Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings

by Alexander Pushkin

  The Tales of Belkin are thus in one sense a ‘plain prose’ equivalent of the dazzling poetic virtuosity he had displayed in Eugene Onegin. But there is no authorial presence in the tales, just as there is no sign of an omniscient narrator. The flashes of insight which transform the stories do not proceed from any individual in them, or, apparently, from the author himself. That anonymity seems to have been what Pushkin was trying to produce in prose. If so he succeeded in doing so with perfect unobtrusiveness. The ashamed and yet exasperated young hussar assures the postmaster that his daughter is very well off, and inadvertently he reveals exactly the truth which the parable of the Prodigal Son preferred to leave out. ‘Neither of you will ever forget what has happened.’ Nor is the old man dignified in his pathos. When the young hussar gives him money he indignantly throws it to the ground and walks away, but after a moment’s reflection comes back to pick it up. Too late! – someone else has already removed it. So it all too often goes with preconceived moral gestures.

  ‘The Blizzard’ is a charming parodic variant on the contemporary vogue for tales of romantic elopements and demon bridegrooms returning from limbo. Miss K. I. T.’s other story, ‘The Squire’s Daughter’, is also discreetly told from the feminine angle. The narrator takes pleasure in the fact that her hero should think of marrying a peasant girl for love; and he is seen from a woman’s point of view, as Darcy and Bingham are seen in Pride and Prejudice. The shop assistant who is the anecdotalist of ‘The Undertaker’ takes for granted his protagonist’s pride in trade and pleasure, in securing custom and cheating the customer. Once again, however, a sudden insight seems to come from nowhere in particular. The new cottage bought by the undertaker, which he has always longed for, does not after all make ‘his heart… rejoice’, as he is surprised to find. For trade and business are his whole life, though he had never realized it before.

  Insofar as there is a meaning or even a moral in the Tales, and to find such things in Pushkin is in any event highly dubious, it is that the objective reality of things always remains outside the stories we tell about them, just as they remain outside the meanings we ourselves seek to impose. Silvio, in ‘The Shot’, has an absolute determination to impose his will upon the indifferent world of fact. His determination is magnificent but futile. He is a mystery man, a melodramatist cut off from the prosaic world, and it takes sober prose to reveal him, not as a hero but as the grotesquely isolated figure he has become. None the less he is surely still admired by the army officer who tells his story.

  In Pushkin’s prose the world seems alienated from the medium describing it by the very operation of that medium. As the Russian critic Lezhnev put it, ‘poetry and truth cannot coexist’ in this atmosphere, which is the point of prose. It is a property of the prose virtues which Pushkin is investigating, rather than something put in by his own personality. The Tales of Belkin are thus very different from the contes of Flaubert, Maupassant or Mérimée, where ‘impersonality’ is a product of the writer’s own personal attitude. They are much more like James Joyce’s Dubliners, and have the same play of parody mixed with realism. We could say that Pushkin, as an experimenter, honours the medium of prose by not slipping it on with the casual and familiar ease with which he had slipped on the garment of poetry. His successor Gogol, who much admired the Belkin tales, could be said to have made a kind of deliberate and often facetious mannerism of his own, out of this unobtrusive evasiveness which he found in Pushkin.

  Pushkin, as we have seen, created the figure of Belkin himself as a kind of postscript to his stories, almost as an incongruous guarantee of their impersonality. When Belkin gets his head, he becomes, as if quite unintentionally, a character in his own right, both comic and endearing. As if to relax himself and his reader, Pushkin went on at once to write his inimitable ‘History of the Village of Goryukhino’. We learn now that young Squire Belkin had always had literary ambitions; that he attempted at first to write a Russian epic, which caused him so much trouble that he turned it into a tragedy and finally into a ballad. Then he dropped the whole idea and started to compose aphorisms, which even he could see were a trifle banal. So he collected and embellished anecdotes – in fact the Tales which we have just been reading – and finally, still unsatisfied, he determines to write a proper history, like that of the Russian historian Polevoy or the celebrated Gibbon (‘whose name I cannot remember’).

  So drolly effective is Pushkin’s satire – if indeed something so good-natured can be called satire at all – that we could easily miss what must have amused his friends, and some of his fellow-authors, at the time. Belkin is struggling to do what the Russian writers of the great classic period, and not least Pushkin himself, had themselves all been trying to do. They had begun ambitious epics, turned to other kinds of poetry, and then finally to prose and to history. Belkin found the diary of his own great-grandfather, once lord of the manor, a preliminary inspiration.

  May 4th. Snow. Trishka beaten for rudeness. 6th – the brown cow died. Senka flogged for drunkenness… 9th – rain and snow. Trishka flogged because of the weather.

  And so forth. The diary, as Belkin observes, ‘is distinguished for clarity and brevity of style’ – just the qualities which Pushkin was seeking in his own prose.

  Oppressed by the weight of things as they actually are, Belkin, unlike his great-grandfather, seeks relief in writing them down as they are not. And yet the gloomy history of Russian feudal serfdom, as also its more incidentally human side, appears both in his introduction and in the ‘history’ itself. Belkin suddenly becomes wholly natural when he describes his own homecoming, and how the birches on the estate have grown taller. ‘I told the women unceremoniously, “How you’ve aged,” and they replied with feeling, “And how plain you’ve become, master.”’ But when writing ‘history’ Belkin attempts the proper magisterial tone, and in doing so makes, as if accidentally, an observation that is true in all nations and at all times, but especially true of what the poet Aleksandr Blok called the dark chronicle of Russia. It is because of that darkness that the Russian peasantry always looked back to what they thought of as a golden age. It was not until the age of Lenin and the Communist Party that they became conditioned to look forward instead – to what was promised and proclaimed to be the gleaming heights of socialism.

  Pushkin’s free and individual brand of interest in history, and how to write it, is also visible in the novel fragment ‘Roslavlev’. It seems at least to have been projected as a novel, a kind of alternative version of his acquaintance Zagoskin’s actual and orthodox historical fiction in the Sir Walter Scott manner, also called Roslavlev. The latter story concerns a young Russian lady, Polina, who has been in France before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, where she has fallen in love with a married man. Back in Russia during the invasion she meets him again, now widowed, and a prisoner of war. She herself is half-heartedly betrothed to a young Russian officer, Roslavlev, but she now deserts her home in the company of her former French lover, and they manage to reach the French army. Like the old-time heroine who has suffered a fate worse than death, and therefore cannot be allowed to survive the conclusion of a heroic narrative, Zagoskin’s Polina is later killed with her lover during the Russian siege of Danzig.

  Pushkin was clearly interested in the possibilities of Polina as a character, implying that she had been merely conventionalized in Zagoskin’s narrative. Slight as his sketch is, he makes it clear that she is a young woman of fire and intelligence, able to think for herself and eager to read and to know about everything that is going on. He gives her, in fact, the qualities which he himself could admire in young women, and which he felt were more paramount in Russian society among women than men. His own Tatiana in Eugene Onegin would be a good example. Young Lieutenant Roslavlev, on the other hand, is the sort of good-natured rake who talks down to what he thinks is women’s level, and who is quite unworthy of Polina’s love. Senicour, the French prisoner, is a different proposition entirely. He is gentle, courteous and attractiv
e. But Polina is a spirited and patriotic girl, who at the end of the fragment gives the news to the female narrator that her brother Roslavlev has been killed fighting heroically at Borodino.

  So what might happen now? A potentially interesting situation, with Polina divided between admiration and growing love for the French prisoner, and her own strong patriotic feelings? Whatever resolution for the story Pushkin might have found, he clearly lost interest at this point in continuing the novel. It was Polina as a person, rather than her story as told by Zagoskin, which had interested him. He toyed with the idea of making her a friend and confidante of the great Madame de Staël, whose personality and intelligence she sees as a reproach to the whole of a philistine Russian upper class. It is of some interest, incidentally, that Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), which Pushkin mentions more than once, is also mentioned by Tolstoy in War and Peace. Madame de Staël is the favourite novelist of the Russian General Kutuzov, and he is actually absorbed in her during the opening stages of the Battle of Borodino, presumably when he knows he can do no more than to let the events of the day take their course – a policy of wise passivity which Tolstoy approves in War and Peace; and which Pushkin, who took a great interest in military matters, and in the personalities of the war of 1812, would no doubt have approved of too.

  Pushkin’s interest in campaigning – in this case a campaign against the Turks – is evident in his unique chapters of autobiography, ‘A Journey to Arzrum at the Time of the 1829 Campaign’. Not only does this give us one of the few pieces of Pushkin’s personal writing, but it is written in a style of quite singular compression, purity and vividness. Many later Russian authors, including Lérmontov and Tolstoy himself, have taken it for a model. Though it is one of the most interesting of Pushkin’s writings it is almost impossible to find in a translation, which makes its appearance in this selection particularly welcome.

  As his early poems show, Pushkin loved the exotic for its own sake. The spirited tale ‘Kirdzhali’ shows that, but it is also a masterpiece of matter-of-fact simplicity which may remind us not only of one of Tolstoy’s last and finest tales, Hadji-Murad, but of some of the best early stories of Hemingway (themselves much influenced by Tolstoy). Love for the exotic, as well as a humorous attitude towards it, is also a feature of that fascinating fragment ‘Egyptian Nights’. Half serious and half playful, Pushkin plays in it with the idea of his own personality as a poet: or rather as two poets, the young Russian aristocrat Charsky, and the humble Italian improviser who possesses, in spite of his lowly status, that mysterious gift of the gods, a true poetic inspiration. Like Pushkin himself, he can produce finished verses on every subject. Nor is he concerned with what they mean, or with what he as a poet is ‘trying to say’. The verses that come have their own value and give their own unique aesthetic satisfaction.

  As well as the exotic Pushkin always rejoiced in what was quietly ironical. To test the improviser’s powers Charsky suggests the theme that the poet, and no one else, should choose what subjects he should take to write on. Who is the laugh on here? Pushkin, like Charsky, believed passionately in the poet’s independence, and yet another poet can produce verses on this very theme to order. It is the paradox of art, making the poet not only his own Priest and Tsar, but mountebank and chameleon. That solemn romantic dogma, the divine dignity of the poet, is being sent up by Pushkin, who knew quite well that the great artists and poets of the Renaissance would never have supposed they were forfeiting their independence by producing the kind of works which their patrons expected of them.

  The story the improviser tells of Cleopatra and her lovers is taken from an anecdote of the classical author Aurelius Victor. The French poet Théophile Gautier wrote a complete poem about it, and the Russian symbolist poet Bryusov ‘continued’ Pushkin’s poem in his own style, giving it a romantic aura of love and death and drawing a parallel between modern St Petersburg and ancient Alexandria. Like Gautier, Bryusov saves the third and youngest suitor, making an inevitable anticlimax, and a banal ending to the poem. Pushkin of course evades this by breaking off at the most suggestive moment.

  And he had a genius for what was suggestive and fragmentary. Indeed it could be said that the idea of the ‘romantic fragment’ was not only the sole innovation that he took from romantic theory and practice – for he is temperamentally and at heart the most classically minded of authors – but the one he brought in his own style to its fullest perfection. He never needed to ‘spell it out’. The same qualities of pungency and economy animate and give his individual stamp to the way he wrote prose. His versatility is amazing, ranging as it does from such already well-known stories as ‘The Queen of Spades’ and ‘The Captain’s Daughter’, to the much less familiar but equally remarkable qualities of the Belkin tales, and the other pieces assembled in this book. Although he adored Shakespeare and Scott, Pushkin’s English was rather rudimentary; but I fancy that he had enough to have appreciated the sober and effective style of Ronald Wilks’s translation, and to have felt it does justice to his original.

  John Bayley

  FURTHER READING

  John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge, 1971)

  A. D. P. Briggs, Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (Bristol, 1991)

  Paul Debreczeny, The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (Stanford, 1983)

  A. Kodjak, Pushkin’s I. P. Belkin (Columbus, Ohio, 1979)

  J. Lavrin, Pushkin and Russian Literature (London, 1947)

  D. S. Mirsky, Pushkin (London, 1926)

  E. J. Simmons, Pushkin (New York, 1964)

  W. N. Vickery, Alexander Pushkin (New York, 1970)

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  This selection of Pushkin’s prose writings comprises: The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, ‘The History of the Village of Goryukhino’, ‘Roslavlev’, ‘Kirdzhali: A Tale’, ‘Egyptian Nights’ and ‘A Journey to Arzrum at the Time of the 1829 Campaign’.

  The Tales of Belkin were written in the space of a few weeks at Boldino in Autumn 1830. The preface, ‘From the Editor’, was written the following year, when they were published, ‘anonymously’, under the initials ‘A. P.’ They are Pushkin’s first completed works in prose, and the reception was very mixed. Asked by a friend from his schooldays, P. I. Miller, ‘Who is this Belkin?’, Pushkin is said to have replied, ‘Whoever he is, this is the way to write stories: simply, briefly and clearly.’ The Tales were first published under Pushkin’s name in 1834.

  ‘The History of the Village of Goryukhino’ was also written at Boldino in Autumn 1830 after the completion of the Tales of Belkin. It was printed after Pushkin’s death, in the Contemporary, in mutilated form: the full text, restored from his manuscripts, was published much later, in 1857. The work was probably left uncompleted because Pushkin felt that to continue with the peasant rebellion would have incurred the wrath of the censors.

  Pushkin started work on ‘Roslavlev’ in 1831, and the novel remained unfinished. The beginning was published separately in 1836 under the title ‘Fragment from the unpublished memoirs of a lady (1811)’. It is interesting to note how the descriptions of the mood of the aristocracy on the eve of the fall of Moscow, and of the banquet held for Madame de Staël, anticipate War and Peace. Pushkin was deeply interested in the events of 1812 and in 1829 produced a fragment, ‘At the beginning of 1812 our regiment was situated…’ ‘Roslavlev’ is polemically directed against Zagoskin’s historical work of the same title (cf. Introduction, and first note to ‘Roslavlev’).

  ‘Kirdzhali’ was written in 1834 and published in the Library for Reading that year. The story is linked to the Greek uprising of 1821, in which Pushkin took a keen interest. He had contemplated a narrative poem on the subject but abandoned it.

  ‘Egyptian Nights’ was probably written in 1835 at Mikhaylovskoye and first printed in the Contemporary in 1837, after Pushkin’s death. Queen Cleopatra captured his imagination more than once. In 1824 he had written the draft of a po
em about her. Pushkin returned to this theme in 1828 when the text of the second improvisation was written. In a prose fragment of 1835, ‘We were spending the evening at Princess D.’s dacha’, which also combines prose with poetry, Cleopatra is compared to other women with claims to fame. For the first improvisation Pushkin reworked lines from his unfinished poem ‘Ezersky’ (1832–3).

  In ‘A Journey to Arzrum at the Time of the 1829 Campaign’, Pushkin describes his time in the Caucasus during the Russo-Turkish War, and his subsequent experiences with the Russian army under General Paskevich (who had been ordered to keep him under close surveillance, chiefly because of his friendship with former Decembrists. Pushkin’s coldness towards the General is apparent in this work). Pushkin’s record of his travels forms the basis of the present account, and in 1830 a fragment was published in the Literary Gazette with the title ‘The Georgian Military Highway’. A complete account was written in 1835 and published in the Contemporary in 1836.

  Title-page of the first edition: The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin,

  Published by A. P., St Petersburg, 1831

  THE TALES OF THE LATE

  IVAN PETROVICH BELKIN

  MRS PROSTAKOV: Oh yes, my dear sir. He’s been keen on stories since he was a little boy.