Selected Poetry (Penguin)

by Alexander Pushkin

  Two lyrics written in the early 1830s each have particularly powerful personal bite. ‘My Pedigree’ (1831), a riposte to his arch-enemy Faddey Bulgarin for a racist insult to his mother, becomes Pushkin’s gloriously taken opportunity to ridicule those he sees as the jumped-up aristocracy created by Peter the Great, while unabashedly making the most of his own lineage. The other poem caused his liberal friends and allies much discomfort – a vigorous defence of the government’s suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830–31, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ (1831), addressed to the many Western critics of the Russian campaign. It is clear that his argument that the affair was just ‘an old domestic difference’ was sincerely his own. He often hated his country; but criticism from foreigners he hated more, and in this poem it fuelled a fine piece of rhetoric, calculated to induce the aesthetically inclined reader to set politics aside while reading it.

  Pushkin’s fondness for the longer line in his later verse is magnificently exemplified in the contemplative poem ‘Autumn (A fragment)’ of 1833 (intentionally without a formal ending). It is written, like ‘Winter. The country’ (1829), in hexameters, and like that poem is a vintage example of the rich combination of qualities to be found in his poetry. With the greatest of ease, it fuses spontaneous first-person utterance with metrical formality in eight-line ottava rima stanzas – not a sensuous distillation like Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ (1819) but a graphic exploration of thoughts and feelings aroused by the season.

  Among the last substantial lyrics Pushkin wrote are half a dozen mysterious short poems appropriating mostly Christian texts and personae – a fourth-century Syrian prayer, the Gospel story – in a parodic and symbolic way in a search for the meaning of his own life and poetic calling. These deeply serious poems have become known in modern times as the ‘Stone Island cycle’ after Pushkin’s last holiday location in the Neva delta where they were written.

  Narrative Poems (Poemy)

  Having early established his reputation in 1820 in the genre of the poema with Ruslan and Lyudmila, Pushkin reached the height of his popularity in 1824 with The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, which chimed with the public’s appetite of the time, primed with the verse tales of Byron and Walter Scott, before fiction became staple fare. In this narrative of the rivalry between two concubines at the court of a Crimean Tatar khan and its tragic end, we are in a world poised between legend, a recent historical past and dream; here is Pushkin’s developed version of Romanticism, abounding in gentle suggestion, sudden breakings-off and with a continuous mellifluous flow. The poem captivatingly evokes the harem’s atmosphere and way of life, and a ruthless young Georgian girl emerges with a memorable monologue that looks forward to Pushkin’s dramatic verse.

  The last of Pushkin’s three southern poemy, The Gypsies (1824), is a different kind of poem entirely. While Pushkin was writing it he was also working on the third chapter of Eugene Onegin, his enthusiasm for Byron and Romanticism was vanishing, and he was dealing with actuality. The precision with which he observes gypsy life (which he had seen at first hand) in this poem turned out to be the beginning of Russian Realism, the foundation for most of nineteenth-century Russian literature. The central figure, Aleko, a fugitive from urban society, enters a gypsy group and brings disruption and destruction to a harmonious and balanced primal society; in parodic reversal of Rousseauesque concepts of the Noble Savage and the Social Contract, he himself becomes the ignoble citizen. The voices of the main characters are stylistically distinct from the narrative style and from each other – the unfocused ‘Romantic’ style of Aleko’s utterance contrasting with the sharply in-focus style of the narrative and the old gypsy and the fiery delivery of his daughter. With its flexible language and philosophical underlay, this poem is a new direction in Russian literature. It leaves the story open to the reader’s interpretation, posing questions for answers to be supplied. What is freedom? What is fate? How free are the gypsies? Are freedom and happiness related? The libretto for Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875) owes just as much to this poem of Pushkin’s as to Prosper Mérimée’s tale (1845), a debt that seems to have been inadequately acknowledged.31

  The Bridegroom (1825), Pushkin’s longest ballad, uses the energetic metre of the enormously popular ballad ‘Lenore’ (1774) by the German Romantic poet Gottfried Bürger (1747–94). The basics of its storyline come not from Bürger, however, but from the Grimms’ tale ‘Der Räuberbräutigam’ (The Robber Bridegroom), which may have reached Pushkin in some form through his old nanny during his first year of exile at Mikhaylovskoye when he wrote the poem. In Pushkin’s hands, the story of a merchant’s daughter and her traumatic experience becomes a masterly whodunnit. He offers the reader the experience of a Romantic ballad, the sinister merging of dream world and reality, but at the end, as the reader realises what has actually happened in the story, the true nature of this once again genre-subverting and dramatic narrative emerges.

  When Pushkin, as he put it later, ‘was living in the country’ towards the end of 1825, he happened to read Shakespeare’s long narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, which he thought ‘rather weak’. He was struck by the thought: what if Lucrece had slapped Tarquin’s face? Perhaps he would have retreated, Lucrece would not have killed herself, Brutus would not have driven out the kings, Rome would not have become a republic; in short, ‘the world and its history would have been different’. Pushkin couldn’t resist the ‘double temptation […] of parodying both history and Shakespeare’.32 In two days he wrote his comic masterpiece Count Nulin, a light-hearted satire on Russian rural types and moeurs of his time.

  A Little House in Kolomna is a jeu d’esprit in reply to Pushkin’s critics for their hostility to him at the time of writing (1830) not only for not producing work of moral and patriotic uplift (at a time of war in the South with Turkey) but also for what was perceived as frivolity and emptiness in what he did write, despite continuing praise for the quality of his verse. In mock-heroic ottava rima he tells an amusing anecdote with a shock ending. The long opening discourse on metre follows the digressive principle that has become a major Pushkinian hallmark since the beginning of Eugene Onegin. The poem, finally, fits Pushkin’s lifelong purpose of bringing literature closer to everyday life and to the less privileged; the widow and her daughter who are its central characters live in contemporary St Petersburg in the same district as the lowly Yevgeny in The Bronze Horseman, and the daughter shares her name, Parasha, with that of Yevgeny’s fiancée and with the young country wife’s housemaid in Count Nulin. Pushkin’s relaxed, conversational style and quiet rhymes, using the same metre as Byron’s Beppo (1818), are poles apart from the latter’s relentless wit and extravagant rhyming.

  It is impossible to think of anything in English at all comparable to The Bronze Horseman (1833), alongside Eugene Onegin Pushkin’s supreme achievement. Concise but stylistically diverse, it synthesises and crystallises material from the most diverse of sources – literary, journalistic, apocryphal, conversation with a friend – into densely layered poetic form. The experience of a humble citizen in St Petersburg’s disastrous flood of 1824 (the most destructive of over three hundred before and since), history and the meaning of history, the founding and growth of St Petersburg and the modern Russian state, the nature of Russian autocracy – all are graphically, symbolically, philosophically and sonically brought together in fewer than five hundred lines.

  The poem is richly intertextual, responding first and foremost to the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s unqualified criticism of Russian autocracy, the inauspicious siting of St Petersburg in the tempestuous Gulf of Finland, and the Russian people for putting up with both. It opposes the official report of the flood, which minimised government responsibility for the flood damage. It reflects Pushkin’s vast reading. Pushkin’s favourite free-rhyming tetrameter abounds in an unusual degree of enjambement in a syntactically complex flow, knitting together disparate elements almost in the manner of music. The prologue, in elevated style, first evokes the founding of Pe
ter the Great’s city and its rise out of desolate wastes, and then majestically rehearses the newly created architectural splendours that were familiar to Pushkin. The following narrative, through successive stylistic shifts, follows the daily life of the clerk Yevgeny, who lives in a district particularly vulnerable to the elements, and moves swiftly through a variety of registers expressive of the humble mind of its hero, the ferocity of the elements, the panorama of the flooded city, Yevgeny’s two confrontations with the awesome statue of Peter the Great, his incoherent but ominous threat to the future of tsars, and an elegiac conclusion.

  In general, Pushkin is sparing with metaphor, and his use of it always carries force. The Bronze Horseman has a higher than usual share of metaphor and simile, applying animal, human and superhuman attributes to the river Neva, giving the poem an organic dynamism up to the climactic moment when the bronze statue of Peter begins to move and to gallop. An unusually high proportion of verbs drives the narrative on at the tempo of the raging river. The overall meaning of the poem centres on our assessment of Peter’s service to the nation in creating a city in a spot so destructive of human life. The achievements of the state are set uncompromisingly beside their human cost. Only the prologue (with four lines censored) was published in Pushkin’s lifetime.

  Fairy Tales (Skazki)

  The fairy or folk tale in verse is a genre that Pushkin made very much his own. During his exile at Mikhaylovskoye, his old nanny Arina Rodionovna would tell him folk tales, his major source; enchanted, he noted down the storylines and later developed his prose notations into verse, mostly rhymed, in folk idiom.

  The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831) is based on two variant sources, neither of which Pushkin follows exactly, pruning extraneous detail and making substantial additions of his own. He retains the basic story of his sources – the voyage by the hero who is cast into the sea with his mother in infancy and grows to adulthood beside her inside a barrel, reaches a desert island and becomes tsar of a new city that springs up there – but he adds much material detail. The wandering island of Buyan is prominent in Slavic mythology, a kind of island of the blessed, harbouring a magic stone with healing powers; Pushkin’s tale has a squirrel that gnaws nuts with wealth-producing gold shells and emerald kernels. This skazka was the literary historian D. S. Mirsky’s favourite poem in all Pushkin.

  The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish (1833) is Pushkin’s only unrhymed skazka. His version of a folk tale about a covetous wife who is punished, found in many cultures, is based on the Grimms’. The overweening figure of the wife is taken to satirise Catherine the Great with her ambition of ruling over the Black Sea.

  The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833) is based on the Grimms’ ‘Snow White’ and a variant told to Pushkin by Arina Rodionovna. Pushkin puts flesh on the bones of the Grimms’ rudimentary prince and princess and adds a number of episodes of his own invention to the story. A high moral thread runs through his tale: the princess behaves more like a servant than a princess as she puts the empty house she finds to rights.

  The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834) is the most sophisticated and least folk-like of Pushkin’s skazki. A Russian critic has said of it: ‘It is not just another fairy tale. It is another dimension.’33 It was written at an intensely fraught stage of Pushkin’s relationship with Tsar Nicholas, who among other aggravations had broken his promise to be his confidential, ‘personal’ censor. Its source is Washington Irving’s ‘Legend of the Arabian Astrologer’ contained in his popular compendium Legends of the Alhambra (1832; Pushkin read a French translation published in the same year). From Irving’s simple story of a good king tricked in his old age by a wily astrologer who makes him a talisman – a bronze warrior supposed to warn him of approaching foes – steals his queen and disappears, Pushkin fashions his own electrifying tale, making the talisman a golden cockerel and knitting the other three, Tsar Dadon, the astrologer and the Queen of Shamakhan, into a dynamic, eerie relationship. In his tale, written in a condensed, detached and lightly ironic style, with the tsar morally culpable and a sinister aura of mystery and the supernatural about the queen, it isn’t hard to see a bitter caricature of Nicholas I in the puffed-up Dadon, the autocrat who breaks his promises. The poem, mysterious to the last, is intriguingly open to still further interpretation (see the introduction to it on p. 215).

  The somewhat random criteria of selection of lyric poems in this book have been long-standing familiarity with particular poems and enthusiasm for new discoveries, judgement as to the actual possibility of translation, and the principle of overall variety of content and kind. The six poemy, half the number that Pushkin completed, have been selected to represent his essential achievement in this genre, and all except one of the completed skazki are here. The decision to exclude the third major category of Pushkin’s poetry, the blank verse of his six completed verse dramas, was taken in order to concentrate focus and to prevent overload. Recent critical attention to the literary and autobiographical background to Pushkin’s verse has contributed to both the translations and the endnotes.

  It is to be hoped that enough of the genius of this poet’s poet who is also a people’s poet might come through these translations to enable the reader to enjoy the quality to which the Russian critic Yury Lotman has drawn particular attention: ‘One of Pushkin’s most remarkable faculties is to be at our side in dialogue with us.’34

  NOTES

  For abbreviated references here and throughout this book, see Abbreviations, p. 223.

  1. The best of earlier English translations, that by the poet Babette Deutsch (New York: Random House, 1936; revised edition Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1964), was surpassed by Charles Johnston’s (London: Scolar Press, 1977; revised edition London: Penguin Classics, 2003), which was in its turn surpassed by Stanley Mitchell’s superlative version (London: Penguin Classics, 2008). Anthony Briggs’s translation (London: Pushkin Press, 2016) is attractive in its colloquial approach.

  2. Letter to his country neighbour and friend Yelizaveta Khitrovo, October 1828 (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 9, note, p. 283).

  3. Vladimir Solovyov, ‘The Significance of Poetry in Pushkin’s Verse’ (1897), included in D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell (ed. and tr.), Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976), pp. 101, 102.

  4. Nikolay Gogol, ‘Neskol’ko slov o Pushkine’ [A Few Words on Pushkin], from Arabeski [Arabesques] (St Petersburg: 1835); this passage tr. A. Wood.

  5. For an English translation of Dostoyevsky’s speech, see: http://www.speeches-usa.com/Transcripts/feyodor_dostoevsky-pushkin.html.

  6. Abram Tertz (pseudonym of Andrey Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin, tr. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 50–51.

  7. For instance, in Donald Rayfield et al. (eds), The Garnett Book of Russian Verse, 2nd edition (London: Garnett Press, 2013).

  8. Binyon, p. 8.

  9. Quoted in Simmons, p. 59.

  10. These details are taken from ibid., pp. 68–88.

  11. Written on 4 May 1820; ibid., pp. 100–101.

  12. For a useful English unrhymed translation, with introduction, commentary, notes and facing original text, see Roger Clarke (tr.), Ruslan and Lyudmila (London: Hesperus, 2005, and subsequent revised editions).

  13. Binyon, p. 175.

  14. Quoted in ibid., p. 242, from a modern Russian source.

  15. William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 53.

  16. Binyon, pp. 381–2.

  17. Chester Dunning et al., The Uncensored Boris Godunov (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 116.

  18. Tatyana to Onegin: ‘I love you (why should I disguise it?), / But I am someone else’s wife, / To him I shall be true for life’ (Eugene Onegin, VIII.47.xii–xiv; tr. Mitchell, p. 195). D’Anthès to Baron Jacob van Heeckeren, 24 February 1836: ‘she told me, “I love you as
I have never loved, but never ask me for more than my heart, for the rest does not belong to me, I can be happy only honoring all my duties”’ (quoted in Vitale, p. 54).

  19. Quoted in Simmons, p. 390.

  20. Vitale, p. 278.

  21. Quoted in Binyon, p. 642.

  22. Pushkin’s elder son, Alexander (1833–1914), became a general; Grigory (1835–1905) a government official; the elder daughter, Marya (born in 1832), died in 1919. The first marriage of the younger daughter, Natalya (1836–1913), was to the son of the chief of staff of the Gendarme Corps, a subordinate of Benckendorff. Her daughter Sophie (1848–1927), by her second husband, Prince Nicholas William of Nassau, whom she married morganatically, married Nicholas I’s grandson, Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhaylovich (1861–1929), and their daughter Nadezhda (1896–1963) married George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven (1892–1938), an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in London in 1916. Descendants of Pushkin today live in various countries, including the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium and the United States.

  23. Bayley, p. 357.

  24. Kahn, p. 17.