Notes on Russian Literature: Pushkin

by EDMUND WILSON

1

WE HAVE long entertained in the West certain notions about Russian literature — which have been shared by such critics as Virginia Woolf with the ordinary literary journalists. These assumptions may be formulated somewhat as follows : —

(1)That the Russians are formless and unkempt;

(2)That they are gloomy;

(3)That they are crudely realistic;

(4)That they are morbid and hysterical;

(5)That they are mystical.

These ideas are all very misleading. They are not susceptible of being applied as generalizations even to the three or four novelists who are usually read by the West. They are obviously not true of Turgenev, but the Westerners get around this by asserting that Turgenev is exceptional: that he acquired a European refinement and became virtually a French writer — though Turgenev’s graceful form and lightness of touch are typical of one Russian tradition. Chekhov also has form, of course, but then he is unquestionably gloomy. Tolstoy is not hysterical till he gets to The Kreutzer Sonata, which comes late in his literary career. Dostoevsky, when one looks into the matter, turns out to be the figure who, par excellence, represents the Westerner’s ideal of what a Russian writer ought to be; but, even in the case of Dostoevsky, our preconceived ideas about Russians partly prevent us from seeing in him the qualities that are really there.

Now the great fountainhead of Russian literature is Pushkin. From him all these other Russian writers in more or less degree derive; and the qualities of Pushkin are the opposites of the qualities usually attributed to the Russians by French and English readers.

The Russians arc in the habit of comparing Pushkin with Mozart, and this is perhaps the nearest one can come to a simple comparison. Pushkin does, through both his career and his qualities, somewhat recall Mozart: he is able to express through an art that is felicitous and formal a feeling that is passionate and exquisite; he has a wide range of moods and emotions, yet he handles them all with precision; and — what is hard to make Westerners believe — he achieved in the poetry of his time a similar preeminence to Mozart’s in music.

Mozart’s career itself was in some ways characteristic of t he generation that followed his rat her than of the eighteenth century. The poets that overlapped the century or were born in the early eighteen hundreds, who lived in the stimulating disturbing time between the old world and the new, tend, in the very disorder of their lives, to repeat the same evolution. They are precocious, they soon make themselves masters of their art; they do personal and original work, and they are likely to try their hands at several genres; they die before their time, of disease or dissipation or the results of reckless living, leaving productions that make the later nineteenth century look rather banal and soggy and that yet constitute a fragmentary lifework. Byron, Keats, Heine, Shelley, Poe, Musset —here the earliest date (Byron’s birth) is 1788 and the latest (Musset’s death) 1857, with all these writers except the tough Heine dying in their twenties or thirties or forties (as Mozart died at thirty-five). If one adds from another department the work of Jane Austen (1775-1817), also consummate and also uncompleted, and of Stendhal (1783-1842), similarly original, non-official and squeezed out, as it were, by the stresses of the age, you get a distinct picture of this brilliant intermediate generation.

Now, though Goethe is of course the figure who dominates the perilous swing out of the past into the modern world, Pushkin, born in 1799, exiled in his youth, censored in his maturity, and shot in a duel in 1837, is the great figure of this short-lived group. Unlikely though it may seem, he hud something in common with every one of the writers named above. He is the universal poet of that moment. Pushkin’s cultural roots and branches reach out about him in every direction; he studied Latin and Greek, and he made a beginning with Hebrew; he digested the age of Voltaire and derived from it all that he needed; he tried his hand at translating Wordsworth, exploited Barry Cornwall by borrowing the form of the Englishman’s Dramatic Scenes, and he achieved a perspective on Byron which few of the European romantics had, by a careful reading of Shakespeare, from whom he learned what he required for his chronicle play, Boris Godunov; he established with the Polish poet Mickiewicz one of those intimate literary relationships, half competitive, half cooperative, that are likely to be so profitable to both parties, and he exchanged, for Prosper Mérimée’s pioneer work in learning Russian and translating him and Gogol into French, translations which improved the originals, of Mérimée’s forged Slavic folk-songs; and in the field of Russian culture itself, he retold the Russian fairy stories as perhaps the fairy stories of no other nation have ever been retold, acted as literary godfather to Gogol, giving him the cues to his artistic development and supplying him with the themes of Dead Souls and The Inspector General, bequeathed to the Russian composers enough subjects for ballets and operas to last all the rest of the century, and sowed the seeds of a Russian realism united with a fine sensibility that has been flourishing ever since. Pushkin had a mastery of language as remarkable certainly as that of any other nineteenth century poet; and, with this, a kind of genius which none of the other poets had, and few of the novelists to the same degree: the genius for dramatic projection.

In this rare combination of qualities, it seems to me that Pushkin is the only modern poet in the class of Shakespeare and Dante. It may seem unbelievable that Pushkin’s achievement in his bare thirty-eight years can be comparable to Shakespeare’s or Dante’s; yet, after all, Shakespeare at thirty-eight had written Julius Caesar and Hamlet, and Dante had had his vision and is thought to have composed at least the first seven cantos of the Divina Commedia. If Pushkin’s latest poems and plays and the final version of Evgeni Onegin do not precisely correspond to these, it is only because Hamlet and the opening of the Inferno are each the beginning of an immense mature work which the poet feels the assurance that he will be able to live to finish. With Pushkin, it is as if his impending death were anticipated by him all along, as if he knew from the first that he must find the way to put into the work of his thirties all his intensity and all his variety. The scale of Pushkin’s work is different because his life-span is different. Just as the subject of Shakespeare is the full experience of a man who is young and passes through middle age and finally grows old, and as Dante’s whole project depends for its force on an organization of experience through self-discipline and an ultimate aloof contemplation hardly attainable before late middle age (Dante died at fifty-six, as soon as his poem was finished); so Pushkin, incongruously situated in the Russia of the Decembrist uprising, where he had felt all his life at the back of his neck the pressure of a remorseless paw, found a way to make his fate itself both the measure and the theme of his work, with a dignity, an objectivity, a clear and pure vision of the human play which remove him completely from the category of the self-dramatizing romantic poets.

2

TO WRITE properly of Pushkin is so large a task that such hints as I here have space for may imply their excuse by their obvious lameness.

First of all, Pushkin’s mastery of form. He is one of the few writers who never seem to fall — from the point where he has outgrown his early models — into formulas of expression. He finds a special shape and a special style for every successive subject; and, even without looking for the moment at his dramatic and narrative poems, one is amazed at the variety of his range. You have lyrics in regular quatrains that are as pointed and spare as Greek epigrams or as forceful and repcrcussive as the Concord Hymn, and you have lyrics in broken accents: soliloquies that rise out of sleep or trail off in unspoken longings — where the modulated meter follows the thought; you have the balladry and jingling of folk-songs, and you have set-pieces like To a Noble (in the meter and rhyme-scheme of Boileau’s epistles) of a rhetorical solidity and brilliance that equals anything in Pope or the Romans; you have airy little ribaldries like the Tsar Nikita, informal discursive poems like Autumn that are like going to visit Pushkin for a week-end in the country, and forgings of fierce energetic language, now metallic and unmalleable, now molten and flowing, like The Upas Tree and The Prophet. You have, finally, dramatic lyrics like The Fiends and Winter Evening, for which it is hard to find phrases or comparisons because they are as purely and intensely Pushkin as Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli — is purely and intensely Catullus or Sweeney among the Nightingales Eliot.

As for the texture of Pushkin’s language and its marvelous adaptation to whatever it describes, one is helpless to give any idea of it without direct quotation from his poetry; but a passage or two may be mentioned in which the patterns and motifs must be obvious even to readers who do not know Russian. Count Nulin is a little tale in verse which Pushkin said he wrote to show that the history of Rome might have taken quite a different turn if Lucretia had slapped Tarquin’s face instead of submitting to him. The poem is relatively light, yet artistically it is perfect; a genre picture of country life as accurately and vividly sketched as any episode in a Russian novel. Here is the passage in which the slap occurs. The Lucretia is a landowner’s lady, and the Tarquin a fashionable traveler returning to Russia from France.

But here she recovered herself, and, spurred by chaste pride, and perhaps by fear as well, she gives Tarquin a swinging slap — Yes, yes! — And what a slap!

Count Nulin burned with shame to swallow such an insult; I don’t know what he might have done, consumed with dire chagrin, if the woolly Spitz had not begun to bark and waked Parasha from her heavy slumber.

The word for slap here is poshchechina, but the actual impact of the slap is conveyed by the first syllable of daet, and the da, da!, yes, yes! at the end of the line, and reinforced by da ved’ in the next line. Then it goes on stinging in the lines that follow, the da cropping up again in the last syllable of styda, shame, and fading somewhat but still clearly perceptible in obidu and dosadoy, insult and chagrin, all these words thus referring by their meaning to Nulin’s injured feelings and by their sound to his tingling cheek. In the last two lines the lap dog begins to yap in the alternating p’s and k’s, which have already been prepared for by the consonants in the description of the earlier shock. Another charming example is in The Tale of the Tsar Saltan, when the brave little prince, adrift with his mother, begins his appeal to the sea: —

Here the v’s alternate with l’s, and the soft l’s alternate with hard Z’s. The rhyme words — sea and free — are identical except for this difference in the l’s. Pushkin here uses metonymically the word for leave for sea; and the whole effect is smooth and undulating like the movement of a gentle swell. It is curious to note that Pushkin has here hit upon the same combination both of consonants and of vowels that Pope, in Windsor Forest, has used for his line on the eel: —

The silver eel, in shining volumes rolled . , .

and that these same combinations occur in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid where Virgil describes the serpent gliding about on the body of Amata: —

It is characteristic of Pushkin that both these passages should owe their vividness primarily to the representation of movement. Movement is a specialty of Pushkin’s. He can do sounds, landscapes, personalities, and all the other things, too; but there is probably no other poet since Virgil, with his serpents, his limping Cyclops, his wheel of Ixion, and his armies moving off, who has this sense so completely developed as Pushkin; and the control of the consistency and pace of the hexameter can never give the freedom for such effects that Pushkin finds in his rapider meters. The flood in The Bronze Horseman, the ballet-girl in Evgeni Onegin, the hawk that drops on the chicken-yard in Ruslan and Lyudmila, the cat in Count Nulin creeping up and pouncing on a mouse — Pushkin is full of such pictures of actions that seem as we read to take place right before our eyes without the intervention of language.

And this natural instinct for movement is shown in another way in the poet’s command of the movement of his verse and the movement of his play or his story. I have spoken in an earlier article of the timing of Russian fiction. The timing in Pushkin is perfect. He never for a moment bores you, yet — touching on nothing, however briefly, without some telling descriptive stroke — he covers an immense amount of ground. The one hundred and seventy pages of Onegin take us through as much of life as many Victorian novels, and give us the feeling of having lived it more intimately. A Russian lady once told me that when she had looked up The Gypsies after not having read it for many years, she was surprised to find how short it was: the impression left in her memory by this succession of ten little scenes had been that of having gone, like the hero, to wander a long time with a caravan. In the case of a writer like Flaubert, for example, we see a story take place: it is a panorama reeled off before us, and its pace is the pace of the showman. With Pushkin, we live the vicissitudes of Aleko as we live the campaigns of War and Peace.

3

BUT what of Pushkin’s larger themes? I should have neither the space nor the confidence to deal with his creations and their meanings. But a foreigner who reads Pushkin for the first time in his forties may derive from his very inexperience one advantage that balances a little the handicaps he suffers from the inadequacy of his Russian. It would be interesting to come upon Shakespeare and to read him all through for his intrinsic interest without ever having studied him at school; and the Russian who has memorized Poltava at the same age when English-speaking children are learning The quality of mercy . . . may never be able to rid himself of preconceptions about Pushkin as national poet that actually obscure his understanding of Pushkin as critic of life. Having got out of Evgeni Onegin what he was capable of getting in his schooldays, he will continue to remember it all his life as a simple and improving story for well brought-up young men and women. One even finds reactionary Russians writing about The Bronze Horseman as if it were simply a glorification of the ruthless authority of Peter the Great, to which the lives of Evgeni and his sweetheart are quite properly sacrificed; yet this is a great deal more obtuse than it would be for an Englishman to see only the patriotism in Hen ry V and not realize that the frustrated Falstaff is more interesting to Shakespeare than Henry. I heard recently at a Russian meeting in celebration of the defense of Leningrad a speaker quote Evgeni’s defiance of the statue: “Where dost thou gallop, haughty steed? — And where wilt thou plant thy foot?” — as if it were a battle-cry, and as if it had never occurred to him that the whole point of Pushkin’s poem is that the hoof of Peter’s charger has crushed the Russians as well as their enemies.

That hoof was hanging over Pushkin all through his later work. It was one of the elements of the complex doom which closed in on him and cut him down — though this doom, like the doom of Aleko in The Gypsies, depended upon Pushkin’s personality, too. The events that resulted in Pushkin’s death make one of the queerest and most disquieting stories in the whole of literary history — a story perhaps more dramatic than anything Pushkin ever invented;¹ and it would provide one of the most fascinating problems for which literature offers the opportunity, to try to explain Pushkin’s writing and these happenings in terms of one another. I am by no means prepared to undertake the explanation, but I am certain that, as Pushkin perfects his art, as he sharpens the profile of his style and intensifies his concentration on human personalities and relations, he is reflecting ever more clearly the internal and external conflicts in which he finds his spirit involved. Aleko, who flees to the gypsies from the organized social world, but finds himself eventually driven to commit among them the same kind of crime that has originally made him an outlaw, and so becomes outlawed by the gypsies themselves; the clerk of The Bronze Horseman, who loses all he has in the flood and yet pays for his rebellion with madness; the young guardsman in The Cottage in Kolomna who dresses as a woman and works as a cook; The Nigger of Peter the Great who can never make up for his blackness; the young mountaineer in Tazit who refuses to avenge his brother and allows himself to be made a pariah; the prince in Rusalka who marries a princess only to be alienated from her by the enchantments of his earlier love, a miller’s daughter turned water-nymph; the merchant’s son of Scenes from the Age of Chivalry who is persuaded by the knights to take service with them and then finds that he has become their menial — all are the images of Pushkin’s false position between the old nobility and the new, between the life of society and the life of art, between the tsardom and the instincts of modern thought, between marriage and the man for himself.

Yet in these dramas the whole situation is usually seen so much in the round, the presentation of opposing forces is so little obscured by animus, that it becomes almost impossible to say that the poet is on either side. In Onegin the clever but sterile Evgeni envies the stupid Lensky for his idealism, his poetry, and his capacity for love, and manages to kill him in a duel; in Mozart and Salieri the academic composer envies the genius and poisons him. Both themes are obviously the reflections of something that has been deeply experienced by Pushkin and on which he might have brooded with bitterness; yet he handles them in such a way that there is never any melodrama involved: Lensky is extremely sincere, but foolish and perhaps a bad poet; Salieri is a villain, but he states his point of view with so much conviction and dignity that we almost come to respect him. The emotion that we get from reading Pushkin is something outside the picture: it is an emotion, half comic, half poignant, at contemplating the nature of things. He gives us the picture created by art — and this is to a considerable extent true even of his personal poetry — and refrains from other comment (his digressions in such stories as Evgeni Onegin and The Cottage in Kolomna always have an artistic value that is different from their ostensible purpose).

1 It has been interestingly told by Mr. Ernest J. Simmons in his biography of Pushkin.

We always feel, thus, in reading Pushkin, that there is something behind and beyond, something we can only guess at; and this makes his peculiar fascination — a fascination which has something in common with the inexhaustible interest of Shakespeare, who seems to be giving us his sonnets and Hamlet and Lear and the rest as the moods and dreams of some drama the actuality of which we never touch.

Pushkin smiles, but he is never free in the sense that Shakespeare in the end is free, and he has always in relation to his art a seriousness and an anxiety of one who knows the night is coming. As his mind grows in clarity and power, the prison of the world grips him tighter; and his final involvement and defiance and defeat are themselves a projection of the drama which is still always behind and beyond.