ce qu'on lui fait dire, même les
choses les plus étranges, en porte essentiellement l'empreinte, comme
les pédants et les marins dans les vieux romans de Fielding. Voyez le
haineux de Byron ... et là-dessus lisez Shakespeare. Il ne craint
jamais de compromettre son personage, il le fait parler avec tout
l'abandon de la vie, car il est sûr en temps et lieu, de lui faire
trouver le langage de son caractère. Vous me demanderez: votre
tragédie est-elle une tragédie de caractère ou de costume? J'ai choisi
le genre le plus aisé, mais j'ai tâché de les unir tous deux. J'écris
et je pense. La plupart des scènes ne demandent que du raisonnement;
quand j'arrive à une scène qui demande de l'inspiration, j'attends ou
je passe dessus."
I quote this letter because it throws light, firstly, on Pushkin's
matured opinion of Byron, and, secondly, on his methods of work; for,
like Leonardo da Vinci, he formed the habit, which he here describes,
of leaving unwritten passages where inspiration was needed, until he
felt the moment of _bien être_ when inspiration came; and this not
only in writing his tragedy, but henceforward in everything that he
wrote, as his note-books testify.
The subject-matter of _Boris Godunov_ was based on Karamzin's history:
it deals with the dramatic episode of the Russian Perkin Warbeck, the
false Demetrius who pretended to be the murdered son of Ivan the
Terrible. The play is constructed on the model of Shakespeare's
chronicle plays, but in a still more disjointed fashion, without a
definite beginning or end: when Mussorgsky made an opera out of it,
the action was concentrated into definite acts; for, as it stands, it
is not a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had not the power of
conceiving and executing a drama which should move round one idea to
an inevitable close. He had not the gift of dramatic architectonics,
and still less that of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the scenes,
whether they be tragic and poetical, or scenes of common life, are as
vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive, and they
speak a language which is at the same time ancient, living, and
convincing.
In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of stage architectonics and
stage carpentry, it is not merely meant that he lacked the gift of
arranging acts that would suit the stage, or that of imagining stage
effects. His whole play is not conceived as a drama; a subject from
which a drama might be written is taken, but the drama is left
unwritten. We see Boris Godunov on the throne, which he has unlawfully
usurped; we know he feels remorse; he tells us so in monologues; we
see his soul stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of fire, and we
watch the wheel revolve; and that is all the moral and spiritual
action that the part contains; he is static and not dynamic, he never
has to make up his mind; his will never has to encounter the shock of
another will during the whole play. Neither does the chronicle centre
round the Pretender. It is true that we see the idea of impersonating
the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind; and it is also true that in one
scene with his Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically moving in a
dramatic situation. She loves him because she thinks he is the son of
an anointed King. He loves her too much to deceive her, and tells her
the truth. She then says she will have nothing of him; and then he
rises from defeat and shame to the height of the situation, becomes
great, and, not unlike Browning's Sludge, says: "Although I am an
impostor, I am born to be a King all the same; I am one of Nature's
Kings; and I defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell every one
what I have told you. Nobody will believe you." And Marina is
conquered once more by his conduct and bearing.
This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict of two wills and two
souls. But there the matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken, and we
are shown a series of different patterns, in which the heroine plays
no part at all, and in which the hero only makes a momentary
appearance. The fact is there is neither hero nor heroine in the play.
It is not a play, but a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame
Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never attempted. As a chronicle,
a series of detached scenes, it is supremely successful. There are
certain scenes which attain to sublimity: for instance, that in the
cell of the monastery, where the monk is finishing his chronicle; and
the monologue in which Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying speech
to his son. The verse in these scenes is sealed with the mark of that
God-gifted ease and high seriousness, which belong only to the
inspired great. They are Shakespearean, not because they imitate
Shakespeare, but because they attain to heights of imaginative truth
to which Shakespeare rises more often than any other poet; and the
language in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitableness, an
absence of all conscious effort and of all visible art and artifice, a
closeness of utterance combined with a width of suggestion which
belong only to the greatest artists, to the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to
Dante.
_Boris Godunov_ was not published until January 1, 1831, and passed,
with one exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. Like so many
great works, it came before its time; and it was not until years
afterwards that the merits of this masterpiece were understood and
appreciated.
In 1826 Pushkin's banishment to the country came to an end; in that
year he was allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St. Petersburg. In
1826 his poems appeared in one volume, and the second canto of
_Onegin_ (the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827 _The Gypsies_, and
the third canto of _Onegin_; in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth
cantos of _Onegin_; in 1829 _Graf Nulin_, an admirably told _Conte_
such as Maupassant might have written, of a deceived husband and a
wife who, finding herself in the situation of Lucretia, gives the
would-be Tarquin a box on the ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in
being unfaithful with some one else--the _Cottage of Kolomna_ is
another story in the same vein--and in the same year _Poltava_.
This poem was written in one month, in St. Petersburg. The subject is
Mazepa, with whom the daughter of his hereditary enemy, Kochubey, whom
he afterwards tortures and kills, falls in love. But it is in reality
the epic of Peter the Great.[3] When the poem was published, it
disconcerted the critics and the public. It revealed an entirely new
phase of Pushkin's style, and it should have widened the popular
conception of the poet's powers and versatility. But at the time the
public only knew Pushkin through his lyrics and his early tales;
_Boris Godunov_ had not yet been published; moreover, the public of
that day expected to find in a poem passion and the delineation of the
heart's adventures. This stern objective fragment of an epic, falling
into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses and cupids,
like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan and executed by a god, met with
little appreciation. The poet's verse which, so far as the public
knew it, had hitherto seemed like a shining and luscious fruit, was
exchanged for a concentrated weighty tramp of ringing rhyme, _martelé_
like steel. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a
style as concise as that of Pope and as concentrated as that of
Browning's dramatic lyrics. The poem is a fit monument to Peter the
Great, and the great monarch's impetuous genius and passion for
thorough craftsmanship seem to have entered into it.
In 1829 Pushkin made a second journey to the Caucasus, the result of
which was a harvest of lyrics. On his return to St. Petersburg he
sketched the plan of another epic poem, _Galub_, dealing with the
Caucasus, but this remained a fragment.
In 1831 he finished the eighth and last canto of _Onegin_. Originally
there were nine cantos, but when the work was published one of the
cantos dealing with Onegin's travels was left out as being irrelevant.
Pushkin had worked at this poem since 1823. It was Byron's _Beppo_
which gave him the idea of writing a poem on modern life; but here
again, he made of the idea something quite different from any of
Byron's work. _Onegin_ is a novel. Eugene Onegin is the name of the
hero. It is, moreover, the first Russian novel; and as a novel it has
never been surpassed. It is as real as Tolstoy, as finished in
workmanship and construction as Turgenev. It is a realistic novel; not
realistic in the sense that Zola's work was mis-called realistic, but
realistic in the sense that Miss Austen is realistic. The hero is the
average man about St. Petersburg; his father, a worthy public servant,
lives honourably on debts and gives three balls a year. Onegin is
brought up, not too strictly, by "Monsieur l'Abbé"; he goes out in the
world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in French, and able to dance
the Mazurka.
Onegin can touch on every subject, can hold his tongue when the
conversation becomes too serious, and make epigrams. He knows enough
Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk about Juvenal, and put "Vale!"
at the end of his letters, and he can remember two lines of the
_Æneid_. He is severe on Homer and Theocritus, but has read Adam
Smith. The only art in which he is proficient is the _ars amandi_ as
taught by Ovid. He is a patron of the ballet; he goes to balls; he
eats beef-steaks and _paté de foie gras_. In spite of all
this--perhaps because of it--he suffers from spleen, like Childe
Harold, the author says. His father dies, leaving a lot of debts
behind him, but a dying uncle summons him to the country; and when he
gets there he finds his uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the
estate. In the country, he is just as much bored as he was in St.
Petersburg. A new neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a young
man fresh from Germany, an enthusiast and a poet, and full of Kant,
Schiller, and the German writers. Lensky introduces Onegin to the
neighbouring family, by name Larin, consisting of a widow and two
daughters. Lensky is in love with the younger daughter, Olga, who is
simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face, as Onegin says, like the
foolish moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less pretty; shy and
dreamy, she conceals under her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut
character and a strong will.
Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen's heroines; as alive as
Fielding's Sophia Western, and as charming as any of George Meredith's
women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. Turgenev, with
all his magic, and Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours of
life, never created a truer, more radiant, and more typically Russian
woman. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman; that
is to say, of all that is best in Russia; and it is a type taken
straight from life, and not from fairy-land--a type that exists as
much to-day as it did in the days of Pushkin. She is the first of that
long gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky
have given us, and which are the most precious jewels of Russian
literature, because they reflect the crowning glory of Russian life.
Tatiana falls in love with Onegin at first sight. She writes to him
and confesses her love, and in all the love poetry of the world there
is nothing more touching and more simple than this confession. It is
perfect. If Pushkin had written this and this alone, his place among
poets would be unique and different from that of all other poets.
Possibly some people may think that there are finer achievements in
the love poetry of the world; but nothing is so futile and so
impertinent as giving marks to the great poets, as if they were
passing an examination. If a thing is as good as possible in itself,
what is the use of saying that it is less good or better than
something else, which is as good as possible in itself also.
Nevertheless, placed beside any of the great confessions of love in
poetry--Francesca's story in the _Inferno_, Romeo and Juliet's
leavetaking, Phèdre's declaration, Don Juan Tenorio's letter--the
beauty of Tatiana's confession would not be diminished by the
juxtaposition. Of the rest of Pushkin's work at its best and highest,
of the finest passages of _Boris Godunov_, for instance, you can say:
This is magnificent, but there are dramatic passages in other works of
other poets on the same lines and as fine; but in Tatiana's letter
Pushkin has created something unique, which has no parallel, because
only a Russian could have written it, and of Russians, only he. It is
a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a
blackbird's song.
Onegin tells Tatiana he is not worthy of her, that he is not made for
love and marriage; that he would cease to love her at once; that he
feels for her like a brother, or perhaps a little more tenderly. It
then falls out that Onegin, by flirting with Olga at a ball, makes
Lensky jealous. They fight a duel, and Lensky is killed. Onegin is
obliged to leave the neighbourhood, and spends years in travel.
Tatiana remains true to her first love; but she is taken by her
relatives to Moscow, and consents at last under their pressure to
marry a rich man of great position. In St. Petersburg, Onegin meets
her again. Tatiana has become a great lady, but all her old charm is
there. Onegin now falls violently in love with her; but she, although
she frankly confesses that she still loves him, tells him that it is
too late; she has married another, and she means to remain true to
him. And there the story ends.
_Onegin_ is, perhaps, Pushkin's most characteristic work; it is
undoubtedly the best known and the most popular; like _Hamlet_, it is
all quotations. Pushkin in his _Onegin_ succeeded in doing what
Shelley urged Byron to do--to create something new and in accordance
with the spirit of the age, which should at the same time be
beautiful. He did more than this. He succeeded in creating for Russia
a poem that was purely national, and in giving his country a classic,
a model both in construction, matter, form, and inspiration for
future generations. Perhaps the greatest quality of this poem is its
vividness. Pushkin himself speaks, in taking leave, of having seen the
unfettered march of his novel in a magic prism. This is just the
impression that the poem gives; the scenes are as clear as the shapes
in a crystal; nothing is blurred; there are no hesitating notes,
nothing _à peu près_; every stroke comes off; the nail is hit on the
head every time, only so easily that you do not notice the strokes,
and all labour escapes notice. Apart from this the poem is amusing; it
arrests the attention as a story, and it delights the intelligence
with its wit, its digressions, and its brilliance. It is as witty as
Don Juan and as consummately expressed as Pope; and when the occasion
demands it, the style passes in easy transition to serious or tender
tones. _Onegin_ has been compared to Byron's _Don Juan_. There is this
likeness, that both poems deal with contemporary life, and in both
poems the poets pass from grave to gay, from severe to lively, and
often interrupt the narrative to apostrophize the reader. But there
the likeness ends. On the other hand, there is a vast difference.
_Onegin_ contains no adventures. It is a story of everyday life.
Moreover, it is an organic whole: so well constructed that it fits
into a stage libretto--Tchaikovsky made an opera out of it--without
difficulty. There is another difference--a difference which applies to
Pushkin and Byron in general. There is no unevenness in Pushkin; his
work, as far as craft is concerned, is always on the same high level.
You can admire the whole, or cut off any single passage and it will
still remain admirable; whereas Byron must be taken as a whole or not
at all--the reason being that Pushkin was an impeccable artist in form
and expression, and that Byron was not.
In the winter of 1832 Pushkin sought a new field, the field of
historical research; and by the beginning of 1833 he had not only
collected all the materials for a history of Pugachev, the Cossack who
headed a rising in the reign of Catherine II; but his literary
activity was so great that he had also written the rough sketch of a
long story in prose dealing with the same subject, _The Captain's
Daughter_, another prose story of considerable length, _Dubrovsky_,
and portions of a drama, _Rusalka_, The Water Nymph, which was never
finished. Besides _Boris Godunov_ and the _Rusalka_, Pushkin wrote a
certain number of dramatic scenes, or short dramas in one or more
scenes. Of these, one, _The Feast in the Time of Plague_, is taken
from the English of John Wilson (_The City of the Plague_), with
original additions. In _Mozart and Salieri_ we see the contrast
between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does
what it can. The story is based on the unfounded anecdote that Mozart
was poisoned by Salieri out of envy. This dramatic and beautifully
written episode has been set to music as it stands by Rimsky-Korsakov.
_The Covetous Knight_, which bears the superscription, "From the
tragi-comedy of Chenstone"--an unknown English original--tells of the
conflict between a Harpagon and his son: the delineation of the
miser's imaginative passion for his treasures is, both in conception
and execution, in Pushkin's finest manner. This scene has been
recently set to music by Rakhmaninov. _The Guest of Stone_, the story
of Don Juan and the _statua gentilissima del gran Commendatore_, makes
Don Juan life. A scene from _Faust_ between Faust and Mephistopheles
is original and not of great interest; _Angelo_ is the story of
_Measure for Measure_ told as a narrative with two scenes in dialogue.
_Rusalka_, The Water Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the sham
province of national legend, and it is tantalizing that this poetic
fragment remained a fragment.
Pushkin's prose is in some respects as remarkable as his verse. Here,
too, he proved a pioneer. _Dubrovsky_ is the story of a young officer
whose father is ousted, like Naboth, from his small estate by his
neighbour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, becomes a highway
robber so as to revenge himself, and introduces himself into the
family of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes his revenge
because he falls in love with his enemy's daughter. In this extremely
vivid story he anticipates Gogol in his lifelike pictures of country
life. _The Captain's Daughter_ is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev
has nothing stagey or melodramatic about him, nothing of Harrison
Ainsworth. Of his shorter stories, such as _The Blizzard_, _The Pistol
Shot_, _The Lady-Peasant_, the most entertaining, and certainly the
most popular, is _The Queen of Spades_, which was so admirably
translated by Mérimée, and formed the subject of one of Tchaikovsky's
most successful operas. As an artistic work _The Egyptian Nights_,
written in 1828, is the most interesting, and ranks among Pushkin's
masterpieces. It tells of an Italian _improvisatore_ who, at a party
in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on Cleopatra and her lovers. The
story is written to lead up to this poem, which gives a gorgeous
picture of the pagan world, and is another example of Pushkin's
miraculous power of assimilation. Pushkin's prose has the same
limpidity and ease as his verse; the characters have the same vitality
and reality as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, and had he
lived longer he might have become a great novelist. As it is, he
furnished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made in 1832) with the subject
of two of his masterpieces--_Dead Souls_ and _The Revisor_.
The province of Russian folk-lore and legend from which Pushkin took
the idea of _Rusalka_ was to furnish him with a great deal of rich
material. It was in 1831 that in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he
wrote his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian popular style,
_The Tale of Tsar Saltan_. Up till now he had written only a few
ballads in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a brilliant success
as a _pastiche_; but it was a _pastiche_ and not quite the real thing,
as cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of epigram here and there,
which indeed makes it delightful reading. He followed it by another in
the comic vein, _The Tale of the Pope and his Man Balda_, and by two
more _Märchen_, _The Dead Tsaritsa_ and _The Golden Cock_; but it was
not until two years later that he wrote his masterpiece in this vein,
_The Story of the Fisherman and the Fish_. It is the same story as
Grimm's tale of the Fisherman's wife who wished to be King, Emperor,
and then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting ambition. The tale
is written in unrhymed rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines;
all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such as might have been
handed down by oral tradition in some obscure village out of the
remotest past; it has the real _Volkston_; the good-nature and
simplicity and unobtrusive humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects
of all these stories were told to Pushkin by his nurse, Anna
Rodionovna, who also furnished him with the subject of his ballad,
_The Bridegroom_. In Pushkin's note-books there are seven fairy-tales
taken down hurriedly from the words of his nurse; and most likely all
that he wrote dealing with the life of the people came from the same
source. Pushkin called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, and said that
he was indebted to her for counteracting the effects of his first
French education.
In 1833 he finished a poem called _The Brazen Horseman_, the story of
a man who loses his beloved in the great floods in St. Petersburg in
1834, and going mad, imagines that he is pursued by Falconet's
equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains a magnificent
description of St. Petersburg. During the last years of his life, he
was engaged in collecting materials for a history of Peter the Great.
His power of production had never run dry from the moment he left
school, although his actual work was interrupted from time to time by
distractions and the society of his friends.
All the important larger works of Pushkin have now been mentioned; but
during the whole course of his career he was always pouring out a
stream of lyrics and occasional pieces, many of which are among the
most beautiful things he wrote. His variety and the width of his range
are astonishing. Some of them have a grace and perfection such as we
find in the Greek anthology; others--"Recollections," for instance, in
which in the sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pass before
him the blotted scroll of his past deeds, which he is powerless with
all the tears in the world to wash out--have the intensity of
Shakespeare's sonnets. This poem, for instance, has the same depth of
feeling as "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry," or "The
expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Or he will write an elegy as
tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture of a sledge in a
snow-storm, and give you the plunge of the bewildered horses, the
whirling demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the quiet spaces of
snow, in intoxicating rhythms which E. A. Poe would have envied; or
again he will write a description of the Caucasus in eleven short
lines, close in expression and vast in suggestion, such as "The
Monastery on Kazbek"; or he will bring before you the smell of the
autumn morning, and the hoofs ringing out on the half-frozen earth; or
he will write a patriotic poem, such as _To the Slanderers of
Russia_, fraught with patriotic indignation without being offensive;
in this poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of Russia: "Will not,"
he says, "from Perm to the Caucasus, from Finland's chill rocks to the
flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to the unshaken walls of
China, glistening with its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise?"
Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance and as humble in
spirit as one of the old Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as
Musset and as playful as Heine: he will translate you the spirit of
Horace and the spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure the
restraint of André Chénier, and the impetuous gallop of Byron.
Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin's poems is the poem which
expresses his view of life in the elegy--
"As bitter as stale aftermath of wine
Is the remembrance of delirious days;
But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs
The past more sorely, as my days decline.
My path is dark. The future lies in wait,
A gathering ocean of anxiety,
But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create,
That is my prayer; to live and not to die!
I know that ecstasy shall still lie there
In sorrow and adversity and care.
Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine,
Be moved to tears by musings that are mine;
And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh
Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."
But the greatest of his short poems is probably "The Prophet." This is
a tremendous poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin only attained
once. It is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression; the
syllables ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a silver clarion.
It is, as it were, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.
Nothing finer as sound could ever be compounded with Russian vowels
and consonants; nothing could be more perfectly planned, or present,
in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the imagination. Even a
rough prose translation will give some idea of the imaginative
splendour of the poem--
"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark
wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the
crossing of the ways: And he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were
as soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my
prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them
with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the
flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that
are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in
the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he
tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and
that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled
with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips,
the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a
sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast
he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and
the voice of God called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take
heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and go forth over the sea and
over the land and set light with My word to the hearts of the
people.'"
In 1837 came the catastrophe which brought about Pushkin's death. It
was caused by the clash of evil tongues engaged in frivolous gossip,
and Pushkin's own susceptible and violent temperament. A guardsman,
Heckeren-Dantes, had been flirting with his wife. Pushkin received an
anonymous letter, and being wrongly convinced that Heckeren-Dantes was
the author of it, wrote him a violent letter which made a duel
inevitable. A duel was fought on the 27th of February, 1837, and
Pushkin was mortally wounded. Such was his frenzy of rage that, after
lying wounded and unconscious in the snow, on regaining consciousness,
he insisted on going on with the duel, and fired another shot, giving
a great cry of joy when he saw that he had wounded his adversary. It
was only a slight wound in the hand. It was not until he reached home
that his anger passed away. He died on the 29th of February, after
forty-five hours of excruciating suffering, heroically borne; he
forgave his enemies; he wished no one to avenge him; he received the
last sacraments; and he expressed feelings of loyalty and gratitude
to his sovereign. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old.
Pushkin's career falls naturally into two divisions: his life until he
was thirty, and his life after he was thirty. Pushkin began his career
with liberal aspirations, and he disappointed some in the loyalty to
the throne, the Church, the autocracy, and the established order of
things which he manifested later; in turning to religion; in remaining
in the Government service; in writing patriotic poems; in holding the
position of Gentleman of the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in fact,
what is called a reactionary. But it would be a mistake to imagine
that Pushkin was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause of liberty for
a handful of silver and a riband to stick in his coat. The liberal
aspirations of Pushkin's youth were the very air that the whole of the
aristocratic youth of that day breathed. Pushkin could not escape
being influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel then, than he was a
reactionary afterwards, when again the very air which the whole of
educated society breathed was conservative and nationalistic. It may
be a pity that it was so; but so it was. There was no liberal
atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and the radical effervescence
of the Decembrists was destroyed by the Decembrists' premature action.
It is no good making a revolution if you have nothing to make it with.
The Decembrists were in the same position as the educated élite of one
regiment at Versailles would have been, had it attempted to destroy
the French monarchy in the days of Louis XIV. The Decembrists by their
premature action put the clock of Russian political progress back for
years. The result was that men of impulse, aspiration, talent and
originality had in the reign of Nicholas to seek an outlet for their
feelings elsewhere than in politics, because politics then were simply
non-existent.
But apart from this, even if the opportunities had been there, it may
be doubted whether Pushkin would have taken them. He was not born with
a passion to reform the world. He was neither a rebel nor a reformer;
neither a liberal nor a conservative; he was a democrat in his love
for the whole of the Russian people; he was a patriot in his love of
his country. He resembled Goethe rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or
Byron; although, in his love of his country and in every other
respect, his fiery temperament both in itself and in its expression
was far removed from Goethe's Olympian calm. He was like Goethe in his
attitude towards society, and the attitude of the social and official
world towards him resembles the attitude of Weimar towards Goethe.
During the first part of his career he gave himself up to pleasure,
passion, and self-indulgence; after he was thirty he turned his mind
to more serious things. It would not be exact to say he _became_
deeply religious, because he was religious by nature, and he soon
discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism; but in spite of this he was
a victim of _amour-propre_; and he wavered between contempt of the
society around him and a petty resentment against it which took the
shape of scathing and sometimes cruel epigrams. It was this dangerous
_amour-propre_, the fact of his being not only passion's slave, but
petty passion's slave, which made him a victim of frivolous gossip and
led to the final catastrophe.
"In Pushkin," says Soloviev, the philosopher, "according to his own
testimony there were two different and separate beings: the inspired
priest of Apollo, and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children
of the world." It was the first Pushkin--the inspired priest--who
predominated in the latter part of his life; but who was unable to
expel altogether the second Pushkin, the frivolous _Weltkind_, who was
prone to be exasperated by the society in which he lived, and when
exasperated was dangerous. There is one fact, however, which accounts
for much. The more serious Pushkin's turn of thought grew, the more
objective, purer, and stronger his work became, the less it was
appreciated; for the public which delighted in the comparatively
inferior work of his youth was not yet ready for his more mature work.
What pleased the public were the dazzling colours, the sensuous and
sometimes libidinous images of his early poems; the romantic
atmosphere; especially anything that was artificial in them. They had
not yet eyes to appreciate the noble lines, nor ears to appreciate the
simpler and more majestic harmonies of his later work. Thus it was
that they passed _Boris Godunov_ by, and were disappointed in the
later cantos of _Onegin_. This was, of course, discouraging.
Nevertheless, it is laughable to rank Pushkin amongst the
misunderstood, among the Shelleys, the Millets, of Literature and Art;
or to talk of his sad fate. To talk of him as one of the victims of
literature is merely to depreciate him.
He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus, which gave him inspiration:
to his own country home, which gave him leisure. He was censored. Yes:
but the Emperor undertook to do the work himself. Had he lived in
England, society--as was proved in the case of Byron--would have been
a far severer censor of his morals and the extravagance of his youth,
than the Russian Government. Besides which, he won instantaneous fame,
and in the society in which he moved he was surrounded by a band not
only of devoted but distinguished admirers, amongst whom were some of
the highest names in Russian literature--Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol.
Pushkin is Russia's national poet, the Peter the Great of poetry, who
out of foreign material created something new, national and Russian,
and left imperishable models for future generations. The chief
characteristic of his genius is its universality. There appeared to be
nothing he could not understand nor assimilate. And it is just this
all-embracing humanity--Dostoyevsky calls him +pananthrôpos+--this
capacity for understanding everything and everybody, which makes him so
profoundly Russian. He is a poet of everyday life: a realistic poet,
and above all things a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as an
epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief and produce a noble
fragment, he cannot set crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians
the beauty of their landscape and the poetry of their people; and they,
with ears full of pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and romantic
stage properties, did not understand what he was doing: but they
understood later. For a time he fought against the stream, and all in
vain; and then he gave himself up to the great current, which took him
all too soon to the open sea.
He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional;
and all his life he was still learning to become more and more
intimate with the savour and smell of the people's language. Like
Peter the Great, he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and his
whole energies in craftsmanship. He was a great artist; his style is
perspicuous, plastic, and pure; there is never a blurred outline,
never a smear, never a halting phrase or a hesitating note. His
concrete images are, as it were, transparent, like Donne's description
of the woman whose
"... pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought,
That you might almost think her body thought."
His diction is the inseparable skin of the thought. You seem to hear
him thinking. He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated
spontaneity. His soul was sincere, noble, and open; he was frivolous,
a child of the world and of his century; but if he was worldly, he was
human; he was a citizen as well as a child of the world; and it is
that which makes him the greatest of Russian poets.
His career was unromantic; he was rooted to the earth; an aristocrat
by birth, an official by profession, a lover of society by taste. At
the same time, he sought and served beauty, strenuously and
faithfully; he was perhaps too faithful a servant of Apollo; too
exclusive a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find none of the
piteous cries, no beauty of soaring and bleeding wings as in Shelley,
nor the sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no tempest of defiant
challenge, no lightnings of divine derision, as in Byron; his is
neither the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that "brave soldier in the
war of the liberation of humanity," nor the agonized passion of a
suffering Catullus. He never descended into Hell. Every great man is
either an artist or a fighter; and often poets of genius, Byron and
Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently fighters than they are
artists. Pushkin was an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what
makes even his love-poems cold in comparison with those of other
poets. Although he was the first to make notable what was called the
romantic movement; and although at the beginning of his career he
handled romantic subjects in a more or less romantic way, he was
fundamentally a classicist--a classicist as much in the common-sense
and realism and solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the
perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form. And he soon cast aside
even the vehicles and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively followed
reality. "He strove with none, for none was worth his strife." And
when his artistic ideals were misunderstood and depreciated, he
retired into himself and wrote to please himself only; but in the
inner court of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired he created
imperishable things; for he loved nature, he loved art, he loved his
country, and he expressed that love in matchless song.
For years, Russian criticism was either neglectful of his work or
unjust towards it; for his serene music and harmonious design left the
generations which came after him, who were tossed on a tempest of
social problems and political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when
Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin's memorial at Moscow, the homage which he
paid to the dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of the whole of
Russia. His work is beyond the reach of critics, whether favourable or
unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of his countrymen, and
chiefly upon the lips of the young.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Not 1763, as generally stated in his biographies.
[3] The poem was originally called _Mazepa_: Pushkin changed the title
so as not to clash with Byron. It is interesting to see what Pushkin
says of Byron's poem. In his notes there is the following passage--
"Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire's history of Charles XII. He was
struck solely by the picture of a man bound to a wild horse and borne
over the steppes. A poetical picture of course; but see what he did
with it. What a living creation! What a broad brush! But do not expect
to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual gloomy Byronic hero.
Byron was not thinking of him. He presented a series of pictures, one
more striking than the other. Had his pen come across the story of the
seduced daughter and the father's execution, it is improbable that
anyone else would have dared to touch the subject."