Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin, Page 2

  Pushkin, like many of his young friends, shared the liberal ideas of the Decembrists. The Raevsky brothers had joined the Southern Society, though they pulled out of it some time before the uprising. He had made the acquaintance of Pestel during his time in Kishinev and had been struck by his forceful personality. Later, as he records in Journey to Arzrum, Pushkin ran into many former Decembrists who had been sent to serve in the Caucasus as “punishment” for their radical views. In September 1826, during a private meeting in Moscow, the new emperor asked him where he would have been on December 26. Pushkin replied candidly: “On Senate Square with the rebels.”

  That conversation took place soon after Nicholas decided to end Pushkin’s exile. A messenger brought the news to Mikhailovskoe. Pushkin left the same day and on September 8 arrived in Moscow. The emperor met with him at once and explained his new situation. His work would no longer be subject to official censorship; instead it would be submitted for approval to the emperor himself. Pushkin, charmed by Nicholas’s apparent benevolence during their meeting, took that as an honor, not realizing that the real censor would be Count Benckendorf, head of the Third Section, his majesty’s new secret police. He soon began to feel the burden of that blessing, but for some time he was reluctant to blame it on Nicholas himself. Nevertheless, it weighed on him for the rest of his life.

  In 1827 he was allowed to move to Petersburg. There he lived more or less as he had before his banishment, and was able to enjoy the company of some of his oldest literary friends. In 1829 he met and fell in love with a beautiful young woman of seventeen, Natalya Goncharova. He proposed to her almost at once, but was refused. He also wanted very much to travel abroad, but that, too, was denied him. Suddenly the capital felt stifling to him, and he took off without permission to join the army in the Caucasus, where the Raevskys were serving. This was during one of the Russo-Turkish Wars. He recounts his experiences in Journey to Arzrum, published six years later. Some of his finest poems also came from events he encountered along the way.

  On his return, Pushkin went to Moscow, where he continued his courtship of Natalya Goncharova. In April 1830 he proposed to her a second time and was accepted. His father, with whom he had always had strained relations, was pleased at this sign of maturity and respectability and settled on him the small estate of Boldino in the region of Nizhny Novgorod, some 385 miles east of Moscow. In late summer, prior to the wedding, Pushkin went to look over the property, intending to stay a few weeks at most, but a cholera epidemic broke out, quarantines closed the roads, and he ended up staying for three months. This period of suspension, the most fruitful in his creative life, came to be known as the “Boldino Autumn.” During it he wrote some thirty lyric poems, the last two chapters of Evgeny Onegin, the comic narrative poem The Little House in Kolomna, and the four superb short plays he referred to as “Little Tragedies”: The Miserly Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, and A Feast in a Time of Plague. And it was during those months that he also wrote his first finished work of fiction, the five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, with their companion piece, The History of the Village of Goryukhino.

  The tales are epitomes of Pushkin’s fiction. “Inspiration finds the poet,” he says in the preface to Arzrum, but prose he worked at very consciously. His aim was to make the tales as unpoetic, as purely narrative, as possible. They have no commentary, no psychology, no ideas, no flights of rhetoric or authorial digressions. They are cast as local anecdotes, and are told so simply and artlessly that at first one barely notices the subtlety of their composition, the shifts in time and point of view, the reversals of expectation, the elements of parody, the ambiguity of their resolutions. Pushkin attributed them to the naïve country squire Ivan Petrovich Belkin, who in turn claimed to have collected them from various local sources. Belkin’s life is briefly sketched in a prefatory letter from one of his neighbors. Pushkin himself appears only as “the publisher” over the initials A. P.

  Belkin seems to have occurred to Pushkin after the tales were written, in connection with their publication. For one thing, the disguise enabled him to elude Benckendorf’s censorship. Mirsky suggests that he may also have wanted an alias because the tales were experimental and he was not sure how they would be received. If so, his uncertainty proved justified. “The stories met with no success,” Mirsky continues. “When they appeared without Pushkin’s name the critics paid no attention to them, and when his authorship was divulged, like good critics, they declared that the stories were not worthy of their author and that they marked a grievous decline in his talent.”*7 Their artistic perfection went unnoticed, as did their originality in the development of Russian fiction.

  Once Belkin appeared, however, he took on his own life in Pushkin’s imagination, resulting in The History of the Village of Goryukhino. It consists of two parts. The first is a superbly comic rendering of Belkin’s (and Pushkin’s) development as a writer, from his initial poetic ambitions to his eventual decision to “descend into prose,” as he puts it himself. The unfinished second part is the history of Goryukhino proper—an equally comic parody of historiography and, behind that, a biting satire on rural life and the evils of serfdom.

  Pushkin’s own “descent into prose” continued throughout his last years. The unfinished works, fragments, and sketches we have included in this collection show not only the breadth of his literary culture but also his conscious experimentation with different formal possibilities: the society novel; the epistolary novel; a Russian variation on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s best-selling novel Pelham, published in 1828; a tale set in Roman times; the blending of prose and poetry in Egyptian Nights. There is the finished story Kirdjali, a briskly narrated and completely unromantic account of the doings of a Bulgarian bandit during the Greek war of independence in 1821. And in contrast to it there is the unfinished Roslavlev, narrated by a woman, saturated with literary references and polemics, portraying the French culture of the Russian aristocracy as it was confronted with Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, a social satire which suddenly takes a dark turn just as it breaks off…(Tolstoy was to play on some of the same ironies thirty years later in War and Peace.) Pushkin wrote Roslavlev in response to the historical novel of the same name published in 1831 by Mikhail Zagoskin. Zagoskin’s first novel, Yuri Miloslavsky, published in 1829, was widely acclaimed and made of him the Russian Walter Scott that Pushkin might have become a year earlier if he had not abandoned The Moor of Peter the Great. In his Roslavlev, Zagoskin made some obvious allusions to Evgeny Onegin, borrowing certain names from Pushkin’s novel in verse and playing variations on the characters’ fates. Pushkin’s narrator, who is Roslavlev’s sister, sets out to correct Zagoskin’s factual and sentimental misrepresentations.

  Dubrovsky, the longest of Pushkin’s unfinished works, is an adventure novel with an honest gentleman robber as hero. As such it is often compared to Scott’s Rob Roy or the tales of Robin Hood. But its portrayal of rural life in eighteenth-century Russia, the relations of landowners and peasants, the connivance of government officials with the rich, has nothing romantic about it, and the quickness and terseness of its prose is the opposite of Scott’s leisurely narration. It is an example of the inclusiveness of Pushkin’s manner, by turns comic, parodic, melodramatic, grimly realistic, and warmly human—what John Bayley has nicely termed his “power of polyphonic suggestion.”*8

  Pushkin’s two most important works of fiction, The Queen of Spades (1834) and The Captain’s Daughter (1836), form a final artistic contrast—the one tense, minimal in detail, impersonal, plot-driven; the other, his only finished novel, a more leisurely memoir, moved by seeming chance, told in the first person. The Queen of Spades is a city story, a Petersburg story; The Captain’s Daughter takes us back to the provinces and as far as the military outposts in the southern Ural region of Orenburg. The two also contrast sharply in their play on fate and chance, darkness and light.

  On the surface The Queen of Spades is an elaborate anecdote about the passion for
gambling, of which Pushkin had great personal experience. But it goes far beyond mere gambling in its brush with the supernatural, or madness, in the fate of its protagonist, the rootless, ambitious army engineer Hermann. The essential ambiguity of the tale is prefigured in the person of the Comte de Saint-Germain, who appears in a flashback early on. Both a typical eighteenth-century aristocrat and the subject of strange legends and mysterious rumors, he is portrayed with considerable sympathy and humor. The same is true of the three main characters—Hermann, the old countess, and her young ward Lizaveta—whose vulnerable humanity tempers the melodrama of the events they are caught up in. Pushkin wisely leaves the central mystery of the tale unresolved, and it lingers darkly in the reader’s mind after the summary conclusion.

  “The thought of abandoning trivial and dubious anecdotes for the recounting of true and great events had long stirred my imagination.” So wrote Ivan Petrovich Belkin in his preface to The History of the Village of Goryukhino, anticipating what would be the final stage in Pushkin’s own development as a prose writer. One of the few real benefits Pushkin derived from being under the emperor’s personal supervision was permission to work in the state archives, granted him in 1832. He made good use of it. His first impulse was to write a history of Peter the Great, which he began that same year but laid aside almost at once. Instead he took up the more recent events of the Cossack rebellion of 1773–1774, the largest peasant revolt of the eighteenth century, led by Emelyan Pugachev, who claimed to be the emperor Peter III. The result was the masterful two-volume History of the Pugachev Rebellion, based on over a thousand pages of notes and transcriptions he took from the archives. In the late summer of 1833, during his work on the History, he also traveled to the Orenburg region, where the rebellion broke out, and visited the various towns and fortresses connected with it. All of this research nourished his last and longest work of fiction, The Captain’s Daughter.

  In the novel Pushkin deals with the same historical events as in the history, but in an indirect, incidental, almost happenstance way, as the personal experiences of the young officer Pyotr Andreevich Grinyov. What concerns Pushkin is not historical forces, causes and effects, but the working out of destiny through a series of apparent coincidences. Destiny seems like mere chance, but here, as Sinyavsky writes, chance has a formative function. It reveals “the wittiness of life…the good sense behind its riddles and mishaps.” It depends, as in Shakespeare, not on ineluctable fate, but on the response of the characters to what befalls them.

  Pushkin has space in the novel to develop his characters more fully than in his earlier fiction. They are unusual because they are quite ordinary. Grinyov himself is a naïve, impressionable young man. Grinyov’s superior at the fortress, Captain Mironov, his wife, and his daughter Masha are simple and good people, portrayed with fine humor, as is Grinyov’s tutor, Savelyich. They show a modest but genuine heroism in the face of catastrophe. Grinyov, too, for all his youthful naïveté and impulsiveness, is both steadfast and intelligent. There is no romantic glamour about any of them. They are masterfully drawn, but with such understatement that we hardly notice how it is done. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil wrote:

  Imaginary evil is romantic, varied; real evil is dreary, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Hence the “literature of imagination” is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of the two). It can only escape this alternative by passing over somehow, by dint of art, to the side of reality—which genius alone can do.

  The characters in The Captain’s Daughter are on the side of reality. The only exception is Shvabrin, the melodramatic villain of the piece, whose villainy, like Iago’s in Othello, is never explained.

  Reality is not banality, as Pushkin constantly shows us. There is nothing documentary about The Captain’s Daughter; on the contrary, it has elements of the folktale about it—mysterious appearances, interventions, coincidences. It is composed of two intertwining stories: the love story of Grinyov and Masha, and the story of Grinyov’s complex relations with the rebel Pugachev (their private conversations are some of the most extraordinary moments in the book). Grinyov’s fate is determined, not by some all-ruling historical inevitability, nor by his personal will, but by two chance meetings: his own with the wayfarer at the beginning, and Masha’s with a little white dog and its owner at the end.

  “Pushkin is the golden section of Russian literature,” wrote Sinyavsky. “Having thrust it forcefully into the future, he himself fell back and now plays in it the role of an eternally flowering past to which it returns to be rejuvenated.” Tolstoy gave an example of that rejuvenation in a letter describing the beginning of his work on Anna Karenina. His wife, he says, had taken down a volume of Pushkin’s prose from the shelf to show to their son and had left it on the table.

  The other day, after my work, I picked up this volume of Pushkin and as always (for the seventh time, I think) read it from cover to cover, unable to tear myself away, as if I were reading it for the first time. More than that, it was as if it dispelled all my doubts. Never have I admired Pushkin so much, nor anyone else for that matter. The Shot, Egyptian Nights, The Captain’s Daughter!!! There was also the fragment, “The guests were arriving at the dacha.” Despite myself, not knowing where or what it would lead to, I imagined characters and events, which I developed, then naturally modified, and suddenly it all came together so well, so solidly, that it turned into a novel…

  Reading Pushkin’s prose will not make great novelists of us all, but we can certainly share Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for the incomparable works, both finished and fragmentary, collected in this book.

  RICHARD PEVEAR

  * * *

  *1 Sinyavsky wrote the book as letters to his wife while he was serving a seven-year sentence in a Soviet labor camp, and published it in 1975 under his pseudonym, Abram Tertz, after his release and forced emigration. An English translation by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava Yastremski was published by Yale University Press in 1994.

  *2 The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, edited and translated by J. Thomas Shaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 237.

  *3 A History of Russian Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 124.

  *4 The Critical Prose of Alexander Pushkin, edited and translated by Carl R. Proffer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 80.

  *5 D. S. Mirsky, Pushkin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), p. 212.

  *6 Letters, pp. 188–189.

  *7 Pushkin, pp. 177–178.

  *8 Introduction to Alexander Pushkin, The Collected Stories, translated by Paul Debreczeny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. xvi.

  The Moor of Peter the Great

  By Peter’s iron will

  Russia was transformed.

  YAZYKOV1

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am in Paris:

  I have begun to live, not just to breathe.

  DMITRIEV, Diary of a Traveler2

  Among the young men sent abroad by Peter the Great to acquire the knowledge necessary for the reformed state was his godson, the moor Ibrahim. He studied at the military school in Paris,3 graduated as a captain of artillery, distinguished himself in the Spanish war,4 and returned, gravely wounded, to Paris. The emperor, in the midst of his immense labors, never ceased to ask after his favorite and always received flattering reports of his progress and conduct. Peter was very pleased with him and repeatedly called him back to Russia, but Ibrahim was in no hurry. He excused himself on various pretexts—now his wound, now his wish to improve his knowledge, now his lack of money—and Peter condescended to his requests, begged him to look after his health, thanked him for his zeal for learning, and, though extremely thrifty in his own expenses, did not spare his purse for him, supplementing the money with fatherly advice and cautionary admonishments.

  From the evidence of all the historical records, nothing could compare with the unbridled frivolity, madness, and
luxury of the French at that time. The last years of the reign of Louis XIV, marked by the strict piety of the court, its pomposity and decorum, had left no traces. The duc d’Orléans, who combined many brilliant qualities with all sorts of vices, did not, unfortunately, possess even a shadow of hypocrisy.5 The orgies in the Palais-Royale were no secret for Paris; the example was contagious. Just then Law appeared;6 greed for money combined with the desire for pleasure and distraction; estates disappeared; morality perished; the French laughed and calculated, and the state was falling apart to the playful refrains of satirical vaudevilles.

  Meanwhile, society presented a most interesting picture. Education and the need for amusement brought all conditions together. Wealth, courtesy, fame, talent, eccentricity itself—all that gave food for curiosity or promised pleasure was received with equal benevolence. Literature, learning, and philosophy left their quiet studies and appeared in the circle of high society to oblige fashion and guide its opinions. Women reigned, but no longer demanded adoration. Superficial politeness replaced profound respect. The pranks of the duc de Richelieu, the Alcibiades of the new Athens, belong to history and give an idea of the morals of the time.7

  Temps fortuné, marqué par la license,

  Où la folie, agitant son grelot,

  D’un pied léger parcourt toute la France,

  Où nul mortel ne daigne être dévot,

  Où l’on fait tout excepté pénitence.*1