Puskin and his Sculptural Myth [Teilw. in kyrill. Schr. Reprint 2018 ed.] 9783110890037, 9789027934260

Table of contents :
EDITOR'S NOTE
CONTENTS
1. The Statue in Puäkin's Poetic Mythology
2. Marginal Notes on PuSkin's Lyric Poetry
3. Marginal Notes on Eugene Onegin
4. On PuSkin's Responses to Folk Poetry
5. PuSkin in a Realistic Light
6. PuSkin Unrestrained
7. The Police Accomplice Sung by PuSkin and Mickiewicz

Citation preview

DE P R O P R I E T A T I B U S L I T T E R A R U M edenda curat

C.H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University

Series Practica 116

ROMAN JAKOBSON

Puskin and His Sculptural Myth Translated and Edited by

JOHN BURBANK

1975

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1975 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

ISBN 90 279 3261 1

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., The Hague

EDITOR'S NOTE

Two years ago I read Roman Jakobson's "Socha v symbolice PuSkinovS" for the first time. When I discovered that this brilliant study was still relatively unknown outside of Czechoslovakia some three decades after its publication, I decided to translate it into English. Later it occurred to me that the author's other Czech writings on Puskin would also interest students of Russian literature. Thus originated the present volume which seeks to acquaint the reader with a collection of stimulating and provocative essays on a great poet's life and works. The fact that the shorter pieces were not written as scholarly articles does not diminish their contribution to our understanding of PuSkin. On the contrary, they contain many remarkable insights into PuSkin's poetry and poetics. As to the translations themselves I would like to call the reader's attention to several points. First, inasmuch as the best English translations of Russian poems cannot match good Czech renditions (of which the author availed himself) for accuracy, I have cited all passages from PuSkin's poetic works in the original. Those readers who are not directly concerned with Russian literature but who may find some of the articles of interest can consult the footnotes, where English prose translations of these passages are given between square brackets. In the case of prose citations from PuSkin I have used English renditions in the text for the sake of continuity and have placed the original Russian passages in the notes. I did not consider it necessary to translate French quotations from PuSkin's letters unless the author had originally done so. Second, the titles of PuSkin's longer poetic works and those of all his prose pieces appear in English, whereas the titles of his shorter poems have been transliterated. The reader should therefore have no difficulty in placing these poems within PuSkin's canon. Third, whenever it has seemed advisable, I have provided specific references to the appropriate volume and page of the poet's collected writings; otherwise citations from the works discussed in the articles have not been annotated. Finally, I take full responsibility for whatever deficiencies the trans-

vi

EDITOR'S NOTE

lations may have. I would hope, however, that these are not of great enough magnitude to interfere with the reader's understanding of these remarkable essays. Without the support of my friends and colleagues I would not have been able to publish these translations. Therefore, I want to express my gratitude and appreciation to all of those who have made suggestions for improving them and especially to Steven Rudy, who has rendered so much able assitance in putting the manuscript into its final form. Moscow September 1972

CONTENTS

Editor's Note

v

1. The Statue in Puäkin's Poetic Mythology

1

2. Marginal Notes on PuSkin's Lyric Poetry

45

3. Marginal Notes on Eugene Onegin

51

4. On PuSkin's Responses to Folk Poetry

58

5. PuSkin in a Realistic Light

63

6. PuSkin Unrestrained

68

7. The Police Accomplice Sung by PuSkin and Mickiewicz. . . .

76

1 THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY1

R. Jakobson, dans un article singulier, pourchasse les visions de statues dans l'œuvre de PuSkin. A. Mazon, Revue des Études Slaves XVH (1937), 119.

Vladimir Majakovskij once remarked that the verse form of every really new and hence original poet can be mastered only if some of his basic intonation penetrates to the reader and takes hold of him. It then spreads and recurs, and the more the poet takes root, the more his admirers and adversaries become accustomed to the sound of his verse, the more difficult it is for them to abstract these original elements from his works. They are the essential, irreplaceable component of his poetry, just as intonation is the basic cement of our speech, and it is interesting that just such elements are the most difficult to analyze. If we move from the one aspect of poetry to the other, from sound to meaning, we encounter an analogous phenomenon. In the multiform symbolism of a poetic oeuvre we find certain constant organizing, cementing elements which are the vehicle of unity in the multiplicity of the poet's works and which stamp these works with the poet's individuality. These elements introduce the totality of a poet's individual mythology into the variegated tangle of often divergent and unrelated poetic motifs; they make poems by Puskin — PuSkin's, those by Mâcha — truly Mâcha's, those by Baudelaire — Baudelairean. It is self-evident to every reader of a poet's work that certain elements constitute an irremovable, inseparable component of its dynamics, and this intuition on the part of the reader is trustworthy. The scholar's task is to follow this intuition and to extract these invariable components or constants directly from the poetic work by means of an internal, immanent analysis or, if it is a question of variable components, to ascertain what is 1 Translated from the Czech original, "Socha v symbolice Puikinovë", Slovo a slovesnost 3 (1937), 2-24.

2

THE STATUE IN PU§KIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

consistent and stable in this dialectical movement, to determine the substratum of the variations. Whether it concerns the rhythm, the melodies, or the semantics of a poetic work, the variable episodic, optional elements will differ substantially from its "invariants". There are verse components that vary from line to line and thus set off and individualize each line; there are other components that do not mark single lines but the verse of the whole poem or a poet's verse in general. They produce the verse design, they create the ideal metrical scheme without which the verse could not be perceived and the poem would disintegrate. In the same way, scattered symbols are in themselves mute; they can be understood fully only in their relation to a whole symbolic system. A fixed mythology, binding for a poetic cycle and often for a poet's entire oeuvre, operates in addition to the varying elements specific to individual poems. In studying theatre, one distinguishes the emploi from the role; the emplois (within the limits of a certain stage genre and style, of course) are fixed; for example, the emploi of the jeune-premier, of the intriguante, of the raisonneur does not depend on whether an officer or a poet is the jeune-premier in a given play or on whether he commits suicide or marries happily at the end. In linguistics we distinguish the general meaning of a grammatical form from single partial meanings conditioned by a given context or situation. In the combination domogat'sja cegolibo ('to solicit something') the genitive designates the object to which the action is directed, whereas in the combination storoniVsja cego-libo ('to avoid, to shun something') the same case designates the object away from which the action moves. This means that only the verb, on which the case depends, introduces the meaning of direction into the genitive; the case in itself does not have this meaning: the general meaning of the genitive, therefore, does not include the meaning of direction. If two contrary definitions are valid, and it can often happen that they are valid at one and the same time, it means that neither one of them really is valid, or more precisely, that both are insufficient. It means therefore, for example, that neither the acceptance of god's existence or of revolution nor their rejection is specific to Puskin's works. It is impossible to understand properly the partial meanings of a grammatical form and their mutual relationship if we do not pose the question of their general meaning. Likewise, if we wish to master a poet's symbolic pattern, we must first of all ascertain the symbolic constants which comprise the poet's mythology. We must not, of course, artificially isolate a poet's symbol; rather we must start from its relationship to other symbols and to the whole system of the poet's work.

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

3

We must not, of course, succumb either to vulgar biographism, which takes a literary work for a reproduction of the situation from which it originated and infers an unknown situation from a work, or to vulgar antibiographism, which dogmatically denies any connection between the work and the situation. The analysis of poetic language can profit greatly from the important information provided by contemporary linguistics about the multiform interpénétration of the word and the situation, about their mutual tension and mutual influence. We do not wish mechanically to derive a work from a situation, but at the same time, in analyzing a poetic work, we should not overlook significant repeated correspondences between a situation and the work, especially a regular connection between certain common characteristics of a poet's several works and a common place or common data, nor should we overlook the biographical preconditions of their origin if they are the same. The situation is a component of speech; the poetic function transforms it like every other component of speech, sometimes emphasizing it as an efficient formal device, sometimes, on the contrary, subduing it, but whether a work includes the situation positively or negatively, the work is never indifferent to it. Of course, we must not assume that PuSkin's mythology, which our description should comprehend, is exclusively his own poetic property. To what extent Puskin here conforms to contemporary Russian poetry, to say nothing of contemporary poetry in general and the whole of Russian poetry, is another question. Comparative linguistics eloquently instructs us that a fruitful comparison necessarily presupposes systematic descriptions. Here I can offer only a small demonstration, only a contribution to the description of PuSkin's symbolic pattern. It concerns one of the most striking images of his poetry — the image of the statue — and its meaning in the poet's work. 2 As a rule the titles of PuSkin's original poems, whether epic or dramatic, indicate the leading dramatis persona or the setting, if it is particularly specific to the plot and the whole subject. Compare Ruslan and Ludmila, The Caucasian Captive, The Robber-Brothers, The Fiancé, Count Nulin, ' Throughout this book citations from PuSkin's works, unless otherwise noted, are to A. S. PuSkin, Polrtoe sobranie socinenij, 3rd ed. (hereafter PSS), 10 vols. (MoskvaLeningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962-1966). In this article citations from PuSkin's letters are to the following editions: A. Hofman and S. Lifar' (eds.), Pis'ma PuSkina k N. N. Goniarovoj (Paris, 1937); B. and L. Modzalevskij (eds.), Pis'ma PuSkina, 3 vols. (Moskva-Leningrad, 1926-1935); V. Saitov (éd.), Soâinenija PuSkina: Perepiska III (Sanktpeterburg, 1911).

4

THE STATUE IN P I P K I N ' S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

Angelo, Eugene Onegin, Boris Godunov, The Covetous Knight, Mozart and Salieri, on the one hand, and Poltava, The Little House in Kolomna, The Fountain of Baxcisaraj, on the other. The "first person", as Puskin expressed it, can also be a collective body; it is not by chance that a poem about the Caucasians and an alien individual and their dramatic conflict is named after this individual, the "Caucasian captive", and that a later poem about the gypsies and an alien individual and their conflict is called The Gypsies ; the center of gravity is located in a different place in each of them. The designation of the main character can be coupled with a specification of the poetic genre to which the work belongs: The Song of Oleg the Seer ; The Fairytale of Tsar Saltan and His Son, the Glorious and Mighty Hero Prince Guidon Saltanovic, and of the Beautiful Tsarevna Lebed'; The Fairytale of the Dead Tsarevna and the Seven Heroes', The Fairytale of the Fisherman and the Little Fish ; The Fairytale of the Priest and His Workman Balda ; The Comedy of Tsar Boris and Griska Otrep'ev (the original title of Godunov). In three of Puskin's outstanding poetic works, however, the title indicates not a living person but a statue, a plastic representation, and in each case an epithet defines the material of which the statue is made: the tragedy The Stone Guest, the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel. The hero of the tragedy, says a literary historian, is the "useless loafer" Don Juan.3 Not at all, for the title proclaims the commander's statue as the main hero. A literary historian speaks about the "main dramatis persona of the narrative poem, Evgenij" ;4 the poet, however, designates Falconet's monument of Peter the Great as the main character. And we can raise the same objection to the most outstanding study of PuSkin's last fairytale:5 "The famous Tsar Dadon", although his name crowns its first lines,, is not its central character; the golden bird is the carrier of the action. But the correspondence of these three works is not limited to the special character of the main hero. Similar, too, is the rôle of the statue in their action. In fact they have the same plot kernel: 1. A man is weary, he settles down, he longs for rest, and this motif is intertwined with desire for a woman. Don Juan speaks to Doña Anna at one and the same time about "weariness of conscience" and about his own rebirth: * D. Darskij, Malen'kie tragedii PuSkina (Moskva, 1915), 53. 4 B. TomaSevskij, " 'Cygany i Mednyj vsadnik' A. S. PuSkina", foreword to the edition of both poems (Leningrad, 1936), 6. 5 A. Axmatova, "Poslednjaja skazka PuSkina", Zvezda 1 (1933), 175ff.; this article has been reprinted in Anna Axmatova, Soíinenija II (Miinchen, 1968), 197-222.

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

5

Bac n o m o 6 a , jho6jik> h floôpoaeTejib H B nepBbiâ pa3 CMnpeHHo nepea Heft ^poMcanpie KOJieHa npexjiOHino.6

Evgenij "is not Don Juan", as the poet explicitly points out in his sk itches for The Bronze Horseman: no rebellion has preceded his settling down. Though deprived of the spirited romanticism of Don Juan's longings, Evgenij's dream before the dramatic dénouement is essentially the same: he wearily dreams of the alluring, peaceful life of happy idlers and of his impeded meeting with Parasa. Tsar Dadon cMojioay 6MJI rpo3eH ...

Ho noflCTapocTb3axoTeJi OxaoxHyTb ... H noKoft ce6e ycrpoHTb.7

Just in this situation he is "charmed, fascinated" by the Tsaritsa of Samaxan. 2. The statue, more precisely the being which is inseparably connected with the statue, has a supernatural, unfathomable power over this desired woman. The connection with a being transforms the statue into an idol, or rather—according to the terminology of modern Russian ethnology — a lekan ; that is, the statue, understood as a pure "external representation", becomes an ongon, an incarnation of some spirit or demon. 8 The connection of the statue with such a being may be of diverse character. The titanism of the stone guest is the exclusive attribute of the statue (see Plate 1): K a m M OH 3Aecb npeflCTaBJieH hcitojihhom! KaKHe nnenn! h t o 3a repKynec! ... A caM noKOHHHK Man 6bui h meflymeH

... Kax Ha ôyjiaBKe cTpeK03a ..."

In The Bronze Horseman this attribute of the statue merges with the titanism of the man represented, Peter the Great — "miracle-workergiant" (cudotvorec-ispolin) — and of his symbolic partner, his steed (see Plates 2 and 3). But in the fairytale, on the contrary, the statuette — "the • ['Falling in love with you, I love virtue, and for the first time I humbly bend my trembling knees before it'.] ' ['... was terrible in his youth ..., but in old age he wanted to rest... and to secure peace for himself'.] 8 Cf. D. Zelenin, Kul't ongonov v Sibiri (Moskva-Leningrad, 1936), 6ff. * ['How he is represented here! Like a giant! What shoulders! What a Hercules! And the deceased himself was short and puny ... like a dragonfly on a pin'.]

6

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

cockerel on the spire" — is almost likened to a "dragonfly on a pin" (see Plate 5). Imitative magic, according to Frazer's terminology, is replaced by contagious magic, or in other words: instead of the relationship of the representation to the object represented, the relationship of the property to the owner of the little golden bird, the old eunuch, moves to the foreground, although a certain hint of likeness is also present in the fairytale: the astrologer is compared to a bird, in particular to a swan.10 But independent of all these variations, evil magic remains in force. In each case the power of the "ongon" over the woman is fatal; in each case life falls into the grasp of dead impotence: "BflOBa aojiacHa h rpo6y 6mtb BepHa", says Doña Anna; "npouijio cto jict",11 emphasizes the introduction ol The Bronze Horseman — a century separates Tsar Peter's life from ParaSa's life, and if Doña Anna's past at least belongs to the commander, what did Peter have to do with ParaSa and ParaSa with Peter? "H 3aieM T e 6 e aeBHua?"12 Dadon sensibly asks the eunuch, but the latter persists in his preposterous claim on the Tsaritsa of Samaxan. 3. After a vain resistance the man perishes through the intervention of the statue, which has miraculously set itself into motion, and the woman vanishes. Don Juan sees Doña Anna enslaved by the tomb statue of the commander, her slain husband, and wants to wrest her from the "fortunate dead man", . . . l e f t xjiaflHbift MpaMop

CorpeT eefluxamieMHe6ecHBiM.13 10 Perhaps the very difference between the metonymic relationship of the golden cockerel to the astrologer and the metaphoric relationship of the monuments to Peter and the commander prevented scholars from seeing the affinity of the fairytale with The Bronze Horseman and The Stone Guest, while they were pointing out single points of contact between these two works in passing (V.Brjusov, MojPuSkin [Moskva, 1929], 87; V. XodaseviC, Stat'i o russkoj poezii [Peterburg, 1922], 94; W. Lednicki, Jeidziec miedziany [Warszawa, n.d.], 47 f.). By the way, in The Stone Guest it is a question of a tombstone monument, so that an association according to contiguity accompanies the main association according to similarity. PuSkin consciously calls attention to it and suggests its irrationality:

O nycn» yMpy cefliac y Banrax Hor, IlycTb 6e£Hbi& npax moA 3,aecb xe noxopoHxr, ... Hto6 KaMHH Moero Moras KocHyrbca Bbi jieraoio Horott una oflonaoS. ... — Doña Anna: "Bu ne b CBoeM ynie" ('O, let me die now at your feet, let them bury my poor remains here... so that you might touch my stone with your light foot or your dress. ...' — Doña Anna: 'You aren't in your right senses.'). 11 ['A widow should remain faithful even to the grave'; 'a hundred years passed ...']. " ['And what good is a girl to you?'] 11 ['... whose cold marble is wanned by her heavenly breath'.]

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

7

According to Don Juan's blasphemous proposal, the "marble spouse" is to stand guard during his love tryst with Doña Anna. She is favorably disposed toward her admirer, she will be his as soon as possible, but suddenly the tramp of the commander's footsteps is heard. The animated statue, which has left the monument, grips Don Juan's hand "heavily" in his "stone right hand"; Do&a Anna vanishes from him; the man perishes. Evgenij loses his fiancée ParaSa during the violent Petersburg flood. We do not find out anything about her demise; only tormenting questions without an answer are posed: . . . Hjn> Be« Hama H 3KH3Hb HHHTO, KaK COH nyCTOft, HacMennca He6a Has 3eMJieft?14

And somewhat further on: " H T O TK 3 T O ? ..." ('Well, what is it?'). In his sudden madness Evgenij clairvoyantly perceives that the real culprit is the guardian of the city, the renowned Bronze Horseman, Tsar Peter (see Plates 2, 3), . . . ibefl BOJieñ poKOBOfi n o n MopeM ropo« ocHOBajica ,.. 16

He threatens the statue: "^o6po, crpoHTejib iy^oTBopin>iH! ... Yaco Te6e! ..." i e The animated statue leaves his block and pursues Evgenij. The heavy tread ( t j a i e l y j topot) of the Bronze Horse (see Plate 2) corresponds to the firm grip (tjazeloe pozat'e) of the commander's right hand and to the tramp of his footsteps. The man perishes. The golden cockerel serves Tsar Dadon as a "faithful guardian". His mysterious bearer, the castrated astrologer, does not want to renounce his ludicrous claim on the Tsaritsa of Samaxan. The exasperated tsar punishes him with death. The golden bird leaves his spire and pursues Dadon. The light ringing of his flight (legkijzvori) echoes and simultaneously softens the Bronze Horseman's heavily ringing gallop (tjaíelo-zvonkoe skakanié). Dadon perishes. A uapmja Bflpyr nponajia, EyflTO BOBce He dimano. 17

"H T P H pa3a MHe CHHJICH TOT »ce COH",18 PuSkin could have repeated after his False Dmitrij. The deceased, as it were, has become incarnated in the 14 15

"

17

"

['Or is our whole life nothing but an empty dream, heaven's mockery of the earth?'] ['... by whose fateful will a city was founded under the sea'.] ['Now then, miracle-working builder! ... You'll get yours!'] ['And the tsaritsa suddenly disappeared, as if she hadn't even existed'.] ['I have dreamed the same dream three times'.]

8

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

statue—the commander in his monument, Peter in the Bronze Horseman, the astrologer in the golden cockerel — in order to punish a rebellious daredevil. Godunov's question: . . . Grrbixaji im tbi Koraa, H t o 6 MepTBbie H3 r p o ô a bmxoahjih? 1 *

again receives an affirmative answer; however, in the tragedy of Tsar Boris the shade of the murdered Dmitrij had been incarnated in a living man—the Pretender. This fact had provided a more rational justification, on the one hand, and had intensified the ambiguity of the avenger's position, on the other; he is not only esteemed simultaneously as the tsarevich and as a "nameless vagabond", but he also affirms the dead Dmitrij in himself ("Tern» rpo3Horo mchh y c t m o B H J i a " ) 2 0 and at the same time repudiates him ("il He xoiy aejiHTbca c MepTBeuoM / JIioôoBHmjeH, eMy npHHaAJieacamea"),21 whereas this rôle of a rival who is jealous of a dead man falls unambiguously to Don Juan in The Stone Guest. In the drama, in the epic poem, and in the fairytale the image of the animated statue evokes the opposite image of rigidified people, whether it involves a mere comparison of them to a statue, an accidental situation, or actual dying and death. Here the boundary between life and immobile dead matter is deliberately obliterated. At the beginning of the drama Don Juan scornfully recalls the northern women: . . . C HHMH TpeX H 3HaTbCfl — B HHX 3KH3HH HeT, BCë KJTUIH BOCKOBfcie.22

By way of contrast he shifts to a glorification not, as we might expect, of vigorous life, but of the lively charm in poor Inez's dying. The play ends with a direct transition from the "cold kiss" (odin, xolodnyj, mirnyj — 'single, cold, calm') that the subdued Don Juan gains from Doña Anna to the heavy grip of the commander's right hand. In Puskin's original version, moreover, there is, as in Mozart's opera, direct mention of the "cold grip" (xolodnoe pozat'e), but later the poet struck out this too blatant "dissolve", as is said in today's film jargon.*3 The hero, longing for rest, inevitably makes his way toward the coldnes and immobility of a "

['Have you ever heard of the dead rising from their graves?'] ['The Shade of the Terrible adopted me as his son*.] 11 [ I don't want to share with a dead man a mistress who belongs to him'.] " [To have relations with them is really a sin; there's no life in them; they're only waxen dolls'.] ** Cf. A. S. PuSkin, Polnoe sobrante soiinenij VII, 9 vols. (Moskva-Leningrad: Academia, 1935-1938) 568 f. 10

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

9

24

statue. " L J a p c T B y ñ , jieaca Ha 6oicy!" reads the motto in The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel. Before Peter's statue comes to life, Evgenij, so to speak, wastes away: B H TO H E c e , HH JKHTEJIB CBETA

HH npH3paK MepTBbiá . . . "

During his first encounter with the Bronze Horseman he grows stiff like a statue and merges with the marble lion onto which the flood has carried him "icaic Gyrrro K MpaMopy npmcoBaH",28 whereas the lion "stands as if he were alive" (see Plate 4). The rigidity of dead bodies stands out sharply against a background of intense love scenes: Don Juan with Laura near the corpse of Carlos ("IIOCTOH . . . npH M E P T B O M ! . . . " ) , Tsar Dadon, who, in the presence of the Tsaritsa of Samaxan, forgets the death of both his sons, who are lying nearby.28 The three works about destructive statues correspond in some secondary details as well; thus, for example, each of them conspicuously emphasizes by different means the fact that a capital is the setting. Right at the beginning of the play Don Juan announces: 27

... Ax, HaKOHeii flOCTHTJIH MM BOpOT MaAPHTa! ... ... TOJIBKO 6 He BCTpenuiCH urae caM Kopojit.29

The Bronze Horseman begins with a hymn to Peter's capital city, and The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel constantly mentions that the action takes place against the background of the capital (v glazax u vsej stolicy, 'in the eyes of the entire capital'). Someone may object that we are not dealing with completely independent themes — The Golden Cockerel is actually an elaboration of Irving's "Legend of the Arabian Astrologer"; The Stone Guest is a variation on a traditional legend and borrows diverse details from Moliére's Festín de pierre and the libretto of Mozart's Don Juan. In fact, however, '* ['Rule, lying down on your side'.] M ['... neither one thing nor the other, neither an inhabitant of this world nor a dead spectre'.] " ['...as if he were riveted to the marble'.] 47 ['Wait... in the presence of the dead!'] And the following scene with Doña Anna develops similarly: "H 3flecb, npn STOM rpo6e! / IIoflHTe npoib" ['Here, near this grave! Go away!']. 28 Cf. also the poem "V naíale ?i7ni Skolu pomnju ja" (see p. 20 below), where a youth is "paralyzed" and dumb in the presence of statues. 29 ['Well, we have finally reached the gates of Madrid! ... If only I wouldn't meet the king himself!']

10

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

a comparison of PuSkin's poems with their foreign models clearly demonstrates the originality of his myth. From his models he selects only elements consistent with his own conception, and he transforms in his own way whatever contradicts it. We have pointed out the significance which the title of a poetic work has in PuSkin : the choice of The Stone Guest from several traditional titles concerning Don Juan is therefore by no means fortuitous. Puskin contributed the triangle — the commander, Doña Anna, Don Juan; he also introduced the rôle of guard that Don Juan thrusts upon the statue, his settling down shortly before the dénouement, and the emphasis on the inevitability of the statue's intervention and Don Juan's death rather than on the appropriateness of the punishment, as is the case in Molière's play and Mozart's libretto. In The Golden Cockerel Puskin deliberately modifies Irving's tale and its title: he introduces the image of the tsar's dead sons, which emphasizes Dadon's desire for the Tsaritsa of Samaxan, he intensifies the ludicrousness of the astrologer's claim on the tsaritsa by the fact of his castration, and most important he gives the fairytale a completely different dénouement — the statue's intervention and the tsar's death. In the model the astrologer tells the sovereign about a metal cockerel, but he makes him a "bronze horseman". Puskin read Irving's tale in 1833, and his first attempt at writing it in verse adjoins the first drafts of the Petersburg story about Evgenij in his manuscript. The figure of the bronze horseman became the main character of that poetic story, and only the cast cockerel remained for the tale, which was not realized until a year later. The combination "bronze tsar", not "bronze horseman", as one reads in Irving, appears in Mickiewicz's "Monument of Peter the Great", which inspired Puskin's description of Falconet's statue. Sometimes another author's work which is the starting point for one of Puskin's creations simultaneously provides a stimulus for another of his related works. Thus, Puskin essentially borrowed from Molière the scene in which Don Juan addresses the commander's statue, but Sganarelle's proposition "Ce serait être fou que d'aller parler à une statue" 30 could have prompted the deranged Evgenij's conversation with the Bronze Horseman. Autumn in the country, as the poet intimates, was most conducive to his intensive creative activity. Puskin retired to his Niznij Novgorod estate, Boldino, three times during autumn — in 1830, in 1833, and again in 1834. "How charming the local countryside is", he wrote to his friend Pletnev from Boldino, "imagine: nothing but the steppe; no neighbors at all ... "

We shall leave French citations from PuSkin uncorrected.

11

THE STATUE IN PU§KIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY 13

you can write at home as much as you like, no one will bother you." The Stone Guest belongs to the rich harvest of the first Boldino autumn, The Bronze Horseman was the most outstanding product of the second autumn, and The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel was the sole profit of the last and least fruitful of the Boldino autumns. These stays at Boldino occupy a truly unique place in the poet's life. The period into which they fall, the period beginning with the marriage proposal to Natalie GonCarova in the spring of 1829, is a wholly special stage in Puskin's life as well as in his literary activity, and the myth of the destructive statue belongs to it alone. In the preceding period, beginning with the execution of the Decembrists and Puskin's return from exile, the source of horror in the poet's epic is the monstrous merging of different creatures (in Tat'jana's dream [1826] CuflflT HyaoBHma KpyroM: OJIHH B porax c co6aibeft Mopflofi, .Hpyrofi c neTynibefi TOJIOBOH, 3aecb BeflbMa c KO3be0 6opoflofi, TyT OCTOB HonopHMfi H ropflbifi TaM Kapna c XBOCTHKOM, a BOT IIoJiyacypaBJU. h nonyKOT.

Eme CTpanmeii, eme nyzpiee: BOT paK BepxoM Ha nayice, BOT nepen Ha rycimoft rnee BepTHTca B KpacHOM KOJinaKe ...) 32

or a human face distorted by violent death (the hanged man in the fragment "Kakaja noc'" as well as in several of the poet's drawings, the drowned man in the ballad of the same name [1828]). In Poltava, written at the end of 1828, these two motifs merge in the deranged Marija's raving about the wolf's head of her executed father.33 At the point of transition from the horror of monsters to the horror of statues lies the story "The Solitary Little House on Vasil'evskij Island", 31

"HTO 3a npenecTb 3flemHsn aepeBHa! Boo6pa3n: crem. Jia CTem>; coceaeft HH

Aynra... mmmflOMaCKOJH>KO B3^yMaeTcx, HHKTO He noMemaeT." For a characterization

of the first Boldino autumn see D. Blagoj, Sociologija tvoriestva PuSkina (Moskva, 1929), 156ff., and A. Bern, O PuSkine (Uzhorod, 1937), 64ff. M ['Apparitions are sitting all around: here one with horns and a dog's snout, there another with a cock's head, here a hag with a goat's beard, here a skeleton stiff and proud, there a dwarf with a litttle tail, and look: a half-crane-half-cat. Even stranger, even more bizarre: look! a crab riding a spider, and look! a skull in a red cap turns round on a goose's neck. ...'] " The monstrous tree of death in the poem "AnCar" (1828) can also be included with these ghastly monsters.

12

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

which Puskin narrated in company at the turn of 1828 and 1829 and which the poet's acquaintance, V. P. Titov, wrote down and published under a pseudonym in the almanach Severnye cvety of 1829. It is a tale about the intrigues of an insidious devil who now enters — in the words of the narration — "with the same marble calm with which the commander's statue arrives at Don Juan's for dinner" 34 and now turns once more into a mysterious coachman, and when a man strikes him with a stick, just as Dadon strikes the astrologer, the ringing sound of bones is heard; the coachman turns his head — here Xodasevic recalls the Bronze Horseman's analogous movement35 — and a death's head appears instead of a face. PuSkin's grotesque "The Coffinmaker", completed at Boldino two months before The Stone Guest, ridicules the outmoded horrific grotesque of hideous corpses and comically foreshadows the plot kernel of Don Juan's involvement with the stone guest.36 However, neither the myth of the destructive statue nor even the very subject of the statue occurs in Puskin's works of the twenties until the end of 1829, that is, with the exception of some insignificant allusions, which are entirely secondary and episodic, in the poem "Cern"' (1828), in the lyrical sketch "Kto znaet kraj" (1827), and earlier in the whimsical verses "Brovi car' naxmurja" and Boris Godunov (1825). A scene in Boris Godunov depicts the ball at Duke Mniszek's. The ladies' gossip is recorded, and it provides a sharp contrast to reality. A statement is made about the Pretender: "H uapcKaa nopo.ua b hcm BHflHa", 37 and it is said about Marina, whose wild obsession with passion PuSkin admired: ... MpaMOpHaa HHM4)a: Tjia3a, ycTa 6ea jkh3hh ... s s

Here, then, is the usual opposition of a live man and his dead representation, complicated, on the one hand, by the fact that the second member of the opposition is metaphorically applied to the first and, on the other hand, by the fact that this application is in direct disagreement with reality. In September 1829 Puskin arrived in Moscow on his way from the 51

"... CTaXHMxeMpaMOpHMMCIIOKOftCTBHGM,CKaKHMCTaTyJIKoMaHflOpanpHXOflHT Ha yacHH k floHOKyaay".

"

Stat'i, 84.

" See Iskoz-Dolinin in A. S. PuSkin, Soiinetiija IV, ed. S. Vengerov, 6 vols. (Sanktpeterburg, 1907-1915), 19f. " ['And it is apparent that he is of royal blood'.] " ['...a marble nymph: eyes, lips without life. ...']

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

13

Caucasus, where he had witnessed the anti-Turkish campaign and the capture of Erzerum. Before his departure for the Caucasus he had asked for Natalie Gonôarova's hand, but he had received an indefinite, evasive answer from her mother, and upon his return he was met with an ungracious welcome. His lack of piety and his invectives against Tsar Alexander especially repelled her,39 and it was precisely during his Moscow stay (September 21, 1829) that the spurned PuSkin concluded a caustic cycle of his poetic invectives against Alexander with the eight-line "K bjustu zavoevatelja", where he, so to speak, affirms his sharply negative attitude toward the late tsar by comparing his bust, sculpted by Thorwaldsen, and its ambiguity with the actual contradictoriness of its model, "A harlequin both in countenance and in life" (see Plate 14). Aside from a contemporaneous occasional quatrain dedicated to Del'vig "upon the sending of the bronze Sphinx",40 this is the first of Puskin's poems of the twenties with a sculptural subject, and from the very beginning this subject is symptomatically coupled with the theme of the Petersburg tsardom. Here the classical form of inscriptions on statues is combined with an epigrammatic content. The traditional sublime tone of this form comes only later in PuSkin. By no means was the poet welcomed home cordially, for Nicholas confirmed the prohibition against publishing Boris Godunov, on which the author had staked so much, and reprimanded him through the chief of the All-Russian Gendarmerie, General Benkendorf, for his willful journeys. Freedom of movement was taken away from Puskin; his literary activity was retarded in every possible way. He realized that the circle around him was constantly closing; "elle est si précaire", he wrote to Benkendorf (March 24, 1830) about his situation, "que je me vois à tout moment à la veille d'un malheur que je ne puis ni prévoir ni éviter." They were constantly demanding of him a more and more far-reaching capitulation. I am speaking about the poet's gradual capitulation, not about his regeneration or reorientation, as this process is often called. Puskin, who had dreamed in the fiery verse of his youth that "we shall commune with the bloody chalice" of revolution (krovavoj casej pricastimsja), was able to change his opinion about the road to liberation, was able to lose faith in its realizability and to declare the battle of liberation a premature and hence a madly hopeless delirium, was able in particular periods of his life to imagine a freedom of his dreams in completely different socio-political " S. N. GonSarov's account recorded by P. Bartenev in Russkij arxiv 15 (1877), pt. 2, 98 ff. 40 PSS III, 113.

14

THE STATUE IN P U S K I N ' S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

and philosophical contours, was able — from weariness and disappointment, from the impossibility of further battle, from the impossibility of escape to "foreign parts", and mainly perhaps from the impossibility of creative work without conforming to the oppressive contemporary conditions — to submit and even cleverly insinuate himself into his jailors' favor — indeed, he himself repeatedly admits a hypocritical masking of his attitude (ja stal umen, ja licemerju), and the local literary tradition furnished him with instructive models of such dissimulation, but he never forgot and, as a matter of fact, never obscured the fact that a jail is a jail. There is a well-known anecdote about a drummer who, when asked whether he would kill the tsar, objected: "But with what? With this drum?" Puskin's allegiance to the tsar was no deeper. What embarrasses the poet in the so-called "Radiscev crime"? The inadequacy of means that makes of his battle a "madman's act": "A petty official, a man without any power, without any support, dares to take up arms against the general order, against the autocracy, against Catherine." 41 PuSkin condemns the Decembrists' rebellion for the same reasons. His capitulatory statement reads: "No matter what my political and religious views are, I keep them for myself alone, and I do not intend to madly oppose the established order and necessity."42 Against the "young Jacobins" who were condemning the reasonings of Karamzin's history, which resounds to the advantage of autocracy, PuSkin has the singular argument that "Karamzin published his History in Russia" and the tsar's patronage "imposed upon Karamzin the obligation of all the modesty and moderation imaginable". 43 These capitulatory slogans never completely dominated the poet: now he sought to wrest a greater independence from the regime, now he audaciously proceeded to the dividing line between legality and bellicose opposition, now he endeavored to deceive the tsar's censorship by means of a masterful tangle of allusions, hidden meanings, and allegories. But all of these fluctuations and deviations do not dispute the fact of the poet's painful capitulation, and the image of the "restrained siskin" (nevol'nyj Sizik nado mnoj), which has forgotten the woods and freedom 41

"Me;ncH0 IHEOBHHK, HGJIOBGK 6eso Bcfflcofl Bjiacra, 6eso BCSKOFI onopu, «ep3aeT BoopyacnTbCH npoTHBy o6mero nopnnica, npoTray caMOAep*aBna, npoTroy ExaTepHHbi" (PSS Vn, 353). " "KaxoB 6H HH 6MJI MOB o6pa3 MMCJieft, nojnrrmecKHfi H pennrno3Hi>ifi, a xpamo ero npo caMoro ce6a H He HaMepeH 6e3yMHO npoTHBopewn. 06menpnHHT0My nopaflicy h He06x0flHM0CTH" (from a letter to 2ukovskij, March 7, 1826). *' "KapaM3HH neiaTaji Hcmopwo CBOIO B POCCHH; ... rocyflapb ... HaJiaraJi Ha KapaM3HHa 06a3aHH0cn> BceB03M03KH0fi CKPOMHOCTH H YMEPEHHOCTH" (PSS VIII, 368).

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

15

and whose only consolation is singing, is for the Puskin of the thirties at times closer than the captive eagle's once proud dream of freedom (the poem "Uznik" of 1822). Puskin's letters fully attest to the fact that his fateful marriage entirely accords with these capitulatory spirits, and his shrewder contemporaries comprehend this. The author Venelin, for example, writes in a letter of May 28, 1830: "A time comes ... [when] one experiences a longing for a nest, [a longing] which bends the back of the proudest man before this law, and Puskin is the document and proof of this." Towards the end of 1829 Puskin visited Tsarskoe Selo for the first time after years of exile. There everything reminded him of his youth at the lyceum, and the magnificent imperial gardens with their famous monuments in particular called to mind an image of the heroic period of the Petersburg monarchy. H BfeflBb h BHxey npea co6ok> ^HeS npoimiMX ropflbie CJieflH. E m e HcnojiHeHbi BeJiHKOio xceHoio, Ee jnoÓHMbie caflbi C t o h t HaceneHw nepToraMH, BpaiaMH, CrojmaMH, 6anmjiMn, KyMHpaMH 6oroB, H cjiaBoií MpaMopHoft, h mcatoimh xBajiaMH EKaTepHHHHCKHX OpJIOB. CaflSTCH npH3paKH repoeB y nOCBflmeHHtIX HM CTOJmOB ,.. 4 4

Thus, after his visit to Tsarskoe Selo, does Puskin modify by means of the same meter, the same stanzas and under the same title his " Vospominanija v Carskom sele", written fifteen years earlier for his lyceum examinations and quite identically rendering homage to the "beautiful gardens of Tsarskoe Selo, to the sceptre of the great woman", to her glorious retinue and to the monuments celebrating victories, once more the Kagul Obelisk (see Plate 11) and the Chesma Monument (see Plate 12) and, moreover, the Morea Column (see Plate 13), commemorating Puskin's great-uncle, the Brigadier Ivan AbramoviS Hannibal, a hero of the victory at Navarino. This solemn official ode of the lyceum muse had soon given way to a fiery ode to freedom (1817), and likewise the "great woman" had soon received an entirely different evaluation from the young Puskin: " ['And I actually see before me the proud vestiges of by-gone days. Still filled with the great woman (i.e. Catherine II), her beloved gardens stand inhabited by palaces, gates, columns, towers, idols of gods, and by the marble glory and the bronze praises to Catherine's eagles. Spectres of heroes alight by the columns dedicated to them....']

16

THE STATUE IN P I P K I N ' S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

But in the course of time history will assess the influence of her reign on morals, will reveal the cruel activities of her despotism under a mask of gentleness and patience, a people oppressed by vice-regents, a state treasury plundered by lovers, will show her momentous errors in political economy, her worthlessness in legislation, the repulsive hypocrisy in her relations with the philosophers of her century — and then the voice of the infatuated Voltaire will not save her glorious memory from the damnation of Russia (1822).46

At this time the poet returns to an impassioned eulogy. He does not, however, stop at a repetitious, servile evocation of a glorious chapter in great-power history but at the same time recollects penitently the erring ways of his own youth and the mental gems frittered away in behalf of "inaccessible dreams". The date added to the manuscript of this unfinished poem — December 14, Saint Petersburg — the anniversary of the Decembrist rebellion — eloquently attests to what "inaccessible dreams" and what "prodigal sons" are at issue here. In the spring of the next year (April 5, 1830) Pu§kin recalls his sad, penitent spirits in a letter to his future mother-in-law, and, as a matter of fact, he recapitulates the content of the above-mentioned poem: Les torts de ma première jeunesse se présentèrent à mon imagination; ils n'ont été que trop violents, et la calomnie les a encore aggravés; le bruit en est devenu, malheureusement, populaire. Vous pouviez y ajouter foi, je n'osois m'en plaindre, mais j'étois au désespoir.

And at the same time he writes the identical thing to the tsar's confidant, Benkendorf: Mme Gontcharof est effrayée de donner sa fille à un homme qui aurait le malheur d'être mal vu de L'Empereur. — Mon bonheur dépend d'un mot de bienveillance de Celui pour lequel mon dévouement et ma reconnaissance sont déjà purs et sans bornes (April 16, 1830).

Aside from patriotic pride in the Russian victories, the poet's lyceum memories are the most passable road to a reconciliation with the court. Indeed, as early as October 1825 in the poem on the anniversary of the Lyceum, a "hurrah for the tsar", Puskin's sworn enemy, Alexander I, resounds in this characteristic formulation: 48 "HO CO BpCMCHCM HCTOpHS OIJGHHT BJIHHHHC œ HapCTBOBaMM Ha HpaBBI, OTKpOCT xecToxyioflejrrejn>HOee flecnoiroMa no« jnnHHofi KPOTOCTH H TCPIIHMOCTH, Hapofl, yraeTerabiâ HaMecTmncaMH, Ka3Hy, pacxameimyio jnoôoBHHKaMH, noicaaceT BaacHbie OUTHÔKH ee B nomrra^ecKoa 3KOHOMHH, HHTTOXHOCTI, B 3aKOHOflaTem»CTBe, OTBpaTHTejibHoe (JmnrapcTBO B CHomemmx c njiocoaMH ee CTOJieraa — H Toraa rojioc o6oxa>meHHoro Bojivrepa Be h3ÔEBHT ee cnaBHofi naMHin OT npoKJurraii POCCHH" (PSS VIII, 128).

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

17

OpocTHM eMy HenpaBoe roHeHbe : O h b3«ji Ilapnac, o h ocHOBan Jlauefi. 4 6

And when Puskin again celebrates the anniversary of the Lyceum in the last year of his life, October 19, 1836, he once again recalls the conquest of Paris, the Tsarina's palace (certog caricyri), which the Lyceum had obtained from the tsar, and the imperial gardens. The memories of Tsarskoe Selo necessarily culminate in an evocation of its bloom — of Catherine's age and her monuments representing both the renowned martial victories and the magnificent conquests of Russia's young sculptural art. In the final chapter of The Captain's Daughter, which carries the same date, October 19, 1836, the Empress Catherine, while facing the Kagul Monument, "erected shortly before to honor the recent victories of Count Petr Aleksandroviô Rumjancev" (the trans-Danubian giant), decides to take mercy on a lad slanderously accused of having joined Pugaôev's Rebellion. There is a characteristic association of statues with Catherine's age, in the poem "K vel'moie" (April 1830), which gained PuSkin sharp rebukes, as if he had gone over to the side of the imperial dignitaries: H Bflpyr nepeHoniycB b o a h h EicaTepHHM. KmeoxpamAuufe, xyjuupbi, u Kapmuttu."

By strange chance the theme of the statue and Catherine had even crept into the poet's private life at this time. His marriage depended on a statue of the tsaritsa. His fiancée's mother did not want to consent to the marriage until her daughter had a luxurious trousseau. The family was bankrupt, however. Natalie Gonôarova's grandfather was willing to sell on her behalf a gigantic bronze statue of Catherine which his grandfather had cast when he had wanted to erect a monument to the tsaritsa in front of his factory. Worries about the tsar's permission for the sale and about the sale itself rested on Puskin. The problem of converting the statue into money, however, dragged perilously, and PuSkin's letters constantly refer half-jokingly, half-tragically to the "bronze grandmother". 48 "Après l'Empereur", he writes to Benkendorf on May 29,1830, "il n'y a guère que feu son auguste Grand'Mère qui puisse nous tirer d'embarras." "Que fait la Grand'maman de Zavode, celle de bronze, s'entend?" he asks his fiancée, and he returns to "la vilaine Grand'maman" in almost every letter to her. "Seriously, I fear that it will delay our wedding ..." (July 30). "Do you 46

['Let us forgive him unjust persecution : he captured Paris, he founded the Lyceum'.] ['I am suddenly carried away into Catherine's days. The library, idols and pictures'.] 48 Cf. Pis'ma n (1928), 439 f. and III (1935), 502ff. A list of pertinent literature can also be found there. 47

18

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

know what [your Grand papa] wrote to me? ... It isn't worth the trouble of disturbing [Grand'maman] in her seclusion ... Don't laugh at me, for I am furious. Notre mariage semble toujours fuir devant moi ..." (September 1830). "What about grandfather with his bronze grandmother? Both are alive and in good health, aren't they" (October 11)?49 The letters from which the last two citations come were written from Boldino where Puskin had retired in the autumn of 1830. In one of these letters he passes from meditation upon the bronze tsaritsa to a gloomy memory of his grandfather. At his grandfather's estate the combination of a reminiscence of Catherine and a capitulatory mood must have manifested itself to Puskin as an ancestral tradition, and in the poem "Moja rodoslovnaja" ("My Pedigree", the end of 1830) the author emphatically dates the submission of his rebellious family from the imprisonment of his grandfather, who had resisted Catherine's palace revolution, just as his earlier ancestor, Fedor Puskin, had opposed Peter I and had been executed at his command. Puskin's Tsarskoe Selo reminiscences come to life in the very first poems with sculptural subjects written at Boldino. There is, on the one hand, the inscriptional tetrastich "Carskosel'skaja statuja" (October 1, 1830) — see Plate 19 — and, on the other hand, the unfinished tercets "V nacale iizni Skolu pomnju ja", probably composed in the same month. The atmosphere of this poem, it is true, smacks somewhat of the Italian Middle Ages, but essentially it is another version, as it were, of the " Vospominanija v Carskom sele" of the preceding year; it develops all the basic motifs of its model but in a new scheme. 60 Both poems are presented right from the beginning as a personal remembrance. In both cases the kernel of this memory is the school with its boisterous family of youthful schoolmates. The leading place belongs to the majestic woman-protectress (velikaja zena — velicavaja zena), who is Catherine in the poem of 1829, but who remains anonymous in the Boldino poem. Another common element of the two poems is the speaker's dreamy wandering through the dusk of the splendid gardens that are inhabited by marble statues and idols of gods, the sense of selfoblivion that arises at the same time (zabyvajus' ja — sam sebjaja zabyval). But in the poem "Vospominanija v Carskom sele" the Biblical image of the paternal home contrasts with the rememberer's delusions, with the "blaze " "Sérieusement je crains que cela ne retarde notre mariage ..."; "Savez-vous ce qu'il m'a écrit? ... celà ne vaut pas la peine de la déranger dans sa retraite ... N e vous moquez pas de moi, car j'enrage"; "Hto fleflynnca c ero MeflHoS Ea6ymKoB? Oôa

xchbbi h 3/topoBbi, He npaBfla JIH?" 60

Cf. I. Annenskij, PuSkin i Carskoe selo (Petrograd, 1921), 18.

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

19

of fleeting raptures" and with the vain wooing of "inaccessible dreams", and this image includes the school as well as the gardens and the remembrance of the majestic woman and the idols of the gods in these gardens, whereas in the Boldino poem the gardens and their idols, in contrast to the school and the majestic woman's "counsels and reproaches", are linked directly to the conception of the wandering dreams and the "dark hunger for unknown delights". flpyine flBa nyaecHbie TBopeHba Bjieium MeHH BOJime6HOK> xpacofi: To 6bum flByx 6ecoB H3o6pa»ceHbH.

OflHH CaeJTb(i)HfiCKHa HflOJl) JIHK MJiaflOft — Bbiji raeBeH, noJiOH ropaocra yacacHofi, H Becb .Human oh cimoii He3eMHofi. /Ipyrofl 3KeHoo6pa3Hbifl, cjiaflocTpacTHMft, CoMHHTenbHbifi h jdkhbmS H/jeaji — Bomne6m.ra ^eMOH — jwcHBtifi, ho npeicpacHHtt.61

There are few of Puskin's images about which commentators could have pondered as much as about these two devils. It is enough to mention Mereikovskij who without firm grounds whatsoever imposes upon Puskin the Nietzschean antithesis of Apollo and Dionysius,62 although here it is not at all a question of the opposition of the two devils and although the second devil is apparently Venus. As to Ermakov's vulgarized Freudianism, it leads him to consider the first image a dream about a father, the second a dream about a mother. 63 In the poet's youthful creation the image of titanism, of proud revolt is closely tied to the image of lustful service to Venus,54 and the two are similarly linked in Puskin's penitent statements when he repudiates the dreams of his youth. The two closely associated images of the devils also appear in this very role in the poem 61

['Two other miraculous creations attracted me with their enchanting beauty: they were the images of two devils. One young face (the Delphic idol) was wrathful, full of terrible pride, and the whole of him breathed an unearthly force. The other, of female shape, a voluptuous, questionable and false ideal — a bewitching demon — false, but beautiful'.] " Veinye sputniki, 3rd ed. (Sanktpeterburg, 1906), 313. " Etjudy po psixologii tvorlestva A. S. PuSkina (Moskva, 1923), 169. " Cf., e.g., the poem to V. V. £ngel'gardt, extolling ... CiaCTJIHBI>I& 6e33aKOHHHK, JleHHBhifi riHHfla rpaxmaHHH, ... BeHepw Ha6o5KHbift hokjiohhhk H HacnajRaemifi BJiacTe/nni! ['the happy lawless one, the lazy citizen of Pindus,... the devoted worshipper of Venus and the sovereign of delights'] and aimed against the celestial and terrestrial tsar.

20

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

" V nafiale iizni skolu p o m n j u j a " , which dates f r o m October 1830. These were the days w h e n Pu§kin was b u r y i n g his a m a t o r y past — a n d , as a m a t t e r of fact, his love lyric in general — in farewell elegies: IIpHMH ace, flaJiBHaa no«pyra npomaHte cepzma Moero, KaK OBflOBeBmaa cynpyra . . . " This was t h e m o n t h w h e n P u s k i n b u r n e d the last c a n t o of Onegin, his last overt poetic m e m o r y of the Decembrists' rebellion, a n d the d a t e of this auto-da-fe is s y m p t o m a t i c — O c t o b e r 19, the anniversary day of the f o u n d i n g of the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, which P u s k i n always celebrated dutifully. Surely the image of the ancient idol in the middle of the gardens, which h a d already a p p e a r e d in a sketch of 1818, m u s t have been tied t o a m a t o r y associations. T h i s a p o s t r o p h e t o P r i a p u s reads as follows: M o r y m H f i 6 o r caflOB —

n a a y nepefl To6ofi,

... T b o S h h k ypofljfflBbifi nocTaBHJi a c Mora>6ott ... H e c TeM, h t o 6 y f l a j m n t m CBoeHpaBHbix k o 3 H r m p i e K o t u j i o a o b h H e a t H b i x h He3pem>ix, T e 6 a yxpacHJi « b c h k o m H 3 ^ h k h x po3

ITpn ruiflCKe noceJWH Becenbix . . . "

A t this p o i n t the sketch breaks off, a n d likewise a f r a g m e n t of the same period (1819), "felegija" ( " T o the K a g u l M o n u m e n t " — see Plate 11), consists merely of a n antithetical i n t r o d u c t i o n of similar structure: Ilo6e«M naMHTHHK HaflMeHHMft [var. MoryHHfl],

C 6naroroBeHbeM H T O C K O 0 06i>eMiiK) rpo3Hbiii MpaMop TBOH, BocnoMHHam>eM oacHBJieHHLiS. He noflBHr POCCOB, He CyjiTaH [var. He cnaBa, flap ExaTepHHe], He 3aflyHaftCKofi BerancaH MeHa BocruiaMeHflKDT Htrae . . . "

" ['Distant friend, receive my heart's farewell, as a widowed spouse ...'] ("ProSCanie"). PuSkin did not return to the love lyric again; the "mysterious melody" of its verse is renounced and cursed in the poem "Kogda v ob"jatija moi" (1831). Moreover, either he provided expressions of an intimate lyric from the first Boldino autumn with bogus earlier dates ("ProScanie" — with the year 1829, "Zaklinanie" and "Dlja beregov otfcizny dal'noj" — with the year 1828) and still did not publish them, or he made himself out to be a mere translator ("Cygany"). 56 ['Mighty god of the gardens, I fall before you. I have erected your ugly face with a prayer ... not so that you would ward off capricious goats and little birds from fruit which is both tender und unripe, I have adorned you with a crown of wild roses accompanied by the dance of the merry peasants. ...'] Cf. A. S. PuSkin, Socinenija II (Sanktpeterburg-Leningrad: Akademija Nauk, 1899-1929) (1905), notes, 139f. 57 ['Haughty (var. mighty) monument of victory, with veneration and anguish I em-

THE STATUE IN PU§KIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

21

What was to have followed? Annenkov intimates that it concerned some amatory intrigue from the lyceum period. If this is the case,88 this sketch would be an admission of the ambivalence of the Tsarskoe Selo sculptural monuments in the poet's symbolic pattern. One of the two conflicting conceptions is presented later in "Vospominanija v Carskom sele", the other in the poem "V nacale zizni...". The negative content of the quoted "felegija" becomes the positive content of "Vospominanija v Carskom sele". There are also some phraseological correspondences;59 the same image of the Kagul monument appears here, and in both cases the first suggestion of the myth of the animated statue is linked directly to it: 1819 — "MpaMop ... BocnoMHHaskeM oHCUBJieHHtra"; 1829 — "CaflHTCJi

repoeB y nocBHmeHHbix H M C T O J I O O B . " "KaryjibCKHH MpaMop" reappeared also in a rough draft of "Lyrical Reminiscences on Lyceum Days" at the beginning of the eighth chapter of Evgenij Onegin (late 18291830). In the poem "V naCale 2izni ..." the Active existence of statues, their npH3paxH

brace your stern marble which has been animated by memory. Not the Russians' feat, not the Sultan (var. not the glory, gift to Catherine), not the trans-Danubian giant [a reference to Count P. A. Rumjancev, the leader of the Russian victory of July, 1770, over the Turkish army at Kagul, a tributary of the Danube] inflame me now ...'] The final text as given in PSS I, 380, reads somewhat differently: BocnoMHHaHteM ynoeHHuft, C 6naroroBem>eM H TOCKOS

06ieMjno rpo3Hi>ift MpaMop TBoft, Karyjia naMSTHmc HaflMeHHbift. He CMeJiMft noflBHT poccHsm, He cnaBa, flap EicaTepHHe, He 3aflyHaficKHfi BenmcaH MeHfl BocmiaMeiunoT Htme ... ['Intoxicated with reminiscence With veneration and anguish I embrace your stern marble, Kagul's haughty monument. Not the Russians' bold feat, Not the glory given to Catherine, Not the trans-Danubian giant Are what inflame me now. ...] For variants, see Polnoe sobranie socinenij II, 1 (Moskva, 1947), 552-553. Cf. Soiinenija II (1905), 31 and notes, 80f. " 1829: "BocnoMHHaHbflMH CMyineHHMft, ncnojineH cjiazucoio TOCKOM." Cf. the initial lines of the earliest reading of the 1819 "Elegy": "no5eflu naMOTHHK HaAMeHHuit/.../ BocnoMHHaHHeM CMymeHHtifi", with the initial line of 1829: "BocnoMHHaHbHMH CMymeHHbia ...", and the same variant in both poems: "BocnoMHHaHbeM ynoeHHufi", as well as the second line of 1829: "HcnoJiHeH CJiaflKoio TOCKOS", and a variant of 1819: "H c HacjiaayieHBeM H TOCKOS".

22

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

sorcery and their alluring deception are opposed to the austerity, calm, and truth of the guardianess's order. This poem, however, remained unfinished, and the parts were interchanged: the inexorable protector of order was embodied in the statue itself, and das Menschliche, das Allzumenschliche of rebellious Don Juanism became its counterpart. Thus originated The Stone Guest, which was completed at Boldino on November 4, 1830. We shall attempt to outline the biographical background against which this first version of Puskin's myth of the destructive statue took shape. Puskin's longing for a wife and his weary resignation pervaded his entire Boldino life. But the dream is threatened : on the one hand, the buried past still lives on and oppresses the poet; on the other hand, the inflexible imperial power, which involuntarily calls to mind childhood memories of the Tsarskoe Selo monuments and statues, watches every move ("je me vois à tout moment à la veille d'un malheur que je ne puis ni prévoir ni éviter"), and finally absurd hindrances grow out of certain fictions — the poet's happiness depends on the "bronze grandmother". The marriage is uncertain ("j'ai laissé la porte toute grande ouverte. ... Ha, la maudite chose que le bonheur!"), and in addition to this "une très jolie personne", cholera morbus, playing havoc all around, provokes an obtrusive thought about death, either his fiancée's or his own ; quarantines restrain him, shut him up in Boldino as on "une île entourée de rochers" ; and in the days when Puskin is working on The Stone Guest his father writes to him that his fiancée is lost to him. The character of Don Juan in Puskin's play has already been interpreted from an autobiographical point of view many times, and perhaps it was precisely the too personal stamp of the drama that prevented the author from having it published, just as the autobiographical element in the first of the Boldino dramas, The Covetous Knight, caused the poet to feign an anonymous translation from English. If Don Juan's lyrical memories of the dead Inez are associated with PuSkin's graveyard lyric, and if the poet's longing for Gonèarova, which is interwoven with ardent poetic allusions to an unnamed mistress (or mistresses),60 recalls the opposition of Dona Anna and Laura, then everything irrational that stood between PuSkin and his promised one, whether it be the will of her family or of his own past or of elemental obstacles, finds a meaningful equivalent in the power of the stone commander. It "Na xolmax Gruzii leiit noËnaja mgla" (May 1829), "Ja vas ljubil: ljubov' eS£e, byt' moiet" (1829), "Cto v imeni tebe moem?" (January 1830), "Net, ja ne doroiu mjateinym naslaiden'em" (January 19,1830[?]), "Pa2 ili Pjatnadcatyj god" (October 7, 1830). If we are to believe Puâkin's admission, not even the poem "Madona", which is dedicated to Goncarova, was inspired by her (viz. Pis'ma II [1928], 397).

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

23

is not just marriage that eludes the poet, however; at times the poet himself would like to escape marriage. He seeks to precipitate it, and when Gonòarova informs him that she is waiting only for him, he replies: "Croyez, que je ne suis heureux que là où vous êtes", but the same day he notes in reference to her letter the proverb: " A B O T T O H Ò Y X E R , H T O HHiero He 6y.neT",61 and he writes to a friend: " Y o u can't imagine how delightful it is to run away from one's fiancée."62 He complains about the cholera that has closed the roads from Boldino, and at the same time he admits: "je ne demandois pas mieux que la peste". He confides to his friends : " I am becoming cool, I am thinking about the cares of a married man and about the charm of a bachelor's life" (August 31, 1830); 63 " I am getting married without elation, without adolescent fascination. The future appears to me not in roses, but in its severe nakedness. Sorrows will not surprise me: they are registered in my domestic budget. Every joy will be a surprise to me" (February 10, 1831, the very week before the wedding). 64 He parts with his bachelorhood, as Hofman correctly remarks, as if he were actually parting with life. 66 The superstitious Puskin recalls that a Moscow fortune-teller had predicted that his own wife would be the cause of his death. 6 6 The horror of the commander's visit would seem a warning dream. Don Juan's success with Dona Anna provides the poet with another motivation for escape. It suffices to confront it with Puskin's previously cited letter to his fiancée's mother, in which this sentence occurs unexpectedly: "Dieu m'est témoin, que je suis prêt à mourir pour elle, mais devoir mourir pour la laisser veuve brillante et libre de choisir demain un nouveau mari — cette idée — c'est l'enfer." During the first Boldino autumn the poet's work is saturated with the image of the statue. The Boldino drawings, as well as the poetic works, deal with sculptural images: a sketch of a pyramid with an Egyptian colossus (October 1830 — see Plate 7) and with contrasting arabesques of birds flying around it is akin to the adjacent drafts for Puskin's poem ['And what will happen is that nothing will happen'.] " "Tw He Moxcenn. Boo6pa3Hn>, icax Beceno yflpan> OT HeBecTu" (from a letter to Pletnev, September 9, 1830). M "JI xjiaaeio,flyMaroo 3a6oTax aceHaToro lejioBeica, o npenecTH xojiocroit Î K I B H H " (from a letter to Pletnev). 84 "SI xcemocfc 6e3 ynoemui, 6e3 peôjwecicoro oiapoBainui. ByaymHOCTb HBJiseTca MHe He B po3ax, HO B cTporoô HaroTe CBoefi. ropecra H e yoHBHT Meira: OHH BXOAHT B MOH aoMamHHe pacieTw. Bcaxaa paflocTt 6yaeT MHe HeommaHHoerHK)" (from a letter to N. I. Krivcov). 41

"

"

Pis'ma

... Gonéarovoj,

116.

Russkij arxiv 50 (1912), pt. 3, 300.

24

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC

MYTHOLOGY

"Autumn" ("Osen' "), where pyramids, as "slumbering symbols of eternity", are confronted with the visionary's "lyrical dreams" ; and there is a classical bust (November 1830), painstakingly and diligently drawn as part of a sketch of PuSkin's study.67 Puskin also outlines the problem of sculpture in a theoretical essay drafted at Boldino ("On Drama"). 88 It is possible that the poet's translation of the beginning of R. Southey's "Hymn to the Penates", which depicts the escape of a tired soul to the redemptive idols, the givers of rest, originated at this time, if not somewhat earlier.69 After Puskin's return from Boldino sculptural themes disappear from his poetic work for three years until the second Boldino autumn, when he writes The Bronze Horseman. A cursory sketch of Voltaire's statue, dated March 10,1832, is the only drawing by Pu§kin with a sculptural topic during this interval (see Plate 8). What circumstances accompanied the origin of this second version of Puskin's myth of the destructive statuel Remembrance of the lonely fiancé's tempestuous autumn in involuntary exile at Boldino, revived after three years by a repeated visit to his hereditary village. Mounting fear of the tsar, who was enslaving the poet and courting his wife, and indignation both at the whole imperial environment, which was wanton and seditious, and at the capital (nevolja nevskix beregov).70 Ever more hopeless prospects for the future. Wistful and jealous letters to his wife from the road and from Boldino ("Without you I feel depressed ... what is the matter with you? ... my heart sinks when I imagine ... I was approaching Boldino, I had the darkest forebodings. ... Don't flirt with the tsar. ... Here you have the whole secret of coquetry! If only there is a trough, there will be pigs").11 And once again the motif of anguish is tied to the motif of escape. When he is projecting his trip to Boldino, Puskin complains to a close friend: "My life in Petersburg is nothing at all {ni to ni sé; in The Bronze Horseman he depicts the mad Evgenij's miserable life with the same words). ... I do not have time to myself, a free bachelor's life. ..." 72 The bronze grandmother crowds the poet's Petersburg life, it depresses " A. Èfros, Risunkipoèta (Moskva, 1932), 432f. and 438f. "8 In PSS this essay will be found under the title "O narodnoj drame i drame Mar fa Posadnica". 69 See Blagoj, Sociologija, 352; see PSS III, 157 for PuSkin's translation. 70 Andrej Belyj has understood the poet's spirits very well in his book Ritm kak dialektika i Mednyj vsadnik (Moskva, 1929). 71 "MHe Tocxa 6e3 Te6a (September 19, 1833) ... HTO C BAMH? ... cep/me 3aMHpaeT, XAK noAyMaeuib. N O A T E 3 » A A K Eojunmy, y MEHH 6bum caMwe Mpanaie NPEJRIYBCTBHH (October 2). He KoxeTHHHafi c IJapeM (October 11). ... BOT BCH Tatea KoxeTCTBa. EbiAo 6bt Kopumo, a ceuntu 6ydym" (October 30). 72 ">KH3HI> MOD B IIeTep6ypre HH TO HH ce ... HET y MEMI flocyra, BOJIBHOFT XOJIOCTOB »arami ..." (from a letter to P. V. NaSòokin, c. February 25, 1833).

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

25

him, but it does not help him out of his financial predicament — hope for its sale founders. Mickiewicz's Petersburg satires (Ustgp), which the poet had just read and partially copied out, present sharply pointed images of the imperial metropolis. 73 The second Tsarina erected a monument "pierwszemu z carow, co te zrobil cuda" ("to the first of the Tsars, who had worked wonders"); however, the inscription on Falconet's monument had already introduced the union of the two names: "To Peter I Catherine II", and Puskin's image of Peter's statue rising above a cliff and surrounded by the waves of a flood has features in common with the image of the monument af the Battle of Chesma (see Plate 12), which the lyceum "Vospominanija v Carskom sele" depict. 74 Historical reminiscences and associations stand out much more distinctly in the initial drafts of The Bronze Horseman than in the subsequent version. On the one hand, the evocation of the glorious Decembrist rebellion, which had taken place near Peter's monument after Alexander's death and which creates the undertone of the "Petersburg tale", 75 is accentuated more in the rough draft, for there the flood is directly depicted as the epilogue to Alexander's reign (Tot samyj god Poslednim godom byl derzavstva Carja); on the other hand, there is an image of a similar flood which had burst forth during Catherine's reign (Ekaterina Byla ziva) shortly after the Pugacev rebellion; it was just at this time that Puskin was working earnestly on a history of this "terrible period". And finally, in the initial drafts the role of Peter, the tamer of the rebellious nobility both during life and after death ("Peter's shade stood threateningly in the midst of the boyars"), 76 had ™ See J. Tretiak, Mickiemcz i Puszkin (Warszawa, 1906); Lednicki, Jezdziec; M. Cjavlovskij, L. Modzalevskij and T. Zenger (eds.), Rukoju PuSkina (Leningrad, 1935), 535 f.

'4

OH eudum: otcpysceH eomwMu, Had TBepnofi, MHIHCTOK) CKOAOU Bo3Heccn naMHTHHK ... KpyzoM noduoncuH, myMJi, eaiiu ceflwe

B 6jiecramefl nern yjienracb. See G. Vernadskij, " 'Mednyj Vsadnik' v tvorSestve Puskina", Slavia 2 (1923-1924), 645-654; Blagoj, Sociologija, 263f.; Belyj, Ritm. The combination and opposition of a storm and Peter's monument in direct proximity with mention of the cruel executioner's law, however, occurs in PuSkin's stock of poetic images even before the Decembrist rebellion — the poet's somewhat enigmatic, derisive couplets "Brovi car' naxmurja", written two or three months before this rebellion, acquired shortly thereafter a tragic fulfillment that may have provided at least one of the impulses for the poet's later "sad story". Perhaps there is a similar relationship between the fragment "Pridet uzasnyj cas ..." and "Zaklinanie": following a draft of a poem about a lover's death (1823) comes a lover's death (1825) and later — in Boldino — a poem about her death (1830); cf. my article "PuSkin Unrestrained", pp. 74-75 below. '« "Tern. FleTpoBa / Crojuia rpo3Ho cpeflb 6onp", PSSIV, 534. 78

26

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

prepared and motivated the bronze tsar's cruel intervention against the descendant of this rebellious nobility. In the process of further work on his poem PuSkin removes the scaffolding of incidental motivations and thus makes the myth of the destructive statue independent of episodic stimuli. The Petersburg tale differs markedly from the first version of Puskin's myth; long past is the period of Don Juan's youthful lack of restraint. Even his vigorous wooing of a last love has already been forgotten. The horror of her loss and of her partner's death supplants the preceding episodes. Originally Puskin's own deliberation about matrimony had passed over into The Bronze Horseman from the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin, written during the first Boldino autumn and later destroyed (on the whole, the creation of the second autumn is connected to the harvest of the first)." flpyrae

ahh,

flpyrne

c h m (the poet h a d meditated in this chapter)

CMHpHJIHCb Bbl, MOefi BeCHfcl BbicoKonapHwe MeiTaHbs,

... Tenepb ... Mofl Hfleaji x c e H a - x o 3 f l f i K a , M o h xcejiamm: noicoa, fla mefi ropmoK, « a caM 6ojn>inoii. 78

In The Bronze Horseman Evgenij had dreamed: JKeHHTbCH, iTO xc? 3aneM ace HeT? H B caMOM flejie. SI ycTpoio Ce6e cMnpeHHbifl j t o j i o k H B HeM Ilapamy ycnoKoro. KpoBaTb, flBa CTyjia; men ropmoK fla caM 6ojibmofi; nero MHe 6ojie? 7B

But Puskin even robbed his hero of this very modest dream: he deleted these lines in the final edition. In The Stone Guest Don Juan had been individualized, and the commander had been depersonalized, almost anonymous. The exact opposite is true in The Bronze Horseman. The victim of the statue — Evgenij — has been depersonalized as much as possible: 77

See Blagoj, Sociologija, 283ff. and 347f. ['Other days, other dreams: you have been humbled, lofty visions of my spring; now my ideal is a housewife, my desires are rest and a pot of cabbage soup and me my own boss'.] 78 ['Get married? What of it? Why not? In earnest. I'll fix up a modest nook for myself and set ParaSa at ease in it. A bed, two chairs, a pot of cabbage soup and me my own boss; what more do I need?'] 78

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

27

. . . r p a a m a m r a cTOJiHHHMft,

KaKHx BCTpenaeTe BH TtMy, H H n o j m u y HH n o

yMy

O T n p o i e f t 6 p a T b H H e OTJiHHHtifi.8

0

"KaK Bee OH ..." ('He is like everyone'), emphatically repeats another variant of the poem. ("II n'est de bonheur", wrote Pu§kin about his own marriage, "que dans les voies communes... At thirty people marry as a rule — I am acting just like other people, and probably I shall not regret this").81 On the other hand, the citizen's persecutor, the Bronze Horseman, is introduced, portrayed and delineated so concretely — despite every latitude of possible interpretations — that Tsar Nicholas made it impossible to publish the poem. In its first draft Puskin had still not impoverished Evgenij in this way; in fact the poet had defended his right to make him the hero of the tale, to pass over terrestrial idols (in his poem PuSkin calls the bronze Peter an idol) in gloomy silence and to defy the establishment (dlja tebja zakona net). In the final edition there is not even a trace of the poet's pugnacity that had originally accompanied the appearance of Evgenij. At the end of August 1834 PuSkin left Petersburg so that he would not be forced to participate in the unveiling of Alexander's column (see Plates 15-17). He notes this in his diary on November 28th, and his aversion to the monument to Alexander I still reverberates a few lines later in the same note in his annoyed remark about the superfluousness and pointlessness of another, similar kind of monument, a column with an eagle, erected by Count S. P. Rumjancev at Tarutino in honor of the victory over Napoleon in the War of 1812.82 Puskin went to Boldino; he wanted to get down to work there, but inspiration was lacking, and "verse [did] not come to mind". 83 Financial worries overcame him at the ruined estate, and he wrote to his wife: "I am sad, and when I am sad, I am drawn straight to you, as you cling to me when you are scared." 84 The third version ofthe myth of the destructive statue resulted f r o m these m o o d s ,

from Boldino reminiscences, from Irving's story, and from folk tale 80

['...a citizen of the capital, such as you meet a lot of, and neither in countenance nor in intellect does he differ from the others'.] 81 "B TpmmaTb jieT JIJOAH 06wKH0BeHH0 »eHHTca — H nocTynaio KaK nioflH H, Beposrao, He 6ypy B TOM pacKaHBaTbCH" (from a letter to N. I. Krivcov, February 10, 1831). 88 See D. Jakubovii in PuSkin — 1834 god (Leningrad, 1934), 45. 88 " H CTHXH B TOJiOBy H e f i f l y r " (from a letter to his wife, September 20-25,1834). 84 " M H e . . . C K y m o , a Konja MHe cxyrao, Men« T a x H rsmer K Te6e, KaK TM acMetntca KO MHe, Kor.ua Te6e CTpanmo" (September 17, 1834).

28

THE STATUE IN PU§KIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

formulae. A derisive grotesque supplanted the tragic Petersburg tale; a castrated magician replaced Peter the Great, and a cockerel on a spire (see Plate 5) — probably an ironic allusion to the eagle on the Tarutino column (see Plate 18) or the angel on Alexander's column (see Plate 15) — was substituted for the gigantic horseman above the cliff. The victim of the statue has grown old, and the poet's facetious complaint to his wife involuntarily comes to mind: "CrapaM CTana h yMOM njioxaM! ['Became old and poor in spirit!'] I shall come and your youth will reanimate me, my angel." 85 Don Juan had been conceived heroically; Evgenij, as a critic rightly points out, is indeed wretched but not even slightly farcical: "in spite of his external shabbiness he grows into a tragic hero, and his death arouses not disdainful pity but terror and compassion". 88 Dadon, on the contrary, is a ludicrous figure upon whom Puskin apparently confers particular attributes of his enemies: Axmatova points out that the caricatured traits of Alexander and Nicholas are combined in Dadon. 8 7 The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel exhausted the theme of the destructive statue in Puskin. It is noteworthy that three poetic genres in his verse creation died out along with this subject — The Stone Guest is the last of Puskin's original, completed dramas in verse, The Bronze Horseman is the last of his narrative poems, and The Golden Cockerel is his last fairytale. "Scenes from Chivalrous Times", it is true, came after the Boldino dramas, and another Petersburg tale, "The Queen of Spades", followed The Bronze Horseman; however, they are prose attempts, and Puskin rightly pointed out that there is "the devil of a difference" (d'javoVskaja raznica) between the prosaic and versified varieties of one and the same literary genre (letter to Vjazemskij on November 4, 1823). The whole set of sculptural themes in Puskin's work is neutralized and gradually dies out with the myth of the destructive statue. It reappears only in 1836 in the epistle "Xudozniku", dedicated to the sculptor Orlovskij, and in the two four-line inscriptions to the statues of players (see Plate 20). The cycle of Puskin's poems about statues began and ended with inscriptions. We can even speak directly about the overcoming of the sculptural subject in the poet's work. Besides the parodistic tinge of The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel, which concludes the fantasmagoria of statues, just 86

"ripHe^y

OHCHBHTLCH TBOOO

MOJiofloCTHio,

moE AHren" (from a

letter of October

21, 1833). 86 D. Mirskij, "Problema PuSkina", Literaturnoe nasledstvo 16-18 (1934), 103. 87 "Poslednjaja skazka", 171 f.; cf. A. S. PuSkin, Soiinenija, ed. B. TomaSevskij (Leningrad, 1935), 845.

THE STATUE IN PU§KIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

29

as the story "The Coffinmaker" had previously ended the fantasmagoria of hideous corpses, and besides the episodic image of overthrown idols, which appears after The Bronze Horseman in the poet's lyrical sketches and which every time is closely connected with the image of a moving crowd (December 9, 1833: S stupeni na stuperC, letjat kumiry ...; September (?) 1834: S satnuvsixsja kolonn kumiry padajut), we may cite what Andrej Belyj has called "a very ambiguous and obscure passage" 88 in Puskin's letter of May 29, 1834 to his wife. The writer speaks about his work on the history of Peter the Great: "I am gathering materials — I am putting them in order — and suddenly I shall cast a bronze monument which it will not be possible to drag from one end of the city to the other, from square to square, from side street to side street." 89 Here it is indisputably a question of a verbal monument which is independent of space in contrast to a statue. Puskin vigorously defined that dependence in his famous comments on Falconet's horseman which Mickiewicz reproduced in his satire "Pomnik Piotra Wielkiego": "Siadl na bronzowym grzbiecie bucefala, i miejsca czekal, gdzieby wjechal konno." 9 0 In these glosses Puskin also parodies V. G. Ruban's inscriptional verses "K pamjatniku Petra I". The eighteenth-century poet extols the miraculous monument above the Colossus of Rhodes and the pyramids, for its base is a true rock or, according to Ruban, rock not made by hand, but brought to Petersburg (nerukotvornaja gora). This Church Slavonic epithet nerukotvornyj (acheiropoietos) was used and reinterpreted by Puskin in his poem of August 21, 1836, "Exegi monumentum", for the delineation of his own monument, which had been created from the poetic word and whose unsubmissive head overshadows Alexander's Column (see Plate 17), the highest such edifice in the world at that time. Thus logos (the word) overcomes eidolon (the idol) and idolatry. The fundamental request of the poet's call on his Muse is her freedom from any surroundings: "He Tpe6yH Bemja, XBany H KJieBeTy npneMJiH paBHOflynmo" ('Do not require any wreath, and remain indifferent both to praise and to slander'). PuSkin's aversion toward any worship of crowned heads finds an eloquent expression in two of his self-portraits, now captivatingly discussed in M. P. Alekseev's monograph Stixotvorenie PuSkina "Ja pamjatnik sebe vozdvig..." (Leningrad, 1967). The last of these drawings, made in 1835 or 1836 88

Jtitm, 71.

"CKOIIJWKJ MaTepbHJibi — npnBoacy B nopaflOK — H Bflpyr Bbrntio MeflHMfl naMOTHHK, KOToporo HejiuH 6y.neT neperacKHBaTb c OflHoro Komia ropofla Ha flpyrofl, c nnomaAH Ha ruioinaflt, H3 nepeyjuca B nepeyjiOK." 80 ['He sat on the bronze back of the bucephalus and waited for a space into which he could ride'.] 89

30

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

and inscribed IIgran' Padre A. P., parodies the traditional medallions of Dante crowned by laurels (see Plate 10). PuSkin's earlier self-portrait of himself crowned by laurels (see Plate 9) likewise "conveyed to his profile the character of a bust, with a sharp-angled cut-off at the breast typical of sculptural representations" — A. £fros, Avtoportrety PuSkina (Moscow, 1945), p. 139. Mickiewicz's profile at the lower left hand side accompanies PuSkin's, above, and the two parallel images of trees beneath them, apparently symbolizing the close ties between the two poets. Cf., on the one hand, PuSkin's simile taken over from a Serbian folksong, "He jiBa ay6a puflOM BbipacTauH. / 3Khjih BMecTe flBa 6paTa poflHbie!" ('Not two oaks grew next to each other, / But two brothers lived together'), and, on the other hand, Mickiewicz's famous Digression (Ustqp), with its dialogue between the two poets beneath the monument to Peter the Great (given here in the English translation edited by G. R. Noyes [N.Y., 1944]): Two youths stood deep in talk one rainy night, Beneath one cloak, hand closely clasped in hand: One was the pilgrim from a Western land, An unknown victim of the tsar's grim might; The other was the famous Russian bard, Beloved through all the Northland for his song. Although their friendship had not flourished long, They were united by a great regard. Their souls soared over earthly trials and woe, Like twin crags jutting from an Alpine peak: Though separated by a roaring creek, They scarcely hear the tumult of their foe, While each to each their towering summits lean. The sketchy figures at the bottom of PuSkin's drawing seem to refer to his work on the unfinished poem "Tazit". The pages to which this drawing belongs are covered with the draft of this poem and with a copy in PuSkin's own hand of Mickiewicz's Ust$p. The Polish work reached PuSkin toward 1833 and in his notes to the Bronze Horseman (October, 1833) he refers to this Digression and particularly to the dialogue quoted above. W. Lednicki, in his Bits of Table-Talk on Pushkin, Mickiewicz, etc. (The Hague, 1956), p. 195f., convincingly assigns PuSkin's drawing of the two poets to 1833, against a surmised earlier date of 1829. The conflict between human spiritual fraternity and tribal strife underlies the drafts of "Tazit", as well as the ties and tension between PuSkin and Mickiewicz. PuSkin, "the famous Russian bard", in Mickiewicz's terms, as £fros observes in the above-quoted work (Joe. «'/.), "drew this apotheosis to himself and apparently was ashamed at such a self-glorification: having completed the drawing, he immediately struck out the characteristic part of the profile, as he used to do when he wanted, so to speak, to express a renunciation of or abdication from himself: the brow, the nose, the lips, and the chin are completely struck out by thick, tightly placed strokes". A laureate bust of oneself, the idea of which repeatedly repelled PuSkin, is one of the significant facets of his obsessive sculptural demonology. [Added July, 1973].

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

31

We have traced the image of the statue and particularly the myth of the destructive statue in the context of Puskin's work and life. But we are interested above all in the internal structure of this poetic image and poetic myth. The problem is all the more interesting in that it concerns the transposition of a work belonging to one kind of art into another artistic mode—into poetry. A statue, a poem — in brief, every artistic work — is a particular sign. Verse about a statue is accordingly a sign of a sign or an image of an image. In a poem about a statue a sign (signum) becomes a theme or a signified object (signatum). The conversion of a sign into a thematic component is a favorite formal device of Puskin's, 91 and this is usually accompanied by exposed and pointed internal conflicts (antinomies) which are the necessary, indispensable basis of any semiotic world. In Puskin's story "Egyptian Nights" a professional improvisator composes a poem on the prescribed theme "the poet himself chooses the subjects for his songs; the crowd is not entitled to guide his inspiration". 92 Here, then, the non-prescriptive nature of the subject is the prescribed subject. The fundamental discrepancy between the two necessary components of linguistic expression — its theme and its situation, a discrepancy that turns into a flat contradiction in this case — is thus emphasized. In The Stone Guest Don Juan says that he suffers in silence. "H TaK-TO bm M o n n r r e ? " 9 S Doña Anna asks him derisively and thereby reveals the contradiction between the first person as narrator and as topic of the narration. " I I o k o h MeHH 6 e » c n T " , says Puskin in the poem "Vojna" — "rest eludes me", literally "runs away". This combination of words, directly contradicting one another, is made possible by the use of the verb bezat' ('run') in the figurative sense. Here we have the union of two opposed semantic spheres — that of rest and that of movement, and this is one of the main motifs of Puskin's symbolic pattern in general. The equation movementrest is presented in the poet's works now as a philosophical clash between external empiric data and a noumenon (the poem "Dviienie ..."), 94 now as a contradiction between the material of a statue and its semantic aspect. A statue — in contrast to a painting — so approximates its model in its three-dimensionality that the inorganic world is nearly cancelled out of its themes: a sculptural still life would not suitably provide the distinct antinomy between the representation and the represented object that every

"

See in particular Ju. Tynjanov, Arxaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929), 241 f.

" "rio3T caM H36apaeT npe»MeTH ajw cbohx neceH; Tojma He HMeeT npaBa ynpaBJum. ero Bfl0XH0BeHHeM." 11

['And this is how you are silent?'] " "ABfDKeHbK HeT, cKa3aJi Myapeu 6paflaTwfi ..." ('There is no movement, said the bearded wiseman ...'), PSSII, 279.

32

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

artistic sign includes and cancels. Only the opposition of the dead, immobile matter from which a statue is shaped and the mobile, animate being which a statue represents provides a sufficient distance. Puskin's titles such as The Stone Guest, The Bronze Horseman and The Golden Cockerel pick up just this fundamental opposition, and it is just this basic antinomy of sculpture that has been most effectively captured and exploited in poetry. 'Tmicy tm mhcjih aaemt", 9 5 says Puskin to the sculptor ("Xudoiniku"), and in another poem he evokes the land where Canova's chisel brought obedient marble to life ("Kto znaet kraj"). It is a traditional image: "He has brought me to life in stone", says Derzavin about the sculptor who molded his bust, and Daskov is constantly surprised in his inscriptions on statues that "Praxiteles' chisel has given stone sensibility and life" ("K istukanu Niovy") and that "the hero breathes in metal" ("Izvajanie Aleksandra") ; "Divine bronze! It seems to come to life", proclaims an analogous inscription by Benitckij. For Baratynskij the mystery of sculpture is that the stone has revealed a nymph to the artist ("Skul'ptor"), 96 and in the idyll "Izobretenie vajanija" Del'vig announces a miracle: "K nyay Bac Kjraiy!: 06pa3 XapHTbi! XapHTa acHBaa! XapaTa H3 rjiHHbi!"97 — amorphous clay turns into a ive image. The semantic aspect of the statue or the internal aspect of the sign cancels. (Xarita zivaja ) its dead immobile matter, that is to say, the external aspect of the sign. The dualism of the sign, however, is its indispensable precondition, and as soon as the internal dualism of the sign is cancelled, the opposition between the sign and the object also disappears of necessity, and the sign becomes reified. The conveutional space of the statue merges with the real space into which the statue has been placed, and despite its atemporal substance, an idea of something that has preceded the represented state and of something that should follow it comes of itself to mind : the statue is placed in temporal succession.98 K>Homa Tpnawbi marHyji, HaKjiomuicji, pyxoft o KOJieHO Eoflpo onepca, apyroïï nojuaim MeTKyro koctb. B o t y» npimemmcH ... npoih! pa3flafica, Hapofl jiioBonbiTHbiâ, Bpo3b paccryimcb ; ne Memafi pyccicofi yflanoft arpe. ( " N a statuju igrajuScego v babki") 9 * • 5 ['You give thoughts to plaster'.] •• Cf. Camille Mauclair, Auguste Rodin: l'homme et l'oeuvre (Paris, 1918) : "J'ai dit un jour à Rodin: 'On dirait que vous savez qu'il y a une figure dans ce bloc, et que vous vous bornez à casser tout autour la gangue qui nous la cache.' Il m'a répondu que c'était absolument son impression en travaillant" (p. 51). " f'I call you to the miracle: the image of Charis! Charis alive! Charis from clay!'] " Auguste Rodin eloquently testifies how a sculptor strives intentionally to master

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

33

Compare: " M a r — h yMHHTca! TaKOB h o j i h w h B0CT0pra neBeu . . . " (1820). 100 A statuesque Mercury, drawn by Puskin on the left side of a manuscript page, and a sketch of Mercury's legs in flight on the right side of the same page (see Plate 6) symbolically separate from one another, on the one hand, Pu§kin's resignation from any service preventing his poetic work, a draft addressed to Count M. S. Voroncov through the latter's gobetween, A. I. Kaznaieev, and on the other hand, the poet's verses prefacing Tat'jana's letter, which was to reach Onegin through her nanny's grandson as messenger. A three-dimensional statue, of course, provides more suitable preconditions for inclusion in real space than a two-dimensional image. Nevertheless, Puskin's lyric poetry also offers such evidence as: Korfla BeJimcoe C B e p m a n o c b T0p»cecTB0, H b Myicax Ha KpecTe K o m a j i o c b 6o»cecTBO,

Torfla no CTopoHaM acHBOTBopama apeBa . . . C t o h j i h HBe xcem>i.

... Ho y noflHOHCHa Teneph KpecTa HecTHoro ... MM 3pHM — nocTaBjieHo Ha MCCTO aceH CBaTbix B py»a>e h KHBepe jxsa. rpo3Htix nacoBtix.101

Here the boundary between the crucifixion in Brjulov's picture and the guards protecting the picture is intentionally obliterated. The poetic transformation of semiotic antinomies is even more sharply obtruded in Puskin's inscription to the statue of the peg player (see Plate 20). If we take into account the external material aspect, the statue appears to us as an immobile piece of live activity, but in Puskin's poem, on the contrary, the swift "action" of the statue (bystraja igra) is opposed to the immobility of a later, conjectured state (posle igry otdyxat' 'rest after the game'). But what about the contrary case: cannot the empirical immobility of a statue triumph for the spectator over the motion that it represents? "They time: "Dans son œuvre, on discerne encore une partie de ce qui fut et l'on découvre en partie ce qui va être" (L'Art [Paris, 1911], 77). 19 ['The youth took three steps forward, squatted, and leaning one hand against his knee, he raised the pointed bone. Look! He has already taken aim! Away! Make way, curious people. Move apart; don't interfere with the bold Russian game'.] 165 ['A moment — and he will fly away! Such is the singer full of ecstasy'.] 101 ['When the great deed was accomplished, and Divinity was dying in torment upon the cross, there on either side of the life-giving wood ... were standing two pale, weak women. ... But now at the foot of the holy cross ... we see two stern guards standing in place of the holy women'.]

34

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

want to sculpt my bust here", wrote PuSkin to his wife from Moscow on May 14, 1836, "but I don't want them to. Then my negroid ugliness will be delivered to eternity in all its dead immobility'\102 Opposed to the "miracle" of the idea of motion overcoming the paralyzation of matter is the converse "miracle" — the immobility of matter overcoming the idea of motion. "^iyAo!" ('Miracle!') says Puskin about the girl with the broken pitcher (see Plate 19) in the inscription "Carskosel'skaja statuja": "fleBa, Haa BeiHoa crpyeii, B C H H O nenajibHa CHAHT." 103 The internal dualism of the sign is cancelled: the immobility of the statue is perceived as the immobility of the girl, and inasmuch as the opposition of the sign and the thing vanishes, immobility is transferred into real time and appears as eternity. We have therefore established two types of the poetic metamorphosis of a statue. How are they realized in lyrics? Subjectivity is the basis of all lyric poetry. It is a question, then, of the poet's subjective conception: the immobile statue of a mobile being is conceived either as a moving statue or as a statue of an immobile being. In the epic both of these transformations are objectified, they become a component of the plot. Kyfla Ti>i CKaienn», rop,m>iii KOHB, H rrie onycTHmb TM KonwTa?104 The poet's reflection is the lyrical realization of a sculptural motif; this motif — the galloping of the horse — is temporally deployed in the poet's imagination, and the urgent question of what will then follow arises. The bronze horse is here conceived as mobile, and actual motion results from mobility — this is the epic realization of a sculptural motif: the Bronze Horseman gallops thunderously over the shaking pavement. On the other hand, the immobility of the horseman, rising with an arm outstretched over the furious waves, also becomes an element of the plot: it is the manifestation of a superhuman repose and of the bronze warrior's eternally unswerving power against the "impudent willfulness" of the savage elements and against every rebellion. Mickiewicz's "Pomnik Piotra Wielkiego" had already presented the two antithetical motifs in their lyrical aspect: on the one hand — "Car Piotr wypuszczal rumakowi wodze, Widad, ze lecial tratuj^c po drodze; Od razu wskoczyl az na sam brzeg skaly. ... Zgadniesz, ze spadnie i prySnie w kawaly"; on the other hand — 10

* "3fleci> XOTHT jienHTb MOFI 6K>CT. H O a He xoiy. Tyr apancKoe Moe 6e3o6pa3ne npeoaHO 6y.neT 6eccMepTmo BO Bcefi CBoefi Mepraott HenoflraacHocTH." 10» ['The girl sits eternally sad over the eternal stream'.] 104 ['Where are you galloping, proud steed, and where will you let your hooves fall?']

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

35

"Od wieku stoi". 105 The two motifs merge in the metaphorical image of the waterfall rushing down from the granite and solidified by frost. The two motifs are likewise connected in Vjazemskij's poem "Peterburg", the other model for The Bronze Horseman — Falconet's Peter is, on the one hand, the immobile, eternal guard who wards off enemies with his petrified appearance; on the other hand, he is ready to fall on them from the steep cliff. 106 The idea of life that is included in the meaning of a statue and the idea of duration that is furnished by its outer shape fuse into an image of continuing life. The imperfective aspect of verbs carries this idea of pure duration in The Bronze Horseman: whether it concerns the historical or the bronze Peter, whether it concerns the immobile or the animated statue, not a single perfective verb is attached to him in the narration: stojal, gljadel, dumal; stoit; sidel, vozvysalsja, obras6alos\ nesetsja, skakal. This imperfectivity contrasts sharply with the perfective, limited character of the surrounding events, just as the morphological verbal categories — aspects, tenses, persons — are generally one of the most effective, most dramatic devices of actualization in Puskin. We hope to treat this question later. As we have already emphasized, the cancellation of the internal dualism of the sign obliterates the boundary between the world of the sign and the world of the objects. The equation between the "eternal sleep" of the deceased Peter and the eternal repose of his bronze double and the simultaneous contradiction between the ephemerality of his mortal remains and the steadfastness of his statue produce the notion of the life of the represented being continuing in its sculptural image, in the monument: "Ce IleTp, e m e xchbmh b Mean KpacHopeiHBoii. ... O h uapcTByeT e m e Haa

co3flaHHbiM hm rpaflOM",107 reads Vjazemskij's poem. Thus for the threatening Evgenij, the Bronze Horseman really is the builder of Petersburg and the epithet "miracle-working" (cudotvornyj) acquires a purely PuSkinian ambiguity in the madman's mouth: "creating miracles", as concerns Tsar Peter, and at the same time "having originated miraculously", as concerns his statue. "Miracle-worker" (cudotvorec) — PuSkin calls Peter, "miraculous creations" {cudesnye tvorenija) — he says about idols. 105

['Tsar Peter was giving his horse free rein; it is apparent that he was flying as he trampled on his way; all at once he jumped to the very edge of the cliff.... You suppose that he will fall and burst into pieces']; ['he has been standing for ages'.] io< "roTOBbrft nacn. Ha hhx c OTBaacHofi icpyTH3HM" — there is an intentional play on the two meanings of Russian past': (1) to fall, (2) to descend upon, to attack. 107 ["This is Peter, living on in eloquent bronze. ... He still rules the city which he created'.]

36

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

The word "zivoj" is polysemantic: it has the meaning 'living', 'being alive', the meaning 'lively', the meaning 'including the idea of life', 'producing the impression of life'; all of these are, in fact, homonyms connected to one another by various semantic relationships. In poetry they are mutually independent variants — independent, equipollent expressions of a single general meaning: it is a question of a general meaning, for usually the etymological kinship of words is distinctly actualized in poetry; it is a question of independent variants, for poetry confers independence upon each lexical meaning. In poetic symbols he who lives in bronze or "in human hearts" has not a figurative but a real life. Deriavin renders this in an inscription of one word — a skillful abbreviation — on Peter's monument: 5KHB ('Alive'). In a significant scene of The Stone Guest, which prepares the way for the statue's active entrance into the plot, Leporello asks Don Juan how the commander—by which he half-jokingly means the tombstone statue — will look upon his amatory intrigue. Don Juan replies that the commander has settled down since the time of his death. Leporello doubts this and calls attention to the statue: KaaceTca, Ha Bac OHa r;uwHT H CepflHTCH.108 Here (for the present in a humorous conversation, but later the tragic action will result from it) the commander's liveness is detached from his human life (it is possible that the deceased has settled down, it is possible that he has not), and the life of the statue, just as his human life, becomes, so to speak, a single segment of the commander's total existence. JCAKHM OH 3#ECB NPEFLCTABJIEH HCHOJIHHOM!

... A caM noKotoiK Man 6HJI H mextymeH, 3flecb, CTaB Ha UMIIOHKH, He Mor 6M pyicy flo cBoero OH HocyflOTHHyrb.109 It is hardly possible to express more drastically the simultaneous distinctness and identity of the representation and the object represented. PuSkin was well aware of the uniqueness of the artistic sign, and at the time of work on The Stone Guest he wrote: "We still reiterate that the beautiful is an imitation of refined nature Why then do we like painted statues less than pure marble and bronze ones?" ("On Drama"). 110 But 108

['It seems to be looking at you and to be angry'.] ° ['How he is represented here! Like a giant!... And the deceased himself was short and puny. Here, even if he were to stand on tiptoes, he would not be able to reach his own nose with his hand'.] 110 "Mbi Bee eme noBTopaeM, noflpaacaHHe H3«mHoi npapofle....

10

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

37

the fundamental difference between the stone guest and Don Carlos, whom Don Juan had accidentally killed, necessarily presupposes the simultaneous identity of the two: the slain man's hand is to the same extent the commander's hand, just as the statue's nose is his own nose (ne mog by ruku do svoego on nosu dotjanuf). And this very identity determines the ensuing action, as if the commander has become embodied in his statue. The relationship of the sign to the object signified, and especially the relationship of the representation to the object represented, their simultaneous identity and difference, is one of the most dramatic semiotic antinomies. It was precisely this antinomy that led to the bitter fights around iconoclasm; 111 disputes about realistic art, which are constantly revived, are connected with precisely this antinomy, and poetic symbolism exploits it. Facetious conversations are also the starting point in the story "The Coffinmaker", which wittily anticipates the plot of The Stone Guest. These conversations gradually expose the contradiction between the linguistic sign and the real object. The coffinmaker Adrian says: "If a living man does not have the means to buy shoes, ... he goes barefoot, but if a dead man is poor, he takes a coffin for nothing." 112 We are accustomed to identifying the grammatical subject of the action with the person acting; "a living man who goes barefoot" is actually such a person, but not "a dead man who takes a coffin". The syntactic parallelism of the two sentences increases even more the tension between the grammatical meaning and the objective relationship. In the cobbler's analogous utterance: "a living man will manage without shoes, but a dead man does not live without a coffin" 113 the contradiction is sharpened by the opposition between the subject "a dead man" (mertvyj) and the basic meaning of the predicate verb "to live" (fif') which has a transferred meaning in the given sentence: here "does not live" (ne zivet) means "is not left [without ...], does not exist" (ne ostaetsja, ne suscestvuet). A client is the subject of the action; the dead are Adrian's clients. If the artisans drink to the health of their clients and if the coffinmaker is also called upon to drink to "the

IIoieMy ace craTyn pacKpameHHtie HpaBsrrca HaM MeHee hhcto MpaMopaux h MeflHHX?" 111

See O. Ostrogorskij, "Gnoseologiòeskie osnovy vizantijskogo spora o sv. ikonax",

Seminarium Kondakovianum 2, 47 f. 111

"Ecjm acHBOMy He Ha »ito Kyran. canor,... xohht oh h 6ocofl ; a HmuHft Mepraeii h flapoM 6epeT ce6e rpo6." 119 ")Khbo8 6e3 canor o6o&qeTC8, a MepTBtifi 6e3 rpo6a He jKHBeT."

38

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

health of his dead", then the opposition of the Word and reality is driven to its extreme and turns into its converse when the drunk Adrian invites his dead to a banquet and they accept his invitation. Thus in Doña Anna's sentence to Don Juan, "Myac moh h bo rpo6e / Bac MyHHT", the husband is a purely figurative subject of the action, but later he turns into the real subject: "íí Ha 30B hbhjich."114 A statue is either an object of the discourse or a subject of the action. The confrontation of a statue with a living being is always the starting point of the discourse: the two schemes interpenetrate one another. A living being is likened to a statue (in Godunov, in "The Solitary Little House"), or a statue is likened to a living being (Takov i byl sej vlasteliri); it becomes identified with a living being through the negation of dead matter (an emphatic variant of the fragment "Kto znaet kraj": "3Khboh pe3en KaHOBbi / IlapoccKHií MpaMop ohchbjihji";115 the poem "Cera"': "Ha Bee / K y M a p Tbi nemiiiib BejibBeflepcKHH / ... H o MpaMop ceñ Beflb

6or! ,.."); 118 it is depicted ("is estranged", according to Sklovskij's term) as a living being. If the discourse about the statue is at the same time a discourse about the past, a reminiscence, then the immobile duration of the statue is opposed to the ephemerality of the living being, whether it concerns an objective loss ("Vospominanija v Carskom sele" of 1814: "Hcie3J70 Bee, bcjihkoh hct"; the epistle "Xudozniku" of 1836: "B TOJine MOJinajiHBbix KyMapoB / TpycTeH ryjiaio ... flejibBura h c t " ) 1 1 7

or a subjective loss (the poem "V nacale iizni ...": the "velicavaja zena" with her veracious pronouncements disappears from the youth who steals away to the immobile statues). What comes to the fore, then, is not the relationship of the representation to the object represented or a similarity (an imitative connection), but a contiguity (a contagious connection): the relationship of the deceased to the statue, a temporal or spatial continuity, the consecration of the statue to his memory. The representation can be replaced by a commemorative column, that is to say, by a statue of solely metonymic designation (Sadjatsja prizraki geroev u posvjascennyx im stolpov). The statue as the subject of poetic (epic or dramatic) action includes and objectifies all of the 114 ['My husband torments you even in [his] grave]; [I have appeared at your invitation'.] 115 ['Canova's lively chisel has brought the Paros marble to life'.] See TomaSevskij's excellent study "Iz PuSkinskix rukopisej", Literaturnoe nasledstvo 16-18 (1934), 311. 118 ['It's by weight that you value the Belvedere idol..., yet this marble is really a god!'] 117 ['Everything has vanished, the great woman is no more']; ['I walk sadly in a crowd of silent idols. ... Del'vig is no more'.] (PuSkin's dearest friend and faithful admirer, and author of the idyll "The Invention of Sculpture".)

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

39

elements that we have examined. The very opposition of the lasting statue and the vanishing man is thus projected into the action: the statue kills the man. The internal antithesis of the man's simultaneous longing for a woman and longing for rest (Don Juan's "cold kiss" is essentially an oxymoron) determines the woman's part in this action. It is symptomatic that PuSkin's "myth of the destructive statue" is the only constant form in his oeuvre of the intervention of the statue in the poetic action. The image of the statue — the maker of human destiny — does not remain isolated in Puskin's works; rather it is organically connected to his entire poetic mythology. Bicilli's study (one of the most insightful contributions to the literature on Puskin) emphasizes the dynamism of his poetry as the principle of its individuality: "I do not know another poet who would use the image of running water as often as Pu§kin. His heavenly bodies are always moving.... He uses a wealth of epithets to characterize the dynamic properties of objects. ... In his vocabulary 'life' and words of the same root occupy an exceptional place. ... In PuSkin everything breathes. ... All objects are comprehended sub specie of motion, their origin or the potential rhythm included in them. ... For him 'dead' nature is full of life. ... Most often the idea of swift, vehement movements dominates him. ... One of his favorite image-symbols is the ship, the embodiment of swift and, at the same time, light sliding motion. ... In his poetry the stereotyped symbol of the road as the 'life path' acquires particular force and charge.... All life — cosmic, personal and social — is conceived as a continuous process ..." l l 8

In Puskin's system of symbols, therefore, rest-immobility is naturally a striking contrastive motif, and whether it appears in the form of forced immobility — here we can include the variously modified images of the prisoner "punished by the torture of rest", the enslaved people, the creature in a cage or the imprisoned stream (nevol'nyx vod) — or in the form of free rest as an imagined, superhuman, and even supernatural state.119 For the poet, time stops for a moment of amatory ecstasy ("Nadpis' k besedke", 1816 [?]); the stream of his days becomes calm in momentary slumber and reflects the azure of the sky (from lyrical sketches, 1834); free rest, not happiness, is the poet's dream ("Pora, moj drug, pora", 1834 [?]). PuSkin connects the idea of solemn, undisturbed rest with the sanctity of miraculous beauty ("Krasavica", 1832) and similarly extols the "joyful peace" and the "unbroken eternal sleep", the "solemn rest" 118 "Podzija PuSkina" in his txjudy po russkoj poezii (Praga, 1926), 65-224 and especially 129ff. ,,, Cf. M. Gerienzon, Mudrost'Puikina (Moskva, 1919), 14ff.

40

THE STATUE IN PU§KIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

of the last repose (the epitaph for N. S. Volkonskij, 1828; "Pered grobniceju svjatoj", 1831; "Kogda za gorodom, zadumciv, ja brozu", 1836), whereas human life is a vigorous manifestation of cosmic activity and rest is only the negation of this life, only a deviation, only an anomaly. For a statue, on the contrary, rest is the natural "unmarked" state, and the motion of a statue is a violation of the norm. To Puskin's myth-creating genius a statue, which always implies activity and movement120 and which is at the same time immobile in itself, displays the pure embodiment of supernatural, free creative rest: in fact a statue is Btrme Bcex HcejiaHHH ... and sleeps "CHOM CHJILI H NOKOA, / Kaic 6ora CITHT B rjiy6oicnx H e 6 e c a x " (The Covetous Knight).121 This reference to the gods in the mouth of a medieval knight sounds peculiar, but it is very characteristic of Puskin. For him the power of "immobile thought" has an undeniably pagan association. It is characteristic that the statues in his poems are usually designated as idols (kumiry), and Tsar Nicholas was particularly shocked by this designation in The Bronze Horseman.122 Whether it concerns the unbeliever Puskin,123 the heretic Blok, or the anti-religious writings of Majakovskij, Russian poets have grown up in a world of Orthodox customs, and their work is unwittingly saturated with the symbolism of the Eastern Church. Precisely the Orthodox tradition, which severely condemned the art of sculpture, which did not admit it into churches, and which understood it as a pagan or diabolic vice (the two concepts were equivalent for the Church), suggested to Puskin the close association of statues with idolatry, with devilry, with sorcery. It is enough to read Gogol' 's deliberations on sculpture for us to understand how inseparably plastic art was linked to the concept of paganism in the Russian view: "[Sculpture] was born along with a definitely formed pagan world, it expressed [this world] and died along with it. ... It was as remote from Christianity as the pagan faith itself" ("Skul'ptura, 2ivopis' i muzyka", 1831). On Russian soil, sculpture was closely associated with whatever was unchristian, even antichristian, in the spirit of the Petersburg tsardom. 124 The discourse about statues in the 120

Rodin, L'Art, 72. [... above all desires, ... is calm']; ['... with the sleep of force and peace, as the gods sleep in the deep heavens'.] 122 Cf. T. Zenger, "Nikolaj I — redaktor Puskina", Literaturnoe nasledstvo 16-18 (1934), 522. 123 Cf. Xodasevii's interesting article "Ko&cunstva Puskina", Sovremennye zapiski 19 (1924), 405-413 and E. G. Kislicyna's mass of material in "K voprosu ob otnoSenii PuSkina k religii", PuSkinskij sbornikpamjatiprofessora Semena Afanas'evica Vengerova (Moskva-Petrograd, 1923), 233-269. 121 The Russian Old-Believer tradition very sharply opposed the statue as a pagan 181

2. The Monument to Peter I, by E.-M. Falconet. A gravure by G. I. Skorodumov.

3. Riderless Horse on a Cliff (after the Falconet Monument). Drawing by Puskin in anticipation of The Bronze Horseman, 1829 or 1830.

4. Triscorni. Lions at the entrance to a building on the Neva Embankment in St. Petersburg, 1810.

5. Puskin's title page to The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel,

1834.

6. A drawing by Puskin, in a manuscript, of the statue of Mercury (on the left) and, separately, of Mercury's legs in flight (on the right), May, 1824.

7. Egyptian Colossus. A drawing by Puskin, October, 1830.

8. J. A. Houdon's statue of Voltaire, drawn by Puskin in his notebook, March 10, 1832.

9. Puskin, crowned with laurels, and Mickiewicz. A drawing by Puskin in the drafts of Tazit, probably 1833.

12. The Chesma Column in Tsarskoe Selo, commemorating the victory of the Russian navy over the Turks on June 25-26, 1770. Erected in 1776 by the architect Rinaldi. Reproduced here from an old gravure.

13. The Morea Column in Tsarskoe Selo, commemorating the Russian victory of February, 1770, over the Turks and the surrender of the Turkish fortress of Navarino to the Brigadier Hannibal, Puskin's great-uncle. Erected in 1771.

14. Bust of Alexander I by B, Thorwaldsen. Executed in Warsaw, 1820.

15. The Angel in the likeness of Alexander I on the top of the Alexander Column in St. Petersburg. Sculpture by B. I. Orlovskij.

16. The raising of the Alexander Column, 1832. A drawing by the architect, Auguste de Montferrant.

17. The Alexander Column St. Petersburg. Unveiled August 30, 1834.

18. MonumentcelebratingaRussian victory of October, 1812, over Napoleon in Tarutino, Kaluga Province. Unveiled June 24, 1834.

in on

19. "Carskosel'skaja statuja"; fountain-statue of a milkmaid with a broken pitcher, sculpted by P. P. Sokolov in the 1810's.

20. Statues of a "Youth Playing Knucklebones"byN.S.Pimenov and of a "Young Peg Player" by A. V. Loganovskij. Both were seen by Puskin at the 1836 exhibition of the Academy of Art; in 1838 they were cast in iron for the entrance of Alexander's Palace in Tsarskoe Selo.

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

41

poem "V na£ale íizni..." is characteristic: "miraculous creations", "magic charm", "images of devils", "unearthly force", "bewitching demon". The pagan, demonic contour of the Bronze Horseman has inevitably manifested itself to interpreters as different as Mere2kovskij,Brjusov,Xodasevi£, and Mirskij. Those scholars who associate Don Juan's invitation to the stone guest with the poet's evocation of the shade of a dead lover in the Boldino lyrics125 and who see in the statue only the mask of a spectre, which would have given the impression of an excessively mad raving without this veiling,126 forget about the specific properties of the statue in PuSkin's symbolic pattern: the animated statue, in contrast to a spectre, is an instrument of evil magic, it bears destruction, and it is never the embodiment of a woman. Puskin's symbolism of the statue continues to affect Russian poetry to the present day, and it constantly points to its creator. Such is the case, for example, in the works of three outstanding Russian poets of this century. In the poem "Sagi Komandora" Alexander Blok resumes the PuSkinian conception of an adoring Don Juan, a Doña Anna who tantalizingly vanishes and the heavy steps "of old fate", and in the poems of the cycle The City he evokes the eternal life of a metallic Peter who vibrates between arrested sleep and dreadful activity ("Petr", "Miting"). In Velimir Xlebnikov's dramatic poem "Markiza Dezes", which is linked to PuSkin in various ways, people grow rigid and turn into statues, and things come to life; in his epic poem "The Crane" a boy flees — against a Neva background that is well known from The Bronze Horseman — from a destructive monster which has originated from animated iron chimneys, machines, and bridges, and which pursues him: 5KH3Hh ycTymuia

BJiacrb

Coio3y Tpyna h Bemn. O tojiobgk! Kaxoñ KOBapm>iñ pyx.

Te6e meirran, y6nfina h c o b c t h h k cpa3y: Jlyx 3KH3HH b Bern? BJiefi! ... yHHTeJIH H npOpOKH y H H J I H MOJIHTLCH, o H e o 6 o p H M O M TOBOpH p o i c e . 1 2 7

feature, and it is noteworthy that according to one of the original sketches for The Bronze Horseman Evgenij's ancestor fought against Peter on the side of the Old-Believers. 1,5 A. Bern, O Pufkine, 80. See GerSenzon in Iskusstvo 1 (1923), 137. la ' ['Life has yielded power to the union of a corpse and a thing. O, man, what insidious spirit, both a murderer and a counselor at the same time, whispered to you: infuse the spirit of life into things! ... Teachers and prophets taught us to pray while speaking about invincible fate'.]

42

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

The punitive campaign of another Petersburg bronze horseman — the statue of Alexander III — is depicted in Xlebnikov's "The Monument"; his ringing galloping, however, is interrupted by the intervention of the police, who accuse him of devilry, and "njieHHOMy Ha njiomaflH bhobb TecHO h y3Ko". 128 The motif of the forced, imprisoning immobility of a statue, polemically opposed to Puskin's myth of its sovereign rest, acquires particular vigor in Majakovskij. In his poetry an apostrophe to Puskin is inseparably connected with the theme of the statue. A poem inveighing in a revolutionary manner against the old art ("Radovat'sja rano") associates Puskin with Alexander's column and with the sculptor Rastrelli who immortalized Catherine. An epigram on Brjusov (1916) ends with the words: Hto nporaB — IlyillKHHy HMeTb? Ero KyjiaK

HaBeK 3aKOBaH

B cnoKotoyio K o6n,ae Meflt! 129

"Poslednjaja peterburgskaja skazka" of the same year, which parodies The Bronze Horseman, leads into lines of "tockh IleTpa — / y3HHKa, / 130 3aKOBaHHoro b c o 6 c t b 6 h h o m ropofle". Life ignores the galloping tsar, whereas he, on the contrary, dreads coursing life. And likewise in the poem "Jubilejnoe", where Majakovskij invites Puskin down from the pedestal of his monument, the statue's hand does not oppress the man; rather the man's hand oppresses the statue (Stisnul? Bol'no?), and the lyrical monologue ends with an expression of hatred for the posthumous, inert glory incarnated in the statue. This attack against bronze and marble still appears also in Majakovskij's farewell poem "Vo ves' golos", which is obviously linked to Puskin's "Exegi monumentum". 131 A. fefros, a sensitive scholar and the author of a special study on Puskin and visual art, asserts in the previously cited book that the poet fulfilled only a worldly man's obligation to sculpture and took note of it to the extent which Onegin's commandment "du comme il faut" compelled him to find a place for it in his life (p. 52). "Genius of form abandoned him here. For the most part he discerned only a literary topic in a work of plastic art ..." (p. 54). We have seen, however, how incisively PuSkin's 128

['It is once again narrow and cramped for the captive on the square'.] 12 > ['What could PuSkin object? His fist is clad forever in bronze which is indifferent to insult'.] 1.0 ['... the anguish of Peter — a prisoner fettered in his own city'.] 1.1 "MHe HaruieBaTb Ha 6poH3bi MHoronyAte, MHe HamieBaTi Ha MpaMopHyio cjm3b. ..." ('I spit on the tons of bronze, I spit on the marble slime. ...').

THE STATUE IN PIPKIN'S POETIC MYTHOLOGY

43

symbolic pattern engages the problems of sculpture and how deeply the symbolism of the statue is rooted in his work, in the poet's life, and in the tradition out of which he grew and how vital it has turned out to be in the further development of Russian poetry. How, then, is this specialist's conclusion, which so flatly contradicts the facts, possible? Thus we return to our starting point: it is difficult to abstract from a work of art the elements most deeply rooted in it. We stop perceiving Falconet's statue in the Bronze Horseman; we experience it as the poet's surreal myth. We can paraphrase a French poet's aphorism about the flowers of a poetic work that do not grow in any garden.132 The statues of Puskin's poems cannot be identified in any glyptotheca.

THE STATUE IN PUSKIN'S WORKS Year

In poems

1814

"Vospominanija v Carskom sele" — strophes about monuments

In letters

In prose and in drawings

1815-1817 1818-1819 Sketch "MoguSiij bog sadov" Sketch "K Kagul'skomu pamjatniku" ("Èlegija") 1820-1823 1824 1825

Drawing of Mercury (V.)

Boris Godunov—mention of the marble nymph "Brovi car' naxmurja"—mention of Peter's monument

1826 1827 1828

1829

1M

"Kto znaet kraj"—mention of Canova "Cern"'—mention of Apollo of Belvedere "K bjustu zavoevatelja" (21 .IX.) "Zagadka"—apostrophe to the sphinx (XI.) "Vospominanija v Carskom sele"(14.XII.)

"The Solitary Little House"—mention of the commander Drawing of Falconet's horse

"Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l'oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets." Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crise de vers", Œuvres complètes (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 368.

1830

Mention of Kagul in the drafts to Ch. Vin of Evgenij Onegin "K vel'moie"—mention of idols (23. IV.) to Benkendorf 29. V. to A.N.GonCarov 7. VI. to Benkendorf 4.VII. to N.N.GonCarova 20.-30. v n . to N.N.GonCarova 30. vn. to A.N.GonCarov 14.VIII. to N.N.GonCarova 0 30. IX. E •o "Carskosel'skaja statuja"(l.X.) "V naiale iizni"(X.) to N.N.GonCarova "The Shot"—mention oUi 11. X. The Stone Guest of busts (14.X.) •O (finished 4.XI.) Drawing of Egyptian J colossus (X.) 3 Drawing of classical O X> bust (XI.) tí to A.N.GonCarov 24.11

I

Boldino

1831

1

1832

to Benkendorf 8.VI

Drawing of statue of Voltaire (10. III.)

1833

to Volkonskij

Drawing of PuSkin and Mickiewicz in the drafts of Tazit

18.11

Boldino 1834

Boldino

The Bronze Horseman (X.) Sketch "Tolpa gluxaja"— about falling idols (9. XII.)

"Vezuvij zev otkryl"— about falling idols (IX.?) The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel (finished 20. IX.)

to his wife about the bronze monument to Peter 29.V.

Diary entry of 25.XI. about Alexander's Column and the Tarutino Column

1835 1836

"Xudoiniku" (25. m ) "Exegi monumentum" (21.VHI) Inscriptions to the statues of players (X.)

to his wife about his own bust 14. V.

Self-portrait of PuSkin as laureate (toward 1836) Reference to Kagul at end of The Captain's Daughter (X.)

2 MARGINAL NOTES ON P I P K I N ' S LYRIC POETRY 1

PuSkin's lyric poetry remains the least studied of all the literary genres that he practiced. This is due to several reasons. To identify them means, in fact, to direct attention to the basic characteristics of the poet's lyric work, and this is the sole purpose of our remarks. Proper attention is not paid to PuSkin's lyric poetry largely because it is usually treated as if it were a side track of his creative achievement, a lesser innovation in the history of Russian verbal art and a less effective impulse in its further evolution than other elements of the poet's legacy. In his first or lyceum period Pu§kin is indeed almost exclusively a lyric poet, but in his more mature work this genre actually occupies — and more and more distinctively — only a secondary place and surrenders the leading rôle now to vast poems of an epic character, now to dramatic and later to prose experiments. His evolutionary drive is, if not an overcoming, then at least a taming and a limiting of the lyric element, and therefore The Queen of Spades, Onegin, Godunov and the like screen the lyric relief of Puskin's poetic world from the observer who views his work retrospectively; accordingly, this observer finds only single prominent peaks but not the entire, uniform range. Yes, in his creative thrust PuSkin did recoil from lyrics, and in his epic creation he often directly suppressed relapses of lyricism, made deletions and replaced the text by dots, but we must not lose sight of the fact that he started from the lyric — all of his poetry issued from it, and his individual epic compositions originated from lyric sketches. Here it is not only a question of Pu§kin's workshop, the historical precondition of the poet's renowned works, but also of the literary background which is simultaneously one of their active components. The poet recoiled from the lyric proper and counted on a reader who would take note of this process and who would also know very well from what he was recoiling. PuSkin's lyric poetry is above all an indis1

Translated from the Czech original, "Na okraj lyrickych bâsni PuSkinov^ch", Vybrané spisy A. S. Puîkina I, eds. A. Bém and R. Jakobson (Praha, 1936), 259-267.

46

MARGINAL NOTES ON PUSKIN'S LYRIC POETRY

pensable key to his symbolism, whichis much more intricate and veiled in the epic works. The lyric poem is the only literary genre to which PuSkin continuously paid homage throughout his entire life — from his boyhood years up to his last days; hence it cements the poet's entire work. PuSkin's lyric includes several points of contact with the prior development of Russian poetry. Undoubtedly this fact led PuSkin to begin with the lyric, to begin with it in his schoolboy years and to abandon it later, just as, on the contrary, the fact that PuSkin began precisely under the sign of the lyric is connected with the wealth of the Russian lyric tradition. The eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth comprise the period of the sweeping rise of Russian lyric poetry. Puskin the lyric poet is the heir of the multiform Russian Classicism. What especially influenced him were the so-called lower forms of Classical literature which belonged to the sphere of "light poetry" and the attempts at overcoming Classical norms which were closely linked to these "lower" forms. Neither in the drama, nor in the epic, nor in prose did PuSkin by any means have such masterful and diverse Russian models as G. Deriavin, K. Batjuskov, and V. Zukovskij in lyric poetry. Puskin is tied to his eminent predecessors in the conception and the elaboration of individual lyric genres. Of course, the young Puskin also learned a great deal from foreign lyric poetry, especially from the French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, somewhat later, from the new English lyric, but no effective borrowing would have been possible without a welldeveloped local tradition. If Puskin was not as much a pioneer and founder of the new forms of Russian literature in his lyric poetry as he was, for example, in the historical drama or in epic forms, his lyric nevertheless synthetically summarized the hundred year evolution of Russian Classical poetry, culminated it, and exhausted its creative possibilities. Neither the Romantic melodious lyric (Baratynskij, Lermontov, Tjutcev), the development of which the Symbolists concluded, nor the realist Nekrasov's parodistically-tuned lyric poetry proceeded by way of Puskin, whereas Onegin, The Bronze Horseman, Godunov, and the poet's attempts at prose became landmarks in the history of Russian literature and pointed towards new artistic conquests. What puzzles literary historians in Puskin's lyric poetry, however, is not merely the fact of its having no heir, but the striking remoteness of its formal devices. The poetics of Puskin's lyric poetry differs so much from customary notions about the composition of a lyric poem that it is one of the most difficult problems for scholars to solve, and it demands of today's reader who wants to assimilate one of Puskin's poems fully an

MARGINAL NOTES ON P U T I N ' S LYRIC POETRY

47

intentional departure from the usual criteria. In such a way we not only recognize a particular world of artistic values, but more important we realize that the world of lyric poetry that we inhabit is just one of the lyric worlds and that its boundaries can be extended. A confrontation of two poetic worlds, such as that to which we are inviting the reader, was in fact the creative premise of Puskin's lyric poetry : it is Classicism enlightened by Romanticism. The Classicism of a poet who remains faithful to its tradition but at the same time knows, understands, appreciates and experiences the conquests of Romanticism is fundamentally distinct from pre-Romantic Classicism, just as Romantics in a realistic ambiance (Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Dostoevskij) differ markedly from ordinary Romantics. "The charm of stark simplicity", says Puskin, "is still unintelligible to us so that even in prose we ask for Worn-out ornaments, and we still do not understand a poetry liberated from conventional poetic adornments." 2 Here is the kernel of Puskin's poetics that places a special, uncommon stamp on his lyric work in particular and that complicates its analysis enormously, for there is no more complicated material for analysis than ascetically simple forms, especially if we ha.ve known them by heart since childhood. Profoundly alien to PuSkin's lyric poetry is the dualism of the story and the narrative embellishments or the opposition of objects and images, of a real and a figurative set (lexical meanings to which objective meaning is ascribed in the poem belong to the first set; it is, so to speak, the content of the lyrical message; "tropes" evoking objects not actually involved in the material content and associated with the latter according to similarity, contrast, or contiguity bslong to the second set). The relationship between the two sets varies according to the poetic school; the boundary between the two can, for example, be obliterated so that words oscillate between them. But Puskin, in heading toward the epic from the lyric, almost rejects self-sufficient tropes, or more precisely — he projects them into poetic reality so that the objects creating the "content" of a poem are in fact connected directly to one another by close relations of contiguity, similarity, and contrast. Métonymie and metaphoric relations are therefore reified, they enter directly into the "content" of a poem, and they become its subject, its dramatic plot. A journey, a distant view, a temporal succession, for example, are common motivations for a chain of contiguous images in Puskin's poems. 1 "IIpejiecTb Harofi npocTOTH Taic eme win Hac HenoHHTHa, raaáHo cracTJiHBa" (PSS VII, 27).

MARGINAL NOTES ON PUSKIN'S LYRIC POETRY

49

thematically superfluous details, the endeavor to draw and color every object belonging to the sphere of description in as much detail as possible, those traits so characteristic of the literature and the visual arts of the "realist period", are equally alien to Puskin's lyric poetry and graphics. His poet images are succinct and almost graphic rather than painterly. By projecting heterogeneous images onto one plane, Puskin cancels their hierarchical scale. Records of subjective experiences are objectified, they lose their distance from images of objective action, and thus the lyrical hero in PuSkin's poems also loses his leading, central position. Emotion is only one of the objects of the poetic presentation — hence PuSkin's lyric poetry can be speech about emotion but not emotional speech. Critics are accustomed to rigidly equate a poet's poetics and his world view; they interpret this speech which seeks to give the impression of an indifferent speech, this equipolence of all images that PuSkin demonstrates to us by comparing the poet's rôle to an echo of all sounds, as PuSkin's "all-approving" attitude toward the world, although we know that his actual personal attitude was entirely different. Every perceptive reader comes to a standstill before the multitude of heterogeneous images that inhabit PuSkin's poetic world with equal rights; a great number of objects interpenetrate one another; the same object is presented in different shots. The polysemy of a work arises necessarily from the absence of a hierarchical scale. "Every image is contested", writes one critic, "not a single image can be interpreted conclusively from one standpoint; each interpretation opens a door to another, and not a single one can be accepted as definitive" (D. Mirskij).4 The critic is in error, however, when he draws a conclusion about the author's personal indecision and vascillation and his ideological vagueness from this polysemy of a poetic work. Ambiguity, or more precisely multiplicity of meanings, is a basic component of PuSkin's poetic works, and it would be futile, of course, to look for a unified ideology in an echo. For this reason, then, endlessly contradictory judgments about the writer's political, philosophical or religious views are gathered from his poetic works, and no attempts to overcome these contradictions by appealing to the author's déclassé status or to his having outgrown his own class save the situation. Critics condemn these ideological "inconsistencies" in PuSkin's works, or they endeavor to excuse this "weakness" somehow, but they do not notice that it is just this astonishing semantic plurality that has accorded the ingenious poet his place as a chosen one standing above time and nation. Each 4

"Problema PuSkina", Literaturnoe nasledstvo 16-18 (1934), 102.

50

MARGINAL NOTES ON PUSKIN'S LYRIC POETRY

generation, each class, each ideological faction inserts its own scale of values into his work, which itself makes no value judgments. The scholar for whom every stanza of Puskin's lyric poetry is a document in itself looks for contradictions in ideas, ascertains an ideological break in 1825 and speaks about the poet's rebellion and capitulation. Yet the reader for whom PuSkin is a vital spring knows well that his entire work is indissoluble and that especially his lyric poetry from the lyceum debuts up to the last sketches is incredibly homogeneous in its symbolism. It is actually almost impossible to speak about small forms in PuSkin, for these small fragments coalesce in a monolithic lyrical life-work, on the last pages of which images from the first pages recur, develop, and fade away. Without an awareness of this wholeness it is not possible to comprehend fully Puskin's lyric poetry. Certain connections between images are so close that it is enough for one image to appear in a poem in order that a second link in the chain also comes to mind of necessity. In this manner the themes of slavery, rebellion, and freedom are inevitably affixed to images of waves, a flood, a ravine, a jail, a cage, Peter, and Napoleon, and this is true even when the topical subject remains unnamed in the poem or is deleted by the author out of consideration for the censorship (e.g. in Kavkaz). Incidentally, one must not overlook the fact that the obtrusive and relentless censorship becomes an essential co-factor in Russian literary history (this applies to a high degree also to the Puskin period), that a sense for reading between the lines becomes unusually keen in the reading public and that the poet indulges in allusions and omissions or — to use the Russian idiom — in "Aesopian language". It is precisely against the background of such stabilized relations between images that the reader experiences with particular intensity those relations which admit diverse variations. Compositionally this reminds us of the traditional comedy (commedia delVarte), in which possibilities for improvisation stood out the more sharply against the background of fixed components. Thus different oppositions of images — oppositions of rest and motion, of free will and restraint, of life and death — recur again and again in Puskin's lyric poetry, while the mutual relationship of these pairs entices and surprises us with its constant, capricious transformations. This relationship is reflected in the eternal variability of the myth about PuSkin, whom one poet (Dostoevskij) ardently glorifies as an eternal embodiment of humility and another (Valerij Brjusov) with equal justification — as an eternal symbol of revolution. It is j ust this unextinguished internal tension that is commonly called "the poet's immortality".

3 MARGINAL NOTES ON EUGENE

ONEGIN1

"The Crimea is the cradle of my Onegin",2 wrote Puskin shortly before his death. The poet considered the Caucasian and Crimean trip that he took in 1820 with the Raevskij family the happiest moment of his life. Reminiscences of Puskin's secret but unforgotten Crimean love, Marija Raevskaja, have been traced in his novel and not only in its lyrical passages but also in several of Tat'jana Larina's features. In 1825, shortly before the Decembrists's rebellion, Marija Raevskaja had married Prince Volkonskij, a man twenty years her elder, and she had heroically followed him to a Siberian prison where he had been sentenced for his participation in this rebellion. Literary historians have also found correspondences between Eugene Onegin and Alexander Raevskij, Marija's brother and the famous model for Pu§kin's "Demon", a lyric poem of 1823. It was at the Raevskijs' in the Crimea that PuSkin became acquainted with the works of Lord Byron, whose influence fades and is overcome in Onegin. Puskin takes the characteristic strophic construction of Eugene Onegin and a whole strophe for its first chapter, on which he began work in May of the following year at KiSinev, from his own sketches for Taurida (dated 1822), an unrealized lyric novel on the Crimean theme. He admits that he is satisfied with the beginning of the new poem, which, he says, seldom happens to him. He persuasively insists that it is his best work. When the first chapters gradually appear, they meet with singular success. "They are the general topic of conversation", reports the Moskovskij Vestnik [Moscow Messenger] in 1828, "women and girls, men of letters and men about town ask one another upon meeting: D o you know Onegin? How do you like the new cantos? What do you say about Tanja? About Ol'ga? About Lenskij? etc." Likewise a bulletin of 1

Translated from the Czech original, "Na okraj Eugena Onegina", Vybrane spisy A. S. PuSkina II, ed. A. Bern and R. Jakobson (Praha, 1937), 257-264. * "C'est le berceau de mon 'OHenm' ..." (Letter of November 10, 1836 to N. B. Golicyn; PSS X, 602).

52

MARGINAL NOTES ON EUGENE ONEGIN

1840 announces: "They are reading it in every nook and corner of the Russian Empire, in all the strata of Russian society, and everyone knows several couplets by heart. Many of the poet's thoughts have become proverbs." Leading Russian critics found Onegin Puskin's most original book, and the renowned Belinskij said: "To evaluate such a work means to evaluate the poet himself in the whole range of his creative activity."3 Both the praise and the negation of PuSkin's legacy have rested primarily on Onegin. And even if Onegin sometimes makes more of an historical, museum-like impression upon the literary epoch which began with the Symbolists than, for example, the ever more contemporary Bronze Horseman or Queen of Spades, the assertion of one of PuSkin's contemporaries is nevertheless still valid 110 years later : "Everyone is fascinated by Tat'jana's dream — lovers of delirium, lovers of reality, and lovers of poetry." In this stifling and portentous dream, which Puskin created in the days when terror was oppressing the vanquished Decembrists, the reality of delirium becomes visionary poetry that suddenly brings the whole image of the impassioned Tat'jana incredibly close to lyricism of today and the arid sketch of her ghostly visions comes incredibly close to a modern, unrestrained grotesque of paranoic tint. In March 1824 Puskin informed a friend from his place of exile in Odessa: "I am writing the variegated stanzas of a Romantic epic and am taking lessons in pure atheism."4 This epic or "novel in verse" is Eugene Onegin. What ties it to Romanticism? Modern literary-historical research rightly emphasizes that the motive force of this work is Romantic irony, which presents the same thing from conflicting points of view, now as grotesque, now as serious, now as simultaneously grotesque and serious. This irony is the distinctive feature of the hopelessly skeptical hero, but it outgrows its characterizing function and, in fact, colors the entire plot of the novel, as if it were being seen through the hero's eyes. A contemporaneous reviewer appropriately compared Onegin to a musical capriccio and grasped that "the poet is constantly playing, now with a thought, now with an emotion, now with imagination; he is alternately gay and pensive, frivolous and profound, derisive and sentimental, spiteful and goodnatured; he doesn't let a single one of our mental faculties slumber, but he doesn't hold onto any one and he doesn't satisfy any one". The cancellation of a fixed order of values, the constant interpénétration of * V. G. Belinskij, Soiinenija Aleksandra Puikina, ed. N. I. MordovCenko (Leningrad, 1937), 385. * "... iimiiy necTpue CTpoi poMaHTinecKoâ dosmm — h 6epy ypora incToro a$eH3Ma ..." (Letter of March 1824 to P. A. Vjazemskij [?]; N. V. Bogoslovskij, ed., PuSkin o literature [Moskva-Leningrad: Academia, 1934], 46).

MARGINAL NOTES ON EUGENE ONEGIN

53

elevated and lowly, even derisive, shots of the same object obliterates the boundary between the solemn and the ordinary, between the tragic and the comic. What is present here is the supreme art of proprie communia dicere, which is what Mérimée and Turgenev admired in PuSkin, and at the same time there is the art of saying the most complex things simply, which is the feature of Onegin that captivated the subtlest of the Russian Romantics, Baratynskij. PuSkin's linguistic devices produced the impression of words that were accidental, natural, casual and at the same time supremely deliberate, disciplined, and close-fitting. As Belinskij rightly pointed out, negation resembles admiration in the poet's novel. Thus despite a crushing image of Russian society — whether that of the city or that of the country — in Puskin's novel, critics who saw in it a welcome counterbalance to a satirically pointed literature (Druzinin) were not mistaken. Indeed, even the poet himself gives contradictory answers to the question whether there is satire in Onegin. The elegaic stanzas on Lenskij's demise are altered by the suggestion of another possibility — by a tentative happy ending, by the negation of a senseless death, by a vision of that glorious future which perhaps awaited the youthful poet; however, the opposite possibility — Lenskij's gradual spiritual decay — is outlined immediately thereafter. The reverent pathos of the preceding image is cancelled, and the youth's tragic death acquires a certain justification. Eugene's supreme drama — his amorous infatuation with Tat'jana — is presented on two levels, one tragic and the other farcical, while the action of the novel is confined to the comic situation of a suitor surprised by his love's husband. The action concludes, but the novel ends only with the evocation of the two leading lyrical motifs of the whole work. These are, on the one hand, the ideal image of Tanja and, in the distance, a shade of the poet's reminiscences, which from time to time flicker behind her and, on the other hand, the theme of vanishing youth which is always irretrievable and which rejects every substitute as blasphemy. This theme pervades the entire novel, and the wise Herzen shrewdly perceived that Onegin kills the ideal of his own youth in Lenskij and that the aging Onegin's love for Tat'jana is only a last tragic dream of irretrievable youth. The image of youth and the image of Tanja create a thread of pure lyricism in PuSkin's novel. The verse structure purposely calls attention to the poet-narrator: "I am now writing not a novel but a novel in verse — the devil of a difference",6 discloses PuSkin. Both the author and the reader, as well as the s

"... « Tenept nnmy He poMaa, a poMaH B craxax —flbOTCWibCKa«pa3Hmja" (Letter of November 4, 1823 to P. A. Vjazemskij ; PSS X, 70).

54

MARGINAL NOTES ON EUGENE ONEGIN

true participants in the action, are constant, active characters in Eugene Onegin. Their points of view are intertwined in various ways, and the interpénétration of subjective meanings creates the impression of the suprapersonal, Olympian objectivity of the work. Internal discrepancies are a conscious component of the work, as Puskin acknowledges in accord with Romantic poetics; a certain oscillation of meaning must be allowed. Too much definitiveness would have mortified the growth of the poem; on the contrary, the impression of the vague range of a free, unplanned novel had to be strengthened. The original preface to the first chapter professed doubt as to whether the poem would ever be finished. According to his own calculation Puskin worked on Onegin for seven years, four months and seventeen days (May 9, 1823 to September 25, 1830); the final revision of the last chapter took another year. During this period many events took place in the lives of Puskin and his friends, of the Russian Empire and Europe. His position and outlook changed substantially. His conception of the novel and his relation to his heroes also changed; the plot crystallized in new ways and took new directions. The poet's age increased along with Onegin's chapters about squandered, vanishing youth. The course of his life became the dynamics of his work; the change in the writer's views on life caused inconsistencies between separate sections of the novel and enhanced its vitality. The alternation of different points of view on one and the same thing perfectly accords with Puskin's poetics, and thus Belinskij's shrewd paradox proves to be true: the very defects of Eugene Onegin constitute its great asset. Each of Puskin's images is so elastically polysemantic and manifests such an amazing assimilatory capacity that it easily fits into the most varied contexts. Puskin's renowned power of poetic transformation is also related to this fact. Hence the features of Onegin's author are different beyond recognition for diverse critics. In his famous invectives against Onegin Pisarev maintains that Belinskij loved a Puskin whom he himself had created, but it may be said with equal justification that Pisarev hated a Puskin of his own fabrication, and the same may be repeated mutatis mutandis about every attempt at a unilateral interpretation of PuSkin's work. If we realize, as did the attentive Dobroljubov, that PuSkin did not introduce a unifying sense into his images, we shall comprehend the futility of the endless arguments about how to interpret the multiplicity of meanings of his novel epistemologically — as a wealth of content or as a lack of content — and how to evaluate it ethically — as a moral lesson or as a profession of amorality. We shall comprehend how it is possible that Eugene Onegin is a manifestation of powerless despair

MARGINAL NOTES ON EUGENE ONEGIN

55

for one outstanding author and an expression of profound epicureanism for another and how it is possible that such contradictory judgments about the title hero as Belinskij's eulogy and Pisarev's censure can occur. Tat'jana's meditation on Onegin in stanza XXIV of the seventh chapter with its chain of contradictory, doubting questions is a telling example of PuSkin's oscillating characterizations. A similar bifurcation, which is, however, motivated developmentally ("yacejit Ta caMaa TaTbaHa ... Kax H3MeHHJiac TaTbHHa!"), 6 distinguishes the characterization of Tat'jana in the last chapter. Either this kind of oscillating characterization evokes the notion of a unique, complex, unrepeatable individuality or, if the reader is accustomed to clear-cut typification, he gets the impression (let us cite several notable expressions of PuSkin's time) that in the novel "characters are lacking", "the hero is only a connecting link of descriptions", "the characterizations are pale", "Onegin is not depicted profoundly; Tat'jana does not have typical traits", etc. Later attempts by different commentators to perceive Onegin as a type either attained results that quite comically contradicted one another or produced such paradoxical formulae as "a typical exception". It is precisely the premise that Onegin is primarily a historical type that leads to a common error, which even the famous historian KljuSevskij has repeated after Herzen in a special essay: Oneginism has to be the result of the unsuccessful December rebellion of 1825; Onegin, they say, is a defeated Decembrist. Literary historical scholarship has shown, however, that according to the minute data of the novel its action occurs in the first half of the twenties and its conclusion in the spring of 1825. Moreover, two-thirds of Onegin had been written prior to the end of that year. As Ryleev's and Bestuiev's letters to PuSkin eloquently attest, Eugene's general defeatism was entirely unacceptable and equally inopportune for the future Decembrists, just as were his icy preaching to the enamoured Tanja and his profession of love to the "indifferent princess", and, actually — here Herzen is right, — as was Onegin's entire existence. Attempts at an unambiguous appraisal of the social tendency of the novel have also been unsuccessful. PuSkin begins Onegin under the sign of impetuous rebellion. He informs his friends of this in conspiratorial terms (in case of police inspection of correspondence). He writes that he is choking on bile and that "if the poem is ever printed, it will certainly not happen either in Moscow or in St. Petersburg". 7 From the beginning •

['Is it really the same Tat'jana (XX) ... How Tat'jana has changed' (XXVIII)]. "... ecna KORAA-HN6YOB oHa H 6 y . n e T HaneiaTaHa, TO BepHO He B MocKBe H H e IIeTep6ypre" (Letter of February 8, 1824 to A. A. Bestuiev; PSS X, 82). 7

B

56

MARGINAL NOTES ON EUGENE ONEGIN

a mood of despair, which, owing to the mounting reaction at home and the defeats of the revolutionary movement in Europe, overcomes the Bessarabian exile, is associated with the rebellion. It is reflected most vigorously in PuSkin's lyric poetry of that period. The despair mounts, the poet gradually conforms to the censorship, his rebellion is more and more concealed. Finally, even an unobjectionable sentence often becomes a tragic allusion in light of the ominous events around December 1825. In the last stanza of the novel a citation from Saadi, which not long ago had seemed to be innocently ornamental, " H H M X yac HET, a Te flajieie",8 becomes a reminiscence of the executed and imprisoned Decembrists, and Lenskij's death is associated with the imprisonment of his model, Ktichelbecker. The theme of resignation intensifies with each chapter and culminates in Tat'jana's final words: Ho h apyroMy OTflaHa; SI 6yay BCK eMy BepHa."

In his renowned speech on Puskin, Dostoevskij — in opposition to Belinskij — finds in these words not a tragedy of resignation before life but an apotheosis of resignation, and he attempts to ground it esthetically and to extend it to PuSkin's entire work. But Tat'jana's thesis also recurs shortly after the concluding chapter of Onegin (completed at the end of September 1830) in the poet's prose — in The Blizzard (October 1830) and in Dubrovs(ij (1832-1833) — as a naked expression of resignation, and here it is not possible to apply Dostoevskij's interpretation ethically. Moreover, this motif is entirely alien to the work of Puskin's youth: it is directly ridiculed in Count Nulin (1825), and in The Gypsies (1823-1824), to which Dostoevskij refers, it is precisely the one seeking that eternal fidelity who is brashly condemned. If the author of The Possessed wanted to ascribe to PuSkin's work a resolute warning against a "fantastic" revolutionary action, the antipode of Dostoevskij, Pisarev, is also disposed, in his polemics with Belinskij, to detect the same tendency: "The whole Eugene Onegin is nothing but a colorful and flashy apotheosis of the most hopeless and senseless status 8

['Some are already no more, and the other ones are far away'.] Earlier PuSkin had used this citation from Saadi as the epigraph for The Fountain of Baxiisaraj. • ['But I am given in wedlock to another, and I will be faithful to him forever'.] It is precisely this motif of hopeless resignation that PuSkin directly links in "Onegin's Journey" with his avowal of retreat from romanticism, which some Soviet critics through a peculiar misunderstanding take to be a revolutionary element in the poet's development.

MARGINAL NOTES ON EUGENE ONEGIN

57

10

quo." The recently decoded fragments of a further chapter of the novel patently reveal the erroneousness of this biased, one-sided interpretation. This chapter, a compact survey of the Russian and European revolutionary struggle against reaction, satisfied the poet's inner need: there could not have been any thought of publishing such an openly incendiary and antiTsaristic reflection; indeed, even the circulation of the manuscript would have threatened the poet with severe punishment. In October 1830 he burned it for fear of a search of his house, and he kept only an encoded record of the beginnings of several stanzas: BjiacTHTeJii» cna6bift n jiyxaBbifi, njienntBbiS merojib, spar Tpy.ua, HeiaaHHo npHrpeTbm cuaBofi,

Has HaMH uapcTBOBaji Toraa, etc.11 The Decembrists' rebellion was apparently to have been the kernel of the chapter; the action of the preceding chapter ends just several months before the rebellion. What kind of role was Eugene to play in it? Was Princess Marija Volkonskaja's heroic part to fall to Princess Tat'jana? Here we can actually apply Dostoevskij's famous words about the great mystery that Puskin took to his grave and that we are now solving without him.

10 D. I. Pisarev, "PuSkin i Belinskij" (1865), Polnoe sobranie soiinenij, 6 vols., 4th ed., V (Sankt-Peterburg, 1904), 63. 11 ['A weak and insidious ruler, a bald-headed fop, a foe of work, unexpectedly wanned by glory, reigned over us at that time'] (PSS V, 209).

4 ON P I P K I N ' S RESPONSES TO FOLK POETRY 1

"In a mature literature", says Puskin, "there comes a time when people of intellect, bored with monotonous works of art and with the limited range of a conventional, select language, turn to fresh folk inventions and to a strange popular speech which has formerly been held in contempt." 2 A Romantic opposition to the exclusiveness and cosmopolitanism of rigid and constricted Classical norms, to an excess of rules and a refined, anemic technique; an upsurge of national consciousness and feeling; a Rousseauistic fascination with the rustic element which was allegedly natural and unspoiled; and a revolutionary enthusiasm for the people and for their longings and creativity — these are the preconditions of the folkloric tendencies in European literature of Puskin's time. Still more complex and more significant was the rôle of oral verbal art in Russia; in fact, a short time before, the difference between literature and oral performances had not been so much a class difference as a functional one: in accordance with medieval tradition the written word had served primarily for sacred tasks, whereas oral creation had functioned in the composition of secular poetry and this was true even in the upper social strata. The eighteenth century, to be sure, had striven successfully for the secularization of the Russian book, and folklore had gradually become the exclusive property of the lower strata, but the life of the Russian landowning nobility, which for a long time remained a decisive factor in Russian literature, was too closely enveloped by the serf element to be able to shun its artistic stimuli. These influences appear especially striking in the lower literary genres, which were less constrained and less controlled by social censorship, and 1

Translated from the Czech original, "K PuSkinovym ohlasûm lidové poesie", Vybrané spisy A. S. Puskina IV, ed. A. Bém and R. Jakobson (Praha, 1938), 238-254. * "B 3peJiofi CJi0BecH0CTH npHxoflHT BpeMH, Korfla yMW, Hacxyia 0AH006pa3m>iMH •pOH3BefleHHHMH HCKyCCTBa, OrpaHHHeHHMM KpyrOM H3MKa yCJIOBJieHHOrO, H36paHHoro, o6pamaK>TCH K CBOKHM BbiMMCJiaM HapoflHMM H K crpaHHOMy npocTopeniio, CHaiajia npe3peHHOMy" (PSS VII, 80-81).

ON PUSKIN'S RESPONSES TO FOLK POETRY

59

there are but few Russian writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who remained absolutely untouched by the folk tradition in their creations. Indeed, only little by little did literary forms of analogous maturity and capacity take up a position beside folkloric forms, and even in the 1830's Pu§kin remarked about domestic artistic prose: "It is necessary that we learn to speak Russian not only in the folktale. But no, it is difficult, it still won't turn out well." Puskin's works and biography provide us with abundant evidence of his intimate familiarity with all the diverse forms of folk poetry — with the lyric and the epic, with songs and tales, with humor and laments, with ritual performances and proverbs. Throughout his whole life he retained a memory of the songs and tales of his old nurse; he liked to listen to folk singers and narrators in his hereditary villages — Mixajlovskoe and Boldino — and during his frequent travels through Russia. He admired and propagated Russian folklore, he carefully read printed collections of it, he himself wrote down folk tales, he recorded songs, he even prepared a collection of Russian historical songs and a detailed folklore study, and he scattered various citations, reminiscences and epigraphs from almost all the genres of folk poetry throughout his writings. Finally, works with a deliberately folkloric imprint occupy a special place in his poetic legacy. In Puskin's first published narrative poem, Ruslan and Ludmila (1820), conservative critics of the time found elements of the Russian muzik epic unlawfully transferred into high literature, and in the prologue which he provided for the second edition of this work (1828) the poet himself includes it in the realm of folk tales. However, Ariosto and Voltaire give Ruslan and Ludmila its tone, and its folkloristic tinge is wholly superficial; in fact, it is limited to a "rural" burlesque and to few "Old Russian" names and requisites. Puskin's true imitations of the forms of folk poetry belong to the years of his internment at Mixajlovskoe, and towards the end of 1826 the exile, having been granted a pardon, brings his songs about Sten'ka Razin to Moscow. Their model is found in the robbers' songs which perhaps of all the song-wealth of the Russian folk attracted the poet the most strongly and the most continuously and which left such striking traces both in his youthful The Robber-Brothers and in his later prose works on Pugafiev. The figures of robber-rebels embodied the ticklish theme of a Russian revolution for Puskin and his Decembrist friends. In motif the songs of 1826 are linked to the data of written monuments and to the image-stock of the folk lyric, but at the same time they summarize the intimate theme of the poet's life of that period in folkloric dissimulation: the ruthless

60

on puSkin's responses t o f o l k poetry

parting with an amatory past (cf. 'Tfle Myxa, r^e jiio6obi>?"),3 the repellent necessity of an understanding with the tsar, the raving about an escape abroad by sea. And finally, they are PuSkin's first attempt at using the verse of the Russian folk song with its fixed number of stresses and fluctuating number of unstressed syllables in the intervals. Before long (1828) he returns to this form in some unfinished, obviously preparatory poetic sketches. Research on Puskin has shown that the second half of the twenties begins a new period in his life, outlook and creation, a period which sharply and clearly crystallized at the beginning of the thirties. If the hero in PuSkin's lyric poetry had been losing his leading, central position, this last period in the poet's evolution entails a further veiling of the author's "I" in his works: the lyric proper recedes into the background; the short story, muffling the narrator's subjective diction, replaces the lyrically colored epic; the author hides behind anonimity and sometimes passes himself oif as a mere translator or as a recorder of someone else's narrative, even as a mere publisher of somebody's records of someone else's writings. The historicity of the fiction increases the author's distance and emphasizes his non-participation in the action. The verse form had produced an impression of the poet's individual diction; accordingly, it yields its place either to prose or to a verse form of strikingly foreign provenance — forms oriented toward antique and folkloric patterns acquire a significant place in Puskin's poetry of the thirties. Thus originates Puskin's cycle of fairy tales in this period. Is the poet concerned here with a faithful imitation of domestic folk poetry? Not at all. Puskin's technique is that of collage. Just as the Frenchman Albert's opening monologue in the drama The Covetous Knight, which PuSkin passed off as an English play, actually elaborates — as it has been shown recently — a Russian proverb, so in Puskin's fairy tales subjects which have been borrowed in detail from Western sources — from the fairy tales of Grimm, Irving, Galland, — are for the most part dressed in Russian folkloric images. Here it is certainly not a question of a slight familiarity with the local folklore tradition, for it is Puskin who supplies the poet 2ukovskij and the folklorizing storyteller Dal' with Russian fairy tale themes. And in the same way he presented Gogol' with the themes for his most celebrated works, while he himself created a personally original piece, for instance, from Wilson's tragedy: he loved to fuse together heterogeneous and remote elements. Thus by lightly re' ['Where are the torments, where is love?'] from the poem of 1826 "Pod nebom golubym strany svoej rodnoj".

60

ON PUSKIN'S RESPONSES TO FOLK POETRY

61

touching Irving's "Legend of the Arabian Astrologer", which semi-parodistically imitates Oriental fairy tale writing, he conjures up a quintessential Russian fairy tale about a golden cockerel that is at the same time full of an internal Puskinian symbolism. In the Songs of the Western Slavs (1833-1835) his responses to the Serbian epic originate from Mérimée's French forgeries and from the formal devices of Russian folklore poetics and rhythmics ; from analogous devices, from two or three Czech names that he had glimpsed and from a Russified German opera, he composes the epic of quasi-Czech origin about Prince Jany§, which is thoroughly saturated with the poet-husband's personal experiences. Puskin's folklorizing epic song necessitates a transposition and a reordering of components, and it is noteworthy that the most artistically crystallized, most original and most closed of the Russian folklore forms — the bylina — remains without response in Puskin's creation despite his enthusiastic evaluation, and repeated attempts in this direction (1822, 1833) come to a standstill at the first steps. The bylina is a ready-made Russian poetic form, and it is just for this reason that PuSkin prefers to transform into a Russian poem a Serbian composition or even a Russian tale in which he divines a potential poem. The Tale of the Golden Cockerel is the last and the supreme link in Puskin's trilogy of magical tales from the lives of tsars (1831-1834). It was in Kisinev in 1822 that the first attempts at this cycle had arisen and among them were both the plan of the tale about Tsar Saltan that was realized nine years later, and the grotesque, frivolous tale Tsar Nikita. The latter derives from a Western literary model, colors it with rich Russian folkloric motifs and its trochaic tetrameter, taken from 2ukovskij's folklorizing ballads, remains completely alien to those of PuSkin's epics which are without a folkloric impetus. These features also characterize the whole trilogy of tales from the thirties, and the ironic tinge of the wanton Kisinev jest returns grotesquely in the last of them. If the theme of a tale is assigned to the middle class, then Puskin's orientation toward the form of the folk tale ceases, and his iamb comes to the fore. Here the colloquial Kievan narrative "Gusar" (1833), which has its source in O. Somov's folklorizing story, joins The Fiancé, one of Grimm's tales that Puskin reworked at Mixajlovskoe (1825) into a balladic song with Burger's stanzaic form. Pu§kin's tales from peasant life constitute a quite particular group. They originate apparently at the beginning of the thirties and have their source solely in folklore, either of Western inspiration as The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish or, in contrast to the above-mentioned cycles,

62

ON PUSKIN'S RESPONSES TO FOLK POETRY

exclusively in Russian oral tradition, which he learned either from records, as in the case of the beginning of the tale about the bear, or directly: Balda is a modification of a tale recorded by the poet at Mixajlovskoe. In all of these tales PuSkin emphasizes elements of social satire, and not a single one of them is written in a traditional literary meter. Here we find a verse of genuine folkloric character which expressly abandons the syllabic scheme and in particular the trochaic tetrameter which conventionally symbolized "folkness". In The Tale of the Fisherman it is a melodious verse, akin to the measures of PuSkin's compositions on Razin and especially to the meter of his epic Songs of the Western Slavs; a recitative verse with an ever looser scheme of unstressed syllables resounds in the tale about the bear, and Balda is composed in the spoken verse of folk ritual speeches which balance the substantial freedom of the verse structure with a striking rhyme and vigorously assert the rhythmic intonational division of the sentence. The poet's attempt at a literary elaboration of this verse has surprised many a person because of its unusualness, and Russian literary studies have until now spoken erroneously about the "rhymed prose" of Puskin's tale. Here the bold introduction into literature of harsh, pointed social themes and of a verse form that abruptly contradicted literary custom provided the poet with the effect of an uncompromising imitation of folklore models. In the thirties Puskin perspicaciously realized that a future Russian poet would arise from domestic folklore verse and would elevate it to the status of a national verse (cf. The Journey from Moscow to Petersburg). The evolution of modern Russian poetry has proceeded precisely along this path, and in the twentieth century a verse of folkloric composition has already appeared "not only in the folk tale": a melodious variant of it resounded in the poetry of the Russian Symbolists, and Vladimir Majakovskij took the principles of its spoken form as the basis for a wide metrical renewal.

5

PUSKIN IN A REALISTIC LIGHT1

The dead are silent. Not seven years have passed since Majakovskij committed suicide, and already the poet's living face is being more and more pretentiously and obtrusively transformed into a canonic icon where a portrait likeness is of the least consequence. A staunch admirer of the Classics has been extracted from a poet who most hated every museum piece, every veneration of the dead and all retrospection. Support for a stable home and strict morals is to be drawn from a rebel who ardently repudiated everything that smelled of the family and the Ten Commandments and who passionately preached that the fornicator and impenitent murderer held the foremost claim on his heavenly kingdom. An artist who fought against canons in language and verse, who fanatically dreamed of a future revolution of the spirit and who demanded that art not conform to reality but outstrip it and drag it forcibly along behind is now bound to the chain of realism. Majakovskij was familiar with that posthumous fate: Hto npoTHB — IlymKHHy HMeTb? Ero KynaK HaBeK 3aKOBaH b cnoKotayio k o6ime Meflb!2

Indeed, Puskin himself did not suffer any illusions. The programmatic preface with which the first edition of his Fountain of Baxcisaraj is provided reads: ... the flowers of a bright and fresh poetry will fade from archival dust, and they will become black from the smoke of the lamps of commentators, antiquarians, scholastics; let us add, if only in future centuries people will be found who live on someone else's mind and, who, like Vampires, ransack 1 Translated from the Czech original, "Puikin v realistickem svgtle", Program D " (Jan. 26, 1937), 133-136. * ['What can PuSkin object? His fist is clad forever in [the monument's] bronze which is indifferent [tit. calm] to outrage'] (an epigram on Brjusov, 1916).

64

PUSKIN IN A REALISTIC LIGHT

graves, gnaw and chew the dead, at the same time not forgetting to bite the living as well ... 3 Let us therefore not look surprised ; rather let us listen. PuSkin is supposed to be the pioneer of modern realism, and the dogma of today's realism can allegedly apply to Puskin. It is of no consequence that Puskin persistently disavowed realism: We still reiterate that the beautiful is an imitation of refined nature. ... Why then do we like painted statues less than pure marble and bronze ones? ... Verisimilitude is still considered as the main condition and basis of dramatic art. What if it is demonstrated to us that the very essence of dramatic art precisely excludes verisimilitude? ... In the ode, in the elegy we may believe that the poet has depicted his actual feelings in actual circumstances. But where is the verisimilitude in a building divided into two parts, one of which is filled with spectators — people who have agreed to be treated as if they were invisible by those who are on the stage.4 Puskin emphasizes that verisimilitude is also an impossible demand in the language of the stage and in the temporal and local coloring of the drama. People combat the irrational, alogical elements of modern poetry with a pathetic reference to Puskin. But Puskin taught that nonsense must not be condemned indiscriminately, for it often originates "from a plenitude of emotions and thoughts and from the lack of words to express them". 5 * "... UBETBI ... apicoâ H CBexefi no33HH ncnycKHeioT OT KaÔHHeTHoft raum, H 3aKonTHTCfl OT jiaMnaAHoro iafla KOMMCHT&TOPOB, airniKBapneB, cxojiacTHieoB; npaôaBHM, ecjffl TOJIBKO B ôy^ymax e r o j i e n w x Hafiflyrca JIKWH, xcHByume HJTKHM yMOM H KOH, n o f l o Ô H O B a M T m p a M , p o i o T c a B r p o ô a x , r n o H c y T H a c y i o T M e p T B b i x , H e

3a6tiBafl npHTOM Kycan» H X H B H X . . . " (A. S. PuSkin, Soiinenija II, ed. S. A. Vengerov, 6 vols. [Sankt-Peterburg, 1907-1915], 190). The preface in question, which is entitled "A Conversation Between a Publisher and a Classic f r o m the Vyborgskaja Side or from Vasil'evskij Island", was written by P. A. Vjazemskij and was published with The Fountain of Baxcisaraj at Puskin's request. That the poet heartily agreed with the views expressed in the preface is evident f r o m the following lines of his letter of April 1824 to Vjazemskij: "Cefinac B03Bpanuica H3 KmiiHHeBa H Haxoscy rractMa, n o c t u r e s H 'Eaxiacapafi'! H e 3Haio, KaK TeSa ÔJiaroflapnn.; 'Pa3roBop' npenecTi», Kax MLICJIH, Tax H 6jincTaTejn>m>ifi o6pa3 HX BMpaaceHHH. CyacaeHHa HeocnopmuH." * " M i l Bcë eme noBTopaeM, I OHH IlOKpOIOTCH, MOfi flPJT, TyMaHOM B e i H O f i HOHH,

MojraaHbe Bcmoe

TBOH COMKHCT y c r a ,

T m H a B c e r A a c o 2 f l e m t B Te M p a r a w e MecTa,

Tfle npafleflOB TBOHX

HOHHIOT MOIHH

xjiaflHti.

H O H, flOTOJie TBOfi nOKJIOHHHK 6 e 3 0 T p a f l H M f i ,

B

o6HTein.

H

easy

cicop6HyK> c o f i f l y h 3a TO6O3 re6n, neianbHbiii h HeMofi, JlaMnaaa 6jieflHaa TBoit xjiaflHMfi Tpyn OCBCTHT, Mofl B30P ...flBIDKeHBHHe 3aMeTHT. 6jth3

H e n o p a 3 H T c y f l b 6 w KOBapHaa H3MeHa.

KocHycb a xnaflHtix Hor — ce6e HX Ha KOJieHa C n o a c y — H 6yjxy »aaTb nenanBHO ... HO Hero? H T O CHJIOKD ... MeuaHbH Moero 10

• Emil FrantiSek Burian (1901-1959), a versatile Czech artist (actor, director, playwright, publicist, composer, poet and writer), was the founder and director of the avantgarde theater D34-D51 (the letter "D" stands for the Czech word divadlo meaning theater, and the numbers represent the relevant theatrical season, i.e. 1934,1935, etc.). Before the Second World War Burian adapted a number of works, both foreign and domestic, for the stage; among these was PuSkin's Eugene Onegin. 10 ['The terrible hour will come ... Your divine eyes, my friend, will be covered by the mist of eternal night, an eternal silence will seal your lips, you will descend forever

P U S K I N UNRESTRAINED

75

Only years later, when RizniC had actually died, did Puskin return to the dream of a lady-love's resurrection in the elegy "Zaklinanie" ('The Spell'), which was designated for publication. Here is its beginning: earn npaBfla, HTO B HOHH, Korfla NOKOHTCH XEHBUE, H c He6a jiyHHtie Jiym CKOJib3flT Ha KEMHH rpo6oBMe, O, ecjra npaBfla, HTO Torfla IlycTeioT THxze MornuM, — Si Tem> 30By, a »my Jlemtbi: Ko MHe, Mofl flpyr, ciofla, ciofla!11 O,

We return to the stanzas from The Little House in Kolomna. The poet apologizes for his arsonistic dream. There is something of romantic irony and something of the fear of all kinds of censorship in this very readiness to extinguish the fire, a fire with which Puskin's poetry lives and goes out. Perhaps the correct answer to possible and actual accusations of arson would be a paraphrase of the challenge by Puskin's distant fellowcombatant, Karel Hynek Macha: Anii kfi£te, 2e VIM stavbu pdlim, jei by sama v kratkem vzplala case. ['And do not cry out that I am burning your edifice, which would itself have caught fire in a short time'.]1'

into those gloomy regions where the cold relics of your ancestors rest. Yet I, hitherto your cheerless admirer, will descend after you into the mournful abode and, sad and mute, I will sit near you. A pale light will illuminate your cold corpse, my gaze ... will not perceive any movement... The insidious treachery of fate will not strike me. I shall touch your cold legs — I shall place them on my knees — and I shall wait sadly for — but for what? That through the force ... of my revery ...'] (PSSII, 169 and 387). 11 ['O, if it were true that at night when the living rest and moon beams from the sky flood grave stones, o, if it were true that quiet graves are then deserted, I am calling a shade, I am waiting for Leila: Come to me, my friend, come here, come here!'] " Karel Hynek Mdcha, Dilo I, ed. Karel Jansky (Praha: Fr. Borovy, 1948), 181.

7 THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ 1

SL B a c JIIO6HJI: JNO6OBB c m e , 6MTI> MOJKCT,

B «yme Moefi y r a c n a

HE COBCCM;

H o n y c T b OHA B a c 6 o j n > m e H e TPCBOJKHT ; Sf. H e

xoiy

n e i a n H T i . B a c HHHCM.

R Bac JHO6HJI 6e3MOJiBHO, 6e3Haae»cHO, T o p o 6 o c r b K ) , TO peBHOCTBK) TOMHM; H B a c JHO6HJI TaK H C K p e i m o , TaK HeacHO,

KaK flafi BaM Eor

j n o 6 H M o f i 6HTI»

apyrHM.2

Who is the heroine of these moving lines by Puskin? To whom are the love poems that were composed almost contemporaneously in the winter of 1829-1830 dedicated: the album verses "Cto v imeni tebe moem?" or the poem about a world that villifies a woman? 3 And how is the basically Catholic nature of the famous romance about a poor knight to be explained?4 To whom did the betrothed Pu§kin bid an ardent farewell several months later with the poem "V poslednij raz tvoj obraz milyj"? Whom do the allusions to the poet's relationship with a "cunning, sickly and passionate creature" designate? Whose feminine profile carefully drawn appears in Puskin's manuscript of this period?5 Who is this unknown, secret Odessa love alluded to in the poems and biographical data? Only now does the mystery appear to be solved. Karolina Sobanska's album with the poem "Cto v imeni tebe moem?", 1 Translated from the Czech original, "Policejni konfidentka opevovana PuSkinem a Mickiewiczem", Lidove noviny (Jan. 3, 1937). This text has been revised and expanded by the author. * t'l loved you: love still, perhaps, has not gone out completely in my soul; but let it no longer trouble you; I do not want to sadden you in any way. I loved you silently, hopelessly, tormented now by shyness, now by jealousy; I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly as that may God grant that you be loved by another'.] • The reference is to "Kogda tvoi mladye leta" (PSS III, 143). * See "2il na svete rycar' bednyj" (PSS III, 116-118). • "This drawing, the largest and most artistic of portraits ventured by PuSkin ... must have had for him a great iconographic significance", A. £fros, Risunki poeta (Moscow, 1930), 337-338.

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PU§KIN AND MICKIEWICZ

77

inscribed by Puskin in January 1830, has been found, and almost simultaneously it has been established that two of the poet's French letters from the beginning of 1830 were destined for the same addressee.6 Their sketches with sentences begun and crossed out have been detected among the poet's manuscripts and the first of them is an answer to a brief message signed with the initials C. S. (Caroline Sobanska). According to her note sent Sunday morning, February 2, 1830, J'ai oublié l'autre jour que c'était à Dimanche que j'avais remis le plaisir de vous voir. J'ai oublié qu'il fallait commencer sa journée par la Messe et que je devais la continuer par des visites et courses d'affaires. J'en suis désolée car cela va retarder jusqu'à demain soir le plaisir de vous voir et celui de vous entendre. Pu§kin's long reply to this sudden postponement begins with a melancholy reproach: Vous vous jouez de mon impatience, vous semblez prendre plaisir à me désappointer, je ne vous verrai donc que demain soir. Quoique vous voir et vous entendre soit pour moi le bonheur, la volupté, j'aime mieux vous écrire que vous parler. Il y a en vous une ironie, une malice qui aigrissent et découragent. Les sentiments deviennent pénibles et les paroles du cœur se tournent en pures plaisanteries en votre présence. Vous êtes le démon, c'est à dire celui qui doute et nie, comme le dit l'Ecriture. Dernièrement, vous avez cruellement parlé du passé. Vous m'avez dit ce que je tâchais de ne pas croire — pendant 7 ans entiers ... This epistle and the second as well are written with such unusual, feverish ardency that until recently they have been considered as drafts for a novel rather than the author's genuine letters. Here are several passages: ... C'est à vous que je dois d'avoir connu tout ce que l'ivresse de l'amour a de plus convulsif et de plus douloureux comme tout ce qu'elle a de plus stupide. De tout cela il ne m'est resté qu'une faiblesse de convalescent, un attachement bien doux, bien vrai, et qu'un peu de crainte qu'il m'est impossible de surmonter. Cependant en prenant la plume je voulais vous demander quelque chose — j e ne sais plus quoi — ha oui — c'est de l'amitié. Cette demande est bien vulgaire, bien ... C'est comme un mendiant qui demanderait du pain — le fait est qu'il me faut votre intimité. Et cependant vous êtes toujours aussi belle que le jour de la traversée ou bien celui du baptême, lorsque vos doigts me touchèrent le front. Cette impression me reste encore — froide, humide. C'est elle qui m'a rendu catholique. Mais vous allez vous faner; cette beauté va pencher tout à l'heure comme une avalanche. Votre âme restera debout quelque temps encore, au milieu de tant de charmes tombés — et puis elle s'en ira et peut-être jamais la mienne, sa timide esclave, ne la rencontrera dans l'infini de l'étérnité. « PSSX, 270-271.

78

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY P I P K I N AND MICKIEWICZ

Et bien, qu'est-ce qu'une âme? Ça n'a ni regard, ni mélodie — mélodie peut-être ... From the other letter: C'est aujourd'hui le 9 anniversaire du jour où je vous ai vu pour la première fois. Ce jour a décidé de ma vie. Plus j'y pense, plus je vois que mon existence est inséparable de la vôtre; je suis né pour vous aimer et vous suivre — tout autre soin de ma part est erreur ou folie; loin de vous je n'ai que les remords d'un bonheur dont je n'ai pas su m'assouvir. Tôt ou tard il faut bien que j'abandonne tout, et que je vienne tomber à vos pieds.7 PuSkin's confidence to Sobanska — "C'est à vous que je dois d'avoir connu tout ce que l'ivresse de l'amour a de plus convulsif et de plus douloureux" — coincides pointedly with his earlier (1828) note of reference to the "intolerable observer" Laurence Sterne, who, according to PuSkin's transmission, affirms that "the liveliest of all our raptures ends with an almost painful convulsion". Only after the careful research of contemporary investigators—Russian (M. P. Alekseev, V. M. Bazileviè, A. M. De-Ribas, Filosofov, N. O. Lerner, B. L. Modzalevskij, Ju. G. Oksman, and especially Tat'jana Zenger) as well as Polish (Sz. Askenazy, M. Czapska, and S. KorwinPiotrowska) — are we in a position to talk about the peculiar biography of a woman who meant so much for the life and creation of the greatest Russian poet and, let us add immediately, of the greatest Polish poet. Karolina Sobanska, whose maiden name was Countess Rzewuska, was born in 1794 or 1795. The blood of the most illustrious families of the Polish nobility ran in her veins. The unusual fortunes of many representatives of the Rzewuski family call to mind the old legend about their cruel ancestor who walled up his own mother out of greed and whose offspring were cursed by her before she died. Among Karolina's ancestors of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries were many famous commanders and diplomats. Her father, a distinguished Polish statesman, was an unyielding fighter for the rights of the nobility and a gifted political writer. After the fall of the Polish state he became a member of the Russian Senate and a marshal of the nobility of the Kievan province, where he owned magnificent tracts of land. His daughter inherited from him the skepticism of a disciple of the French Enlightenment and from her mother a fervent Catholicism. Her father's castle was always full of various guests; the Rzewuskis' hospitality became proverbial. Hence Karolina * Rukoju PuSkina (Academia, 1935), 203.

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ

79

acquired both a love for an easy, luxurious life and exquisite, charming manners. Another school was the Viennese house of her aunt LubomirskaRzewuska, one of the most celebrated European salons during the dancing Congress of Vienna, which embarrassed even Alexander I with its mad dissipation. The very atmosphere of this salon, where sovereigns and successors to thrones enchanted the young girl, and the aunt herself, whose mother had died on the guillotine in Robespierre's Paris, instilled in Karolina and her siblings a passionate legitimism and a hatred for revolutionary currents. Both the seventeen-year-old countess and her two sisters were married to wealthy old roués. Hieronim Sobanski, an upstart from the petty nobility, the owner of one of the most considerable trading houses in Odessa, was thirty-three years older than Karolina. Mickiewicz depicts him as an ill-bred person and a drunkard ; Puskin conferred his name upon a Polish mercenary of the False Dmitrij in the drama Boris Godunov and dismissed him with a few contemptuous words. In Odessa, a "colonial" city which was rapidly expanding and becoming prosperous during Alexander's reign, Mrs. Sobanska won quick fame with her impressive eyes and figure, with the beauty of her voice and her musical talent, with the refinement of her manners and her provocative coquetry. She soon became estranged from her husband and was surrounded by admirers in her much frequented salon. General I. O. De Witt (1780-1840), a temperamental double-dealer and Don Juan who lacked intellectual education and moral principles, a man feeble on the battle field but masterful in secret police contrivances and provocation, was her closest friend. His father had been a Dutchman in the Polish service, his mother a Greek beauty of obscure origin whom her husband had later sold to a wealthy Pole. According to Mickiewicz, the general himself did not know what his nationality or denomination was. With Poles he spoke their mother tongue and masterfully played the part of a clandestine Polish revolutionary. In the words of Grand Prince Konstantin Pavlovic, De Witt was "a swindler and a good-for-nothing in the full sense of the word, ripe for the gallows". He had a responsible police assignment to spy upon the activity of both Polish and Russian revolutionary organizations in the south of Russia and upon their relations with one another. Sobanska became his active accomplice. In the first half of the twenties the two lovers' rôle was probably unknown to anybody in Odessa society. Nor did Puskin have any sensible knowledge of these secret activities. He apparently became acquainted with Karolina in 1821, used to visit her from nearby Kisinev, and in 1823 he moved right to Odessa. At this point,

80

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ

however, a series of still unexplained mysteries begins. Why did PuSkin so carefully conceal his very acquaintance with Sobanska? Did De Witt know about their becoming intimate? If he knew, did he perhaps attempt to exploit the poet's confidence with Sobanska in order to ascertain oppositional and revolutionary moods in the educated classes with which Puskin associated and corresponded? Was not the general involved in the poet's banishment from Odessa to Mixajlovskoe? When the notorious A. K. Bosnjak, De Witt's helper, spied upon Puskin's conduct at Mixajlovskoe and rendered the favorable evidence that made the poet's future lot easier, did not Sobanska hold her hand over him? Several months after PuSkin's departure (February 1825) the Polish poet, who was also suspect in the eyes of the government, arrived in Odessa, and an analogous story begins. Sobanska wins Mickiewicz's love, she "chases a butterfly" according to the poet's simile. He carefully keeps his relationship with her secret, he conceals her under fictitious initials (D.D.) in several poems dedicated to Karolina. "Only to kiss, to kiss, and to kiss", reads the end of his sextets "Do D.D", written in Odessa, 1825, and set to music by Chopin. In a passion-charged elegy of the same year somewhat similar to Puskin's French letters Mickiewicz declares: W twe r§ce powierzywszy moj§ przyszl^ dole, Na twym zlozylbym lonie moj rozum i wol§.8 Sobanska proposed to Mickiewicz that they take a joint trip to the Crimea. In reality it was a matter of the general's making an inconspicuous investigation in connection with the tsar's planned arrival in the south. Mickiewicz was to be used as a guise and a lure for the suspected Poles. In addition to Mickiewicz and to the lady who inspired him, the company included her estranged husband, as well as de Witt with his right hand — Bosnjak, an experienced informer who was disguised as a learned collector of insects but who soon awaked suspicion in Mickiewicz. Finally there was {Carolina's brother, Henryk Rzewuski, who later acquired considerable fame as an outstanding writer, and who at the same time aroused violent opposition among his compatriots as a cynical advocate of Polish defeatism and collaborationism and as an alleged agent of the tsar's government in Warsaw. This is perhaps the only case in literary history of a journey undertaken on the initiative of the police and having endowed world poetry with a chef-d'oeuvre. It is perhaps an even keener paradox that this masterpiece, 8 ['Confiding my future lot to your hands, I would lay down my reason and will on your bosom'.]

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ

81

Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets, was addressed to his "travel companions", most of whom were in the service of the secret police. This dedication — TOWARZYSZOM P 0 D R 0 2 Y KRYMSKIEJ AUTOR—dates to 1826, when the confederation De Witt-Sobanska-Bosnjak had already accomplished much work. Puskin's free-thinking friends, A. N. Raevskij, V. L. Davydov et al., had been betrayed and thrown into prison; the activity of the southern branch of the Decembrists had been exposed by De Witt and Bosnjak with the help of the "filthiest intriguante", according to the Grand Prince's expression; Sobanska had discovered and denounced the connection of this organization with a Polish patriotic group. Her "good friend" among Poles, the Prince Jablonowski, after having been arrested in Kiev, had been insidiously interrogated by De Witt and had betrayed numerous Polish patriots, whereupon a mass arrest had followed. Only several years later did it come to pass "how much loathing was concealed under the elegance" of Sobanska, only several years later was she charged with informing and suspected of dark crimes (as F. F. Vigel' reports in his Memoirs). De Witt's part, however, hardly remained concealed from Mickiewicz in 1826. How then is the friendly dedication of the book of sonnets to be explained? Was it an intentional dissimulation on the part of the Polish poet, was it "Wallenrodism", as some biographers believe? Or did Sobanska's charm and his trust in her heavily outweigh his antagonism to this pack of spies? What induced De Witt to intercede for the poet and thereby to save him and make possible his going abroad, where he could engage in an open struggle? Was it Mickiewicz's successful Wallenrodism or Sobanska's sympathy and intercession? In a Crimean sonnet excluded by Mickiewicz from the collection of his Sonety krymskie the author compares himself to a hawk forcibly carried away from his country by a tempest, and it is again the same heroine of the poet's lyrics whom he portentously adjures not to capture the feathered guest, since the one who would mistreat a guest will himself become the victim of a tempest: Wspomni na moje, wspomni na twe wlasne dzieje. I ty§ na zycia morzu — widzialas straszydla, I mnie wicher odp^dzil, slota zlala skrzydla. Po coz te slowa mile, te zdradne nadzieje? Sama w niebezpieczenstwie — drugim stawisz sidla.8 " ['Remember my as well as your own past! You also have seen monsters on the sea of life, I too was rooted out by the whirlwind, and my wings were soaked by the storm. Then for what are those sweet words and those delusive hopes? Yourself in danger, you lay out your nets for others'.]

82

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PU§KIN AND MICKIEWICZ

The final line of this sonnet has remained intentionally concealed. Before his departure from Odessa the Polish poet allegedly wrote to his mistress: "We shall part! And when shall we encounter each other again? You will not seek me, and I must not seek you." In Petersburg, however, Mickiewicz again visits Sobanska, who had moved there with De Witt. His hostess would have said: "It is inexcusable that you and Puskin, the two leading poets of your nations, have not met one another yet. I shall have you brought together. Come for tea tomorrow." They went and became friends. Puskin read his Godunov to her. She remarked that Marina was frightfully Polish ("horriblement polonaise"). Apparently Marina, the main female character of the drama, who was of unusual importance for Pu§kin and to whom he wanted to return in a special play ("j'y reviendrai, si Dieu me prête vie"), had been inspired by Karolina. In Puskin's conception Marina is full of charm and is possessed by the madness of ambition: "Après avoir goûté de la royauté, voyez-la, ivre d'une chimère, se prostituer d'aventurier en aventurier. ... Voyez-la braver la guerre, la misère, la honte ... et finir misérablement l'existence la plus orageuse et la plus extraordinaire ... Elle me trouble comme une passion", 10 says the poet, and soon, in addressing Sobanska, he repeats almost the same words about her unusually stormy life. Mickiewicz went abroad; Puskin left for the Caucasus. At the end of 1829 he returned to Petersburg; he was once more in Karolina's captivity, and Puskin's vision of the False Dmitrij's superstitious, self-destructive anxiety in the presence of Marina ("Is it a tremor of tense lusts? N o — it is a fear") seems to be an earlier Russian variant of the poet's French letters to Sobanska ("crainte qu'il m'est impossible de surmonter"). These impassioned calls from Puskin remained without response, all of a sudden he left Petersburg for Moscow, he became engaged to the beautiful Natal'ja Goncarova, and he wrote — to the point of despair — gloomy letters to friends about his coming marriage. During the Polish rebellion of 1831 De Witt and Bosnjak were sent to the front. But Russian officers killed Bosnjak apparently out of revenge for his provocation and denunciation of the Decembrists. After the defeat of the Polish insurgents De Witt was named military governor of Warsaw. Sobanska also moved to Warsaw. The vice regent, Count I. F. Paskeviô, considered her close relations with Poles and the information that she delivered to De Witt a great asset to the government. It was also De Witt who sent her to Dresden with the secret mission of finding out the plans 10 Letter of January 30, 1829, to N. N. Raevskij, Jr.; A. S. PuSkin, Polnoe sobranie soâinenij XIV (Moskva-Leningrad: A N SSSR, 1941), 46-47.

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ

83

of the Polish emigrants. According to her own testimony, which has been preserved, she made important discoveries there about intended plots, about their methods and secret contacts with Russia. She also met Mickiewicz in Dresden. His historical drama "Les confédérés de Bar", written in 1836 for the Paris stage and preserved in a twoact fragment, depicts its main character, the "countess Karolina", as a tragic and bemoaned victim of her split personality. A divorcée in love with a Russian, militantly anti-Polish governor-general, in defiance of him she feels devoted to her oppressed homeland, and openly abhors the "mean spy" who denounces the Polish confederates and whom Mickiewicz bitterly modeled after Bosnjak. She uses her influence upon her lover to save her compatriots from jail and execution, but is sternly hated and despised by them. Tender reminiscences mutually uniting her and a lad who became a symbol of the struggle for liberation seem to carry in the poet's play an autobiographic tinge. In Dresden, perhaps not only Mickiewicz but also the head of the Polish insurrectional committee let themselves be convinced by Sobanska that she secretly sympathized with the Polish cause and that she was trying to work for it covertly, à la Wallenrod in the enemy's camp. Was this only a skillful accomplice's lie? Or is the old emigrant Budzynski right when he says in his memoirs that the conscience of a Polish woman had not been extinguished in her and that in Warsaw she saved many Polish officers from Siberia? Nicholas I maintained that Sobanska was "the greatest and most adept plotter and a Polish woman who under a mask of gallantry and amiability caught everyone in her nets" (one recalls Mickiewicz's enigmatic line "Yourself in danger, you lay out your nets for others") and that "under a guise of personal devotion she sought only her own Polish advantages and has not been more faithful to the Empire as its subject than to De Witt as his mistress". When the police reported that Sobanska was trying to obtain responsible positions in Warsaw for recent participants in the rebellion, she was ordered to leave the city. For the present it is not possible to say with certainty whether her letter of protest to the Chief of the Russian Gendarmerie, A. Benkendorf, was not merely a cunning simulation. In this document she speaks of her "profound contempt for the country to which she has the misfortune to belong", she compares the Polish insurgents to "mad dogs foaming at the mouth", she extols her own merits as a Russian spy, and she demands redress "in the name of honor and religion". For which of the two sides did she work less mendaciously? The notoriously treacherous French marshal Auguste de Marmont, who, in 1834, was the guest of De Witt and his mistress in the Crimea,

84

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ

praised the "noble spirit" of his hosts, De Witt's "esprit éclairé, positif et étendu" and Karolina's "âme si noble et si faite pour apprécier tout ce qu'il y a de franc et de généreux". Yet despite his intimate correspondence with Sobanska, in which he endeavored to prevent the rupture of this couple and preached dignified faithfulness, the liaison was definitely broken off toward 1836. Is it really a mere coincidence that precisely in 1836 Mickiewicz devoted his play to the gloomy fate of Karolina? The lonely Sobanska, "la dolorosa", as she was nicknamed, sought solace in the circle of so-called "visionaries", the high-society female disciples of the baroness Kriidener's mysticism, but in the same year she married the Croat S. Cirkovic, who had been in his past first an Austrian officer, then De Witt's adjutant, and who at the end of his life became the vice-governor of Bessarabia. He died in 1846 and his widow, in her fifties, was still dazzling society with her renowned "unfading beauty". Karolina's younger sister, the attractive Countess Ewelina Hanska (18057-1882), when her first husband died, married Honoré Balzac after her long-standing amatory adventure with this famous writer. Balzac's attitude toward her is reflected in his love letters, which also somewhat recall Puskin's letters to her sister. Uncommon charm and talent combined with sharply fluctuating passions were, it seems, a family trait of the Rzewuskis. Ewelina's image runs through several of Balzac's novels, and even Karolina's shadow flickers in his Modeste Mignon. In this novel, dedicated to Ewelina and depicting her as its title-heroine, the elder sister of Modeste carries the name Bettina-Caroline; the first component of this double name alludes to Goethe's correspondence with Bettina Brentano, and the second to Karolina Rzewuska. In her early youth Modeste had nursed Caroline "with the inquisitiveness of a maiden imagination": the two girls, in the watches of the night, had exchanged many a confidence ... Between two girls every man, wretch though he be, is a lover. Passion is the one thing really absolute in human life; it will always have its own ... The sisters had often discussed the great drama of passion, to which imagination lends added importance. The novelist's correspondence with Ewelina deplores the "duplicity" of her elder sister, whom he scorns as "une folle hypocrite, la pire de toutes". Soon after Cirkovic's death, his widow moved to Paris. The renowned critic Sainte-Beuve was rumored to have nearly become her husband. In 1851 she married Jules Lacroix (1809-1887), a second-rate novelist, poet, translator, and playwright, some fourteen years younger than his bride. Mickiewicz again visited her, but the hostess was outraged at his un-

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ

85

sociably harsh judgment of contemporaneous French literature in the presence of French men of letters. Karolina Rzewuska-Sobanska-Cirkovic-Lacroix was approaching her eighties when in 1872 her husband published Vannée infâme, a bibliophilie volume of poems where he damned first the German intruders and then the Parisian Communards as "barbarians and bandits". Fourteen sonnets of this book were dedicated to the author's wife, accustomed to sonnetry since Mickiewicz's tributes. The first of the new series was written in Paris, September, 1870, and its final line reads: "Ma compagne est vaillante, et je reste auprès d'elle." The sonnet "France et Pologne. À ma femme", from January, 1871, begins with a lament for the agony of France and the loss of her soldiers and generals : Le glaive s'est brisé dans la main du héros. Le glaive ne peut rien, hélas! sans la prière. C'est pourquoi dans l'église, humble femme, à genoux, Les mains jointes vers Dieu, tu pleures et tu pries, Demandant au Seigneur qu'il ait pitié de nous! France et Pologne, ô sœurs, ô vous, ses deux patries! Ne désespérez pas, sanglantes et meurtries! Un ange est là, du moins, qui prie encor pour vous. Among the sonnets dedicated by Jules Lacroix to his wife ten are filled with hatred and maledictions against the bloody, blasphemous Commune. Karolina's pose of magnanimity is rebuffed by her husband's lines written in Nice, May 24, 1871: Tu pleures, ô mon ange, et je t'entends prier ... Pour qui? — Pour les bourreaux! Plaignons-les. — Ces infâmes! Non. Jusqu'au dernier souffle, on m'entendra crier: "Lâches, soyez maudits! ... et maudits dans vos femmes! Maudits dans vos enfants! ... et n'ayez pour tombeaux Que le ventre affamé des chiens et des corbeaux!" Jules' elder brother Paul (1806-1884), a popular polygraph, known under the pseudonym Bibliophile Jacob, inscribed his book on Madame de Kriidener to his sister-in-law and in its preface resumed the inveterate motif : "You have been sent down here by God in order to appeal and to charm." We do not know of another woman in world literary history to whom writings in three languages were dedicated by admirers for half a century. Ursule Lucie Caroline died at ninety (1885), nearly five decades after Pu§kin. A. Novaczynski recounts that at the end various people and periods within her adventurous life span became intertwined in her

86

THE POLICE ACCOMPLICE SUNG BY PUSKIN AND MICKIEWICZ

memory: she confused Gambetta with Garibaldi, Lev Tolstoj with Dmitrij Tolstoj, the minister of internal affairs and head of gendarmery. Nicholas II, at that time the heir to the throne, merged in her mind with Nicholas I. Right up to her death she had a liking for Astrakhan caviar and champagne, played on the clavier, excelled in wit and told frivolous anecdotes, visited the opera, loved Eugene Onegin, and the melancholy of its last stanzas seems to have reminded her of the long past Petersburg epilogue of her amatory drama with Puskin.

de proprietatibus lîtterarum serles Practica . 1 2 3 4 5

Cohn, R . G . : M a l l a r m é ' s M a s t e r p i e c e H Í e a t t , C . B . : - T h e Realism o f Dream V i s i o n Mogan, J . J . : Chaucer and the Theme o f M u t a b i l i t y N u s s e r , P . : M u s l l s Romantheorle P e r l o f f , M. :' Rhyme and Meaning i n the P o e t r y o f Yeats 6 Cusac, M . H . : N a r r a t i v e S t r u c t u r e i n t h e N o v e l s of Sir Halter Scott 7 Newton r R . P . : Form i n the 'Menschheitsdammerung' 8 Wort l e y , W.V. t T a l l e m a n t .des Rëaux 9 Swanson, D . R . : Three Conquerors 10 Gopnlk, I . : A Theory o f S t y l e and R i c h a r d s o n ' s Clarieaa 12 Feldman, S . D . : The M o r a l i t y - P a t t e r n e d Comedy o f t h e Renaissance' 13 M i t c h e l l , G . : The A r t Theme i n J o y c e C a r y ' s First Trilogy 14 Ebner, D . : Autobiography i n S e v e n t e e n t h Century England 15 B a l l , D . L . : Samuel R i c h a r d s o n ' s Theory o f Fiction 17 Raymond, M . B . : Swinburne's P o e t i c s 19 P o w e r s , ' D . C . : E n g l i s h Formal S a t i r e 20 S c h i c k , E . B . : M e t a p h o r i c a l Organicism i n H e r d e r ' s E a r l y Works 21 Hood, H.s The H i s t o r i e s o f Herodotus 22 Magner, J . E . : John Crowe Ransom 23 L a a r , E.th.M.van d e : The Inner S t r u c t u r e o f ¡fathering Heights 24 Einbond, B . L . : Samuel Johnson's A l l e g o r y 26 Harder, W . T . : A C e r t a i n Order 27 V e r n i e r , R. : ' P o é s i e i n i n t e r r o m p u e ' e t l a p o é t i q u e de Paul Eluard 39 FF/ 28 Hennedy, H . L . : U n i t y i n B a r s e t s h i r e 29 McLean, S . K . : The "Bânkelsang" and the Hork o f B e r t o l d Brecht 30 I n n i s s , K.s D.H.Lawrence's B e s t i a r y 32 G e o r g e , E . E . : H o l d e r l i n ' s "Ars P o e t i c a " 33 ° Sampson, H . G . : The A n g l i c a n T r a d i t i o n i n Eighteenth-Century V e r s e (34 B l a k e , R . E . : The "Essays de m é d i t a t i o n s p o é t i q u e s " o f F r è r e Zacharie de V i t r é 49 FF/ 35 Jakobson, R. and L . G . J o n e s : Shakespeare's V e r b a l A r t i n Th'Expence of Spirit 36 S i l v e r m a n , E . B . : P o e t i c S y n t h e s i s i n ' S h e l l e y ' s "Adonais" 38 Dougherty, A . : A Study o f Rhytmic S t r u c t u r e i n the Verse o f William Butler Yeats '40 E u s t i s , A . : M o l i è r e as I r o n i c Contemplator 41 Champigny, R . : Humanism and Human Racism 43 Kopman, H . : Rencontres w i t h t h e Inanimate i n P r o u s t ' s Reoherohe 31 FF/ 4 5 ' ' H i l l e n , G . : Andreas Gryphius' Cardenio vnd Celinde 47 Ewton, R . W . : The L i t e r a r y T h e o r i e s o f August Wilhelm S c h l e g e l 4'8 Todd, J . E . : Emily D i c k i n s o n ' s Use o f t h e Persona

Dfl. 24,18,30,22,48,24,34,24,24,22,18,18,22,36,36,30,25,32,18,40,18,28,25,28,54,28,96,48,32,10,20,38,40,18,20,22,22,22,-

de proprietatibus litterarum Series Practica 50 Metcalf, A.A.: Poetic Diction in the old English Meters of Boethlus 51 Knowlton, M.A. : The Influence of Richard' Rolle and of Julian of Norwich on the Middle English Lyrics 52 Richmond, H.M.: Renaissance Landscapes 34 54 Celler, M.M.: Giraudoux et la métaphore 55 Fletcher, R.M.! The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe 57 Nelson, T.A.: Shakespeare's Comic Theory 59 Dugan, J.R.: Illusion and Reality 61 Couchman, G.W.: This our Caesar 63 Schulz, H.-J.: This Hell of Stories .69 Godshalk, W.L.: Patterning in Shakespearean Drama 71 Kostis, N.s The Exorcism of Sex and Death in Julien Green's Novels 72 Woshinsky, B.R.: La Princesse de Clêves 49 75 Hewitt, W. : Through Those Living Pillars 49 78 Ferrante, J.M.: The Conflict of Love and 49 Honor» 83 Jones, L.E.i Poetic Fantasy and Fiction Series Didactica Swaim, K.M.: A Reading of Gulliver's Travels

Dfl. 28,28,28,FF/ 22,34,18,26,32,20,50,22,FF/ 32,FF/ 32,FF/ 32,20,-

38,-