Selected Poetry (Penguin)

by Alexander Pushkin

  In narrative verse, metre, the storytelling vehicle, has its own dynamic and carries more of the essence of the poem than is the case with lyric verse outside stylised genres, and so in the ten long poems in this book, with two exceptions, I have kept the original metres. In non-stanzaic narrative poems, where the lines are continuous and undivided, I have matched the syllabic loss of shorter English words by a reduction in the overall line count: my translation of The Bronze Horseman, for example, in the same metre as Pushkin’s poem, has eight per cent fewer lines, and in the case of The Tale of the Golden Cockerel the reduction is seven per cent.

  In terms of sound, stressed syllables in Russian words are much more emphatic and graphic than in English, and this too presents the translator with difficulties. The literal sense of a phrase or line of Pushkin may be dead simple, but the expressiveness of the original will often lie in its sound, its assonance, alliteration or rhythm. Without the Russian sound, a close translation will tend to seem dead, and especially in verse as sparing in metaphor as Pushkin’s. His word music can never be matched wholly, but attempts can be made at some compensatory representation. At least the translator can always aim to achieve something like Pushkin’s quality of directness.

  Since the eighteenth century, Russian and English poetry have shared the familiar classic range of metres in the accentual-syllabic tradition – that is, with a set number and pattern of stresses and syllables in a line – so that at least in this respect the English translator can have some feeling of common ground with Pushkin. But of course poetry, lyric verse especially, moves in its own language-specific way, and in translation verse form will often need to be translated as well as words. For maximum authenticity I have kept Pushkin’s lyric metres wherever possible without what seemed too much distortion, but have followed the metrical course in which a poem seemed to be heading in its new linguistic garb rather than impose a straitjacket that would have falsified the sense and crushed the life out of it. Whether or not the metrical form of the original is kept in any given translation, I have always followed consistent metre and scansion. Occasionally I have abandoned Pushkin’s formal architecture altogether. Original verse forms where the translation is otherwise, as in the majority of cases, are indicated in the endnotes.

  Pushkin’s lyric verse until late in his career is always rhymed, and I have usually rhymed too, sometimes preferring the greater freedom afforded by near and half-rhymes and non-rhyming alternate lines. I have not followed the regular alternation of feminine and masculine rhymes that is obligatory in Russian verse but is unnatural or unwantedly light-hearted or satirical in English; however, I have sometimes used the rhythm of unrhymed unstressed English word-endings to give an echo of feminine rhyme.

  My overriding aim has been to offer what seemed to work as English verse, tethered to the original as closely as possible in the ways I have mentioned.

  Pushkin’s texts I have used are those of Sobraniye sochineniy v desyati tomakh [Collected Works in Ten Volumes], ed. D. D. Blagoy et al. (Moscow: State Publishing House of Literature, 1959–62), vols 1 and 2 (Stikhotvoreniya [Lyric Poems], 1814–36), and vol. 3 (Poemy, skazki [Narrative Poems and Fairy Tales]), which reproduce those of the collected edition of the USSR Academy of Sciences in seventeen volumes (1937–59) with corrections.

  Antony Wood

  February 2020

  Further Reading

  GENERAL

  Richard, D. J., and Cockrell, C. R. S. (ed. and tr.), Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976). Perspectives by twenty-six writers and critics from Pushkin’s time to the Soviet era.

  Tertz, Abram (pseudonym of Andrey Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin, tr. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993). A whimsical, irreverent and deeply loving extended essay on Pushkin’s poetry and its relationship with his life.

  Todd, William Mills, III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). A useful general account of Pushkin’s reading public and the contemporary publishing and literary scene.

  BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS

  Binyon, T. J., Pushkin: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002). The definitive biography in English.

  Chandler, Robert, Alexander Pushkin, in ‘Brief Lives’ series (London: Hesperus Press, 2009). A handy summary of the essentials of Pushkin’s life.

  Feinstein, Elaine, Pushkin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). A nice balance between biographical and literary treatment.

  Shaw, J. Thomas (ed. and tr.), The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, 3 vols (Downham Market: Milner, 1999–2001). An indispensable reference work.

  Tynyanov, Yury, Young Pushkin, tr. Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush (London: Angel Classics, 2007). A novel (1935–43) by a leading Pushkinist and classic historical novelist convincingly recreating Pushkin’s personality in his formative years and the society of his time.

  Vitale, Serena, Pushkin’s Button, tr. Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild, paperback edition (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). An account of the last year or so of Pushkin’s life and of the fatal duel; impeccably researched.

  CRITICISM

  Basker, Michael (ed.), A. S. Pushkin: The Bronze Horseman, with an introduction and notes (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000) and including the original text edited by N. V. Izmailov (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978). A comprehensive and absorbing introduction to the vast literary and historical background to this work.

  Bayley, John, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971; reissued 2010). An enduring literary consideration of Pushkin’s writings.

  Bethea, David M. (ed.), Pushkin Today (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993). A wide-ranging collection of essays on Pushkin by contemporary American scholars.

  –——, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). A sophisticated examination of the life/work relationship, testing the critical toolkits of Sigmund Freud, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin and Yury Lotman.

  Bloom, Harold (ed.), Alexander Pushkin, in the ‘Modern Critical Views’ series (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987). A selection of pieces (some translated from Russian) by leading literary critics and Pushkinists.

  Briggs, A. D. P., Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998; reissued Bloomsbury, 2013). A sound survey of Pushkin’s work in all genres with some penetrating close readings.

  –—— (ed.), Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration of Russia’s Best-loved Writer (London: Hazar Publishing, 1999). A bicentenary collection of essays by leading Pushkinists.

  Gillespie, Alyssa Dinega (ed.), Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). A groundbreaking collection of essays on Pushkin’s use of taboo subjects (sexual, political, religious), desanctifying received notions of his literary personality; especially the editor’s contribution ‘Bawdy and Soul: Pushkin’s Poetics of Obscenity’.

  Kahn, Andrew, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). An in-depth study of how Pushkin wrote, and his use of ideas, modes and writings from a huge variety of sources.

  Wachtel, Michael, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry 1826–1836 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). The essential background – literary and biographical – for a fuller understanding of each poem written in the second half of Pushkin’s life; for those who can read Russian.

  Wolff, Tatiana (ed. and tr.), Pushkin on Literature, revised edition (London: Athlone Press, 1986). An indispensable compilation of all that Pushkin wrote on his own and others’ writings.

  PUSHKIN’S CONTEMPORARIES IN TRANSLATION

  Baratynsky, Yevgeny, Half-light and Other Poems, tr. Peter France (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2015). An extensive bilingual selection of the poet Pushkin most admired among his contemporaries.

  Batyushkov, Kons
tantin, Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry: Konstantin Batyushkov, presented by and tr. Peter France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). A substantial selection from the work of a key poet of Pushkin’s period, accompanied by a biographical account with much that is relevant to Pushkin too.

  Chandler, Robert, Dralyuk, Boris, and Mashinski, Irina (eds), The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 2015). Includes representative selections of the most prominent of Pushkin’s contemporaries in translation; with a generous selection of masterly versions of Pushkin’s older contemporary the great Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov.

  Lermontov, Mikhail, After Lermontov: Translations for the Bicentenary, ed. Peter France and Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014). A strikingly contrasting voice to Pushkin’s, in translations in English and Scots with original texts.

  Pilkington, Anna (ed.), The Garnett Book of Russian Folk and Anonymous Verse (London: Garnett Press, 2015). Original texts with plain prose translations. Pushkin must have known the medieval byliny (oral heroic poems) published by Kirsha Danilov in 1804 and 1818.

  Rayfield, Donald, et al. (eds), The Garnett Book of Russian Verse, 2nd edition (London: Garnett Press, 2013). A compendious anthology with original texts and plain prose translations: seventy-five poets from 1730 to 1996.

  Tyutchev, Fyodor, Versions from Fyodor Tyutchev, 1803–1873, tr. Charles Tomlinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Free translations which get to the heart of a contemporary poet greatly admired by Pushkin.

  Introduction

  To non-Russians Pushkin is the most elusive of Russian writers. It is over a century since the Russian novelists began to change our lives in Constance Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy (War and Peace and Anna Karenina) and Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, followed by other leading works). But one of the summits of Pushkin’s achievement, the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, has had to wait until the present century for the first truly representative English translation, by Stanley Mitchell,1 and the rest of his verse is much less well known in English.

  Pushkin was born into what is known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry, broadly speaking the first three decades of the nineteenth century, in which he became its central figure. The beginnings of generally accessible Russian poetry were made in the eighteenth century by Mikhail Lomonosov, Aleksandr Sumarokov and Gavrila Derzhavin. But by the end of the century the Russian language still lacked words with subjective and emotional meanings, such as ‘touching’, ‘influence’, ‘nuance’, ‘interesting’. The influential literary figure Nikolay Karamzin (1766–1826) then introduced a layer of new words modelled on French into the Russian literary language, which Pushkin’s immediate predecessors and older contemporaries such as the fabulist Ivan Krylov, the poet-translator Vasily Zhukovsky and the distinguished poet Konstantin Batyushkov used in their verse. But it was Pushkin most of all who brought the new vocabulary into currency.

  What is special about Pushkin’s poetry? He once wrote about himself: ‘I am perhaps elegant and comme il faut in my writing, but my heart is wholly vulgaire and all my tastes third-estate.’2 This statement would seem to fit, in its way, with an opinion given in 1897 by the poet and philosopher Vladimir Solovyov:

  The very essence of poetry – that which strictly constitutes poetry or which is poetic in itself – has never appeared in a purer form than in Pushkin, although there have been greater poets […]. Pushkin’s personality never held any […] dominating central content: his was simply a living, open, extraordinarily receptive and responsive soul […]. The basic distinguishing characteristic of this poetry is its freedom from any preconceived tendency and any affectation.3

  This profile is perceptive about Pushkin’s nature as a poet. However, it would be totally misleading if we were to take it as suggesting that his verse lacks a core of individuality. The topics that drew poetry from him give us a most powerful sense of such a core: love and friendship; the spectacle of human foibles; political ideals allied to a painful sense of his own deprivation of privacy; the history of his country and his own genealogical place in it; his relationship with three tsars; the literature of Classical Antiquity, the Renaissance and contemporary Europe and curiosity about foreign cultures; the Gospel story as a metaphorical and parodic framework for autobiographical inquiry.

  The young Gogol described the impact one of his elder contemporary’s lyric collections made on him:

  This is not eloquence, this is poetry; without surface brilliance, everything simple and fitting, everything filled with internal brilliance, which does not reveal itself at once; everything is laconic, just as pure poetry always is. Words are few, but so exact that they express everything. Each word contains its own immensity of space; each word is as boundless as the poet himself. This is what makes you read and reread these short poems, and gives them an attraction not possessed by work in which a single leading theme is predominant.4

  Dostoyevsky, in his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin (by A. M. Opekushin) erected in Moscow by public subscription in 1880, saw in him a unique quality of ‘pan-humanity’, a universal sympathy for people of diverse cultures, and claimed that this made him not only Russia’s national poet but the world’s. Some have commented that much in this speech is really about Russia and the author himself; nevertheless, it contains much about Pushkin too.5

  Eighteenth-century Russian poets followed stylistic consistency. Pushkin mixes style and diction at various levels, and his themes in lyric verse are considerably more varied and personal than those of even the most original of his contemporaries. His short poems are typically of the present moment and constitute a kind of emotional diary throughout his life. Without obvious baggage, he was free to respond uninhibitedly in accordance with his own human experience. In the post-Soviet era the eminent dissident Andrey Sinyavsky put across the freedom and sheer variety of Pushkin’s writing in this way:

  Lightness is the first thing […] we get out of his works […]. Before Pushkin there was almost no light verse [in Russia] […]. And suddenly, out of the blue, there appeared curtsies and turns comparable to nothing and no one, speed, onslaught, bounciness, the ability to prance, to gallop, to take hurdles, to do splits […].6

  Pushkin is central not only to Russian culture, but to Russian identity. He gave the Russians their own language, a classical literature and an inspirational demonstration of human claims against state power. His extensive and varied oeuvre fertilised the soil for Russian literature throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and the twentieth. His completed work includes over eight hundred lyric poems, a dozen long narrative poems (poemy), six folk or fairy tales (skazki) in verse, six verse plays, a novel in verse, a novel in prose, six short prose tales and a history of the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–5. Like a number of other writers of his period, he was an internationalist, steeped in West European culture from medicine to aesthetics. Much of his inspiration and thinking is drawn from Western and Classical literature and ideas, making him a powerful influence in the tug-of-war between Westernisers and Slavophiles that has gone on in Russia from his death to the present day.

  LIFE

  Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born on 26 May 1799 in Moscow. On his father’s side he was descended from an old boyar family (next below princely rank) that had sunk into obscurity. On his mother’s he was the great-grandson of Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696?–1781), who had been taken as a boy from Turkish captivity in some part of north-central Africa (until recently believed to have been Abyssinia/Ethiopia, now thought to be Chad), brought to the Russian capital and gifted to Peter the Great, who educated him to pursue a career as a military engineer; he was ultimately a decorated general.

  Pushkin’s father, Sergey L’vovich (1767–1848), already retired from the army when he married, had taken up a low-paid administrative post by the time his children were born. An indolent, sociable wit, he had a deep love of French literature and gave literary evenings that were atten
ded by leading writers. His brother Vasily had a minor talent for mildly obscene light verse; his racy narrative poem A Dangerous Neighbour (1811) in colloquial Russian, about a brawl in a brothel, is still anthologised.7 Pushkin’s mother Nadezhda (1775–1836) was the daughter of Gannibal’s dissolute third son Osip, who abandoned her mother Mariya and contracted a second, bigamous marriage; legal proceedings brought against him by Mariya resulted in his estate of Mikhaylovskoye near Pskov becoming her property (albeit encumbered with debt) on his death when Pushkin was seven years old. Nadezhda, well read and an excellent French speaker, known in Moscow society as ‘la belle Créole’, was charming, strong-willed and perpetually restless; during Pushkin’s childhood she was forever moving the family (Pushkin had a younger brother and sister) from lodging to lodging and shifting furniture from room to room in a chaotic household.8