The value of Russian literature, its peculiar
and unique message to the world, would not
be sensibly diminished, had everything it
produced from the twelfth to the beginning
of the nineteenth century perished, with the
exception of The Raid of Prince Igor. With
the beginning of the nineteenth century,
and the accession of Alexander I, the New
Age began, and the real dawn of Russian
literature broke. It was soon to be followed
by a glorious sunrise. The literature which
sprang up now and later, was profoundly
affected by public events; and public events
during this epoch were intimately linked with
the events which were happening in Western
Europe. It was the epoch of the Napoleonic
wars, and Russia played a vital part in that
drama. Public opinion, after enthusiasm had
been roused by the deeds of Suvorov, was
31]
exasperated and humiliated by Napoleon’s
subsequent victories over Russian arms. But
when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, a
wave of patriotism swept over the country,
and the struggle resulted in an increased sense
of unity and nationality. Russia emerged
stronger and more solid from the struggle.
As far as foreign affairs were concerned,
the Emperor Alexander I—on whom everything
depended—played his national part
well, and he fitly embodied the patriotic
movement of the day. At the beginning of
his reign he raised great hopes of internal
reform which were never fulfilled. He was
a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time;
a pupil of La Harpe, the Swiss Jacobin, who
instilled into him aspirations towards liberty,
truth and humanity, which throughout remained
his ideals, but which were too vague
to lead to anything practical or definite. His
reign was thus a series of more or less
undefined and fitful struggles to put the
crooked straight. He desired to give Russia
a constitution, but the attempts he made to
do so proved fruitless; and towards the end
of his life he is said to have been considerably
influenced by Metternich. It is at any rate
32]
a fact that during these years reaction once
more triumphed.
Nevertheless windows had been opened
which could not be shut, and the light which
had streamed in produced some remarkable
fruits.
When Alexander I came to the throne, the
immediate effect of his accession was the ungagging
of literature, and the first writer of
importance to take advantage of this new
state of things was Karamzin (1726-1826).
In 1802 he started a new review called the
Messenger of Europe. This was not his début.
In the reign of Catherine, Karamzin had been
brought to Moscow from the provinces, and
initiated into German and English literature.
In 1789-90 he travelled abroad and visited
Switzerland, London and Paris. On his
return, he published his impressions in the
shape of “Letters of a Russian Traveller”
in the Moscow Journal, which he founded
himself. His ideals were republican; he was
an enthusiastic admirer of England and
the Swiss, and the reforms of Peter the
Great. But his importance in Russian
literature lies in his being the first Russian
to write unstudied, simple and natural prose,
33]
Russian as spoken. He published two sentimental
stories in his Journal, but the reign
of Catherine II which now came to an
end (1796) was followed by a period of unmitigated
censorship, which lasted throughout
the reign of the Emperor Paul, until
Alexander I came to the throne. The new
review which Karamzin then started differed
radically from all preceding Russian reviews
in that it dealt with politics and made belles
lettres and criticism a permanent feature.
As soon as Karamzin had put this review on
a firm basis, he devoted himself to historical
research, and the fruit of his work in this
field was his History of the Russian Dominion,
in twelve volumes; eight published in 1816,
the rest in 1821-1826. The Russian language
was, as has been said, like an instrument waiting
for a great player to play on it, and to make
use of all its possibilities. Karamzin accomplished
this, in the domain of prose. He
spoke to the Russian heart by speaking
Russian, pure and unmarred by stilted and
alien conventionalisms.
The publication of Karamzin’s history was
epoch-making. In the first place, the success
of the work was overwhelming. It was the
34]
first time in Russian history that a prose work
had enjoyed so immense a success. Not only
were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian
language revealed to the Russians in the style,
but the subject-matter came as a surprise.
Karamzin, as Pushkin put it, revealed Russia
to the Russians, just as Columbus discovered
America. He made the dry bones of history
live, he wrote a great and glowing prose epic.
His influence on his contemporaries was
enormous. His work received at once the
consecration of a classic, and it inspired
Pushkin with his most important if not his
finest achievement in dramatic verse (Boris
Godunov).
The first Russian poet of national importance
belongs likewise to this epoch, namely
Krylov (1769[2]-1844), although he had
written a great deal for the stage in the preceding
reigns, and continued to write for a
long time after the death of Alexander I.
Krylov is also a Russian classic, of quite a
different kind. The son of an officer of the
line, he started by being a clerk in the provincial
magistrature. Many of his plays
35]
were produced with success, though none of
them had any durable qualities. But it was
not until 1805 that he found his vocation
which was to write fables. The first of these
were published in 1806 in the Moscow
Journal; from that time onward he went on
writing fables until he died in 1844.
His early fables were translations from La
Fontaine. They imitate La Fontaine’s free
versification and they are written in iambics
of varying length. They were at once successful,
and he continued to translate fables from
the French, or to adapt from Æsop or other
sources. But as time went on, he began to
invent fables of his own; and out of the two
hundred fables which he left at his death,
forty only are inspired by La Fontaine and
seven suggested by Æsop: the remainder
are original. Krylov’s translations of La
Fontaine are not so much translations as
re-creations. He takes the same subject, and
although often following the original in every
single incident, he thinks out each motif
for himself and re-creates it, so that his translations
have the same personal stamp and
the same originality as his own inventions.
This is true even when the original is a
36]
masterpiece of the highest order, such as La
Fontaine’s Deux Pigeons. You would think
the opening lines—
“Deux pigeons s’amoient d’amour tendre,
L’un d’eux s’ennuyant au logis
Fut assez fou pour entreprendre
Un voyage en lointain pays”—
were untranslatable; that nothing could be
subtracted from them, and that still less
could anything be added; one ray the more,
one shade the less, you would think, would
certainly impair their nameless grace. But
what does Krylov do? He re-creates the
situation, expanding La Fontaine’s first line
into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps
on it the impress of his personality and his
nationality. Here is a literal translation of
the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously
trying a third English version.)
“Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother.
Neither would eat nor drink without the other;
Where you see one, the other’s surely near,
And every joy they halved and every tear;
37]
They never noticed how the time flew by,
They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh.”
This gives the sense of Krylov’s poem word
for word, except for what is the most important
touch of all in the last line. The trouble
is that Krylov has written six lines which
are as untranslatable as La Fontaine’s four;
and he has made them as profoundly Russian
as La Fontaine’s are French. Nothing could
be more Russian than the last line, which it
is impossible to translate; because it should
run—
“They were sometimes sad, but they never felt ennui”—
literally, “it was never boring to them.”
The difficulty is that the word for boring in
Russian, skuchno, which occurs with the
utmost felicity in contradistinction to sad,
grustno, cannot be rendered in English in its
poetical simplicity. There are no six lines
more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly
poetical in the whole of Russian literature.
Krylov’s fables, like La Fontaine’s, deal with
animals, birds, fishes and men; the Russian
peasant plays a large part in them; often
they are satirical; nearly always they are
38]
bubbling with humour. A writer of fables
is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is
sometimes to convey pregnant sense, keen
mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled
manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human
foibles, or to express wisdom in the form of
wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse.
But Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in
remaining a poet. It has been said that his
images are conventional and outworn—that
is to say, he uses the machinery of Zephyrs,
Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,—and that
his conceptions are antiquated. But what
splendid use he makes of this machinery!
When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is
a Zephyr blowing, for instance, as when
the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze.
Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse
he conveys a picture, and more than a
picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and
the Mole, in the first lines of which he
makes you see and hear the eagle and his
mate sweeping to the dreaming wood, and
swooping down on to the oak-tree. Or again,
in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider,
he gives in a few words the sense of
height and space, as if you were looking down
39]
from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over
the mountains of the Caucasus, sees the end
of the earth, the rivers meandering in the
plains, the woods, the meadows in all their
spring glory, and the angry Caspian Sea,
darkling like the wing of a raven in the
distance. But his greatest triumph, in this
respect, is the fable of the Ass and the Nightingale,
in which the verse echoes the very trills
of the nightingale, and renders the stillness and
the delighted awe of the listeners,—the lovers
and the shepherd. Again a convention, if
you like, but what a felicitous convention!
The fables are discursive like La Fontaine’s,
and not brief like Æsop’s; but like La Fontaine,
Krylov has the gift of summing up a
situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect
by the sudden evocation of a whole picture in
a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable of
the Peasants and the River: the peasants go
to complain to the river of the conduct of the
streams which are continually overflowing
and destroying their goods, but when they
reach the river, they see half their goods
floating on it. “They looked at each other,
and shaking their heads,” says Krylov,
“went home.” The two words “went home”
40]
in Russian (poshli domoi) express their hopelessness
more than pages of rhetoric. This is
just one of those terse effects such as La
Fontaine delights in.
Krylov in his youth lived much among the
poor, and his language is peculiarly native,
racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the
language of the people and of the peasants,
and it abounds in humorous turns. He is,
moreover, always dramatic, and his fables
are for this reason most effective when read
aloud or recited. He is dramatic not only
in that part of the fable which is narrative,
but in the prologue, epilogue, or moral—the
author’s commentary; he adapts himself
to the tone of every separate fable, and becomes
himself one of the dramatis personæ.
Sometimes his fables deal with political
events—the French Revolution, Napoleon’s
invasion of Russia, the Congress of Vienna;
the education of Alexander I by La Harpe,
in the well-known fable of the Lion who sends
his son to be educated by the Eagle, of whom
he consequently learns how to make nests.
Sometimes they deal with internal evils and
abuses: the administration of justice, in fables
such as that of the peasant who brings a
41]
case against the sheep and is found guilty
by the fox; the censorship is aimed at in
the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing
in the cat’s claws; the futility of bureaucratic
regulations in the fable of the sheep
who are devoured by their superfluous watchdogs,
or in that of the sheep who are told
solemnly and pompously to drag any offending
wolf before the nearest magistrate; or, again,
in that of the high dignitary who is admitted
immediately into paradise because on earth
he left his work to be done by his secretaries—for
being obviously a fool, had he done his
work himself, the result would have been
disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they
deal merely with human follies and affairs,
and the idiosyncrasies of men.
Krylov’s fables have that special quality
which only permanent classics possess of
appealing to different generations, to people
of every age, kind and class, for different
reasons; so that children can read them
simply for the story, and grown-up people for
their philosophy; their style pleases the
unlettered by its simplicity, and is the envy
and despair of the artist in its supreme
art. Pushkin calls him “le plus national et
42]
le plus populaire de nos poètes” (this was
true in Pushkin’s day), and said his fables
were read by men of letters, merchants,
men of the world, servants and children.
His work bears the stamp of ageless modernity
just as The Pilgrim’s Progress or Cicero’s
letters seem modern. It also has the peculiarly
Russian quality of unexaggerated realism.
He sees life as it is, and writes down
what he sees. It is true that although his
style is finished and polished, he only at
times reaches the high-water mark of what
can be done with the Russian language: his
style, always idiomatic, pregnant and natural,
is sometimes heavy, and even clumsy; but
then he never sets out to be anything more
than a fabulist. In this he is supremely
successful, and since at the same time he
gives us snatches of exquisite poetry, the
greater the praise to him. But, when all is
said and done, Krylov has the talisman which
defies criticism, baffles analysis, and defeats
time: namely, charm. His fables achieved
an instantaneous popularity, which has never
diminished until to-day.
Internal political events proved the next
factor in Russian literature; a factor out of
43]
which the so-called romantic movement was
to grow.
During the Napoleonic wars a great many
Russian officers had lived abroad. They came
back to Russia after the Congress of Vienna
in 1815, teeming with new ideas and new
ideals. They took life seriously, and were
called by Pushkin the Puritans of the North.
Their aim was culture and the public welfare.
They were not revolutionaries; on the contrary,
they were anxious to co-operate with
the Government. They formed for their purpose
a society, in imitation of the German
Tugendbund, called The Society of Welfare:
its aims were philanthropic, educational, and
economic. It consisted chiefly of officers of
the Guard, and its headquarters were at St.
Petersburg. All this was known and approved
of by the Emperor. But when the Government
became reactionary, this peaceful progressive
movement changed its character. The
Society of Welfare was closed in 1821, and its
place was taken by two new societies, which,
instead of being political, were social and revolutionary.
The success of the revolutionary
movements in Spain and in Italy encouraged
these societies to follow their example.
44]
The death of Alexander I in 1825 forced
them to immediate action. The shape it took
was the “Decembrist” rising. Constantine,
the Emperor’s brother, renounced his claim to
the throne, and was succeeded by his brother
Nicholas. December 14 (O.S.) was fixed
for the day on which the Emperor should
receive the oath of allegiance of his troops.
An organized insurrection took place, which
was confined to certain regiments. The
Emperor was supported by the majority of
the Guards regiments, and the people showed
no signs of supporting the rising, which was at
once suppressed.
One hundred and twenty-five of the conspirators
were condemned. Five of them
were hanged, and among them the poet
Ryleev (1795-1826). But although the
political results of the movement were nil,
the effect of the movement on literature was
far-reaching. Philosophy took the place of
politics, and liberalism was diverted into
the channel of romanticism; but out of this
romantic movement came the springtide of
Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the
soul of the Russian people found adequate
expression. And the very fact that politics
45]
were excluded from the movement proved, in
one sense, a boon to literature: for it gave
Russian men of genius the chance to be writers,
artists and poets, and prevented them from
exhausting their whole energy in being inefficient
politicians or unsuccessful revolutionaries.
I will dwell on the drawbacks, on
the dark side of the medal, presently.
As far as the actual Decembrist movement
is concerned, its concrete and direct legacy
to literature consists in the work of Ryleev,
and its indirect legacy in the most famous
comedy of the Russian stage, Gore ot Uma,
“The Misfortune of being Clever,” by
Griboyedov (1795-1829).
Ryleev’s life was cut short before his
poetical powers had come to maturity. It is
idle to speculate what he might have achieved
had he lived longer. The work which he
left is notable for its pessimism, but still
suffers from the old rhetorical conventions
of the eighteenth century and the imitation
of French models; moreover he looked on
literature as a matter of secondary importance.
“I am not a poet,” he said, “I am
a citizen.” In spite of this, every now and
then there are flashes of intense poetical
46]
inspiration in his work; and he struck one
or two powerful chords—for instance, in his
stanzas on the vision of enslaved Russia,
which have a tense strength and fire that
remind one of Emily Brontë. He was a poet
as well as a citizen, but even had he lived to
a prosperous old age and achieved artistic
perfection in his work, he could never have
won a brighter aureole than that which his
death gained him. The poems of his last
days in prison breathe a spirit of religious
humility, and he died forgiving and praying
for his enemies. His name shines in Russian
history and Russian literature, as that of a
martyr to a high ideal.
Griboyedov, the author of Gore ot Uma, a
writer of a very different order, although not
a Decembrist himself, is a product of that
period. His comedy still remains the unsurpassed
masterpiece of Russian comedy,
and can be compared with Beaumarchais’
Figaro and Sheridan’s School for Scandal.
Griboyedov was a Foreign Office official,
and he was murdered when Minister Plenipotentiary
at Teheran, on January 30, 1829.
He conceived the plot of his play in 1816,
and read aloud some scenes in St. Petersburg
47]
in 1823-24. They caused a sensation in
literary circles, and the play began to circulate
rapidly in MSS. Two fragments of the drama
were published in one of the almanacs, which
then took the place of literary reviews. But
beyond this, Griboyedov could neither get
his play printed nor acted. Thousands of
copies circulated in MSS., but the play was
not produced on the stage until 1831, and
then much mutilated; and it was not printed
until 1833.
Gore ot Uma is written in verse, in iambics
of varying length, like Krylov’s fables. The
unities are preserved. The action takes place
in one day and in the same house—that of
Famusov, an elderly gentleman of the Moscow
upper class holding a Government appointment.
He is a widower and has one daughter,
Sophia, whose sensibility is greater than her
sense; and the play opens on a scene where
the father discovers her talking to his secretary,
Molchalin, and says he will stand no nonsense.
Presently, the friend of Sophia’s childhood,
Chatsky, arrives after a three years’ absence
abroad; Chatsky is a young man of independent
ideas whose misfortune it is to be
clever. He notices that Sophia receives him
48]
coldly, and later on he perceives that she is
in love with Molchalin,—a wonderfully drawn
type, the perfect climber, time-server and
place-seeker, and the incarnation of convention,—who
does not care a rap for Sophia.
Chatsky declaims to Famusov his contempt
for modern Moscow, for the slavish worship
by society of all that is foreign, for its
idolatry of fashion and official rank, its
hollowness and its convention. Famusov, the
incarnation of respectable conventionality, does
not understand one word of what he is saying.
At an evening party given at Famusov’s
house, Chatsky is determined to find out whom
Sophia loves. He decides it is Molchalin, and
lets fall a few biting sarcasms about him to
Sophia; and Sophia, to pay him back for his
sarcasm, lets it be understood by one of the
guests that he is mad. The half-spoken hint
spreads like lightning; and the spreading of
the news is depicted in a series of inimitable
scenes. Chatsky enters while the subject
is being discussed, and delivers a long tirade
on the folly of Moscow society, which only
confirms the suspicions of the guests; and he
finds when he gets to the end of his speech
that he is speaking to an empty room.
49]
In the fourth act we see the guests leaving
the house after the party. Chatsky is waiting
for his carriage. Sophia appears on the staircase
and calls Molchalin. Chatsky, hearing
her voice, hides behind a pillar. Liza, Sophia’s
maid, comes to fetch Molchalin, and knocks at
his door. Molchalin comes out, and not knowing
that Sophia or Chatsky are within hearing,
makes love to Liza and tells her that he only
loves Sophia out of duty. Then Sophia appears,
having heard everything. Molchalin
falls on his knees to her: she is quite inexorable.
Chatsky comes forward and begins to
speak his mind—when all is interrupted by the
arrival of Famusov, who speaks his. Chatsky
shakes the dust of the house and of Moscow
off his feet, and Sophia is left without Chatsky
and without Molchalin.
The Gore ot Uma is a masterpiece of satire
rather than a masterpiece of dramatic comedy.
That is to say that, as a satire of the Moscow
society of the day and of the society of
yesterday, and of to-morrow, it is immortal,
and forms a complete work: but as a comedy
it does not. Almost every scene separately
is perfect in itself, but dramatically it does
not group itself round one central idea or
50]
one mainspring of action. Judged from the
point of view of dramatic propriety, the
behaviour of the hero is wildly improbable
throughout; there is no reason for the spectator
to think he should be in love with Sophia;
if he is, there is no reason for him to behave
as he does; if a man behaved like that, declaiming
at an evening party long speeches on
the decay of the times, the most frivolous of
societies would be justified in thinking him
mad.
Pushkin hit on the weak point of the play
as a play when he wrote: “In The Misfortune
of being Clever the question arises,
Who is clever? and the answer is Griboyedov.
Chatsky is an honourable young man who
has lived for a long time with a clever man
(that is to say with Griboyedov), and learnt
his clever sarcasms; but to whom does he
say them? To Famusov, to the old ladies
at the party. This is unforgivable, because
the first sign of a clever man is to know at
once whom he is dealing with.”
But what makes the work a masterpiece
is the naturalness of the characters, the
dialogue, the comedy of the scenes which
represent Moscow society. It is
51]
extraordinary that on so small a scale, in four short
acts, Griboyedov should have succeeded in
giving so complete a picture of Moscow
society, and should have given the dialogue,
in spite of its being in verse, the stamp of
conversational familiarity. The portraits are
all full-length portraits, and when the play
is produced now, the rendering of each part
raises as much discussion in Russia as a
revival of one of Sheridan’s comedies in
England.
As for the style, nearly three-quarters of
the play has passed into the Russian language.
It is forcible, concise, bitingly sarcastic, it is
as neat and dry as W. S. Gilbert, as elegant
as La Fontaine, as clear as an icicle, and as
clean as the thrust of a sword. But perhaps
the crowning merit of this immortal satire is
its originality. It is a product of Russian
life and Russian genius, and as yet it is without
a rival.
Outside the current of politics and political
aspirations, there appeared during this same
epoch a poet who exercised a considerable
influence over Russian literature, and who
devoted himself exclusively to poetry. This
was Basil Zhukovsky (1783-1852). He
52]
opened the door of Russian literature on the
fields of German and English poetry. The
first poem he published in 1802 was a translation
of Gray’s Elegy; this, and an imitation
of Bürger’s Leonore, which affected all Slav
literatures, brought him fame. Later, he
translated Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, his
ballads, some of the lyrics of Uhland, Goethe,
Hebbel, and a great quantity of other foreign
poems. His translations were faithful, but
in spite of this he gave them the stamp of
his own dreamy personality. He was made
tutor to the Tsarevitch Alexander—afterwards
Alexander II,—and for a time his production
ceased; but when this task was finished, he
braced himself in his old age to translate The
Odyssey, and this translation appeared in
1848-50. In this work he obeyed the first
great law of translation, “Thou shalt not
turn a good poem into a bad one.” He produced
a beautiful work; but he also did what
all other translators of Homer have done;
he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky,
and with it something sentimental, elegiac,
and didactic.
Zhukovsky’s greatest service to Russian
literature consisted in his exploding the
53]
superstition that the literature of France was
the only literature that counted, and introducing
literary Russia to the poets of England
and Germany rather than of France. But
apart from this, he is the first and best
translator in European literature, for what
Krylov did with some of La Fontaine’s fables,
he did for all the literature he touched—he
re-created it in Russian, and made it his own.
In his translation of Gray’s Elegy, for instance,
he not only translates the poet’s meaning
into musical verse, but he conveys the
intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape,
and the poignant accent which makes that
poem the natural language of grief. It is
characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years
after he translated the poem, he visited Stoke
Poges, re-read Gray’s Elegy there, and made
another translation, which is still more
faithful than the first.
The Russian language was by this time
purified from all outward excrescences, released
from the bondage of convention and
the pseudo-classical, open to all outside influences,
and only waiting, like a ready-tuned
instrument, on which Krylov and Zhukovsky
had already sounded sweet notes and deep
54]
tones, and which Karamzin had proved to be
a magnificent vehicle for musical and perspicuous
prose, for a poet of genius to come
and sound it from its lowest note to the top
of its compass, for there was indeed much
music and excellent voice to be plucked from
it. At the appointed hour the man came.
It was Pushkin. He arrived at a time when
a battle of words was raging between the so-called
classical and romantic schools. The
pseudo-classical, with all its mythological
machinery and conventional apparatus, was
totally alien to Russia, and a direct and slavish
imitation of the French. On the other hand,
the utmost confusion reigned as to what constituted
romanticism. To each single writer it
meant a different thing: “Enfonçez Racine,”
and the unities, in one case; or ghosts,
ballads, legends, local colour in another; or
the defiance of morality and society in another.
Zhukovsky, in introducing German romanticism
into Russia, paved the way for its death,
and for the death of all exotic fashions and
models; for he paved the way for Pushkin to
render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating
models of his own and by founding a national
literature.
55]
Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, at
Moscow. He was of ancient lineage, and
inherited African negro blood on his mother’s
side, his mother’s grandmother being the
daughter of Peter the Great’s negro, Hannibal.
Until he was nine years old, he did not show
signs of any unusual precocity; but from then
onwards he was seized with a passion for
reading which lasted all his life. He read
Plutarch’s Lives, the Iliad and the Odyssey
in a translation. He then devoured all the
French books he found in his father’s library.
Pushkin was gifted with a photographic memory,
which retained what he read immediately
and permanently. His first efforts at writing
were in French,—comedies, which he performed
himself to an audience of his sisters.
He went to school in 1812 at the Lyceum of
Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St. Petersburg. His
school career was not brilliant, and his leaving
certificate qualifies his achievements as
mediocre, even in Russian. But during the
six years he spent at the Lyceum, he continued
to read voraciously. His favourite poet at
this time was Voltaire. He began to write
verse, first in French and then in Russian;
some of it was printed in 1814 and 1815 in
56]
reviews, and in 1815 he declaimed his Recollections
of Tsarskoe Selo in public at the
Lyceum examination, in the presence of
Derzhavin the poet.
The poems which he wrote at school afterwards
formed part of his collected works. In
these poems, consisting for the greater part of
anacreontics and epistles, although they are
immature, and imitative, partly of contemporary
authors such as Derzhavin and Zhukovsky,
and partly of the French anacreontic
school of poets, such as Voltaire, Gresset and
Parny, the sound of a new voice was unmistakable.
Indeed, not only his contemporaries,
but the foremost representatives of the
Russian literature of that day, Derzhavin,
Karamzin and Zhukovsky, made no mistake
about it. They greeted the first notes of this
new lyre with enthusiasm. Zhukovsky used
to visit the boy poet at school and read out
his verse to him. Derzhavin was enthusiastic
over the recitation of his Recollections of
Tsarskoe Selo. Thus fame came to Pushkin
as easily as the gift of writing verse. He had
lisped in numbers, and as soon as he began
to speak in them, his contemporaries immediately
recognized and hailed the new voice.
57]
He did not wake up and find himself famous
like Byron, but he walked into the Hall of
Fame as naturally as a young heir steps into
his lawful inheritance. If we compare
Pushkin’s school-boy poetry with Byron’s
Hours of Idleness, it is easy to understand
how this came about. In the Hours of
Idleness there is, perhaps, only one poem
which would hold out hopes of serious promise;
and the most discerning critics would
have been justified in being careful before
venturing to stake any great hopes on so
slender a hint. But in Pushkin’s early verse,
although the subject-matter is borrowed,
and the style is still irregular and careless,
it is none the less obvious that it flows
from the pen of the author without effort
or strain; and besides this, certain coins of
genuine poetry ring out, bearing the image
and superscription of a new mint, the mint of
Pushkin.
When the first of his poems to attract the
attention of a larger audience, Ruslan and
Ludmila, was published, in 1820, it was
greeted with enthusiasm by the public; but
it had already won the suffrages of that
circle which counted most, that is to say,
58]
the leading men of letters of the day, who
had heard it read out in MSS. For as soon
as Pushkin left school and stepped into the
world, he was received into the literary circle
of the day on equal terms. After he had read
aloud the first cantos of Ruslan and Ludmila
at Zhukovsky’s literary evenings, Zhukovsky
gave him his portrait with this inscription:
“To the pupil, from his defeated master”;
and Batyushkov, a poet who, after having
been influenced, like Pushkin, by Voltaire and
Parny, had gone back to the classics, Horace
and Tibullus, and had introduced the classic
anacreontic school of poetry into Russia, was
astonished to find a young man of the world
outplaying him without any trouble on the
same lyre, and exclaimed, “Oh! how well
the rascal has started writing!”
The publication of Ruslan and Ludmila
sealed Pushkin’s reputation definitely, as far
as the general public was concerned, although
some of the professional critics treated the
poem with severity. The subject of the poem
was a Russian fairy-tale, and the critics blamed
the poet for having recourse to what they
called Russian folk-lore, which they considered
to be unworthy of the poetic muse.
59]
One review complained that Pushkin’s choice
of subject was like introducing a bearded
unkempt peasant into a drawing-room, while
others blamed him for dealing with national
stuff in a flippant spirit. But the curious
thing is that, while the critics blamed him
for his choice of subject, and his friends and
the public defended him for it, quoting all
sorts of precedents, the poem has absolutely
nothing in common, either in its spirit, style
or characterization, with native Russian
folk-lore and fairy-tales. Much later on in
his career, Pushkin was to show what he
could do with Russian folk-lore. But Ruslan
and Ludmila, which, as far as its form is concerned,
has a certain superficial resemblance
to Ariosto, is in reality the result of the
French influence, under which Pushkin had
been ever since his cradle, and which in this
poem blazes into the sky like a rocket, and
bursts into a shower of sparks, never to
return again.
There is no passion in the poem and no
irony, but it is young, fresh, full of sensuous,
not to say sensual images, interruptions,
digressions, and flippant epigrams. Pushkin
wondered afterwards that nobody noticed
60]
the coldness of the poem; the truth was that
the eyes of the public were dazzled by the
fresh sensuous images, and their ears were
taken captive by the new voice: for the importance
of the poem lies in this—that the
new voice which the literary pundits had
already recognized in the Lyceum of Tsarskoe
Selo was now speaking to the whole world,
and all Russia became aware that a young
man was among them “with mouth of gold
and morning in his eyes.” Ruslan and
Ludmila has just the same sensuous richness,
fresh music and fundamental coldness as
Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. After finishing
the poem, Pushkin added a magnificent and
moving Epilogue, written from the Caucasus
in the year of its publication (1820); and when
the second edition was published in 1828, he
added a Prologue in his finest manner which
tells of Russian fairy-land.
After leaving school in 1817, until 1820,
Pushkin plunged into the gay life of St.
Petersburg. He wanted to be a Hussar, but
his father could not afford it. In default
he became a Foreign Office official; but he did
not take this profession seriously. He consorted
with the political youth and young
61]
Liberals of the day; he scattered stinging
epigrams and satirical epistles broadcast.
He sympathized with the Decembrists, but
took no part in their conspiracy. He would
probably have ended by doing so; but, luckily
for Russian literature, he was transferred in
1820 from the Foreign Office to the Chancery
of General Inzov in the South of Russia;
and from 1820 to 1826 he lived first at Kishinev,
then at Odessa, and finally in his own
home at Pskov. This enforced banishment
was of the greatest possible service to the
poet; it took him away from the whirl and
distractions of St. Petersburg; it prevented
him from being compromised in the drama
of the Decembrists; it ripened and matured
his poetical genius; it provided him, since it
was now that he visited the Caucasus and the
Crimea for the first time, with new subject-matter.
During this period he learnt Italian and
English, and came under the influence of
André Chénier and Byron. André Chénier’s
influence is strongly felt in a series of lyrics
in imitation of the classics; but these
lyrics were altogether different from the
anacreontics of his boyhood. Byron’s
62]
influence is first manifested in a long poem
The Prisoner of the Caucasus. It is Byronic
in the temperament of the hero, who talks in
the strain of the earlier Childe Harold; he is
young, but feels old; tired of life, he seeks for
consolation in the loneliness of nature in the
Caucasus. He is taken prisoner by mountain
tribesmen, and set free by a girl who
drowns herself on account of her unrequited
love. Pushkin said later that the poem was
immature, but that there were verses in it
that came from his heart. There is one
element in the poem which is by no means
immature, and that is the picture of the
Caucasus, which is executed with much
reality and simplicity. Pushkin annexed the
Caucasus to Russian poetry. The Crimea
inspired him with another tale, also Byronic
in some respects, The Fountain of Baghchi-Sarai,
which tells of a Tartar Khan and his
Christian slave, who is murdered out of
jealousy by a former favourite, herself drowned
by the orders of the Khan. Here again the
descriptions are amazing, and Pushkin draws
out a new stop of rich and voluptuous music.
In speaking of the influence of Byron over
Pushkin it is necessary to discriminate.
63]
Byron helped Pushkin to discover himself;
Byron revealed to him his own powers,
showed him the way out of the French
garden where he had been dwelling, and acted
as a guide to fresh woods and pastures new.
But what Pushkin took from the new provinces
to which the example of Byron led him was
entirely different from what Byron sought
there. Again, the methods and workmanship
of the two poets were radically different.
Pushkin is never imitative of Byron; but
Byron opened his eyes to a new world,
and indeed did for him what Chapman’s
Homer did for Keats. It frequently happens
that when a poet is deeply struck by the
work of another poet he feels a desire to
write something himself, but something different.
Thus Pushkin’s mental intercourse
with Byron had the effect of bracing the
talent of the Russian poet and spurring him
on to the conquest of new worlds.
Pushkin’s six years’ banishment to his own
country had the effect of revealing to him
the reality and seriousness of his vocation
as a poet, and the range and strength of his
gifts. It was during this period that besides
the works already mentioned he wrote some
64]
of his finest lyrics, The Conversation between
the Bookseller and the Poet—perhaps the most
perfect of his shorter poems—it contains four
lines to have written which Turgenev said he
would have burnt the whole of his works—a
larger poem called The Gypsies; his dramatic
chronicle Boris Godunov, and the beginning
of his masterpiece Onegin; several ballads,
including The Sage Oleg, and an unfinished
romance, the Robber Brothers.
Not only is the richness of his output
during this period remarkable, but the variety
and the high level of art maintained in all
the different styles which he attempted and
mastered. The Gypsies (1827), which was
received with greater favour by the public
than any of his poems, either earlier or later,
is the story of a disappointed man, Aleko,
who leaves the world and takes refuge with
gypsies. A tragically ironical situation is the
result. The anarchic nature of the Byronic
misanthrope brings tragedy into the peaceful
life of the people, who are lawless because
they need no laws. Aleko loves and marries
the gypsy Zemfira, but after a time she tires
of him, and loves a young gypsy. Aleko
surprises them and kills them both. Then
65]
Zemfira’s father banishes him from the
gypsies’ camp. He, too, had been deceived.
When his wife Mariula had been untrue and
had left him, he had attempted no vengeance,
but had brought up her daughter.
“Leave us, proud man,” he says to Aleko.
“We are a wild people; we have no laws,
we torture not, neither do we punish; we
have no use for blood or groans; we will not
live with a man of blood. Thou wast not
made for the wild life. For thyself alone
thou claimest licence; we are shy and good-natured;
thou art evil-minded and presumptuous.
Farewell, and peace be with thee!”
The charm of the poem lies in the descriptions
of the gypsy camp and the gypsy life,
the snatches of gypsy song, and the characterization
of the gypsies, especially of the women.
It is not surprising the poem was popular; it
breathes a spell, and the reading of it conjures
up before one the wandering life, the camp-fire,
the soft speech and the song; and makes
one long to go off with “the raggle-taggle
gypsies O!”
Byron’s influence soon gave way to that
of Shakespeare, who opened a still larger
field of vision to the Russian poet. In 1825
66]
he writes: “Quel homme que ce Shakespeare!
Je n’en reviens pas. Comme Byron le tragique
est mesquin devant lui! Ce Byron qui
n’a jamais conçu qu’un seul caractère et c’est
le sien ... ce Byron donc a partagé entre
ses personages tel et tel trait de son caractère:
son orgeuil à l’un, sa haine à l’autre,
sa mélancolie au troisième, etc., et c’est
ainsi d’un caractère plein, sombre et énergique,
il a fait plusieurs caractères insignifiants; ce
n’est pas là de la tragédie. On a encore une
manie. Quand on a conçu un caractère, tout
ce qu’on lui fait dire, même les choses les plus
étranges, en porte essentiellement l’empreinte,
comme les pédants et les marins dans les
vieux romans de Fielding. Voyez le haineux
de Byron ... et là-dessus lisez Shakespeare.
Il ne craint jamais de compromettre son
personage, il le fait parler avec tout l’abandon
de la vie, car il est sûr en temps et lieu, de
lui faire trouver le langage de son caractère.
Vous me demanderez: votre tragédie est-elle
une tragédie de caractère ou de costume?
J’ai choisi le genre le plus aisé, mais j’ai tâché
de les unir tous deux. J’écris et je pense. La
plupart des scènes ne demandent que du
raisonnement; quand j’arrive à une scène qui
67]
demande de l’inspiration, j’attends ou je
passe dessus.”
I quote this letter because it throws light,
firstly, on Pushkin’s matured opinion of
Byron, and, secondly, on his methods of
work; for, like Leonardo da Vinci, he formed
the habit, which he here describes, of leaving
unwritten passages where inspiration was
needed, until he felt the moment of bien
être when inspiration came; and this not
only in writing his tragedy, but henceforward
in everything that he wrote, as his note-books
testify.
The subject-matter of Boris Godunov was
based on Karamzin’s history: it deals with
the dramatic episode of the Russian Perkin
Warbeck, the false Demetrius who pretended
to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible.
The play is constructed on the model of
Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, but in a still
more disjointed fashion, without a definite
beginning or end: when Mussorgsky made an
opera out of it, the action was concentrated
into definite acts; for, as it stands, it is not
a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had
not the power of conceiving and executing
a drama which should move round one idea to
68]
an inevitable close. He had not the gift
of dramatic architectonics, and still less that
of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the
scenes, whether they be tragic and poetical,
or scenes of common life, are as vivid as any
in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive,
and they speak a language which is at the
same time ancient, living, and convincing.
In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of
stage architectonics and stage carpentry, it
is not merely meant that he lacked the gift
of arranging acts that would suit the stage,
or that of imagining stage effects. His whole
play is not conceived as a drama; a subject
from which a drama might be written is taken,
but the drama is left unwritten. We see
Boris Godunov on the throne, which he has
unlawfully usurped; we know he feels remorse;
he tells us so in monologues; we see his soul
stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of
fire, and we watch the wheel revolve; and
that is all the moral and spiritual action that
the part contains; he is static and not dynamic,
he never has to make up his mind; his will
never has to encounter the shock of another
will during the whole play. Neither does the
chronicle centre round the Pretender. It is
69]
true that we see the idea of impersonating
the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind;
and it is also true that in one scene with his
Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically
moving in a dramatic situation. She loves him
because she thinks he is the son of an anointed
King. He loves her too much to deceive her,
and tells her the truth. She then says she
will have nothing of him; and then he rises
from defeat and shame to the height of the
situation, becomes great, and, not unlike
Browning’s Sludge, says: “Although I am
an impostor, I am born to be a King all the
same; I am one of Nature’s Kings; and I
defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell
every one what I have told you. Nobody will
believe you.” And Marina is conquered once
more by his conduct and bearing.
This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict
of two wills and two souls. But there the
matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken,
and we are shown a series of different patterns,
in which the heroine plays no part at all, and
in which the hero only makes a momentary
appearance. The fact is there is neither hero
nor heroine in the play. It is not a play, but
a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame
70]
Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never
attempted. As a chronicle, a series of detached
scenes, it is supremely successful.
There are certain scenes which attain to
sublimity: for instance, that in the cell of
the monastery, where the monk is finishing
his chronicle; and the monologue in which
Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying
speech to his son. The verse in these scenes
is sealed with the mark of that God-gifted
ease and high seriousness, which belong only
to the inspired great. They are Shakespearean,
not because they imitate Shakespeare,
but because they attain to heights of imaginative
truth to which Shakespeare rises more
often than any other poet; and the language
in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitableness,
an absence of all conscious effort and of
all visible art and artifice, a closeness of
utterance combined with a width of suggestion
which belong only to the greatest artists, to
the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to Dante.
Boris Godunov was not published until
January 1, 1831, and passed, with one
exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics.
Like so many great works, it came before its
time; and it was not until years afterwards
71]
that the merits of this masterpiece were
understood and appreciated.
In 1826 Pushkin’s banishment to the
country came to an end; in that year he was
allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St.
Petersburg. In 1826 his poems appeared in
one volume, and the second canto of Onegin
(the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827
The Gypsies, and the third canto of Onegin;
in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth cantos of
Onegin; in 1829 Graf Nulin, an admirably
told Conte such as Maupassant might have
written, of a deceived husband and a wife who,
finding herself in the situation of Lucretia,
gives the would-be Tarquin a box on the
ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in being unfaithful
with some one else—the Cottage of
Kolomna is another story in the same vein—and
in the same year Poltava.
This poem was written in one month,
in St. Petersburg. The subject is Mazepa,
with whom the daughter of his hereditary
enemy, Kochubey, whom he afterwards tortures
and kills, falls in love. But it is in
reality the epic of Peter the Great.[3] When
72]
the poem was published, it disconcerted the
critics and the public. It revealed an entirely
new phase of Pushkin’s style, and it
should have widened the popular conception
of the poet’s powers and versatility. But at
the time the public only knew Pushkin
through his lyrics and his early tales; Boris
Godunov had not yet been published; moreover,
the public of that day expected to find
in a poem passion and the delineation of
the heart’s adventures. This stern objective
fragment of an epic, falling into their sentimental
world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses and
cupids, like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan
and executed by a god, met with little appreciation.
The poet’s verse which, so far as the
73]
public knew it, had hitherto seemed like
a shining and luscious fruit, was exchanged
for a concentrated weighty tramp of ringing
rhyme, martelé like steel. It is as if Tennyson
had followed up his early poems in a style
as concise as that of Pope and as concentrated
as that of Browning’s dramatic lyrics. The
poem is a fit monument to Peter the Great,
and the great monarch’s impetuous genius
and passion for thorough craftsmanship seem
to have entered into it.
In 1829 Pushkin made a second journey to
the Caucasus, the result of which was a
harvest of lyrics. On his return to St.
Petersburg he sketched the plan of another
epic poem, Galub, dealing with the Caucasus,
but this remained a fragment.
In 1831 he finished the eighth and last
canto of Onegin. Originally there were nine
cantos, but when the work was published one
of the cantos dealing with Onegin’s travels
was left out as being irrelevant. Pushkin
had worked at this poem since 1823. It
was Byron’s Beppo which gave him the
idea of writing a poem on modern life; but
here again, he made of the idea something
quite different from any of Byron’s
74]
work. Onegin is a novel. Eugene Onegin
is the name of the hero. It is, moreover,
the first Russian novel; and as a novel it
has never been surpassed. It is as real as
Tolstoy, as finished in workmanship and
construction as Turgenev. It is a realistic
novel; not realistic in the sense that Zola’s
work was mis-called realistic, but realistic in
the sense that Miss Austen is realistic. The
hero is the average man about St. Petersburg;
his father, a worthy public servant, lives
honourably on debts and gives three balls a
year. Onegin is brought up, not too strictly,
by “Monsieur l’Abbé”; he goes out in the
world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in
French, and able to dance the Mazurka.
Onegin can touch on every subject, can
hold his tongue when the conversation becomes
too serious, and make epigrams. He knows
enough Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk
about Juvenal, and put “Vale!” at the end
of his letters, and he can remember two lines
of the Æneid. He is severe on Homer and
Theocritus, but has read Adam Smith. The
only art in which he is proficient is the ars
amandi as taught by Ovid. He is a patron
of the ballet; he goes to balls; he eats
75]
beef-steaks and paté de foie gras. In spite of all
this—perhaps because of it—he suffers from
spleen, like Childe Harold, the author says.
His father dies, leaving a lot of debts behind
him, but a dying uncle summons him to the
country; and when he gets there he finds his
uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the
estate. In the country, he is just as much
bored as he was in St. Petersburg. A new
neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a
young man fresh from Germany, an enthusiast
and a poet, and full of Kant, Schiller,
and the German writers. Lensky introduces
Onegin to the neighbouring family, by name
Larin, consisting of a widow and two daughters.
Lensky is in love with the younger daughter,
Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a
round face, as Onegin says, like the foolish
moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less
pretty; shy and dreamy, she conceals under
her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut
character and a strong will.
Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen’s
heroines; as alive as Fielding’s Sophia Western,
and as charming as any of George Meredith’s
women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as
Juliet. Turgenev, with all his magic, and
76]
Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours
of life, never created a truer, more radiant,
and more typically Russian woman. She is
the type of all that is best in the Russian
woman; that is to say, of all that is best in
Russia; and it is a type taken straight from
life, and not from fairy-land—a type that
exists as much to-day as it did in the days
of Pushkin. She is the first of that long
gallery of Russian women which Turgenev,
Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky have given us, and
which are the most precious jewels of Russian
literature, because they reflect the crowning
glory of Russian life. Tatiana falls in love
with Onegin at first sight. She writes to him
and confesses her love, and in all the love
poetry of the world there is nothing more
touching and more simple than this confession.
It is perfect. If Pushkin had written this and
this alone, his place among poets would be
unique and different from that of all other
poets.
Possibly some people may think that there
are finer achievements in the love poetry of
the world; but nothing is so futile and so
impertinent as giving marks to the great
poets, as if they were passing an examination.
77]
If a thing is as good as possible in itself, what
is the use of saying that it is less good or
better than something else, which is as good
as possible in itself also. Nevertheless, placed
beside any of the great confessions of love in
poetry—Francesca’s story in the Inferno,
Romeo and Juliet’s leavetaking, Phèdre’s
declaration, Don Juan Tenorio’s letter—the
beauty of Tatiana’s confession would not be
diminished by the juxtaposition. Of the rest
of Pushkin’s work at its best and highest, of
the finest passages of Boris Godunov, for
instance, you can say: This is magnificent,
but there are dramatic passages in other
works of other poets on the same lines and
as fine; but in Tatiana’s letter Pushkin has
created something unique, which has no
parallel, because only a Russian could have
written it, and of Russians, only he. It is
a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as
spontaneous as a blackbird’s song.
Onegin tells Tatiana he is not worthy of
her, that he is not made for love and marriage;
that he would cease to love her at once; that
he feels for her like a brother, or perhaps a
little more tenderly. It then falls out that
Onegin, by flirting with Olga at a ball, makes
78]
Lensky jealous. They fight a duel, and
Lensky is killed. Onegin is obliged to leave
the neighbourhood, and spends years in travel.
Tatiana remains true to her first love; but she
is taken by her relatives to Moscow, and
consents at last under their pressure to marry
a rich man of great position. In St. Petersburg,
Onegin meets her again. Tatiana has
become a great lady, but all her old charm
is there. Onegin now falls violently in love
with her; but she, although she frankly confesses
that she still loves him, tells him that
it is too late; she has married another, and
she means to remain true to him. And there
the story ends.
Onegin is, perhaps, Pushkin’s most characteristic
work; it is undoubtedly the best
known and the most popular; like Hamlet,
it is all quotations. Pushkin in his Onegin
succeeded in doing what Shelley urged
Byron to do—to create something new
and in accordance with the spirit of the age,
which should at the same time be beautiful.
He did more than this. He succeeded
in creating for Russia a poem that was purely
national, and in giving his country a classic,
a model both in construction, matter, form,
79]
and inspiration for future generations. Perhaps
the greatest quality of this poem is its
vividness. Pushkin himself speaks, in taking
leave, of having seen the unfettered march
of his novel in a magic prism. This is just
the impression that the poem gives; the scenes
are as clear as the shapes in a crystal; nothing
is blurred; there are no hesitating notes, nothing
à peu près; every stroke comes off; the nail
is hit on the head every time, only so easily
that you do not notice the strokes, and all
labour escapes notice. Apart from this the
poem is amusing; it arrests the attention as
a story, and it delights the intelligence with
its wit, its digressions, and its brilliance. It
is as witty as Don Juan and as consummately
expressed as Pope; and when the occasion
demands it, the style passes in easy transition
to serious or tender tones. Onegin has been
compared to Byron’s Don Juan. There is
this likeness, that both poems deal with
contemporary life, and in both poems the
poets pass from grave to gay, from severe to
lively, and often interrupt the narrative to
apostrophize the reader. But there the likeness
ends. On the other hand, there is a
vast difference. Onegin contains no adventures.
80]
It is a story of everyday life. Moreover,
it is an organic whole: so well constructed
that it fits into a stage libretto—Tchaikovsky
made an opera out of it—without difficulty.
There is another difference—a difference
which applies to Pushkin and Byron in
general. There is no unevenness in Pushkin;
his work, as far as craft is concerned, is always
on the same high level. You can admire the
whole, or cut off any single passage and it
will still remain admirable; whereas Byron
must be taken as a whole or not at all—the
reason being that Pushkin was an impeccable
artist in form and expression, and that Byron
was not.
In the winter of 1832 Pushkin sought a
new field, the field of historical research; and
by the beginning of 1833 he had not only
collected all the materials for a history of
Pugachev, the Cossack who headed a rising
in the reign of Catherine II; but his literary
activity was so great that he had also written
the rough sketch of a long story in prose dealing
with the same subject, The Captain’s Daughter,
another prose story of considerable length,
Dubrovsky, and portions of a drama, Rusalka,
The Water Nymph, which was never finished.
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Besides Boris Godunov and the Rusalka,
Pushkin wrote a certain number of dramatic
scenes, or short dramas in one or more scenes.
Of these, one, The Feast in the Time of Plague,
is taken from the English of John Wilson (The
City of the Plague), with original additions.
In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast
between the genius which does what it must
and the talent which does what it can. The
story is based on the unfounded anecdote
that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri out of
envy. This dramatic and beautifully written
episode has been set to music as it stands by
Rimsky-Korsakov.
The Covetous Knight, which bears the
superscription, “From the tragi-comedy of
Chenstone”—an unknown English original—tells
of the conflict between a Harpagon and
his son: the delineation of the miser’s imaginative
passion for his treasures is, both in
conception and execution, in Pushkin’s finest
manner. This scene has been recently set to
music by Rakhmaninov. The Guest of Stone,
the story of Don Juan and the statua gentilissima
del gran Commendatore, makes Don
Juan life. A scene from Faust between
Faust and Mephistopheles is original and not
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of great interest; Angelo is the story of
Measure for Measure told as a narrative with
two scenes in dialogue. Rusalka, The Water
Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the
sham province of national legend, and it is
tantalizing that this poetic fragment remained
a fragment.
Pushkin’s prose is in some respects as
remarkable as his verse. Here, too, he
proved a pioneer. Dubrovsky is the story of
a young officer whose father is ousted, like
Naboth, from his small estate by his neighbour,
a rich and greedy landed proprietor,
becomes a highway robber so as to revenge
himself, and introduces himself into the family
of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes
his revenge because he falls in love with his
enemy’s daughter. In this extremely vivid
story he anticipates Gogol in his lifelike
pictures of country life. The Captain’s
Daughter is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev
has nothing stagey or melodramatic about
him, nothing of Harrison Ainsworth. Of his
shorter stories, such as The Blizzard, The
Pistol Shot, The Lady-Peasant, the most
entertaining, and certainly the most popular,
is The Queen of Spades, which was so admirably
83]
translated by Mérimée, and formed the subject
of one of Tchaikovsky’s most successful
operas. As an artistic work The Egyptian
Nights, written in 1828, is the most interesting,
and ranks among Pushkin’s masterpieces. It
tells of an Italian improvisatore who, at a
party in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on
Cleopatra and her lovers. The story is
written to lead up to this poem, which gives
a gorgeous picture of the pagan world, and
is another example of Pushkin’s miraculous
power of assimilation. Pushkin’s prose has
the same limpidity and ease as his verse; the
characters have the same vitality and reality
as those in his poems and dramatic scenes,
and had he lived longer he might have
become a great novelist. As it is, he furnished
Gogol (whose acquaintance he made
in 1832) with the subject of two of his masterpieces—Dead
Souls and The Revisor.
The province of Russian folk-lore and
legend from which Pushkin took the idea of
Rusalka was to furnish him with a great
deal of rich material. It was in 1831 that
in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he wrote
his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian
popular style, The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Up
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till now he had written only a few ballads
in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a
brilliant success as a pastiche; but it was a
pastiche and not quite the real thing, as
cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of
epigram here and there, which indeed makes
it delightful reading. He followed it by another
in the comic vein, The Tale of the Pope and
his Man Balda, and by two more Märchen,
The Dead Tsaritsa and The Golden Cock; but
it was not until two years later that he wrote
his masterpiece in this vein, The Story of the
Fisherman and the Fish. It is the same
story as Grimm’s tale of the Fisherman’s
wife who wished to be King, Emperor, and
then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting
ambition. The tale is written in unrhymed
rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines;
all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such
as might have been handed down by oral
tradition in some obscure village out of the
remotest past; it has the real Volkston; the
good-nature and simplicity and unobtrusive
humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects of
all these stories were told to Pushkin by his
nurse, Anna Rodionovna, who also furnished
him with the subject of his ballad, The
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Bridegroom. In Pushkin’s note-books there
are seven fairy-tales taken down hurriedly
from the words of his nurse; and most likely
all that he wrote dealing with the life of the
people came from the same source. Pushkin
called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher,
and said that he was indebted to her for
counteracting the effects of his first French
education.
In 1833 he finished a poem called The
Brazen Horseman, the story of a man who
loses his beloved in the great floods in St.
Petersburg in 1834, and going mad, imagines
that he is pursued by Falconet’s equestrian
statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains
a magnificent description of St. Petersburg.
During the last years of his life, he was
engaged in collecting materials for a history
of Peter the Great. His power of production
had never run dry from the moment he left
school, although his actual work was interrupted
from time to time by distractions and
the society of his friends.
All the important larger works of Pushkin
have now been mentioned; but during the
whole course of his career he was always
pouring out a stream of lyrics and occasional
86]
pieces, many of which are among the most
beautiful things he wrote. His variety and
the width of his range are astonishing. Some
of them have a grace and perfection such as
we find in the Greek anthology; others—“Recollections,”
for instance, in which in the
sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pass
before him the blotted scroll of his past deeds,
which he is powerless with all the tears in the
world to wash out—have the intensity of
Shakespeare’s sonnets. This poem, for instance,
has the same depth of feeling as
“Tired with all these, for restful death I
cry,” or “The expense of spirit in a waste
of shame.” Or he will write an elegy as
tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture
of a sledge in a snow-storm, and give you the
plunge of the bewildered horses, the whirling
demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the
quiet spaces of snow, in intoxicating rhythms
which E. A. Poe would have envied; or again
he will write a description of the Caucasus
in eleven short lines, close in expression and
vast in suggestion, such as “The Monastery
on Kazbek”; or he will bring before you the
smell of the autumn morning, and the hoofs
ringing out on the half-frozen earth; or he
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will write a patriotic poem, such as To the
Slanderers of Russia, fraught with patriotic
indignation without being offensive; in this
poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of
Russia: “Will not,” he says, “from Perm to
the Caucasus, from Finland’s chill rocks to the
flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to
the unshaken walls of China, glistening with
its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise?”
Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance
and as humble in spirit as one of the old
Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as
Musset and as playful as Heine: he will
translate you the spirit of Horace and the
spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure
the restraint of André Chénier, and the
impetuous gallop of Byron.
Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin’s
poems is the poem which expresses his view
of life in the elegy—
“As bitter as stale aftermath of wine
Is the remembrance of delirious days;
But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs
The past more sorely, as my days decline.
My path is dark. The future lies in wait,
A gathering ocean of anxiety,
But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create,
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That is my prayer; to live and not to die!
I know that ecstasy shall still lie there
In sorrow and adversity and care.
Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine,
Be moved to tears by musings that are mine;
And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh
Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky.”
But the greatest of his short poems is probably
“The Prophet.” This is a tremendous
poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin
only attained once. It is Miltonic in conception
and Dantesque in expression; the syllables
ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a
silver clarion. It is, as it were, the Pillars of
Hercules of the Russian language. Nothing
finer as sound could ever be compounded
with Russian vowels and consonants; nothing
could be more perfectly planned, or present,
in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the
imagination. Even a rough prose translation
will give some idea of the imaginative splendour
of the poem—
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“My spirit was weary, and I was athirst,
and I was astray in the dark wilderness.
And the Seraphim with six wings appeared
to me at the crossing of the ways: And he
touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as
soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle
that is frightened my prophetic eyes were
awakened. He touched my ears and he filled
them with noise and with sound: and I
heard the Heavens shuddering and the
flight of the angels in the height, and the
moving of the beasts that are under the
waters, and the noise of the growth of the
branches in the valley. He bent down over
me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore
out my sinful tongue, and he took away that
which is idle and that which is evil with his
right hand, and his right hand was dabbled
with blood; and he set there in its stead,
between my perishing lips, the tongue of a
wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder
with a sword, and he plucked out my trembling
heart, and in my cloven breast he set
a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the
desert I lay, and the voice of God called
and said unto me, ‘Prophet, arise, and take
heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and
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go forth over the sea and over the land and
set light with My word to the hearts of the
people.’”
In 1837 came the catastrophe which brought
about Pushkin’s death. It was caused by
the clash of evil tongues engaged in frivolous
gossip, and Pushkin’s own susceptible and violent
temperament. A guardsman, Heckeren-Dantes,
had been flirting with his wife.
Pushkin received an anonymous letter, and
being wrongly convinced that Heckeren-Dantes
was the author of it, wrote him a
violent letter which made a duel inevitable.
A duel was fought on the 27th of February,
1837, and Pushkin was mortally wounded.
Such was his frenzy of rage that, after lying
wounded and unconscious in the snow, on
regaining consciousness, he insisted on going on
with the duel, and fired another shot, giving a
great cry of joy when he saw that he had
wounded his adversary. It was only a slight
wound in the hand. It was not until he reached
home that his anger passed away. He died
on the 29th of February, after forty-five hours
of excruciating suffering, heroically borne;
he forgave his enemies; he wished no one to
avenge him; he received the last sacraments;
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and he expressed feelings of loyalty and
gratitude to his sovereign. He was thirty-seven
years and eight months old.
Pushkin’s career falls naturally into two
divisions: his life until he was thirty, and
his life after he was thirty. Pushkin began
his career with liberal aspirations, and he
disappointed some in the loyalty to the throne,
the Church, the autocracy, and the established
order of things which he manifested later;
in turning to religion; in remaining in the
Government service; in writing patriotic
poems; in holding the position of Gentleman
of the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in
fact, what is called a reactionary. But it
would be a mistake to imagine that Pushkin
was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause
of liberty for a handful of silver and a riband
to stick in his coat. The liberal aspirations
of Pushkin’s youth were the very air that the
whole of the aristocratic youth of that day
breathed. Pushkin could not escape being
influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel
then, than he was a reactionary afterwards,
when again the very air which the whole of
educated society breathed was conservative
and nationalistic. It may be a pity that it
92]
was so; but so it was. There was no liberal
atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and
the radical effervescence of the Decembrists
was destroyed by the Decembrists’ premature
action. It is no good making a revolution
if you have nothing to make it with. The
Decembrists were in the same position as
the educated élite of one regiment at Versailles
would have been, had it attempted to destroy
the French monarchy in the days of Louis
XIV. The Decembrists by their premature
action put the clock of Russian political progress
back for years. The result was that
men of impulse, aspiration, talent and originality
had in the reign of Nicholas to seek
an outlet for their feelings elsewhere than in
politics, because politics then were simply
non-existent.
But apart from this, even if the opportunities
had been there, it may be doubted
whether Pushkin would have taken them.
He was not born with a passion to reform the
world. He was neither a rebel nor a reformer;
neither a liberal nor a conservative;
he was a democrat in his love for the whole of
the Russian people; he was a patriot in his
love of his country. He resembled Goethe
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rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or Byron;
although, in his love of his country and in
every other respect, his fiery temperament
both in itself and in its expression was far
removed from Goethe’s Olympian calm. He
was like Goethe in his attitude towards society,
and the attitude of the social and official
world towards him resembles the attitude of
Weimar towards Goethe.
During the first part of his career he gave
himself up to pleasure, passion, and self-indulgence;
after he was thirty he turned his
mind to more serious things. It would not
be exact to say he became deeply religious,
because he was religious by nature, and he
soon discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism;
but in spite of this he was a victim of amour-propre;
and he wavered between contempt
of the society around him and a petty resentment
against it which took the shape of
scathing and sometimes cruel epigrams. It
was this dangerous amour-propre, the fact of
his being not only passion’s slave, but petty
passion’s slave, which made him a victim of
frivolous gossip and led to the final catastrophe.
“In Pushkin,” says Soloviev, the
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philosopher, “according to his own testimony
there were two different and separate beings:
the inspired priest of Apollo, and the most
frivolous of all the frivolous children of the
world.” It was the first Pushkin—the inspired
priest—who predominated in the latter
part of his life; but who was unable to expel
altogether the second Pushkin, the frivolous
Weltkind, who was prone to be exasperated
by the society in which he lived, and when
exasperated was dangerous. There is one
fact, however, which accounts for much.
The more serious Pushkin’s turn of thought
grew, the more objective, purer, and stronger
his work became, the less it was appreciated;
for the public which delighted in the comparatively
inferior work of his youth was not
yet ready for his more mature work. What
pleased the public were the dazzling colours,
the sensuous and sometimes libidinous images
of his early poems; the romantic atmosphere;
especially anything that was artificial in
them. They had not yet eyes to appreciate
the noble lines, nor ears to appreciate the
simpler and more majestic harmonies of his
later work. Thus it was that they passed Boris
95]
Godunov by, and were disappointed in the
later cantos of Onegin. This was, of course,
discouraging. Nevertheless, it is laughable
to rank Pushkin amongst the misunderstood,
among the Shelleys, the Millets, of Literature
and Art; or to talk of his sad fate. To talk
of him as one of the victims of literature is
merely to depreciate him.
He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus,
which gave him inspiration: to his own
country home, which gave him leisure. He
was censored. Yes: but the Emperor undertook
to do the work himself. Had he lived
in England, society—as was proved in the
case of Byron—would have been a far severer
censor of his morals and the extravagance of
his youth, than the Russian Government.
Besides which, he won instantaneous fame,
and in the society in which he moved he was
surrounded by a band not only of devoted but
distinguished admirers, amongst whom were
some of the highest names in Russian literature—Karamzin,
Zhukovsky, Gogol.
Pushkin is Russia’s national poet, the Peter
the Great of poetry, who out of foreign
material created something new, national
96]
and Russian, and left imperishable models for
future generations. The chief characteristic
of his genius is its universality. There
appeared to be nothing he could not understand
nor assimilate. And it is just this all-embracing
humanity—Dostoyevsky calls him
πανάνθρωπος —this capacity for understanding
everything and everybody, which makes him
so profoundly Russian. He is a poet of everyday
life: a realistic poet, and above all things
a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as
an epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief
and produce a noble fragment, he cannot set
crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians
the beauty of their landscape and the poetry
of their people; and they, with ears full of
pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and
romantic stage properties, did not understand
what he was doing: but they understood
later. For a time he fought against the
stream, and all in vain; and then he gave
himself up to the great current, which took
him all too soon to the open sea.
He set free the Russian language from the
bondage of the conventional; and all his life
he was still learning to become more and more
97]
intimate with the savour and smell of the
people’s language. Like Peter the Great,
he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and
his whole energies in craftsmanship. He was
a great artist; his style is perspicuous, plastic,
and pure; there is never a blurred outline,
never a smear, never a halting phrase or a
hesitating note. His concrete images are, as
it were, transparent, like Donne’s description
of the woman whose
“... pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought,
That you might almost think her body thought.”
His diction is the inseparable skin of the
thought. You seem to hear him thinking.
He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated
spontaneity. His soul was sincere,
noble, and open; he was frivolous, a child
of the world and of his century; but if he
was worldly, he was human; he was a citizen
as well as a child of the world; and it is that
which makes him the greatest of Russian
poets.
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His career was unromantic; he was rooted
to the earth; an aristocrat by birth, an official
by profession, a lover of society by taste. At
the same time, he sought and served beauty,
strenuously and faithfully; he was perhaps
too faithful a servant of Apollo; too exclusive
a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find
none of the piteous cries, no beauty of soaring
and bleeding wings as in Shelley, nor the
sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no
tempest of defiant challenge, no lightnings
of divine derision, as in Byron; his is neither
the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that
“brave soldier in the war of the liberation
of humanity,” nor the agonized passion of a
suffering Catullus. He never descended into
Hell. Every great man is either an artist or
a fighter; and often poets of genius, Byron
and Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently
fighters than they are artists. Pushkin was
an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what
makes even his love-poems cold in comparison
with those of other poets. Although he was
the first to make notable what was called the
romantic movement; and although at the
beginning of his career he handled romantic
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subjects in a more or less romantic way, he
was fundamentally a classicist—a classicist
as much in the common-sense and realism and
solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the
perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form.
And he soon cast aside even the vehicles
and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively
followed reality. “He strove with none, for
none was worth his strife.” And when his
artistic ideals were misunderstood and depreciated,
he retired into himself and wrote
to please himself only; but in the inner court
of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired
he created imperishable things; for he loved
nature, he loved art, he loved his country,
and he expressed that love in matchless
song.
For years, Russian criticism was either
neglectful of his work or unjust towards it;
for his serene music and harmonious design
left the generations which came after him, who
were tossed on a tempest of social problems and
political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when
Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin’s memorial at
Moscow, the homage which he paid to the
dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of
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the whole of Russia. His work is beyond
the reach of critics, whether favourable or
unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of
his countrymen, and chiefly upon the lips of
the young.
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