7–8 his visage bears / A proud proprietorial smile: Pushkin’s vowels are graphic: ‘Yegò dovòl’noye litsò / Priyàtnoy vàzhnost’yu siyàyet.’ Literally: ‘His satisfied face / With pleasant importance shines.’ See also note below to lines 127–30 of The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834).
20–21 The period […] prose: The prosaic elements in Count Nulin (including everything about the heroine) irritated reviewers, as they were supposed to.
29 And toasts the devastating chase: Pushkin exploits the long polysyllabic Russian adjective: his ‘toasts’ comes at the end of the preceding line, leaving ‘the devastating chase’ to occupy a whole line – ‘Opustoshìtel’nyy nabèg’.
40–42 ‘Natasha’ […] Natalya: Play with nomenclature. ‘Natasha’ is the name of wholesome ‘Russian’ characters in Pushkin’s poems, as in The Bridegroom (1825). Here the more formal version is a veneer that goes with Natasha’s affected Europeanism, covering her true rural Russian self.
56 long, long, long, long novel: Pushkin’s line reiterates the adjective dlinnyy, ‘long’, three times within the line.
106 ‘Courage, allons!’: Nearly a dozen French phrases and names occur in Count Nulin in the Latin alphabet.
117 Petropole: A poetic Russian name for St Petersburg.
119–23 With store of hats […] Lorgnettes: These details are reminiscent of the ‘young philosopher’s’ items of toiletry and dress listed in the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, published on its own in the year The Bridegroom was written, 1825.
124 Guizot’s new tome (a lot of rot!): The voluminous historical works of the French Liberal politician François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874) were much admired throughout Europe during the post-Napoleonic era.
127 and 128 Béranger […] Paer: The songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857), voicing the aspirations of the Parisian working class, were hugely popular throughout Europe, including progressive circles in Russia, for much of the nineteenth century. Ferdinando Paer (1771–1839) was an Italian composer who settled in France; his forty-three operas include one, Leonora, that uses the same plot as Beethoven’s Fidelio.
145–7 Talma […] Mamselle Mars […] Potier: Leading lights of the theatre of the Napoleonic era.
151 d’Arlincourt and Lamartine: C.-V. Prévot, vicomte d’Arlincourt (1788–1856), a Romantic French novelist much read in his time, and the poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), a leading figure in the French Romantic movement.
155 God grant we’ll soon be educated!: Not yet. Alexander I’s reactionary educational policies centred on the eradication of subversive, un-Russian ideas and freethinking; staff of Russia’s five universities were sacked for their ideas of constitutional government.
161 the Telegraph: The Moscow Telegraph was a popular literary review that included a pictorial supplement showing foreign fashions in clothes, furniture and so on. Pushkin resisted (not always successfully) efforts to get him to contribute, for he thought the magazine superficial.
334 Picard has seen to everything: If Pushkin’s work on the poem had run to a third morning, he might have rhymed this line.
A Little House in Kolomna (1830)
3 pentameter: When he wrote this poem, Pushkin had reached his summit with the pentameter, the vehicle of all his dramatic verse, such as the blank verse ‘Little Tragedies’ written at this time.
13 Shikhmatov: The limited number of inflected verb endings in Russian makes it very easy to rhyme verbs. The versifying academician Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1790–1853), who eventually entered a monastery, took pride in avoiding such rhymes. Pushkin was fond of mildly poking fun at him.
42 go for broke: Pushkin uses an equivalent term from the card game of faro.
58–60 Pegasus […] Parnassus: In Greek mythology the fountain Hippocrene on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses and whose waters were believed to give poetic inspiration to whoever drank them, was said to have sprung from a hoofprint of the winged horse Pegasus; its name means ‘Horse’s Fountain’. Mount Helicon is in the same range in central Greece as Parnassus, home of the god Apollo and the Muses.
71 sentry-box. There is an army barracks in the area (see stanza XXV).
104 Emin: Fyodor Aleksandrovich Emin (1735–70), of Turkish Muslim background, whose numerous moralising, sentimentalist novels of adventure had long been popular in Russia.
162 A countess: Pushkin’s friend and literary agent P. A. Pletnev identifies this character as a real-life beauty who married a wealthy septuagenarian count in order to save her family from bankruptcy, and tells us that Pushkin would visit St Mary’s Church specifically to set eyes on the young countess, with whose sad history he was acquainted (Arndt, p. 469, note).
210 bath: Located in the bathhouse, an outbuilding.
285 (An indication of a downright boor): The last line of the sestet, i.e. the line following this one, is lacking in the original. Line numbering includes the missing line.
The Bronze Horseman (1833)
Title: Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great was commissioned by Catherine the Great and unveiled on 7 August 1782, the official centenary date of Peter’s accession to the throne, in an area on the Admiralty Embankment then known as Peter’s Square, later developed to form Senate (today called Decembrists’) Square.
preface: The official record of the St Petersburg flood of 1824, incorporated in a detailed historical account of all previous St Petersburg floods compiled by the naval engineer V. N. Berkh and published in 1826, was propagandistic, downplaying its exceptional nature (comparable disasters having occurred in other countries) and exaggerating the tsar’s measures to alleviate the consequent distress and disease. It included an eyewitness account by Pushkin’s bitter enemy, the journalist, writer and police informer Faddey Bulgarin (on whom see more in the Introduction under ‘Life’ and ‘Lyric Poems’). In his preface, Pushkin stresses his authentic realism and makes a show of respectability before the censorship. Although he himself, in exile at Mikhaylovskoye at the time, had not witnessed the 1824 flood, his poem, drawing on a variety of published accounts, firmly contradicts Berkh’s official account.
1–20 Beside […] open sea: A prosodically subtle opening to the prologue. Anthony Briggs (pp. 128–9) observes that in the original the first ten lines, describing an undisturbed natural scene, a ‘watery waste’ (line 1) and ‘ancient forest’ (line 9), consist of two five-line stanzas with rhymes in a rather special arrangement. The next ten lines change to a more regular rhyme scheme when Peter the Great begins to plan his transformation of the bleak spot, and man-made order, or disorder, supplants nature – the setting for the story to come. Behind this opening lies a passage from the poet Konstantin Batyushkov’s essay ‘A Walk to the Academy of Fine Art’ (published in 1817), in which he imagines what the site of St Petersburg might have been like before the founding of the city; Batyushkov’s words are much more unequivocally positive than Pushkin’s.
15–16 hew / A window on to Europe: In the first of the five elliptical notes that Pushkin offered the reader with the poem (see Basker, pp. 15 and 49–52, giving these notes in the original and discussing their buried meanings) he quotes from the Enlightenment writer Count Francesco Algarotti’s description (in a French translation that Pushkin may have read) of a visit to Russia in 1738–9: ‘Petersburg is the window through which Russia looks at Europe.’ Pushkin’s barbed version of this suggests, rather than a conduit for enlightened European values, the unenlightened use of the axe to create a spyhole. Basker’s close analysis of Pushkin’s elliptical notes to the poem shows them to be a Pandora’s box of intentional and typically Pushkinian misdirections that both conceal and reveal the poet’s own both negative and positive attitudes to St Petersburg. For present purposes it has been thought best not to distract the reader from the poem itself by detailed consideration of these semi-private notes but to make brief references to them.
57 Allowing night a mere half-hour: Pushkin’s second note directs
the reader here to a poem by his friend the poet Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky repudiating his previous dislike of St Petersburg, the third stanza of which several lines in this paragraph echo.
67 the playing field of Mars: The largest open space in central St Petersburg, the parade ground for the Imperial Guards, still known as ‘the Field of Mars’.
109–14 His family name […] low and grand. In early drafts of the poem, Pushkin made Yevgeny a prosperous figure, then further and further reduced his material and social status until his end as a beggar.
112 Karamzin: Nikolay Mikhaylovich Karamzin, author of the monumental History of the Russian State (1818–29). Pushkin hints in the previous three lines that Yevgeny’s forebears may have been illustrious before the social reforms of Peter the Great.
133 They’d take the bridges off the Neva: In Pushkin’s time, the two bridges over the main channel of the Neva were on pontoons that could be temporarily removed when the water level became dangerously high.
159–60 the stormy night / Had ended; came pale dawn: In his third note to this poem, Pushkin seizes on meteorological detail to begin to articulate his concern at what he saw as Mickiewicz’s distorted portrayal, in verse included in Forefathers’ Eve (see Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’) written after Russian suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1830–31, of the 1824 flooding of St Petersburg as a retributive act of God rather than a man-caused disaster. ‘It is a pity that [Mickiewicz’s] description is inaccurate,’ he observes in his third note to his poem. ‘It was not snowing – the Neva was not iced over. Our account is truer, although lacking in the vivid colours of the Polish poet.’
176–7 As if a captive beast let loose / Fell on the city: This poem has a pervasive imagery rare in Pushkin. The river Neva is an almost living human and animate, even at one point superhuman presence. See also lines 182–5, 249–58 and 267–8, for example.
177 Fell on the city … Before it: One of three lines in this poem Pushkin left unrhymed; the others in this translation are lines 313 and 341 (rhymed in translation). In this case, a rhyming draft line was omitted in revision. But Thomas Shaw suggests that here Pushkin might have intended to disrupt a succession of harmonious couplet rhymes (not reflected in the present translation) in order to represent the sudden chaos of the flood (Basker, p. 33). The first explanation would seem the most likely for this and Pushkin’s other exceptional unrhymed lines.
182–3 Behold Petropolis […] Poseidon. Carrying the idea that Triton, the merman sea god of Greek myth, surfaces from the city’s substratum either in confirmation of a chaotic reversal of the natural order or, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when summoned by his father Neptune (Greek Poseidon) – iconographically associated with Peter the Great – to signal the sea to return to its normal level.
184–5 and 344–5 Malicious waves / Swarm and with loathing / Children pelted him: The same word in Pushkin, zlyye, ‘malicious’, lies behind both these translations, linking the elements and human society in its destructive hostility towards Yevgeny (though human charity has not entirely vanished: ‘food / Was offered him […] / On window-sills’, lines 341–3).
197 The late tsar ruled with glory still: Alexander I (r. 1801–25), an early liberal who turned into a repressive reactionary in the second part of his reign.
209 In due course sent his generals out: In his fourth note to The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin names Count Miloradovich and Adjutant-General Benckendorff; the former was military governor-general of St Petersburg, the latter the founder of the notorious Third Department of the tsar’s Chancellery, the tsarist secret police, and Pushkin’s de facto censor. It is part of Pushkin’s satire on the ineffectiveness of officialdom in dealing with the flood to relegate these names to a note, while naming the McGonagallian poet Count Khvostov (see note on line 322 below) in the poem itself.
271–80 He hails a boatman […] he makes the shore: Commentators have seen symbolic Greek mythological reference here, the Neva boatman standing for Charon on the Styx as he ferries Yevgeny to the realm of the dead about to be portrayed.
313 And found no traces of disaster: Another line unrhymed by Pushkin.
314 The ill work crimson-covered: Crimson or purple was the ceremonial colour of the tsar’s mantle, so standing for imperial power, and this line, besides referring to the normalising light of dawn, could be taken as an ironic allusion to the tsar’s inadequate dealing with the flood.
322 Count Khvostòv: Dmitry Khvostov (1757–1835), a ludicrously bad poet and self-publisher who wrote continuously for sixty years. Pushkin and other leading poets were forever poking fun at this surprisingly amiable figure.
391–3 Was it not exactly thus […] the abyss: Basker (p. xlii) comments that in his published copy of The Bronze Horseman Pushkin’s friend Prince Vyazemsky noted: ‘My expression, uttered to Pushkin and Mickiewicz as we were walking past the statue’, and that this must have been among many conversations to have taken place about the statue’s meaning.
393 Upon the brink of the abyss: Pushkin’s last laconic note to The Bronze Horseman reads: ‘See the description of the statue in Mickiewicz.’ In his poem ‘The Monument of Peter the Great’ (see introduction to The Bronze Horseman), Mickiewicz has the statue depicting Peter tottering as if out of control on the edge of a precipice.
III
FAIRY TALES (SKAZKI)
The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831)
58 And Widow Baba Babarikha: In the original this phrase, to be repeated throughout the tale, has an infectious ring with a prominent a sound: ‘S svat’yey baboy Babarikhoy’. The word svat’ya here goes with baba, denoting the oldest woman of a household; we learn later in the poem that she is Prince Guidon’s grandmother (line 670). Babarikha is a common nickname in Russian folk tales.
229 the island of Buyan: See Introduction under ‘Fairy Tales’.
484 Chernomor: Also the name of the evil wizard in Ruslan and Lyudmila (1817–20).
568 Damask steel: A special patterned steel made in India and exported by Arab traders to Damascus for sword-making from the early centuries AD up to the seventeenth century.
923–4 I too enjoyed […] whiskers there: The traditional Russian storyteller’s standard closing lines, after which he will pass round the hat and get his whiskers properly wet. The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833) ends with a similar form of words.
The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish (1833)
165 They’d have hacked him down with their hatchets: With previous details of the old wife’s cruelty to her servants (lines 110–11) and menacing guards with hatchets (lines 154–5), this picture of royal court style is reminiscent not of Catherine the Great’s era but of earlier, harsher times, perhaps of the court of Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547–84).
The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833)
22 She sighed the deepest sigh: Pushkin’s folk-tale style in this poem abounds in diminutives, giving colour and emphasis in various ways. Here, in language appropriate to a loved child’s ears, tyazhelò, ‘heavy’, is lengthened to five-syllable tyazhelyòshen’ko, weightily taking up most of the line and enacting the sigh.
65 towers: In early Russia, and in Russian legend and folk tale, the typical domestic dwelling took elevated form.
154 A tiled shelf on the stove: A sleeping place on the flat top of a Russian stove, used when the fire has died down but still emits warmth.
192 wine: Literally, ‘green wine’, a term in folk poetry for vodka.
209 Cherkess: Anglicised Russian word for ‘Circassians’, a people of the north Caucasus.
309 The little old woman: Pushkin refines what is already a diminutive, starùshka, ‘little old woman’, by adding a syllable, starushònka. Twelve lines further on, he dazzlingly adds yet another syllable, starushònochka, to which the translator cannot respond. See also note to line 22 above. Diminutives in Russian often denote the opposite of affection, as here (and another example: in Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov (182
5) the diminutive form of the Pretender’s given name, Grishka for Grigory, is used by supporters of Tsar Boris with belittling intention, and even appears in the uncensored version of the work’s original title.
489 that deep cavern’s entrance: The deep o sounds of ‘Pòd goròyu tyòmnyy vkhòd’, ‘Beneath the mountain the dark entrance’, graphically convey the gaping entrance-hole of the cave.
533–4 I tasted mead and ale […] scarcely wet: The traditional Russian storyteller’s standard closing lines. The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831) ends with a similar form of words.
The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834)
1–2 Thrice-Ninth Clime […] Thrice-Eleventh Time: Terms meaning ‘Once upon a time’ in Russian fairy and folk tales.
14 Men in thousands under arms: Pushkin’s ‘full line’ here, consisting chiefly of a single polysyllable, ‘Mnogchìslennuyu rat”, is one of a number of two-word lines in The Tale of the Golden Cockerel that contribute significantly to the slow, measured rhythm of this tale and have an incantatory quality.
58 What an easy life for you!: Literally: ‘Rule, lying on your side!’ This line was removed by the censor on first publication.
116–18 Back and forth […] horses pass: Pushkin deliberately slows the tempo. ‘The image of grass, red with blood,’ Valentin Nepomnyashchy (p. 117) has written, ‘grows to a monstrous size in close-up […] in the middle of a narrative shorn of colourful adjectives’. The mode of repetition is now set up for the tsar’s histrionics, in his own words and the next three lines of narrative.
127–30 Opened wide […] Walked the Queen of Shamakhàn: Pushkin has twenty a sounds in these four lines, seven of them in the climactic line 130, ‘Shamakhànskaya tsaritsa’, making the passage into one long gasp of surprise.
188 Best with some though not insist: Pushkin first wrote ‘But with the mighty [singular] it is bad to quarrel’, changed this in his fair copy to ‘But with tsars it is bad to quarrel’, and finally, before sending his manuscript to the censor, altered the line to (literally) ‘But with a certain one it is costly to quarrel’. In a letter to his wife written two months before composition of The Golden Cockerel, Pushkin wrote: ‘The other day I came within a hair’s-breadth of disaster: I nearly quarrelled with him […]. If I quarrel with this one – I won’t survive to see another’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 10, p. 202, note).
Selected Poetry (Penguin) Page 29
