Pushkin spent the first three years of his exile (1820–23) in what he called the ‘accursed town’ of Kishinev, 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 passivity. Indirectly, the poem targets the Carbonari and their followers in Western Europe (1820–23), 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 Kishinev 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 massive peasant revolt against Catherine the Great, dominates The Captain’s Daughter. These rebellions were popular, not directed by another class. Smaller peasant revolts were innumerable during the entire period of serfdom. Where the Decembrists wished to import Western constitutional 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 Godunov, set in the so-called Time of Troubles (1604–13), the interregnum between the Riurik and the Romanov dynasties. Here, the people, who take centre stage, appear by turn passive, fickle, savage, murderous and finally mortified by the assassination 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, passes judgement not only on their time, but on ruling-class manipulation in every age. The centrality of the people in Boris Godunov 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.
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Eugene Onegin is certainly about the life of the nobility 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 superstition 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.
The language of the novel, although largely the idiom of the nobility, extends into popular speech, for which Pushkin was often taken to task at the time by conservative critics. Surpassing previous writers in this respect, Pushkin took his Russian directly from the streets, the market-places and the country estates. In Onegin he honours his Decembrist friend Pavel Katenin for translating Corneille’s Le Cid (Chapter I, stanza 18). French neo-classicism and its heroic language were a model for the revolutionary nobility. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, by contrast, abounds with ordinary speech, as does his historical novel The Captain’s Daughter. ‘Vulgar’ expressions enter into the most intimate of Pushkin’s lyrics. By and large, writers came from the gentry, that is the minor nobility, and shared on their estates a common culture with their serfs, as the Larin family does in Onegin, despite differences in status and education. The Larin family is not wealthy. It does not employ foreign tutors or governesses. The Westernized Onegin, by contrast, grows up, handed from one to another. Only the serf nurse looks after the two sisters.
As early as Chapter III of Onegin Pushkin announces that he might give up poetry for prose. At this moment in the story he is responding to the harmful effect of Western novels and tales upon Tatiana. In the place of these he proposes to write an idyllic novel about innocent love and the ancient ways of Russia, but does no such thing, instantly returning to his heroine’s romantic agony. Towards the end of Chapter VI, as he contemplates his passing youth, he considers again the abandonment of poetry:
To Spartan prose the years are turning,
Coquettish rhyme the years are spurning;
And I – I with a sigh confess –
I’m running after her much less.
(Stanza 43)
The novel-in-verse, as Pushkin chose to call his poem, is a workshop out of which his later prose fiction emerges. His Dedication to his publisher, written after he had completed five chapters, pinpoints the character of his new work:
Accept these chapters and their rhymes,
Half-comic and half-melancholic,
Ideal and down-to-earth bucolic…
The intellect’s cold observations,
The heart’s impressions marked in tears.
Pushkin prefaced his first chapter, which he published on its own in 1825, with ‘A Conversation Between a Bookseller and a Poet’, in which the poet argues the rights of poetry against the requirements of the market. After a flood of Romantic protestation the poet suddenly accepts the bookseller’s case, abandons his verse and negotiates the sale of his manuscript in three short sentences of prose: ‘You’re perfectly right. Here’s my manuscript. Let’s come to terms.’
What Pushkin calls his ‘descent’ to prose is, however, more than a matter of using ordinary language. The death of the poet Lensky in Chapter VI not only sounds the knell of Pushkin’s youth, too, but questions the future of his own poetry in a world that kills imagination:
Let not a poet’s soul be frozen,
Made rough and hard, reduced to bone
And finally be turned to stone
In that benumbing world he goes in,
In that intoxicating slough
Where, friends, we bathe together now.
(Stanza 46)
From now on the tone of the novel changes. Pushkin completed Chapter VI about four months after the five Decembrist leaders were hanged. Repeatedly, in his manuscripts he draws sketches of his friends on the gallows, in one case adding ‘this might have been me’. In an omitted stanza he suggests that Lensky, too, had he lived, could have swung from the gallows like the Decembrist poet Ryleyev, who was also Pushkin’s acquaintance. Pushkin’s distancing from the Decembrists was part of his ‘descent’ to prose, yet the executions of his friends haunted him for the rest of his life, as they do the pages of Onegin.
Chapters VII and VIII present a post-Decembrist world full of nonentities with the exception of his poet friend Vyazemsky, who comforts an unhappy Tatiana on her entry into the monde – the same Vyazemsky from whom the epigraph to Chapter I is taken. Both Tatiana and Onegin are hopelessly isolated in this new milieu, despite the former’s well-schooled endeavours to behave comme il faut, which, as she confesses to Onegin, are a pretence. The term ‘prose’ refers not only to language, but to the prosaic world of Russia at all its levels. In Onegin Pushkin turned this prose into a new kind of poetry.
Pushkin belongs to a European shift from poetry to prose that Edmund Wilson characterizes in his excellent essay ‘In Honour of Pushkin’ (1937):
It was as if in those generations where Byron, Shelley, Keats, Leopardi, and Poe were dead in their twenties or thirties or barely rea
ched forty, where Coleridge and Wordsworth and Beddoes and Musset burned out while still alive, where Lermontov, like Pushkin, was killed in a duel, before he was twenty seven – it was as if in that great age of the bourgeois ascendancy – and even in still feudal Russia – it were impossible for a poet to survive.
He adds:
There was for the man of imagination and moral passion a basic maladjustment to society in which only the student of society – the social philosopher, the historian, the novelist – could find himself and learn to function. And to deal with the affairs of society, he had to learn to speak its language, he had – as Goethe and Hugo did, as Pushkin did just before he died – to train himself to write in prose.6
A heroic age had come to an end that began with the French Revolution and of which the Decembrist revolt was Europe’s last echo. In poems of 1821 and 1824 Pushkin mourned the death of the epoch’s giants, Napoleon and Byron, despite his fluctuating attitudes to them. (Onegin’s study is adorned with a portrait of Byron and a statuette of Napoleon.) Pushkin was already concerning himself with the role of prose in 1822, at the height of his Romantic period, a decade before he embarked on prose fiction, insisting on the need for ‘precision and brevity’, as well as ‘thought and more thought’. While poetry, he acknowledged, was different, it, too, he declared, would benefit from ‘a larger stock of ideas’, adding: ‘Our literature won’t get very far on memories of vanished youth.’7
Pushkin is referring here to elegiac poetry, including his own, which prevailed in his day. Onegin is, of course, full of ‘memories of vanished youth’, largely in the digressions. An ironic seesaw turns between ‘remembrance of things past’ and the narrative demands of the present. Recidivist memories are quenched by a brisk couplet, allowing the story to continue, as in the ‘little feet’ digression from Chapter I:
Their charming words and glances cheat
As surely as… their little feet.
(Stanza 34)
Or a digressive stanza tunes back into the narrative, as when Pushkin, having mourned the absence of ballerinas he has known in the past, whisks his hero into the theatre of today:
My goddesses! Where now? Forsaken?
Oh hearken to my call, I rue:
Are you the same? Have others taken
Your place without replacing you?
When shall I listen to your chorus,
Behold in soul-filled flight before us
Russia’s Terpsichore again?…
The house is full; the boxes brilliant…
(Chapter I, stanzas 19–20)
The digressions are slower in pace than the narrative, more insistent, impassioned, full of questions. The language is more archaic, more ‘poetical’. Pushkin’s narrative in general is precise, brief and straightforward. Rarely is a noun accompanied by more than one adjective. But Pushkin’s recourse to the past is more than a question of ‘vanished memories’. It is also an attachment to past values, traditions, institutions, sometimes ironically expressed, but not always. In a world dominated by Western fashions Pushkin likes to return to the ‘good, old days’. He is constantly calling his generation ‘light’, that is, without depth, not rooted. The digressions refer either to the past or the future, to ‘vanished memories’ or future hopes. Tatiana and Onegin are likewise immersed in their past, while Lensky thinks only of a happy or heroic future. Nevertheless, the narrative takes place in the present, although told mostly in the pasttense. Here is the real world which Pushkin describes with a mixture of realism and irony – from the benevolent evocations of country customs to the repugnant chatter of the monde. The most Romantic episode in the novel, Tatiana’s dream, is firmly based in folklore. The digressions remain the locus of romanticism, but they are always tempered with irony, as in the examples given above, and they get fewer towards the end of the novel. Romanticism and realism contrast most starkly in the Narrative between Lensky’s elegiac poem written on the eve of the duel and Pushkin’s meticulous account of the duel itself. Where Lensky writes:
Whether I’m piercèd by an arrow
Or whether it should miss – all’s well:
A predetermined hour will tell
If we’re to wake or sleep tomorrow
(Chapter VI, stanza 21)
Pushkin describes, as if from a manual, the loading of pistols:
The pistols glistened; soon the mallets
Resoundingly on ramrods flicked,
Through cut-steel barrels went the bullets,
The cock has for the first time clicked.
(Chapter VI, stanza 29)
Irony bridges the several, often contradictory planes of the novel – linguistic, stylistic, cultural, social. There is scarcely anything in Onegin, from characters to environment, from convictions to sentiment, that is not touched by it. The one exception is Pushkin’s description of nature. Onegin reflects a world in flux. Some commentators have compared his irony with that of the German Romantics. This is wrong. The latter conceived the world as an illusion to be ironically punctured, not in favour of the real world, but a primordial chaos. Postmodernists have interpreted Pushkin in a similar way. Like the Romantics, Pushkin uses irony to remove illusion, but this makes his fictional world more rather than less real, which is how it was taken to be by his contemporaries and the generations that followed them.
Of Lensky and Onegin, for example, Alexander Herzen, exiled revolutionary of the decade succeeding Pushkin, wrote:
Between these two types – between the dedicated enthusiast and poet and, on the other hand, the weary, embittered and useless man, between Lensky’s grave and Onegin’s boredom – stretched the deep and muddy river of civilized Russia, with its aristocrats, bureaucrats, officers, gendarmes, grand-dukes and emperor – a dumb and formless mass of baseness, obsequiousness, bestiality and envy, a formless mass which draws in and engulfs everything.8
Or, as Pushkin puts it, that ‘slough/Where, friends, we bathe together now’ (Chapter VI, stanza 46). I have already referred to Dostoyevsky’s praise for Tatiana as the epitome of Russian womanhood.
Nevertheless, the characters are not of the kind we find in a realist prose novel. They are silhouettes. The encounters between Onegin and Tatiana are few, and the decisive ones are the responses to letters. There is a simple symmetry about their relationship: Tatiana falls in love with Onegin and is rejected; Onegin falls in love with her and is rejected. It is the symmetry of a mathematical equation or a chemical formula of the kind that Goethe pursues in his novel The Elective Affinities (1809). It gives the relationship between hero and heroine a spare objectivity that is consolidated by the central preoccupations of the novel – the nature of passion, romantic love, romantic literature, libertinage, marriage, the position of women, morality. Neither Onegin nor Tatiana develops slowly; they jump from situation to situation like film cuts. Pushkin agreed with his friend Katenin that the result of omitting the former Chapter VIII (Onegin’s Journey) was to make ‘the transition from Tatiana the provincial miss to Tatiana the grande dame… too unexpected and unexplained’ (Foreword to Fragments of Onegin’s Journey). But it is not just a question of excising a chapter. The characters are not the ‘independent’ actors of prose fiction. They are half-lyrical, half-novelistic. This is obvious in Chapter I, where Pushkin enters the story as Onegin’s friend, sharing the same discontent. They cross one another’s paths twice again in the novel, in Onegin’s Journey (stanza 10), when Onegin traverses the same route in the Caucasus that Pushkin had taken at the beginning of his exile, and in a variant, when they meet face to face in Odessa. Yet Pushkin is quick to disclaim identification with him. What we see in Chapter I is a fusion of poet and hero, followed by their parting, when Onegin is invited to his uncle’s deathbed, and resumes his separate status. But Pushkin’s friendship and their travel plans give Onegin a deeper sensibility than was evident before. The theme of exile unites them both – self-imposed for Onegin, who flees his killing of Lensky. Even after this Pushkin continues to speak indulgentl
y of his hero. At the end of the novel Pushkin bids farewell to his ‘strange comrade’ (the Russian word sputnik can mean ‘travelling companion’). Onegin is part Pushkin’s earlier self.
In Chapter VIII Pushkin’s Muse embodies each of Pushkin’s feminine ideals in turn until she becomes Tatiana. (In Onegin’s Journey (stanza 9) he embraces the ideal of the housewife!) Pushkin’s friend the poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker remarked that he saw Pushkin himself in the new Tatiana. It has also been suggested that Pushkin intended his heroine as a model for his future wife to follow. There has been an industry of attempts in Russia to identify Pushkin’s characters with real people. But the direct source of his characters is his poetry. They are poetic creations. They proceed from his lyrical self. Pushkin constantly refers to them as ‘my Eugene’, ‘my Tatiana’, ‘my Lensky’. Each is endowed with a specific vocabulary that accompanies him or her through the story. Onegin is ‘strange’, ‘odd’, ‘eccentric’, ‘addicted to dreams’, ‘abrasive’, his mind is ‘sharp’ and ‘chilled’, his humour ‘bilious’, his epigrams ‘dark’. Nor is he just a Russian type. Pushkin noted in a draft that Onegin always took three novels with him: Charles Mathurin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, François-René de Chateaubriand’s René and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe:
In which the epoch was displayed
And modern man put on parade
And fairly faithfully depicted:
With his depraved, immoral soul,
Dried up and egotistical,
To dreaming endlessly addicted,
With his embittered, seething mind
To futile enterprise consigned.
(Chapter VII, stanza 22)
The epithets attending Tatiana belong, by contrast, to elegiac poetry. She is ‘wayward’, ‘silent’, ‘sad’, ‘shy’, ‘dreamy’, ‘contemplative’, ‘languid’, ‘pale’, ‘strange’ – ‘strange’ not in the manner of Onegin, but as an anomaly in her family, in rural society and later in the monde where she hides her true feelings. In the early chapters she is always to be found at a window, contemplating the moon. Tatiana is transformed when she becomes a princess, but when she tells Onegin that this is only outward show, she speaks as she used to when she first met him. Like Onegin she is characterized by the foreign novels she reads. These, however, are the pre-Romantic or sentimental novels of the eighteenth century rather than the early nineteenth-century Romantic fiction that Onegin enjoys. She identifies with the heroines of Samuel Richardson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mme de Staël, whose novel Delphine appeared just at the beginning of the new century, in 1802. Although Tatiana is ‘Russian to the core’ (Chapter V, stanza 4), her letter to Onegin is not only a translation of a non-existent French original, but, as Nabokov has shown, French translators have found no difficulty in rendering it back into their own language more or less literally. It echoes not only phrases from Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, one of Tatiana’s favourite novels, but other French sources beyond Tatiana’s ken. The letter can be decoded as a palimpsest of borrowings, while it retains the spontaneous passion that has moved generations of readers in Russia.9