Imperial literature

Pushkin occupies a unique place in Russian literature. It is not just that Russians view him as their greatest poet; he is also virtually the symbol of Russian culture. His life, as well as his work, has acquired mythic status. To criticize Pushkin, or even one of his characters—as, for example, Tatyana, the heroine of his novel Yevgeny Onegin (written 1823–31; Eugene Onegin)—has been taken as something akin to blasphemy. Pushkin’s quasi-sacred status has itself been parodied by Russian authors, including the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, the absurdist Daniil Kharms, and, most recently, Andrey Sinyavsky in his Progulki s Pushkinym (1972; Strolls with Pushkin).

Even if one sets this mythic image aside, Pushkin is truly one of the world’s most accomplished poets; his verse, however, which relies on the author’s perfect control of form, tone, and language, does not read well in translation. Deeply playful and experimental, Pushkin adopted a vast array of conflicting masks and personae. He writes now seriously, now with irony, and now with irony at his own irony, on moral and philosophical themes. He is ultimately a philosophical fox, appreciating the limitations, as well as the virtues, of any set of ideas. A master parodist, Pushkin wrote a number of erotic and at times sacrilegious mock-epics, such as “Gavriiliada” (1821; “The Gabrieliad”), a scabrous retelling of the Annunciation, and Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Ludmila), which, after parodying epic, folk tale, literary ballad, and romance in a spirit of pure play, ends with a startlingly sombre epilogue. His diverse lyrics include a series on the poet’s double identity as artist and man of the world; political poems that got him into trouble with the tsar as well as poems in praise of the tsar and his suppression of the Poles; some remarkable elegies (“Vospominaniye” [1828; “Remembrance”]; “Elegiya” [1830; “Elegy”]); love poems, including the “imageless” “Ya vas lyubil” (1829; “I Loved You Once”); and powerful meditations on human evil (“Anchar” [1828; “The Upas Tree”]; “Ne day mne Bog soyti s uma” [1833; “God Grant I Go Not Mad”]).

Pushkin’s narrative poems include Tsygany (1824; “The Gypsies”), which considers the meaning of freedom. Plot is mere excuse for parody of literary forms and conventions in Domik v Kolomne (1830; The Little House in Kolomna). Most famously, Medny vsadnik (written 1833; The Bronze Horseman), which reflects on Peter the Great and the significance of St. Petersburg, examines the meaning of history in relation to individual lives. Concern with the nature of historical causation also led to complex formal innovations in the quasi-Shakespearean drama Boris Godunov (written 1824–25), which reworked Karamzin’s Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo and was in turn reworked by other artists, notably Modest Mussorgsky in his opera Boris Godunov (1869; revised 1874). Pushkin’s greatest work was probably Eugene Onegin, the first truly great Russian novel and the source of countless themes and images in Russian fiction. Playful in the manner of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Lord Byron’s Don Juan, it far surpasses them for sheer brilliance of form, wit, and thought. Amid endless clever digressions, in which the poet adopts a dazzling array of tones and engages in myriad self-conscious self-parodies, it tells the story of Onegin, a “superfluous man”—that is, a man with no core or purpose to his life—and Tatyana, who stands for authenticity in a sea of literary or social clichés, which she somehow manages to transcend even when she accepts them. The work’s serial publication over several years enabled both its own unpredictable creation and changes in the author’s perspective to become themes of the poem itself.

Each of Pushkin’s four “little tragedies,” all written in 1830, succinctly deals with a philosophical problem. The most remarkable, Motsart i Salyeri (Mozart and Salieri), based on a legend that Salieri poisoned Mozart, meditates on the nature of creativity while introducing, in brilliantly compressed speeches, what was to be one of the important Russian themes—metaphysical rebellion against God.

After 1830 Pushkin turned to prose. He wrote both a novella and a nonfictional account—Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The Captain’s Daughter) and Istoriya Pugachovskogo bunta (1834; The History of Pugachev)—about the same historical events, as if to illustrate that representing the historical truth requires more than one genre. Povesti pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (1831; Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin) filters five narratives, each a parody of a received plot, through the minds of several narrators, collectors, or editors. Pikovaya dama (1834; The Queen of Spades) offers a suspenseful account of a man seeking mystic knowledge that would enable him to gamble without risk and, implicitly, to know the deepest forbidden truths. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment may be seen as an expansion of Pushkin’s brief story.

Lermontov and Griboyedov

Next to Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, who personifies Romanticism, is probably Russia’s most frequently anthologized poet. His celebrated lyrics often recycle lines from his own and others’ poems. “Smert poeta” (1837; “Death of a Poet”), which first earned him fame, deals with Pushkin’s death shortly after a fatal duel in 1837. Among his narrative poems, Demon (1841; The Demon) describes the love of a Byronic demon for a mortal woman; Pesnya pro tsarya Ivana Vasilyevicha, molodogo oprichnika i udalogo kuptsa Kalashnikova (1837; A Song About Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Bodyguard, and the Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov) is a stylized folk epic. Also an accomplished prose stylist, Lermontov wrote Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time), which in form is something between a novel and a complexly framed cycle of stories about a single hero, a Byronic superfluous man. This work ranges from sketches of philosophical brilliance (“The Fatalist”) to episodes of near puerility (“Princess Mary”). The theme of the superfluous man finds another important rendition in Aleksandr Griboyedov’s classic work, Gore ot uma (completed 1824; Woe from Wit).