Part 28 (1/2)

He was received everywhere with open arms. He joined the main current of social and literary life and speedily electrified society. He was for a little entirely happy, but he had overestimated the extent of his freedom. Gradually he realised that he was not allowed even to read aloud his writings without submitting them to his censor.

_Bors G.o.dunv_ was refused on the plea that it would have been better if the author had rewritten it in prose, turning it into a historical novel like those of Sir Walter Scott. Consequently the drama did not appear till 1831, much polished and toned down.

In these last years Pushkin founded and edited a literary monthly called _The Contemporary_, which played a great part in the development of the literature of Russia later on.

The net of officialdom was meanwhile being drawn tighter and tighter round him: he had to attend compulsory meaningless ceremonies at the Court. The Government gave him 20,000 roubles for the publication of his works, and elected him member of the Academy. But they would not allow him to retire from the service. In 1829 he dashed away to the Caucasus without leave.

He joined the ranks and fought, but returned safely. He then married a society beauty whom he loved sincerely but who increased his expenses enormously. He continued to train his talents and wrote a series of brilliant epigrams which increased the number of his friends and foes.

He had enemies in every camp.... Meanwhile a young officer, of French and Dutch extraction, by name Baron Dantes, began to press his attentions on Pushkin's wife. Pushkin received a series of anonymous letters ... he, however, trusted his wife completely. She urged him to retire with her to the country to get away from the impending doom, but he challenged the Baron, who had by that time married the sister of Pushkin's wife. Pushkin was fatally wounded in the duel and died mourned by a whole nation.... And what is his legacy? He must have been no mean poet who could induce Turgenev to say that he would burn all his works if he could but have written four lines of the conversation between the Bookseller and the Poet.

His legacy is that he stripped Reality from her daintily-coloured veil--not to show her possible hideousness, but to enjoy the beauty of her form. And beneath his hands nakedness rose like a piece of magic sculpture, warm and breathing of life. His variety and the width of his range are astonis.h.i.+ng.

I have attempted to convey something of this. He can write an elegy as tender as Tennyson, a picture of a snowstorm in intoxicating rhythms which would have made Poe green with jealousy; his patriotic poems are lofty and inspired, his prayers humble, sincere and devout. His love poems are as playful as Heine's, as tender as Musset's; he can translate with equal spirit and exactness Byron and Horace, the Koran and Dante.

Mr Baring selects two poems as examples of the greatness of his style and the force of his magic.

”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, 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.”

The other and greater is _The Prophet_, which is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression: it is, Mr Baring says, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.

”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 peris.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take heed, and hear; be filled with my will, and go forth over the sea and over the land and set light with my word to the hearts of the people.'”

IV

LeRMONTOV (1814-1841)

Lermontov was descended from a Scotsman, George Learmonth, who was present at the siege of a small Polish town in 1613.

He had always been connected with the army: his father was an officer, his mother a young girl, at the time of her marriage, of n.o.ble birth: she died at the age of twenty. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother, who only permitted him to visit his father on very rare occasions. He was in all respects very lonely, entirely without society or friends.h.i.+p, excellently educated by the very best tutors in n.o.ble tastes and refined manners, with such success that he knew French, German and English thoroughly before he was twelve. If ever he saw a serf being punished he would immediately give vent to his anger by attacking the torturer with a knife or stones.

He was, in spite of his fondness for other languages, tenacious of his own, and a great lover of Russia. ”In the Russian folklore,” he wrote when he was fifteen, ”told from mouth to mouth there is probably more than in the whole of French literature.”

But it was the Caucasus that first led him to creative art. He was ten when he first accompanied his grandmother to that land, whither she went in search of health. It is, I think, worth while to dwell on the beauties of this country in order to see quite what sort of scenery it was that so fascinated the child's mind.

In his fifteenth and sixteenth year Lermontov was educated at the University Pension at Moscow, and filled all his exercise-books with poetry, all of which betrayed a deeply impressionable, pa.s.sionate, highly strung nature, permeated with views quite extraordinary in one so young.

The two years following saw him a member of the University proper, consciously isolating himself from his contemporaries in spite of adequate means; on the other hand, he launched into the sea of fas.h.i.+onable society life.

The influence of an unending round of b.a.l.l.s, masquerades and supper-parties prompted him to write drinking songs and epigrams which could not be tolerated by the Press, while at the same time he showed an extraordinary power of detaching himself from vulgarity and giving himself up to his work. Always he would invest his productions with mockery and sarcasm.

During his second year he left Moscow on account of a row which he got into over an unpopular professor, and went to Petrograd, where he joined the fas.h.i.+onable Yunker's School, and learnt some of the joys of military life.