Pushkin, Literary Criticism, and Creativity in Closed Places
- Pushkin, Literary Criticism, and Creativity in Closed Places
For the Russian-speaking world, the approaching bicentennial of their greatest poet is easily as significant as the new millennium. Precociously gifted, prodigiously restless, Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow of noble and exotic parentage in 1799, less than a century after Peter the Great had opened his still medieval country to Western Europe. Pushkin’s life had little slack in it. Politically suspect and financially strapped for much of his maturity, he married the most beautiful woman in the empire and was killed defending her honor (and his own) in a duel in St. Petersburg in January 1837. During these decades, the salon and patronage system that had sponsored high art gave way to a literary market—and Pushkin, adapting to the transition with ingenuity and uneven success, became Russia’s first fully professional writer. In a trajectory that appears incomprehensible from the perspective of cultures with more leisurely literary development, Pushkin both created the modern Russian literary language and within two decades raised it to a peak that his countrymen slowly came to realize was not to be surpassed. Leaping over the baser metals, we now call his era Russia’s “Golden Age.”
I. Pushkin
By some caprice of fate, Pushkin’s genius appeared at precisely the right time for this fledgling secular-aristocratic culture. In the pre- and post-Napoleonic era, from the venerated intellectual centers of France, England, and the German and Italian states, the literati of Russia’s two capitals were exposed to a steady influx of styles and genres: neoclassical odes, sentimental ballads, society tales, gothic narratives, Byronic verse epics, romantic dramas, Waverley historical novels. With great virtuosity, Pushkin absorbed these models, transfigured them, integrated them, parodied them, and then readied himself—and the Russian language—for the next wave. The tiny group of Enlighteners at the edge of this huge Eurasian continent was an articulate and agile force. Bilingual by [End Page 653] upbringing (French was the language of polite high society), borderline by geography, and translator by necessity, the Russian man of letters felt himself to be wholly at home nowhere, an outsider to each of these successively imported traditions. To the extent that the court society of Tsar Nicholas I had a “native language,” it was protocol itself. But it was protocol mixed with the masquerade and with a pervasive, capricious censorship that encouraged Russian subjects to encode disagreements in “Aesopian language” rather than risk illicit public opposition; intonations of irony came to underlie the most innocent utterance. The elite salon-dwellers of early nineteenth-century Russia became superb readers. They were also natural residents of “secondary city,” that realm of art at one remove: literary criticism.
At the time, however, this subtle play of perspectives and acts of translation went almost entirely one way. As a cultural borrower, a colony with a “barbaric” history vis-à-vis Western Europe, Russia could not wait for others to learn her language and read her. That task fell to the second half of the century; in this earlier period, European travelers preferred to see in Russian culture (both low and high) something exceptional and untranslatably exotic. Surveying the empire two years after Pushkin’s death, the urbane Marquis de Custine, in his famous account, expressed profound dissatisfaction with the Russian imperial court: its “Asiatic” love of deception, its “multitude of little superfluous precautions” 1 and the “designed inertia” (272) and “protective silence” (273) surrounding public atrocities, its society women for whom “illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness” (84). And of Pushkin, whom he read in French translation, the Marquis wrote: “This author has borrowed much of his colouring from the new poetical school of Western Europe. . . . I therefore do not recognize him as a real Muscovite poet. . . . Where there is no language, there is no poetry. . . . How could the national genius develop itself in a society where people speak four languages without knowing one?” (288–89).
The Frenchman was wrong, but provocatively so. The ability of Russian writers to absorb, translate, and juxtapose the systems of others, measuring one against the other and criticizing them all...
