I have seen many beautiful women, have met many women even more charming than Mrs Pushkin, but I have never seen a woman who combined to such perfection classically regular features and figure. She was tall, with a fabulously narrow waist, and luxuriously developed shoulders and bust, and her small head, like a lily on its stem, swayed and graciously turned about on her slim neck […].16
The Pushkins must have made an odd pair, the shorter, carelessly dressed, jerkily moving figure of Pushkin alongside such a picture-wife. Four children, two daughters and two sons, were born in five years.
In the summer of 1830, Pushkin’s father had settled his modest Boldino estate in the province of Nizhny Novgorod on his son to try to help his financial situation for marriage. That year and in 1833, alone in the autumn months there, he wrote a number of the works that would eventually be seen as his greatest, among them the four blank verse dramas the ‘Little Tragedies’ (including Mozart and Salieri, the inspiration for Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus), the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman and the last two chapters of Eugene Onegin.
Marriage saw Pushkin with continually increasing debt, arising from the expenses of keeping a sizeable family, low income from falling sales of his work, and Natalya’s extravagances, but most of all his own gambling losses. In 1831, reading and approving (in censored form) Boris Godunov for publication, Tsar Nicholas had appointed Pushkin Russia’s official historian laureate in succession to Nikolay Karamzin, author of the monumental History of the Russian State (at twice the latter’s salary, but still inadequate).17 At this time Pushkin planned to write a history of the reign of Peter the Great, for which task he was now granted permission to use the state archives. But three years later, the tsar appointed him to the additional and humiliating court post of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), traditionally an eighteen-year-old’s position, necessitating his attendance at balls with Natalya, who had become a favourite court beauty, thus tying him to the capital when he wanted to work in the country. When he tried to resign from this post, Nicholas insisted that would mean forfeiting his indispensable access to the imperial archives.
Pushkin set high hopes on sales revenue from his long-contemplated journal for serious literature, The Contemporary. Four issues came out under his editorship in the last year of his life, the first including poems by Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73), this great poet’s debut, and the third Gogol’s fantastic story ‘The Nose’. But he was to be bitterly disappointed. The journal was stifled by competition not only from the Library for Reading but also from Bulgarin’s popular journal Son of the Fatherland and his newspaper the Northern Bee. The public had lost the taste for poetry in general and for Pushkin’s combination of unvarnished, essentially classical writing in particular.
The last part of Pushkin’s life is the best known. In autumn 1835, after nearly five years of marriage, Natalya met a French guards officer in Russian service, Baron Georges d’Anthès, tall, blond and blue-eyed, who was claimed by the Dutch envoy in St Petersburg, Baron Jakob van Heeckeren, to be his adopted son, some suspected his lover. She was attracted to him too, and allowed him to flirt with her. D’Anthès made at least one attempt on her virtue, which was rebuffed in a striking echo of Tatyana’s rejection of Onegin as written six years earlier.18 After continued intrigue, including the dissemination of an anonymous round-robin letter declaring in mock-officialese that Pushkin had been ‘unanimously nominated coadjutor to the Grand Master of the Order of Cuckolds’,19 and also d’Anthès’s astounding move in suddenly marrying one of Natalya’s sisters – presumably to divert attention from his real intentions towards Natalya – Pushkin was goaded into challenging d’Anthès to a duel. The latter fired first and severely wounded Pushkin in the stomach. Pushkin’s return shot, taken lying on the ground, hit his opponent in the right arm but was then harmlessly deflected, probably by a silver button on the latter’s regulation tunic.20 D’Anthès quickly recovered but Pushkin died two days later, on 29 January 1837, at the age of thirty-seven.
Zhukovsky wrote to Nicholas I seeking his charity for Natalya and the children and suggesting that a complete edition of Pushkin’s works should be published. The tsar concurred on the latter and most of his proposals for the family’s welfare, but refused Zhukovsky’s idea of an imperial pronouncement on the national importance of Pushkin’s work such as he had composed for Karamzin. ‘What a crackbrain Zhukovsky is!’ Nicholas is recorded as saying. ‘He will not understand that Karamzin was a man who was almost a saint, but what was Pushkin’s life like?’21
Nicholas nevertheless paid off Pushkin’s debts, granted Natalya a pension, settled further sums on the four children until they came of age, and decreed that Pushkin’s works should be published at state expense, with net proceeds going to Natalya and the trustees of the estate. All four children lived on well into the twentieth century, with one granddaughter marrying a grandson of Nicholas I.22
Soon after Pushkin’s death, d’Anthès was court-martialled and sentenced to death for participation in a duel and for killing Pushkin, a decision commuted by Nicholas, on the ground that the accused was a foreign subject, to expulsion from the Russian army and return to France, where he would continue his military career. Natalya, following advice Pushkin had given her on his deathbed, left the capital, taking the children to live in the country for two years. Seven years later, she married a friend of d’Anthès, Pyotr Lanskoy, an officer in the horse guards, by whom she had three daughters. The marriage, heartily approved by the tsar, who promoted Lanskoy to commander of the horse guards and stood godfather to the eldest daughter, appears to have been harmonious.
Zhukovsky, whom Natalya had asked to be a trustee of Pushkin’s estate, prepared a posthumous edition of his works. The first part, containing all Pushkin’s published work, appeared in eight volumes in 1838; produced in a hurry and with editorial collaborators, it was full of mistakes and misprints, and texts remained in their original censored forms. The second part, in three volumes containing hitherto unpublished work, also edited by Zhukovsky, came out in 1841, having undergone not only cuts and amendments imposed by the censor but also Zhukovsky’s editorial changes reflecting his own taste. In 1855–7 the first comprehensive edition of Pushkin’s works appeared in seven volumes, edited by the literary critic P. V. Annenkov (1813–87) with materials for a biography, once more a far from reliable edition; while most previously censored passages were restored, some were not, and overall Zhukovsky’s personal changes remained.23 It was not until the centenary year of Pushkin’s death in 1937 that a reliable edition of the complete works in seventeen volumes began to appear, produced by the USSR Academy of Sciences.
CHARACTERISTICS OF PUSHKIN’S POETRY
Pushkin’s lyric poetry closely reflects his life experience, and his poetic development and the emergence of his themes are clearly to be seen within the chronology of his life. The poems in this book are placed in each of the three parts in chronological order of writing (as far as may be ascertained), and this chronology can enhance our reading – for example, in the poems on a past love written on the uneasy eve of Pushkin’s marriage or the growing impatience with his public seen in poems on the poet’s calling, or the distancing from Byron that takes place between the narrative poems The Fountain of Bakhchisaray and The Gypsies.
Behind Pushkin’s formal perfection lie not only his early practice in writing verse as a prospective and then a full member of Arzamas, but also his lifelong reading of French and Russian poetry of the eighteenth century and European and Graeco-Roman literature. Arzamas upheld the ‘correctness’ of eighteenth-century French-based neoclassical tradition, and, writing in this context, Pushkin became a master of imitation and parody.24 In his hands the clarity, elegance and precision of French are organically joined to Russian, with the latter’s stress patterns miraculously disposed over the metres of the accentual-syllabic scansion system established in Russian verse in the eighteenth century, which followed English tradition. At the same early stage he ac
quired perfect command of verse styles and genres used by his Russian predecessors. Here lie the foundations of the prosodic mastery displayed throughout Pushkin’s poetry, from the present selection to his best-known work, Eugene Onegin, the novel in verse about an idle young St Petersburg dandy and the country girl he spurns, which contains much of Pushkin himself and surveys, with light irony, much of contemporary Russian life.
At the age of sixteen, in the same year (1815) that Derzhavin heard the young poet’s reading of his recently written ode on Tsarskoye Selo, Pushkin wrote a dazzlingly witty and accomplished mock-epic account of a literary descent into hell, the comic playwright Denis Fonvizin (1745–92) being the Virgilian guide to the narrator (Pushkin), with encounters with three untalented Russian writers and Derzhavin. Pushkin imitates and parodies the style of all of them in turn, including, respectfully, the last. Later in this same year he wrote another long poem in a similar irreverent spirit, this time a bawdy ballad, The Shade of Barkov, which has always been considered outside the canon and only recently accepted as Pushkin’s work. Both poems are harbingers of things to come. The ballad tells of a defrocked priest’s visit to a brothel, where the ghost of the celebrated (by male readers) obscene poet Ivan Barkov (1732–68) appears to him in a morale-boosting visitation. Critics Russian and Western have uncovered Barkov’s influence on nineteenth-century Russian poets only in recent decades, especially during the post-Soviet era.25 Reminders of Pushkin’s Barkovian ballad, not in its language or immediate subject matter but in certain verse patterns and rhyme echoes, have even been found in one of his greatest poems, ‘The Prophet’ (1826), and an astonishing claim has been made that both poems are linked by their author’s fundamental urge, to be thwarted throughout his life, towards personal independence and freedom from any political or social restraint.26
Parody, then, is central to Pushkin’s poetry. The first long narrative poem he published, Ruslan and Lyudmila, was conceived partly as a parody of Zhukovsky’s supernatural but serious verse epic The Twelve Sleeping Maidens (1817). Pushkin’s fantasy tale (of an abduction by an evil wizard and the quest to rescue the bride) is satirical and full of jokes shared with the reader. The comic narrative poem Count Nulin, included in the present selection, parodies the plot of Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Formal parody of the Gospel story comes into the late ‘Stone Island cycle’ of lyric poems, also included in this selection.
Allied to parody are two further practices central to Pushkin’s poetry – translation and adaptation. He was steeped in the poetry of Western countries, especially France and England, and the literature of Classical Antiquity. Although his reading of foreign literature was largely through French translations, mostly in prose (notably of Byron), later on he was able to read original texts of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and possibly Milton in English. His friend Zhukovsky, nearly a generation older than him, was also a significant early influence in this respect, with his own pioneering translations of German and English Romantic poets. Pushkin once noted that translators are ‘the post-horses of enlightenment’,27 and he made a number of translations and adaptations himself; the present selection of lyric verse includes several of his free versions of poems and passages that in his hands become his own poems. Among his most daring adaptations (not in the present selection) are a recasting of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as the dramatic-narrative poem Angelo (1833) and a treatment in lyric verse of the first chapter of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (‘The Wanderer’, 1835).
‘Pushkin possessed,’ in the words of a modern Russian critic, ‘as no one else did, the brilliant ability to rework creatively all that was best in the foregoing literary tradition, originally and independently melting it down and turning the foreign into his own.’28
THE PRESENT SELECTION
Lyric Poems
In Pushkin’s time, writers had to have their book-length work printed at their own expense; then they would distribute it to booksellers of their choice who sold it and remitted earnings at a negotiated percentage to the author on copies sold. Pushkin had his narrative poems and his four lyric collections published in this way. Lyric poems were generally far less valued and known than narrative poems in his day, and were scantly, if at all, remunerated on their individual appearance in journals and almanacs.
Surveying Pushkin’s oeuvre today, we have a rather different perspective from that of his contemporaries. His lifetime reputation and his livelihood derived from the publication of his narrative poems, individual chapters of Eugene Onegin, prose and the four collections of short lyric poems that he published. Many of his lyric poems were unpublished in his lifetime – around forty per cent of the present selection, including some now among the best known: ‘Once there lived a humble knight’, ‘Autumn (A fragment)’, ‘It’s time, my love, it’s time!’, ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’, and of course anti-autocratic poems such as ‘Liberty: An Ode’ and ‘To Chaadayev’, although these were widely read in manuscript.
Posthumous filling in of Pushkin’s lyric oeuvre gives it a centrality in his work as a whole that it did not have in his lifetime. Except in cases of conscious stylisation, Pushkin’s verse reads in everyday language that carries naturally into the modern era. Comparing his short poems with those of his exact contemporary Yevgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844), we find clear differences. Both poets write personally, but whereas Baratynsky is calm and reflective – Pushkin admired him as ‘one of our outstanding poets […] unique in that he thinks’29 – Pushkin’s lyric utterance has the immediacy of the present moment, and its emotional power is concentrated and increased by extreme precision of language and tonal sensitivity within formal balance: the right word always in the right place and in an exact fit to the metre. Most of his poems written at the Lycée are more striking for their technique than their content, though the first in this selection, ‘To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff’ (1814), is refreshingly inventive and the second, ‘The Rose’ (1815), adopts a delightfully mature stance.
‘Liberty: An Ode’ (1817) and ‘To Chaadayev’ (1818) are among the post-Lycée anti-autocratic poems that resulted in Pushkin’s six-year banishment from the capital. The first was unpublished in his or Nicholas I’s lifetime and the second printed in 1829 after his exile, without the last climactic lines.
Through the 1820s, Pushkin wrote lyric poems in a wide range of genres, beginning with ‘The light of day has faded’, written in 1820 just after he had dipped into the first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) in a French prose translation. The sound of the waves can be heard in the varying rhythms of this elegy looking back on his life as he makes a sea crossing to his first place of exile. The poems throughout this decade abound in responses to Pushkin’s daily life, and their themes often carry wider significance: love and personal admiration expressed directly or from a distance; incarceration; winter as a symbolic setting for the national condition; the poet and his public; the role of chance in life; and – perhaps most frequently of all – self-contemplation. Such a solemn-sounding array of themes belies the intimate, personal tone that runs through many of the poems.
Three of Pushkin’s greatest lyrics belong to the post-Decembrist period, ‘The Prophet’ (1826), ‘The Upas Tree’ (1828) and ‘Demons’ (1830). The first two use biblical reference and language. ‘The Prophet’, on the inspiration of Isaiah with the Word of God, is commonly interpreted to be about the poet’s calling, but there is some indication that it is the sole survivor from a group of anti-government poems the rest of which Pushkin destroyed before his interview with Nicholas I. Pushkin steps up the level of violence of Isaiah 6:6–7 to the point of shock. ‘The Upas Tree’, in which a potentate sends a slave to his death by getting him to fetch poison for military use, has a background in both the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis and the Islamic concept of the deadly tree that punishes the sins of mankind, but it has powerful political resonance too. Both these poems are
key examples of how Pushkin achieves maximum expressive power by combining extreme economy, perfect construction and sonic effects and how he can achieve density and depth through the use of an intertext. A ballad of the period, ‘Demons’, on being lost in a blizzard, seems to plunge the reader into the national mood of the Russian intelligentsia following the failure of the Decembrist uprising and the execution and banishment of its leaders.
Pushkin was always pushing in new directions. In 1825, the year of writing Boris Godunov, this master of rhyme anticipated our own times by writing an essay (unpublished) in which he called rhyme, which first appeared in the West in medieval French poetry, a ‘new ornament of verse’ that ‘led necessarily to a straining in expression, a form of preciosity quite unknown to the ancients’, and went on to comment: ‘petty wit replaced feeling, which cannot find expression in triolets. We find miserable traces of this in the greatest geniuses of our own time.’30 Later, reading Wordsworth and Coleridge in English and having a desire to recapture the unadorned plainness of the poets of Classical Antiquity that he had been reading in French all his life, he turned to unrhymed verse in some of his lyrics. In the blank verse meditation written on a late lone visit to Mikhaylovskoye ‘… I see again / That corner of the earth’ (1835), he makes his best-known lyric use of this vehicle.
Selected Poetry (Penguin) Page 4
