ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov
Selected Stories
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Adolescent
The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
Demons
The Double and The Gambler
The Eternal Husband and Other Stories
The Idiot
Notes from a Dead House
Notes from Underground
NIKOLAI GOGOL
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls
NIKOLAI LESKOV
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories
BORIS PASTERNAK
Doctor Zhivago
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
War and Peace
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2016 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Foreword copyright © 2016 by Richard Pevear
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799–1837, author. | Pevear, Richard, 1943– translator. | Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator.
Title: Novels, tales, journeys / by Alexander Pushkin ; a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. | “Borzoi book”—Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049350 (print) | LCCN 2016000916 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307959621 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780307959638 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PG3347.A15 2016 (print) | LCC PG3347 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049350
Ebook ISBN 9780307959638
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This collection follows the contents and order in volume 5 of the “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” edition of Pushkin’s works (Moscow, 1975), omitting a few very brief fragments.
Cover image: Alexander Pushkin (detail). Pictoral Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Cover design by Oliver Munday
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Contents
Cover
Also Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
The Moor of Peter the Great
The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin
From the Publisher
The Shot
The Blizzard
The Coffin-Maker
The Stationmaster
The Young Lady Peasant
The History of the Village of Goryukhino
Roslavlev
Dubrovsky
The Queen of Spades
Kirdjali
Egyptian Nights
The Captain’s Daughter
Journey to Arzrum
Fragments and Sketches
The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha
A Novel in Letters
At the Corner of a Little Square
Notes of a Young Man
My Fate Is Decided. I Am Getting Married…
A Romance at the Caucasian Waters
A Russian Pelham
We Were Spending the Evening at the Dacha
A Story from Roman Life
Maria Schoning
Notes
A Note About the Translators
A Note About the Author
Introduction
PUSHKIN’S DESCENT INTO PROSE
Alexander Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel on the afternoon of January 27, 1837, at Chernaya Rechka, just outside Petersburg. “It is thus that the figure of Pushkin remains in our memory—with a pistol,” Andrei Sinyavsky wrote in Strolls with Pushkin.*1 “Little Pushkin with a big pistol. A civilian, but louder than a soldier. A general. An ace. Pushkin! Crude, but just. The first poet with his own biography—how else would you have him up and die, this first poet, who inscribed himself with blood and powder in the history of art?”
Pushkin was just thirty-seven when he died, but he had already been acknowledged as Russia’s greatest poet, a title that has since been defined and redefined but never disputed. In the decade before his death, however, he had also become the true originator of Russian prose. Sinyavsky is right to say that Pushkin lives in Russian memory as more than a writer, more than a poet—as “Pushkin!” In a speech delivered at a commemoration in revolutionary Petrograd in February 1921, the poet Alexander Blok said: “From early childhood our memory keeps the cheerful name: Pushkin. This name, this sound fills many days of our life. The grim names of emperors, generals, inventors of the tools of murder, the tormented and the tormentors of life. And beside them—this light name: Pushkin.” Yet his personal presence is in marked contrast with the essential impersonality of Pushkin’s art. It is not that he celebrated himself and sang himself: he never did. In a letter to his friend Nikolai Raevsky, written in July 1825, Pushkin criticized Byron (whom he generally admired) for the constant intrusion of his personality: “Byron…has parceled out among his characters such-and-such a trait of his own character; his pride to one, his hate to another, his melancholy to a third, etc.”*2 And he contrasts Byron’s practice with the multifarious receptivity he had come to admire in Shakespeare—his “negative capability,” as Keats called it. Sinyavsky intensifies Keats’s paradox: “Emptiness is Pushkin’s content. Without it he would not be full, he would not be, just as there is no fire without air, no breathing in without breathing out.” Impersonality, openness, and lightness are the essential qualities of his prose.
Our collection includes Pushkin’s few finished and published works of fiction—The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, Kirdjali, The Captain’s Daughter—each different and all masterpieces. It also includes his experiments in various forms, borrowing from and parodying well-known European models, consciously trying out the possibilities of Russian prose. The closest he came to a self-portrait is perhaps the character of Charsky in the fragmentary Egyptian Nights; otherwise he appears in person only in the nonfictional Journey to Arzrum, where, as D. S. Mirsky wrote, “he reached the limits of noble and bare terseness.”*3
Pushkin’s family on his father’s side belonged to the old military-feudal aristocracy, the Russian boyars, dating back some six centuries to the founding of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. He proudly refers to their “six-hundred-year standing” more than once in his letters. He was also proud of the rebelliousness of some of his ancestors, one of whom was executed by Peter the Great for opposing his political reforms, another of whom (his grandfather) was imprisoned for protesting against the “usurpation” of the throne by the Prussian-born Catherine the Great. The new gentry that arose in the eighteenth century as
a result of Peter’s reforms more or less eclipsed the old boyars, and Pushkin’s father was left with relatively modest means.
On his mother’s side, Pushkin’s ancestors bore the name of Gannibal, from his great-grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal. It was long thought (by Pushkin among others) that Ibrahim was the son of a minor Ethiopian prince, though recently it has been argued that he came from the sultanate of Logone-Birni in Cameroon. In any case at around the age of five he was sent as a hostage or slave to the court of the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, and a year later was either ransomed or stolen by Sava Vladislavich-Raguzinsky, advisor to the Russian ambassador, and brought to Petersburg, where he was presented to Peter the Great. Peter was very taken with the boy, stood as godfather at his baptism, gave him the patronymic Petrovich from his own name, and had him educated in the best European fashion. Ibrahim rose to the rank of general, was granted nobility, and had a long military and political career in the reigns of Peter and his daughter Elizabeth. While serving in the French army in his youth he adopted the surname Gannibal, or Hannibal, after the great Carthaginian general.
Pushkin prized his African ancestry, and his African ancestor, highly, and when he decided, in 1827, to try his hand at a historical novel along the lines of Walter Scott’s immensely popular Waverley (published in 1814), he chose the life of Ibrahim as his subject. The result was The Moor of Peter the Great. In an article published three years later, he observed: “In our time, by the term novel we mean an historical epoch developed in a fictional narrative.”*4 And indeed, while the two protagonists, Ibrahim and Peter the Great, are fully historical, his portrayal of their interactions is almost entirely invented. We first meet Ibrahim during his military service in the decadent Paris of Philippe d’Orléans’s regency (1715–1723), and hear mainly about the complications of his love life, both in France and on his return to Russia. Peter, meanwhile, is busy building his new capital in the north, “a vast factory,” as it appears to Ibrahim, and though the emperor is referred to at one point as “the hero of Poltava, the powerful and terrible reformer of Russia,” we see him mainly as the “gentle and hospitable host” of his godson. More historical and personal complexity is suggested in later chapters, in Peter’s relations with the old boyar aristocrats and with the entrance of Ibrahim’s rival Valerian, but Pushkin abandoned the novel just at that point and never went back to the Waverley manner.
That was in 1828. A year or two later, one of Pushkin’s literary enemies, Faddei Bulgarin (Pushkin liked to call him “Figlyarin,” from figlyar, “buffoon”), wrote a scurrilous article about a certain unnamed poet whose grandfather was not a Negro prince, as he boasted, but had been bought by a sea captain for a bottle of rum. Pushkin replied in a post scriptum to his poem “My Genealogy”: “That skipper was the glorious skipper / Who started our land moving, / Who forcefully took the helm of our native ship / And set it on a majestic course.” Pushkin’s awareness of himself as a descendant both of old boyar stock and of the reformer’s black godson nourished his meditations on state power in all its contradictions. In the same year that he abandoned his first novel, he wrote the long poem Poltava, about Peter’s decisive victory in 1709 over the Swedish forces of Charles XII, which led to the emergence of Russia as the predominant nation of northern Europe. The “terrible reformer,” grown more ambiguous and demonic in the grim figure of his statue, is also the subject of Pushkin’s last long poem, The Bronze Horseman, written in 1833. D. S. Mirsky has called it “the greatest work ever penned in Russian verse.”*5
Pushkin’s own confrontation with imperial power had begun many years earlier. After the defeat of Napoleon, Russian troops occupied Paris and camped along the Champs-Élysées. The victorious coalition restored the French monarchy, but the young Russian officers picked up French revolutionary thinking in the process and came home with new notions of political liberty. French culture had been the dominant influence in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 until her death in 1796. The aristocracy spoke French, which was Pushkin’s first language. In 1811, the emperor Alexander I founded a school which he called by the French name of lycée (litsei in Russian) in the imperial village of Tsarskoe Selo, some eighteen miles south of Petersburg, to give the sons of the aristocracy a European education, after which they were to take up important posts in government service. Pushkin was in the first class of thirty, and his years at the lycée remained central to his life. There he began to write poetry, first in French, then in Russian, and by the age of fourteen he had already seen his work published and praised. On graduating in 1817, he moved to Petersburg, where he held a nominal post in the service, which did not keep him from living a rather wild life, gambling, womanizing, dueling. In Petersburg he also got to know some of the young officers who had come back from Paris. He shared their thoughts and hopes, and in that spirit wrote a number of poems which were not very pleasing to the authorities. One of them, the ode “Liberty,” written as early as 1817, praises “the exalted son of Gaul” who sang of Liberty and denounced “enthroned vice” with its scourges, irons, and serfdom. Against “lawless Authority” it invokes “the trustworthy shelter of the Law.” This, along with some biting epigrams on various government officials, was finally too much even for the rather liberal Alexander. Pushkin was relieved of his post in Petersburg and “exiled” to the south, to serve in Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, and finally Odessa.
Pushkin was absent from Petersburg from 1820 to 1826. During those years he wrote a great deal of poetry, some of it based on his travels to the Caucasus and the Crimea with General Nikolai Raevsky, a retired hero of the Napoleonic Wars, and his sons Alexander and Nikolai, who became his close friends. He detested life in backward Kishinev, which had been ceded to Russia by the Turks in 1812, managed to get transferred to Odessa, but caused himself trouble there as well, particularly with the beautiful young wife of the governor-general, Prince Mikhail Vorontsov. He wrote a notorious epigram about the governor-general:
Half milord, half merchant,
Half wise man, half ignoramus,
Half scoundrel, but there’s hope
He’ll finally become a full one.
The post office routinely opened Pushkin’s mail, and in one letter found him sympathizing with the atheistic arguments of a local philosopher (a certain “deaf Englishman”). This was enough to allow Vorontsov to petition for Pushkin’s removal from Odessa. By imperial order he was expelled from the service and confined to his mother’s small estate at Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov, where he was to be kept under surveillance by his father and the local authorities.
In a way the two years of this “house arrest” were Pushkin’s salvation. He was left free to read and to write, and he produced more than he had in the previous four years. Along with many of his finest lyric poems, which went into the collection he was gathering then and published in 1826, he finished his long poem The Gypsies, begun in Kishinev, wrote two more long poems, The Bridegroom and the comic parody Count Nulin, completed three chapters of his novel in verse Evgeny Onegin, and wrote his first and longest play, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov. And he worked on yet another narrative poem, Cleopatra, parts of which eventually found their way into the prose/verse fragment Egyptian Nights, included in our collection.
In a letter to his brother in November 1824, he describes his typical day: “I write memoirs until dinner; I dine late. After dinner I ride on horseback. In the evening I listen to fairy tales, and thereby I am compensating for the insufficiencies of my accursed upbringing. How charming these fairy tales are!”*6 The storyteller was his former nanny, the house serf Arina Rodionovna, who at first was his only company on the estate. Pushkin was deeply struck by her tales, kept notes on them, and a few years later turned them into some of his finest poems: Tsar Saltan, The Golden Cockerel, and The Dead Princess and the Seven Mighty Men. He also collected her sayings and expressions, a trove of Russian speech that was part of the compensation for his “accursed upbringing.”
But his confinement to Mikhailovskoe saved him in a more literal sense as well. The young officers who had come back from France began to organize a movement for political reform and in 1816 founded a secret society called the Union of Salvation, based in Petersburg with branches in other cities. The Union later divided into the Northern Society in Petersburg and the Southern Society in the Ukraine. Their aims included the abolition of serfdom, the election of a legislative assembly, and the drafting of a constitution limiting the powers of the monarchy. The Southern Society, led by Colonel Pavel Pestel, went further, advocating universal suffrage and the abolition of the monarchy. Both foresaw the inevitability of an armed uprising.
Their chance came in December 1825. The emperor Alexander died suddenly on December 1, at the age of forty-eight, leaving no direct heir. The elder of his two brothers, Constantine, had married a Polish woman and Roman Catholic, and had renounced his right of succession, but only Alexander knew of it. There was uncertainty for several weeks before the younger brother, Nicholas, was prevailed upon to accept the throne. The secret societies decided to take the opportunity of his coronation on December 26 to stage their uprising, earning themselves the name of Decembrists. Some three thousand soldiers, led by the young officers of the Northern Society, appeared in Senate Square in Petersburg, calling for the formation of a provisional government. A few days later the Southern Society incited a mutiny among the troops in the Ukraine. But the revolts were poorly organized and, after the initial shock, were quickly suppressed. The instigators were arrested; five of them, including Colonel Pestel and the poet Kondraty Ryleev, were executed, and another 120 were sent into permanent exile in Siberia.