Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings
Alexander Pushkin
TALES OF BELKIN AND OTHER PROSE WRITINGS
ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. He was liberally educated and left school in 1817. Given a sinecure in the Foreign Office, he spent three dissipated years in St Petersburg, writing light, erotic and highly polished verse. He flirted with several pre-Decembrist societies, composing the mildly revolutionary verses which led to his disgrace and exile in 1820. After a stay in the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. His work took a more serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, when he began The Gipsies and Eugene Onegin. In 1824 he moved to his parents’ estate at Mikhaylovskoye in north-west Russia and wrote The Gipsies. The following year he wrote his great historical drama Boris Godunov and continued Eugene Onegin. With the failure of the Decembrists’ rising in 1825 and the accession of a new Tsar, Pushkin recovered his freedom. During the next three years he wandered restlessly between St Petersburg and Moscow. He wrote an epic poem, Poltava, but little else. In 1829 he went with the Russian army to Transcaucasia, and the following year he retired to a family estate at Boldino, completing Eugene Onegin. In the autumn of 1830 he wrote Tales of Belkin and his experimental ‘Little Tragedies’ in blank verse. In 1831 he married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova. The rest of his life was plagued by debts and the malice of his enemies. His literary output slackened, but he wrote two prose works, The Captain’s Daughter and The Queen of Spades, and folk poems, including The Golden Cockerel. Towards the end of 1836 anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging a troublesome admirer of his wife to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.
RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, and six volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories and Ward No. 6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.
JOHN BAYLEY was Warton Professor of English Literature, Oxford University, from 1974–92. Among his many books are The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution, The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality, Tolstoy and the Novel, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary, An Essay on Hardy, Shakespeare and Tragedy, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch and a detailed study of A. E. Housman’s poems. Alice (1994), The Queer Captain (1995) and George’s Lair (1996) are his trilogy of novels. He has also introduced Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and edited James’s The Wings of the Dove for Penguin Classics.
TALES OF BELKIN AND OTHER PROSE WRITINGS
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Translated by RONALD WILKS
With an Introduction by JOHN BAYLEY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Russian in 1831
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 1998
10
Copyright © Ronald Wilks, 1998
Copyright © Introduction, John Bayley, 1998
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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EISBN: 9781101492604
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BAYLEY
FURTHER READING
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
THE TALES OF THE LATE IVAN PETROVICH BELKIN
FROM THE EDITOR
THE SHOT
THE BLIZZARD
THE UNDERTAKER
THE POSTMASTER
THE SQUIRE’S DAUGHTER
THE HISTORY OF THE VILLAGE OF GORYUKHINO
ROSLAVLEV
KIRDZHALI: A TALE
EGYPTIAN NIGHTS
A JOURNEY TO ARZRUM AT THE TIME OF THE 1829 CAMPAIGN
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
There is a kind of genius in art who seems to embody a culture, a language, a created world. Examples are Shakespeare and Mozart. In some degree each national culture possesses one such genius: one who most obviously embodies and expresses it. For Russia it is Pushkin. His poems taught the Russian people to speak, to be themselves and rejoice in their language, to know who they were and how they felt. No cultivated Russian, familiar with his country’s history and literature, would find such a claim extravagant.
And yet the absolute ascendancy of Pushkin’s genius in Russian eyes and for Russian culture does continue to puzzle the rest of Europe. Pushkin is above all a poet, and so absolute a poet in his own language that he cannot be translated. Shakespeare is a poet too, of course; but he has so many other gifts that his native linguistic genius dilutes itself naturally into universal human channels. This is not the case with Pushkin. As a poet his dependence on his own language is complete. To see his real point you must be able to participate in the magic of the words of his poems. Those words lose their magic utterly in translation.
This strange fact has annoyed as well as puzzled writers and critics in western countries, who rightly supposed that they could always tell literary genius when they saw it. Flaubert in France was more than willing to accept his friend Mérimée’s enthusiastic assessment of Pushkin as one of the greatest. But he soon changed his mind. ‘Il est plat, votre poète’, he exclaimed disconsolately when Mérimée supplied him with translated samples of Pushkin’s poetic masterpieces, put into accurate French. Mérimée could read Russian: Flaubert could not.
If Mérimée, on the other hand, had seen fit to supply his friend with translations of Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin, Flaubert’s reaction might well have been very different. In fact Mérimée did translate at least two of the tales, and one, ‘The Shot’, he virtually passed off as his own. One could say, in fact, that Pushkin’s prose inspired the French writer in a way that Pushkin’s poetry could not possibly have done. And yet Mérimée, as a man of letters who knew Russian, was well aware that Pushkin’s greatness for his own countrymen was in his poetry, and so he attempted to persuade Flaubert. No good. It sounded flat; and the novelist was quite right to say so. But any Tale of Belkin would have sparkled in French, as it can in English. The
humour, the understatement, the graphic simplicity all come over very well. Flaubert would have seen that and enjoyed it. He would at least have been valuing Pushkin as an admirable and versatile prose writer, even though he could not understand why he was a very much greater poet.
Dostoyevsky too made a valiant attempt, on a very much larger scale than Mérimée’s, to persuade the world of the importance of his country’s greatest genius. At the celebration of Pushkin’s fiftieth anniversary in Moscow he made an impassioned speech, which he obviously hoped would be widely reported throughout Europe. In it he claimed that Pushkin was indeed a universal genius, who should be recognized as such wherever great books were read. Shakespeare, Cervantes – yes, very well, said Dostoyevsky, but neither had our Pushkin’s power of projecting himself into every country, every culture, every class and kind of mind. This startling claim was based on the ideas and the situations that can be extrapolated from Pushkin’s swift-moving poetic and dramatic narratives, and particularly from the so-called Little Tragedies, such as ‘Mozart and Salieri’. In a sense the claim is just enough, for Pushkin’s ideas and situations did indeed inspire subsequent Russian writers, and none more than Dostoyevsky himself.
But ideas and situations are commonplace in themselves. They must be transformed by the magic of art, and it is this art which – residing in the poetry as it does – is so difficult to bring across in a translation. Pushkin’s lighter art, on the other hand, as it is expanded in prose stories – his humour, his pleasure in absurdity, his good-natured amusement at human beings – these things can come across very well. Yet it has never been easy to find translations of the prose pieces in which these qualities of a great writer are both paramount and accessible. Hence the pleasure with which the reader who has not come across Pushkin’s prose before will welcome this excellent translation of most of his lesser known prose works.
Where prose was concerned Pushkin was above all a pioneer and experimentalist. The vogue for his poetry, especially his early poetry, had been sensational. In Russian literary circles he had become as famous as Byron had been in England and throughout western Europe. His poems were popular among ordinary folk too, in the same way that those of Burns became in his native Scotland. He had the common touch, and delighted in fairy tales and ballads, but he was also a dedicated and sophisticated artist who was never prepared to repeat a success, but was always exploring new effects and different forms. In his short life (he was killed in a duel at thirty-seven) he wrote a great deal, not in sheer bulk but in terms of versatility and variety. Furthermore, as he himself often stressed in a humorous way, he wrote for money. His early narrative poems had brought him in a good deal, but in the 1830s – he was born in the last year of the previous century – he understood very well that the fashion for romantic poetry was beginning to wane. A contemporary of his, an aspiring novelist in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, famously remarked that Russian readers had begun to get tired of poetry, as a child gets tired of its rattle: ‘There is a general outcry – give us prose! Water, plain water!’
Pushkin was prepared to oblige. His first serious attempt at writing prose fiction was to begin a novel about his own ancestor: the boy, probably from Abyssinia, who had been presented by the Turkish sultan to Peter the Great, and who had risen to become a general in Peter’s service. ‘Precision and tidiness are the prime merits of prose’, he had observed in one of his letters, and ‘The Negro of Peter the Great’ (1827) is perhaps almost too bald and simplistic in its narrative mode, although the account it gives of the period is a vivid and fascinating one. Probably the sheer impersonality of the narrative technique did not suit Pushkin, who in a narrative poem like Eugene Onegin had enjoyed playing deftly and humorously with every kind of literary convention and stylistic approach. In the unfinished Peter the Great story – it remains no more than a fragment – he ventured too boldly and too far towards the kind of omniscient and impersonal prose narration that would become common in the second half of the century – the heyday of the great novel. Possibly too he saw no way of making his leading character more significant and more interesting as the story of the young negro’s career developed. And so, with characteristic decisiveness, he stopped writing it.
None the less he did not at once abandon its impersonal and omniscient method. When reading ‘The guests were arriving at the dacha’, and ‘At the corner of a small square’ – these are the opening sentences of a pair of fragments a good deal shorter than the ‘Peter’ one – one has the uncanny impression of entering the sort of highly sophisticated and complex social world which is to be found in the novels of Stendhal or Flaubert. The characters Pushkin rapidly sketches in seem immensely ‘promising’: in a page or two one is already quite absorbed by them. The two fragments, especially the first, fascinated Tolstoy, who was inspired by its opening sentence (‘That is how prose should be written’, he remarked) in beginning the first draft of Anna Karenina.
And yet one can see why Pushkin found himself unable to develop a situation that seemed so auspiciously begun. The simple deadpan method gave him no room in which to turn round, and to expand the fashionable and intricate social scene in which his characters appear to be moving, and of which they are evidently natural denizens.
Pushkin moved in that sophisticated urban world himself, especially after 1831, when he married the beautiful Nataliya Goncharova. His marriage was a happy one, but his wife’s frivolity and flirtatiousness were to lead to the fatal duel seven years later, for Pushkin was by temperament intensely jealous, attributing this, like his own highly-sexed nature, to the remote African ancestor of whom he remained extremely proud. He loved society and gambling, and all the pleasures of the metropolis, but for two highly-productive autumns – the time he liked best to write – he withdrew to a small family manor house in the country at Boldino, shut himself up and wrote night and day for a month in a single continuous burst of inspiration. These ‘Boldino autumns’, as they are known to Pushkin scholars and admirers, produced astonishing achievements in verse, and at the same time in prose stories and the drama.
It was there he wrote his first prose masterpiece – the Tales of Belkin. This unique and delightful series of tales was first written straight out: it was afterwards that Pushkin invented the inimitable figure of Squire Belkin himself, as part of an elaborate mechanism of anonymity, and of a pretended naïveté. Pushkin was well aware too of a literary precedent, for both Walter Scott in Tales of My Landlord (1816–19) and the American Washington Irving in Tales of a Traveller (1824) had employed the same elaborately humorous narrative device. Pushkin’s humour is more subtle, however, and Belkin himself an excellent ‘character’, seen both with amusement and with a kind of affectionate respect. He is the simple good-hearted Russian squire – prostoy i dobry barin – rather like the father of Tatiana Larin in the verse novel Eugene Onegin. It seems quite likely that he was the kind of inspiration that came not only from a Boldino autumn in the country but from some of the local landowners.
As the ‘editor’ of the late Mr Belkin’s tales tells us in a footnote, their collector picked them up from various sources, in the course of his rural routines. A civil servant, a ‘titular councillor’, supplied ‘The Postmaster’. ‘The Shot’ he had heard from a Lieutenant-Colonel, and ‘The Undertaker’ from a ‘shop assistant’, perhaps at second-hand. Miss K. I. T., herself perhaps the daughter of a local squire, had been the source of the two most obviously ‘romantic’ tales – ‘The Blizzard’ and ‘The Squire’s Daughter’.
It is obvious of course that Pushkin enjoyed himself in his own quiet artist’s way by putting in touches appropriate to these various narrators. What is less obvious is the skill with which he has made his narrators not necessarily typical at all. His own theory of character (though one can hardly call the rapid, sparkling way in which he flung out ideas in his letters by the name of a ‘theory’) was that really great creators, notably Shakespeare, never created characters whose behaviour was consistent and all-of-a
-piece. Shylock and Macbeth, for instance, show personalities – Shylock a man of his word and a devoted father, Macbeth tormented by conscience and wholly unsuited by nature to murder and intrigue – which are quite at variance with their dramatic roles. Byron, on the other hand, says Pushkin, makes a conspirator ‘even order a drink conspiratorially, and that’s absurd’.
This sense of a true and unpredictable humanity was vital to Pushkin’s creative genius. It appears most clearly in the Little Tragedies, where Salieri is as honourable and high-minded a murderer as Othello, and Don Juan irresistible not because he is an expert and cold-hearted seducer but because he really loves and appreciates women – all women. We can see the same impulse working in the complex comedy of the Belkin stories, most felicitously of all in ‘The Postmaster’. For a start the narrator is himself by no means a ‘typical’ civil servant: he is a man of sense and sensibility, who understands and appreciates both the pathos of the situation from the old father’s point of view, and how things must look to a pretty and intelligent daughter longing for a chance to make her way in the world. The consistency and predictability which Pushkin subtly undermines in his tale are here in fact those of the New Testament story of the Prodigal Son. So far from going to the bad, the Postmaster’s daughter Dunya goes to the good, as it were. Everything turns out well for her; it is her old father who takes to drink and dies forlorn. And then she comes home, as he would not permit her while he was alive, to shed a tear on his grave. She is by no means an abandoned or a hard-hearted girl.
There is not a trace of sentimentality in the telling of the story, and yet this quiet and unemphatic presentation of an episode from Wordsworth’s ‘still sad music of humanity’ is very moving. Romanticism tended of course to sentimentalize such things. Pushkin was very gently sending up the famous tear-jerker ‘Poor Liza’ (1792), by the older and distinguished Russian author Karamzin. The same sentimental formula would be exploited by Dickens. But temperamentally Pushkin was not in the least a romantic. He was, it would be true to say, much more a Shakespearean; and in his first wholly successful prose pieces he delighted in using the subtle arts of parody and comedy to produce an effect which was intelligently moving, and never superficial or sensationalized. As his critics have demonstrated, Pushkin’s art is full of implication. In his own words there was ‘no need to spell it out’.
