И время и место: Историко-филологический сборник к шестидесятилетию Александра Львовича Осповата. Сборник статей

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СКАЧАТЬ And underlying all this was a burning curiosity and impatience that was colored with superstition but not religious belief per se. Pushkin was not and never would be a confirmed unbeliever; in a world so full of charm and beauty, he could not give himself to any authority – except his poetry – completely, up to and including the ultimate authority of Russian Orthodoxy or its opposite, atheism. As he writes in the 1817 poem, “Unbelief” (Bezverie), the closest thing to a cri de cœur during the Lyceum years, “Mind seeks the Godhead, but the heart does not find it” (Um ishchet bozhestva, a serdtse ne nakhodit) (I, 243). This does not mean that Pushkin is asserting that God does not exist, only that he, his heart, that part of him that feels, cannot find him yet in his young life. And so it would always be. As Pushkin says in a poem written several months before his death:

      Напрасно я бегу к сионским высотам,

      Грех алчный гонится за мною по пятам…

      Так, ноздри пыльные уткнув в песок сыпучий,

      Голодный лев следит оленя бег пахучий.

(III,419)

      [In vain do I run up to the heights of Zion,

      Greedy sin follows fast on my tracks…

      Thus, its dusty nostrils stuck into the crumbling sand,

      Does the hungry lion follow the scent of the deer.]

      Note that Pushkin is painfully aware of his sin and its consequences, which presupposes not just an understanding but an acceptance of the difference between right and wrong.

      Thus, and this is my principal argument in these pages, Pushkin is intensely superstitious, but not religious, in a distinctive Russian way. This superstitiousness is a trait that goes perfectly with, precisely because it is so different from, the enlightenment principles, beginning with liberté, égalité, fraternité, that he inherited at the Lyceum. Without the Lyceum Pushkin might have become another rather talented, though frivolous, versifier like his father or uncle. Without superstition (again, the “religion” of poetry, or at least his poetry) he might have become a government official, like Iakovlev, or military officer, like Matiushkin, or Decembrist, like Pushchin. The superstitious person is the card player, the gambler, which Pushkin also started to become at school. He would play cards passionately, and badly, his entire life, many times getting deeper into debt at moments when he needed money most. Superstition is the agnostic’s, not the atheist’s, religion. One follows certain rituals and procedures (recall the scene of fortune-telling that brings on Tatiana’s prophetic dream in Eugene Onegin) just in case they might help, but not because one is certain they will. This is also how poets engage otherworldly forces, now challenging them, now coaxing them, as Pushkin also started doing in earnest at the Lyceum.

      I would also argue that it was during these Lyceum years that Pushkin’s verbal role-playing became something more momentous. Now it began to involve what might be called ontological rhymes. His challenges to Derzhavin and Davydov were playful, but they had the potential to become serious, particularly if the object of the challenge was a dead authority figure. Note that Derzhavin would die within a year of his “annointing” Pushkin as his successor. In that period not only did Pushkin ventriloquize Derzhavin’s voice perfectly in Reminiscences at Tsarskoe Selo (Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele, 1814), but he also managed to parody the old man’s odic sputterings in the unpublished Fonvizins Shade (Ten Fonvizina, 1815). In fact, in the latter work the playful schoolboy seemed to give his benefactor a push, claiming that Derzhavin and his fustian rhetoric had outlived their time. All this gave the generational confrontation a “ghost story” quality that appealed to Pushkin’s sense of fate, risk, chance. It was as if the mastery at one level (the first member of the rhyme pair) was so complete that it implied an act of usurpation that carried beyond the poem (the second member of the rhyme pair, i.e., the “other shoe” still waiting to drop). This was happening even as Pushkin was spouting epigrams at any and all who happened to thwart him or assert their authority over him. By taking chances, by not looking before he leapt, Pushkin learned another lesson. He came to understand that his challenges had consequences, not merely in this world, but more importantly, in the next. His acts of language became totemic, mythopoetical, capable of creating plot in life. For the shades of those who had departed (think how many ghosts and shades there are in Pushkin’s poetic world) could not stand to be mocked – there was something blasphemous in this, something that called punishment down on own’s head, which the boy also knew perfectly well. But he could not help himself from mocking, that was how he asserted himself, made a place for himself at the table.

      Therefore, when Pushkin says in the poem to Marie Smith that the dead husband is sleeping soundly in the grave and will not return should they take their pleasure in the here and now, he is really whistling in the dark. With superstitious awe he senses that the ghost may well return to punish him because he, the pretender, deserves to be haunted. We can say this because that is precisely the plot of one of Pushkin’s greatest masterpieces, The Stone Guest (Kamennyi gost\ 1830), written thirteen years later on the eve of the poet’s own marriage and telling the story of how Don Juan is dragged off to hell by the statue of the man he has killed and in the presence of the widow he was about to enjoy. The part of the puzzle that is missing is beyond of the page so to speak, somewhere in the future. The poet has set the action in motion by desiring the widow in the first place and mocking the one who has the moral right to her in the second. He can’t help himself but he knows it is wrong. He is Davydov and Derzhavin at the same time. Language is his power,but it is his only power – a distinctly modern concept. In short, Illichevskii’s play with language gives us a riddle plain and simple; Pushkin’s play with language gives us a ghost story that is a secret map to our darkest desires and fears. Pushkin knows that potentially the joke is on Pushkin, and that is why he became the closest thing in Russian to Shakespeare.

      Notes

      ¹ The present essay is adapted from a work in progress (a “creative biography” of Pushkin) by the author and Sergei Davydov (Middlebury College).

      ² Пушкин А. С. Полное собрание сочинений: В 17 т. М., 1937–1959. Т. 6. С. 165 (further references to this edition will appear directly in the text accompanied by volume and page numbers); Pushkin A. Eugene Onegin / Trans, by J.E. Falen. Oxford, 1995. P. 185.

      ³ Грот К.Я. Пушкинский лицей. СПб., 1998. С. 412.

      ⁴ Пущин И.И. Записки о Пушкине. Письма. М., 1989. С. 43–44.

      ⁵ Cited in: Анненков П.В. Пушкин в Александровскую эпоху. Минск, 1998. С. 43/

      ⁶ Вересаев В. Пушкин в жизни / 6-е изд. М., 1936. Т.1. С. 89.

      ⁷ Пущин И.И. Указ. соч. С. 46–47.

      ⁸ Nabokov V. Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, 1944. P. 29.

      ⁹ Recall Pushkin’s famous definition of inspiration (vdokhnovenie), which he often shows in practice in poems like “Poet” (1827): “Inspiration? It is the disposition/orientation of the soul to the most vivid reception of impressions, and consequently, to the rapid grasp of ideas, which aids in the explanation of the former” (XI, 41).

      ¹⁰ «Юный Пушкин-поэт – это младенец, который сразу встал СКАЧАТЬ