Eugene Onegin
Александр Пушкин
OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Eugene Onegin
A Novel in Verse
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by JAMES E. FALEN
James E.Falen 1990, 1995
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-283899-5
CONTENTS
Introduction
vii
Note on the Translation
xxv
Select Bibliography
xxxi
A Chronology of Alexander Pushkin
xxxiii
EUGENE ONEGIN 1
Appendix: Excerpts from Onegin's Journey
213
Explanatory Notes
229
INTRODUCTION
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is the poet and writer whom Russians regard as both the source and the summit of their literature. Not only is he revered, like Shakespeare in the English tradition or Goethe in the German, as the supreme national poet, but he has become a kind of cultural myth, an iconic figure around whom a veritable cult of idolatry has been fashioned. This exalted status that Pushkin has been accorded in his own land has been something of a disservice to the living reality of his works, and it contrasts oddly with the more modest reputation that Pushkin has secured abroad. To many non-native readers of Russian literature the panegyrics of his compatriots seem excessive, and indeed, in their eyes, Pushkin has been somewhat overshadowed by the great Russian writers who came after him. They do not comprehend why these writers themselves generally grant him the first and highest place in their pantheon of artistic geniuses. For those who do not read Pushkin in his own language, the situation remains perplexing and the questions persist: just who is he and why, almost without exception, do the most perceptive of his compatriots regard him as one of the world's greatest artists?
Within the Russian tradition the scope of Pushkin's achievement is essentially clear and well established. He is unarguably a figure of protean dimensions, the author in his own right of a formidable and enduring body of work and at the same time the seminal writer whose example has nourished, enriched, and in large part directed all subsequent literature in the language. He came of age at a historical moment when the Russian literary language, after a century or so of imitation of foreign models, had been roughly shaped and readied for the hand of an original genius. Pushkin was to fulfil that role.
He began his career in an era when both the writers and the readers of literature belonged almost exclusively to the limited
milieu of aristocratic society and at a time when poetry rather than prose was the dominant mode for high literature. Well read in both the ancient classics and in Western European literature, especially French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Pushkin was the most dazzlingly talented member of a younger generation of writers who were attempting, under the banner of romanticism, to reform and invigorate the language and the styles of poetry. If Pushkin's early work (he began composing as a schoolboy prodigy) was facile and conventional, consisting mainly of light verse suitable for the literary salons of the day (frothy Epicurean pieces, witty epigrams, album verse), it already displayed an impressive plasticity of language that was new in Russian literature; and quite soon he exhibited a mastery of virtually all the poetic genres and styles known to the writers of his era. The eventual range of his creativity was enormous, embracing not only all the prevailing forms of lyric verse (which he reshaped into his own freer medium of expression), but including brilliant examples of narrative verse as well. He also achieved stunning success in poetry based on the idioms and themes of Russian folklore, and he experimented fascinatingly in the field of verse drama, both on a large Shakespearian scale and in intensely concentrated, minimalist studies of human passions. He is, in sum, a poet of astonishing versatility. Possessed of a uniquely supple linguistic instrument, he is the master of an apparently effortless naturalness, a seamless blend of appropriate sound, sense, and feeling. During the last decade of his life, when literary activity was being democratized and commercialized, and when a larger, more broadly based readership was emerging, Pushkin turned increasingly to prose, which was fast outdistancing poetry in popularity, though it had yet to achieve the same high level of excellence attained by Russian verse. Pushkin's prose fiction, which is characterized by an unusual terseness and precision of expression, includes several masterpieces in the short-story form, one completed historical novel (as well as the beginnings of several others), and a number of unfinished drafts of a
contemporary social novel. He also made significant contributions to Russian culture as a journalist, as a literary critic and editor, as an accomplished letter-writer, and as a gifted, if amateur, historian. He became in effect Russia's first complete man of letters.
All his creative life Pushkin suffered from the indignities and impositions of an autocratic state: exile in his youth, the frustrations of police surveillance and a grossly interfering censorship in his later years, the constant and onerous obligations of government service, and the continuing humiliation of having to rely on imperial favour. In an effort to secure his independence from such state control over his affairs he gave his political allegiance to a kind of 'aristocratic party', seeing in the old Russian landed gentry, the class to which he himself was born, the only viable check on the arbitrary power of the autocracy. This aligned him as well, in a literary sense, with the notion, prevalent among the educated members of 'lite' society, that the writer's appropriate role was that of the gentleman littrateur, a view of the artist that probably hindered Pushkin in his effort, during the last decade of his life, to transform himself into a truly free and independent professional writer. He never succeeded, finally, in escaping from either the constraints of court pressure or his own persistent allegiance to a fading aristocratic culture. His further development as an artist was abruptly terminated by his death in a duel at the age of 38.
In both his poetry and his prose Pushkin was a profound innovator. He brought to its successful conclusion the revolt against the tenets of French neoclassicism, which, with its rigid divisions and classifications of genres, had dominated the literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Life, in Pushkin's view, was wilder and more various than these conventions would allow, and, although he always retained a rather classical respect for balance and proportion in art, he introduced into his native literature a new sense of artistic freedom. His formal experiments encouraged a vigorous
inventiveness in the writers who followed him, and his modernization of the diction and syntax of literary texts with infusions of living contemporary speech pointed the way to a perennial renewal of the literary language. In the area of literary subject-matter as well his influence was far-reaching: he introduced a host of suggestive themes that later writers would explore more fully, and he greatly enlarged the cast of characters in serious literature. No topic or person lay beyond the reach of his interest; his poetry and prose are filled with life's essential concerns and activitieswith love, work, art, history, politics, and nature; with all the mundane trivia of everyday existence and with the more rarefied realm of dreams and thoughts. He virtually created and shaped modern Russian literature and in countless ways determined the course it would follow after him.
Those who seek labels have made numerous attempts to define and categorize this astonishing writer. He has been called variously a romantic and a realist, the poet of freedom and the bard of Russia's imperium; he has been dubbed in political terms a radical, a liberal, and a conservative, a revolutionary critic of the Czarist regime and its loyal defender. Persuasive arguments can and have been made in support of each of these characterizations,
but a poet of genius always in the end evades our efforts to tame and contain him.
This brief assessment of Pushkin's place in Russian literature, although it provides a reasonably accurate recital of established critical views, ignores certain anomalies and paradoxes that are part of the Pushkin story. Rather curiously, for example, all the prolific and prodigious achievement of this 'father of Russian literature' was the work of a man whose chief public mask in his own day was that of a gadfly and wastrel. Disciplined in his art, he was often irresponsible and profligate in his social behaviour. There was about him, as the reminiscences of contemporaries observe, something of the eternal schoolboy and prankster, a bit of the renegade always at odds with the respectable adult world. For several years he played the roles of dandy or bohemian; he loved to shock with outlandish dress or
outrageous behaviour, and he enjoyed flirting recklessly with the dangers of a dissolute and dissident life. Upon leaving school he put on, briefly, the mask of political rebel and quite consciously provoked, with several courageous poems of liberal sentiment, the displeasure of the emperor, for which he was punished with removal from the centres of Russian culture and power. Even then, in banishment, he courted further punitive action from the authorities by circulating verse of blasphemous, if humorous, content.
Exile seems to have been a defining experience of Pushkin's young manhood. He deeply resented his enforced absence from the social scene, yet he gained through his distance from the centre of events a clearer vision of the society he craved to rejoin. When he was permitted, eventually, to reside once again in St Petersburg and Moscow, he quickly set about to re-establish his nonconformist credentials, indulging once more in a dissipated style of life, although it now seemed less appropriate to his advancing years. Even after his marriage (at almost 32), when he had ostensibly settled down, he continued to provoke outrage, antagonism, and even ridicule with his endless literary feuds, his increasingly touchy pride in his ancient lineage, and his utter contempt for the circles of the court. Yet another cause for the contradictory impulses of his spirit was the black African strain in his ancestry, a heritage that he saw as both a source of uniqueness and a mark of his alienation from the society whose acceptance he simultaneously rejected and craved. At times he revelled in his 'African strangeness' and spoke of his 'moorish' features as the emblem of an elemental and primordial side of his identity, while on other occasions he lamented the racial characteristics that set him apart from those around him. In any case, whatever his ambivalences, it seems clear that Pushkin relished as well as resented his estrangement from society; and certainly his marginal position in it helped him to see all the triviality and hypocrisy of the monde. If he continued to live by its codes, he also studied it keenly as an artist and depicted it matchlessly in his work.
Even by the standards of his time and circle Pushkin's appetite for dissipation was large. He was an inveterate gambler and a famous seducer of women, behaviour that he was reluctant to relinquish, not merely out of a mindless adoption of available social roles, but because of the special powers that he attributed to chance and sensuality in his creative life. His youthful anacreontic verse with its playful eroticism, several narrative poems of refined ribaldry, and his more mature love poetry all testify to a deeply sensual nature; and his passion for gambling figures prominently in some of his finest prose works. He was always fascinated, on behalf of his art, in the play of the fortuitous, in the luck of the draw, in the creative possibilities of life's contingencies. He was willing as man and artist to trust in chance, to submit to it as the mechanism that, while it might condemn him to an outwardly undefined and precarious existence, would also assure his inner artistic freedom and his poetic destiny. Chance, in Pushkin's view, was the servant of the greater thing that he called fate, and his reverence for fate as the ultimate shaper of human destinies haunts his work at almost every stage of his career. Essentially buoyant and optimistic in his youth, perceiving fate as the artist's benign and essential guide, he would never distrust it, not even when later in his life it took on an ominous and threatening aspect. Opposition to the tyranny of human institutions was an essential element in Pushkin's conception of the free artist, but resistance to fate, he believed, was a perilous course of action for any individual; for himself he was convinced it was the surest way to destruction as a poet. These elements of Pushkin's characterhis sensuality, his courting of chance, and his trust in fateare essential clues to his artistic nature and to his conception of creativity. He is an artist for whom personality means little, for whom an ordinary human nature and a mundane existence are the very attributes and signs of the poet who is fully engaged with life and at the same time receptive to the designs of Providence.
The poet for Pushkin is a mysterious being: inspired to
exalted utterance by strange gods, yet remaining at an everyday level the most insignificant of humans, a misfit and outcast. Far from being in propria persona a poetic demi-urge, the poet is the instrument and voice of powers beyond the self. This is a conception of the poet that combines elements of both a romantic and an anti-romantic sensibility. It yokes together two disparate images, that of the divinely inspired seer and that of the human misfit. It is a vision, of course, with ancient roots and, in its specifically Russian variant, with links to the native tradition of the 'jurodivy', the wandering 'holy fool' of popular veneration. For Pushkin such an image of the poet provides a justification for asserting at once an enormous arrogance for his art and a fundamental humility toward his gift. And perhaps it helps to explain the peculiar instability and elusiveness of Pushkin's artistic personality, the odd sense his reader has that the author is both palpably present in his work and yet nowhere to be found. We seldom know directly what this author thinks, even about seemingly obvious things, and we are made uneasy by this lack of a familiar and reassuring human intelligence. The point is not that Pushkin leaves a great deal to the reader's creativity and perception, though he does, but rather that his genius is to an unusual extent of a peculiarly negative kind. He is that rare artist who possesses to an extreme degree a kind of splendid receptivity, an ability to absorb and embody the very energy of his surroundings, to take into himself with an amazing sympathy all the shapes and colours of the life that he sees and hears and responds to. He may or he may not examine intellectually the life that he describes, he may or he may not admire it or approve of it, but what he must do is reveal it, recreate it in its vivacity, display his sheer perception of it, refraining from an easy human judgement.
Pushkin is something of an artistic chameleon, and this is why it is so difficult to define him or to fix on a clear and consistent image of his authorial person and stance. He seems almost to lack a coherent artistic persona; like a chameleon, he seems capable of changing his colours and of adapting to almost
any milieu. He is enormously alive to the ephemera of experience, fascinated by everything and everyone: the sublime and the ridiculous; the sacred and the profane; all the roles that people play and every style of behaviour; he is interested equally in the talented and the mediocre, in the articulate and the dumb; in Czars, peasants, soldiers, fops, rakes, society women, vulnerable girls, rascals, villains, and almost anyone else. He wants, if only fleetingly, to capture everything, to absorb it all in his appetite for lifeeven at the risk of losing himself, or perhaps out of the need to lose himself. And the vision that emerges from this fleeting race through experience is no less perceptive and suggestive than many more lengthy examinations of life. Pushkin's manner of describing phenomena is fleeting and abrupt because he is never sated, never content, never willing to stay in one place; he has to rush on to the next person or thing that catches his eye. His omnivorous curiosity lends a kind of 'lightness' as well as universality to Pushkin's worka lightness of touch, weight, and illumination. The quality is legendary in descriptions of Pushkin's art, but it can be mistaken for superficiality. Our elusive author appears to take few things seriously (not excluding himsel
f) and often poses as a mere 'entertainer'. Entertaining he certainly is, but if we, as readers, are taken in by his ruse and allow ourselves to become inattentive, we are in danger of missing the subtle and hidden aspect of his art.
The effect of lightness, the exceptional clarity that so famously accompanies Pushkin's breadth of interests, goes hand in hand with his vaunted terseness and simplicity, his evident and easy accessibility. But his terseness can be more apparent than real, for his art has the capacity to suggest much in a few spare and simple observations, and his simplicity can be deceptive, screening from the casual reader an art of great sophistication and delicacy. To the foreign reader, especially, Pushkin's qualities of clarity and simplicity can be an impediment to the appreciation of his work; and if the reader has first come to Russian literature through the tormented and profound explorations of
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Pushkin's view of the passing scene, filled with a bracing humour as well as grief, may produce a rather strange impression; he is not at all what such a reader has come to expect of a Russian writer. Unlike those two later masters, Pushkin is neither philosopher nor religious thinker, neither didactic moralist nor analytical psychologist. He is both more universal in his sympathies and more modest in his artistic person.
Perhaps, in his final years, this poet of light could not fully adjust to the passing of his youth and the waning of youth's poetic energy. If he would not become a poet of the dark, perhaps he did at the last become the seer of an 'unbearable lightness of being'. In several of his later poems some spectral beast of retribution seems to haunt the poet's mind, along with premonitions of, and even yearnings for, an early death. But the ending in human life is always the same, whereas in great art, as in the plenitude of Pushkin's work, it can at least seem otherwise. Pushkin retained to the last his humility before Providence and he went to his duel and his death completely in character. We cannot, finally, answer the question: who is Pushkin? We can only say with some degree of certainty what he is: Russia's most utter artist, its closest thing to the pure poet incarnate, that being who sacrifices all the other possibilities of his human existence to the expression, through language, of life's fascinating variety. The aim of poetry, Pushkin asserted, is poetry itself; the poet emerges from the creative spirit to show us the world and speak of things beyond our normal ken; he is the voice of time's fleeting and intricate fullness.
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