Part 1 (1/2)

EUGENE ONEGIN.

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN.

Acknowledgements.

I should like to thank the following for their help: Peter Carson, my editor for his constant scrutiny; Nina Zhutovsky (St. Petersburg) who cleared up every mistake; Robert Chandler for his devotion and counsel; Angela Livingstone for her careful reading and improvements; Ruth Pavey for her pertinent comments; Carla and Dan Mitch.e.l.l for their common sense; the late Hannah Mitch.e.l.l for her enthusiasm and encouragement; Leonid Arinshtein (Moscow) for his suggestions; Yu D. Levin (Moscow) for his criticism; Sergei Bocharov (Moscow) for his advice about the map; Martin Thom for his clarification of the role of the Carbonari in my Introduction; PKS Architects and the Art History Department of University College, London for the use of their photocopy facilities; Tom Dale Keever for sending me an audiotape of Innokentii Smoktunovsky reading Eugene Onegin. In retrospect, I am grateful to the late Isaiah Berlin and John Bayley for having blessed my very first stanza.

I thank the following for their warm support throughout my work on Onegin: Antony Wood, Natalia Mikhailova (Deputy Director of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Nicholas Jacobs, Dmitry Gutov (Moscow) and Gina Barker. Above all, I am indebted more than I can say to Barbara Rosenbaum for her love of the poem and her unstinting efforts to ensure that my translation was poetic. Whether it is or not is my responsibility not hers.

Stanley Mitch.e.l.l.

Chronology.

1799 26 May Born in Moscow. Father of ancient Muscovite aristocratic lineage; mother a granddaughter of Abyssinian General Abram Gannibal (hero of Pushkin's unfinished novel The Negro of Peter the Great).

1811a17 Educated at newly opened Imperial Lycee at Tsarskoe Selo. First poetry (earliest publication 1814).

1817a20 Nominal government appointment in Foreign Office, St Petersburg. Life of dissipation. 'Free-thinking' acquaintances (future Decembrists).

1820 Completed first major narrative poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila. Exiled to south for a handful of 'liberal' verses on freedom, serfdom and autocracy.

1820a24 'Southern exile' (via Caucasus and Crimea to Kis.h.i.+nev and, from July 1823, Odessa). 'Byronic' narrative poems, including The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray. Began Eugene Onegin (1823). Recognition as leading poet of his generation.

1824a6 After misdemeanours in Odessa, exile continued in greater isolation of parental estate of Mikhailovskoe. The Gipsies (1824); Count Nulin; Boris G.o.dunov (1825). Misses Decembrist Revolt of 1825, ruthlessly suppressed by new emperor, Nicholas I.

1826 September Summoned to Moscow by Nicholas I. Freed from exile, with tsar as personal censor; subject thereafter to 'surveillance, guidance and counselling' of Count Benkendorf, Head of the Third Section (Secret Police). Resumed life in Moscow and St Petersburg; restlessness, search for stability.

1828 Poltava (narrative poem on Peter the Great and Mazeppa). Four-month visit to Transcaucasia. Witnessed Russian army in action against the Turks.

1830 Proposed to Natalya Goncharova (1812a63). In September a November stranded by cholera epidemic at new estate of Boldino: first and most productive 'Boldino autumn' (Onegin; lyrics; Little Tragedies; Tales of Belkin; The Little House in Kolomna).

1831 Married in February. Settled in St Petersburg. Completed Onegin.

1833 Historical research. Travelled to Urals. Second Boldino autumn (The Bronze Horseman; work on The Queen of Spades).

1833a6 Unhappy period in St Petersburg: humiliations at court (with requests for retirement from government service refused), mounting debts and marital insecurity. Relatively little creative work: The Captain's Daughter (completed 1836) and some outstanding lyrics.

1837 27 January Provoked into duel with Baron D'Anthes, adopted son of Dutch amba.s.sador, and shot in stomach. Died two days later. 'Secret' burial decreed to avoid expressions of public sympathy.

Introduction.

1.

Alexander Pushkin (1799a1837) is by the common consent of his compatriots Russia's greatest writer. He is to Russia what Shakespeare is to England, Goethe to Germany and Dante to Italy. He lived at the springtime of Russian literature, which had gained its independent language only some fifty years before his birth. There was no unified language before Mikhail Lomonosov formulated it in his famous grammar of 1755. Before that, Church Slavonic coexisted with the disparate dialects of the civil service and the business community. With the growth of a centralized state a national language appeared.

In this new period Russian writers leaned heavily on Western models, and the n.o.bility, to which Pushkin belonged, spoke French before it did Russian. French phraseology, often in its more flowery form, left its stamp on dramatists, novelists and poets during the reign of the German Empress Catherine the Great (1762a96), who loved all things French, corresponded with Voltaire and invited Diderot to St Petersburg. She freed the n.o.bility from the service imposed on them by Peter the Great (1672a1725) and encouraged them to use their leisure in the pursuit of literature and the arts, as long as they didn't question the fundamentals of the Russian state, in particular serfdom. Enlightenment figures at home were imprisoned or sent to Siberia.

While it would be wrong to say that Pushkin was the first authentically Russian writer, since predecessors like the fabulist Ivan Krylov and the playwright Denis Fonvizin were already incorporating the vernacular in their work, nevertheless he was the first to treat the major events of Russian history and society in an accessible way. He borrowed themes and styles from Western literature only to give them new twists from a Russian perspective. Although he tried his hand at most genres, he was essentially a poet. The new literary language had blossomed into a poetic culture in the generation preceding him, dominated by the Romantic Vasily Zhukovsky and the more cla.s.sical Konstantin Batyushkov. Zhukovsky gave the language a new expressiveness and musicality, Batyushkov a fresh clarity and precision. Pushkin learned from them both. In his own generation a cl.u.s.ter of poets appeared a Yazykov, Delvig, Baratynsky a who became known as the Pushkin pleiad and appear as minor characters in Eugene Onegin. As elsewhere in contemporary Europe this poetic heyday was short-lived, superseded by the prose novel a Gogol, Turgenev a with which Western readers are more familiar. Pushkin himself went on to produce an historical novel, The Captain's Daughter (1836), and other works of prose. His poetry reflected a time of hope among the younger members of the n.o.bility, epitomized by two dates a 1812 and 1825.

In 1812, Russia's armies defeated Napoleon. Yet on reaching Paris their younger officers were drawn to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Back in Russia, they were keen to introduce reforms a abolition of serfdom, a const.i.tutional monarchy, even a republic. Having no influence on the increasingly reactionary Tsar Alexander I (1777a1825), who headed the Holy Alliance, they began forming secret societies on the model of the Western Carbonari1 movements, aimed at overturning the government. Pushkin, then aged thirteen, befriended some of these officers when they were quartered in the grounds of his lycee. Several of his close schoolfriends would later join the secret societies. For the liberal n.o.bility 1812 was a wake-up call. Officers were impressed by the courage of their serf soldiers. Soon, on leaving the lycee, Pushkin was writing poems deploring serfdom. Circulating all over Russia, they earned him the honour of becoming the Tsar's first political victim, exiled in 1820. The years of hope came to an end when the young revolutionaries attempted an ill-organized coup d'etat on the death of Alexander, which was mercilessly crushed by the new Tsar, Nicholas I (1825a.5.5). The date of the revolt, 14 December 1825, gave the partic.i.p.ants the name 'Decembrists'.

Pushkin was still in exile at the time. During the previous years he had met the conspirators, but was not admitted to their ranks because of his volatility and indiscretion. However, when the new Tsar called him to Moscow and asked him what he would have done had he been present at the attempted revolt, Pushkin replied that he would have stood with his friends on the Senate Square in St Petersburg, the chosen place of the insurrection. Nicholas played a cat-and-mouse game with him, revoking his exile and promising to be his personal protector and censor. In fact, the task fell to the chief of the secret police. Pushkin married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova in 1831, who had no interest in his work and was happy only at court functions, which Pushkin hated, particularly after having been a.s.signed a demeaning rank by the Tsar out of keeping with his age. Nor was he, either as a small landowner or a professional writer, able to pay for his wife's expensive tastes.

From this moment Pushkin was trapped by the court until his death in a duel with a French emigre officer, the Baron D' Anthes, who was paying attentions to his wife. Pushkin was thirty-seven. Later, the symbolist poet Alexander Blok remarked that it was not D' Anthes's bullet that killed Pushkin, but 'lack of air' in the court environment.

Although the Pushkin age was short-lived, and Pushkin himself died at thirty-seven, his work provided the seeds for the later Russian novel and several operas. Eugene Onegin inaugurated a lineage of superfluous men and self-sacrificing women in the novels of Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev, and in Tchaikovsky's opera version of Pushkin's novel-in-verse. Pushkin suggested the plots of Dead Souls and The Inspector General to Nikolai Gogol, appreciating the latter's gifts for the grotesque that were outside his more cla.s.sical bent. Leo Tolstoy emulated Pushkin's storytelling manner, comparing it with Homer's, and his novel Anna Karenina describes what might have happened to Tatiana had she given in to Onegin. With Fyodor Dostoevsky, who condemned the Onegin type as a Western intrusion and glorified Tatiana as the exemplar of Russian womanhood, a nationalist cult of Pushkin began that has not ceased. Radicals and conservatives fought over Pushkin's characters as if they were real people. Opponents of Tsarism saw Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana as kindred victims of feudal Russia.

By birth Pushkin was deeply embedded in Russian history. On his father's side he could boast a 600-year lineage as a n.o.bleman. On his mother's he was the great-grandson of an African princeling, stolen from the harem at Constantinople for Peter the Great, under whose tutelage he rose to the rank of general. The features of Gannibal, as he was called, still showed in his great-grandson, whose African roots gave him the romantic feeling of an outsider wanting to get back to his native land (Chapter I, stanza 50). But Pushkin was equally attached to Peter, who played a dominant part in his outlook and work (see The Bronze Horseman (1833) and Poltava (1828a9)). At the same time he was envious of the new aristocracy who owed their advancement to Peter (and then to Catherine), ousting the older n.o.bility to which his family, on his father's side, belonged. Unloved as a child, he found a new family in his lycee, where he made lasting friends.h.i.+ps. He was famed for his love poetry, but friends.h.i.+p nevertheless remained his chief value, as Onegin attests, where friends form an invisible audience or enter directly into the novel.

2.

On 4 November 1823 Pushkin wrote to a friend, Prince Vyazemsky, from Odessa: 'I am writing now not a novel, but a novel in verse a the devil of a difference. Something like Don Juan a there's no point in thinking about publication; I'm writing whatever comes into my head.'2 Odessa was Pushkin's second place of exile after Kis.h.i.+nev, in Bessarabia. In Odessa he was in the employ of the Governor Count Vorontsov, who had little appreciation for his poetry, calling him 'a weak imitator of a writer whose usefulness may be said to be very slight a Lord Byron'.3 The zest with which Pushkin wrote his new work reflected a hectic life that included an affair with the Governor's wife.

In 1825, he was removed from Odessa, at the request of Vorontsov, to Mikhailovskoye, the Pushkin family estate in north-west Russia, which was to be his third and final place of exile, From there, in a letter to another friend, Alexander Bestuzhev, Pushkin wrote, in a different vein, about Onegin and Don Juan: No one respects Don Juan more than I do... but it hasn't anything in common with Onegin. You compare the satire of the Englishman Byron with mine, and demand the same thing of me! No, my dear fellow, you are asking a lot. Where is my satire? There's not a hint of it in Eugene Onegin. The foundations of Petersburg would crack if I touched satire. a The very word 'satirical' should not have entered the preface. Wait for the other cantos... Canto One is merely a rapid introduction.4 Bestuzhev, himself a writer, was also a Decembrist. Many Decembrists were literary men, who, like Bestuzhev, saw their craft as a means of political struggle against autocracy and serfdom and were puzzled by Pushkin's apparent departure from the radical poems that had sent him into exile. Why was Russia's foremost poet, they asked, wasting his talent on the trivial lives of the gentry? In 1824, four years into exile, Pushkin declared in response to the most significant of Decembrist works, Kondraty Ryleyev's Dumy (Reflections), that the aim of poetry was poetry. In a series of poems Ryleyev had evoked heroic figures from the past as models to be followed in the present. Pushkin questioned the accuracy of Ryleyev's work, claiming that he was on the contrary projecting present ideals into the past.

Pushkin spent the first three years of his exile (1820a23) in what he called the 'accursed town' of Kis.h.i.+nev, capital of Bessarabia, serving in the office of General Inzov, Administrator for New Colonies in the South. By 1823, when the Decembrist movement was gathering steam, Pushkin had disavowed his earlier idealism. In 'The Sower of Freedom in the Desert', a poem written in Odessa, he scorns himself for philanthropy and the people for pa.s.sivity. Indirectly, the poem targets the Carbonari and their followers in Western Europe (1820a23), crushed by the Holy Alliance. Pushkin writes to a friend that he is parodying the parable from the Matthew and Luke gospels that tells of Christ going out to sow. In Pushkin's incarnation the saviour is 'a moderate democrat' who sows in vain. The Decembrists were, like the Carbonari, largely a military organization, operating through secret societies and equally disconnected from the people they wished to liberate. Pushkin's sympathies for the Greek insurgents, whom he met in Kis.h.i.+nev and Odessa, likewise vanished. Could these dregs, he asked, be the descendants of Themistocles and Pericles?

Exile brought Pushkin into closer contact with his own countrymen, learning of their folklore from his beloved serf nurse, Arina Rodionovna, who appears as Filipevna, Tatiana's nurse, in Eugene Onegin. Her songs about the seventeenth-century rebel Sten'ka Razin inspired Pushkin's own songs about him (1826). In a letter to his brother (1824) he called him 'the only poetic figure in Russian history'.5 The magnetic Emelyan Pugachov (1740?-75), who led a ma.s.sive peasant revolt against Catherine the Great, dominates The Captain's Daughter. These rebellions were popular, not directed by another cla.s.s. Smaller peasant revolts were innumerable during the entire period of serfdom. Where the Decembrists wished to import Western const.i.tutional models into Russia, Pushkin delved ever more deeply into Russian history to seek political answers for his own time. On the eve of the Decembrist revolt he completed his Shakespearean drama Boris G.o.dunov, set in the so-called Time of Troubles (1604a13), the interregnum between the Riurik and the Romanov dynasties. Here, the people, who take centre stage, appear by turn pa.s.sive, fickle, savage, murderous and finally mortified by the a.s.sa.s.sination of the deceased Boris's family, to which they have been party. Their horrified silence at the end, when asked by the Boyars to applaud yet another Pretender, pa.s.ses judgement not only on their time, but on ruling-cla.s.s manipulation in every age. The centrality of the people in Boris G.o.dunov goes beyond any of Pushkin's Shakespearean models. But the play is Shakespearean in the sense that no one is the victor other than history. With this lesson in mind Pushkin writes to a friend, on hearing of the Decembrist defeat, that they should look upon it through Shakespearean eyes.

3.

Eugene Onegin is certainly about the life of the n.o.bility down to the niceties of Onegin's toiletry. But the popular element is very strong there and even decisive. Filipevna, based on Pushkin's nurse, is also storyteller to Tatiana, who is rooted in peasant superst.i.tion and the Russian countryside. Of course, she also reads French and English novels and writes Russian with extreme difficulty. Her declaration of love for Onegin has to be translated by Pushkin into Russian. Nevertheless, it is clear where her roots are when, as the Princess whom Onegin is courting in Chapter VIII, she repudiates the aristocratic flummery that surrounds her and expresses her longing for the countryside and her nurse, now dead.