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| Pugachev's judgement; Vasiliy Perov,1875 |
Modernism is Art becoming aware of its precarious
status and responsibility
Gabriel Josipovici
The Oxford world’s classic edition of Pushkin
Stories assembles in one volume the famous short stories “The Queen of Spades”,
the “Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin”, “Peter the Great’s Blackamoor”
and the historical short novel “The captain’s daughter”.
I restricted my reading to the two best
known stories: The captain’s daughter and the Queen of spades. While united
between the same covers, both stories could not be more different, as if
written by a different man. In the spooky yarn “The Queen of Spades”,, the author is full of confidence, self-assured,
master of his Art. In “The captain’s daughter”,
written later, the author leaves us with a salmagundi of different genres and we
feel that something else is going on. It is as if Pushkin is pondering which
way to lead his art and how to escape the restrictions both real and artistic,
which have been forced upon him.
ooOoo
The story narrated in “The captain’s
daughter” is the story of Pyotr Andreyich Grinyov. In fact, we are reading his
memoir. Grinyov is the child of a retired army officer and is bred to thread in
his father’s steps. When he is seventeen, he is sent to the far city of Orenburg
En route, Grinyov does things his own way
and is an easy prey for gamblers and drunks. His man-servant unsuccessfully
tries to intervene, when he sees his young master Pyotr squandering the money
his father gave him for the long trip. During a fierce blizzard Grinyov goes
even so far as to give away his hare skin jacket, in true Saint
Martin fashion, to a mysterious man they bump into and who is
dying of cold.
Still, after a few more incidents, which emphasize
the young man’s initial “naïveté”, Grinyov arrives at Orenburg
Grinyov meets also a fellow officer,
Shvabrin, who is send to this outback on account of a fatal duel. Both young
officers fall in love with the only available young woman and soon enough they
stand face to face to decide things with a duel. Grinyov is wounded and the
duel remains undecided.
Masha from her side has eyes only for Grinyov
and this encourages the young man to write his father to ask a blessing for
their marriage. But the father finds his
son too young and refuses the blessing.
A few days later, the fort is attacked by a
wild bunch of renegade Cossacks, led by the historical rebel Pugachev. After a
few skirmishes, the fort is easily taken by the Cossacks. All military and
civilian are forced to swear allegiance to Pugachev. Only Mironov and Grinyov
refuse. The old Captain is the first one to be executed. His wife is killed as
she tries to intervene and protect her husband. Then it is the turn of Grinyov.
But Pugachev, who appears to be the man who was saved by Grinyov, during the
snowstorm, recognizes the young man and sets him free. The other officer, Shvabrin,
joins the rebels to save his life. Masha is able to hide somewhere within the
fort.
Later at night, Pugachev and Grinyov have a
private discussion over dinner. The young officer still refuses the offer to
join the rebels and Pugachev decides to send him back to the city of Orenburg
Grinyov leaves the city with a heavy heart.
He and Masha ( who is still hiding in the fort ) are in love and the young man
hates to leave his beloved behind, especially when Pugachev appoints Shvabrin
as new commander of the fort. Shvabrin has noticed the disappearance of the
girl and is trying o find her.
In Orenburg Orenburg
ooOoo
“The
Captain’s daughter” appeared in the November 1836 issue of the literary journal
Sovremennik, only two months before Pushkin was killed by that rascal ( may his
name be triply cursed ) Georges d’ Anthès. This means that although, the
elaboration and the first drafts of the novel were already written as from
1833, the final version of the book was penned down in that year ’36, the year
that saw the tragic build up of the tensions which would culminate in the fatal
duel. While it was the unfaithfulness of his wife which tilted the writer over
the edge, other frustrations had strongly fuelled his anger. Pushkin did not do
well anymore commercially speaking and his financial situation got the worse
for it. Things were so bad, that he even had to sell Mikhailaovskoe,
the beloved rural estate of his mother. On top of that there was the younger
breed of writers yapping at his heels. They still treated Pushkin, now 37 years
old, with due respect, true, but the mere fact that they were recognized as the
younger generation implied that he could be considered “passé”. The critic
Belinsky had already warned his readers that Pushkin’s prose was a sure sign of
the writer’s decline.
Torn between the necessity to write a
commercial success and the aspiration to remain a literary innovator at the
Artistic forefront, Pushkin still believed he needed another masterpiece to
seal his reputation and silence his critics. Last but not least, Pushkin was immensely
frustrated with his relation with the St
Petersburg
In this oppressive, even claustrophobic
atmosphere, we can imagine that the writer was captivated by the forgotten
revolutionary “hero” Pugachev and the “Sturm und Drang” dynamics of his
rebellion. Pugachev was rather unknown with the larger Russian public, because
after his execution his name and memory had officially been banned. He was a
disaffected ex-lieutenant of the Imperial army, who in the year 1773 and 1774,
during the largest peasant revolt of Russia’s history, took the lead of an
insurrection of a Cossack faction, at the moment the unrest swept trough south
and central Russia as a wildfire. Emboldened by his first success, Pugachev even
formed an alternative government to challenge the imperial administration of
Catherine II. However once the Imperial army recovered from her surprise, the
rebellion was knocked down and Pugachev captured and executed in January 1775.
Pushkin immediately saw the possibilities
to use the Pugachev rebellion as the backdrop for a new fictional story, but
while working himself trough an enormous pile of documentation, he decided to
switch to a non – fiction rendering of this history. He submitted his idea to
the Tsar, who agreed that the writer could proceed. Under close scrutiny of the
Tsar, Pushkin thoroughly studied the court’s archives and documents related to
that uprising. He even travelled to Kazan
It seems that Pushkin was not happy with
the result either. Especially the figure of Pugachev, whom he had described and
depicted very carefully, anticipating a reaction from the Tsar against a too
humanly or sympathetic bringing of the rebel, was unsatisfying. This character
deserved better and Pushkin decided to have a second go at it but this time in
a fictional way.
We can only guess of course, but there is a
suspicion that in the fictional rendering of the same occurrences, Pushkin wanted
to add flesh and blood to the character he seemed to admire. The result is evident.
While Pugachev in the historical narration remains a two – dimensional
character, in the “Captain’s daughter” the fictional Pugachev becomes a man described
with all his strengths and weaknesses, his mercilessness and his grandeur, his
cruelty and his bravery.
Pushkin, aware of the thin ice he moved on
by rendering the man, who dared to challenge the established law and order,
more sympathetic, took the necessary precautions. He made sure that his novel
would be perceived as a fictional story, a journal or a memoir by a potentially
unreliable narrator, recounting occurrences obscured by the distance of half a
century. Pushkin already incorporated different elements into the book, in
preparation of a refutation of the possible critics who, he suspected, would
accuse him immediately of trying to whitewash the Cossack rebel. Still one
cannot but observe the human traits, Pushkin adorns the rebel with: comprehension,
indulgence, humor, compassion and honor. Clearly the writer sympathizes with
the rebel. Maybe he envied him.
The composition of the “Captain’s daughter”
took place in the early 19th century. It was a time of political turmoil
throughout Europe , with an Aristocracy and a
Clergy fighting for survival. Curiously, Pushkin hidden rebellion is noticeable
in his writing too. It finds its expression first of all in the choice for the
novel, that formless vehicle, as the medium to convey his new story. In that
time, the novel was still pretending to be something else: a journal, a diary,
a letter and writers still were uneasy with the artistic authority bequeathed
to them. But, rather than trying to shake of the dominion of genre and style,
Pushkin in his novel creates a hodgepodge of genres. Refuting the choice to
compulsively follow or stick to a genre, he explores and uses the different
genres: the story kicks off as a “Coming of age” novel, with a young man
entering a world of challenges and education. It gets an air of a historical
novel, à la Walter Scott, doubling as a biographical novel, then it becomes a
Romance and finishes in a way of a fairy tale, with a gentle old woman, to whom
the captain’ daughter opens her heart, transforming herself into the Good Tsarina
who with one tip of her magical baton, punishes the bad ones and rewards the
good and honorable victims.
It
is as if he wants to say: “Look, I can do it anyway I want it. I am free to
develop my story however I want”.
Subversive is what comes to mind, when we
see how Pushkin rejects all fixed points of view, how he is both Romantic and
not Romantic, classicist and non classicist, realist and non realist.
Strange book…
The Death of Pushkin was a disaster. We
will never know what other great masterpieces where going to flow out of his
genius pen. The confusion of genres, the sense of rebellion we like to imagine
in the “Captain’s daughter”, was it a preparation of greater things? Did
Pushkin knew what was next? Did he instinctively imagine it? We will never
know. In any case the narration can be seen as a demonstration of his
versatility, the chaotic sound of an orchestra tuning it’s instruments, nothing
less than a stretching and warming up for better things to come. This
hodgepotch of styles gives the story an eerie edge, a kind of a freeze-frame
within a movement towards a Modernism “avant la letter”. As Andrew Kahn boldly
concludes, the story of the “Captain’s daughter” leads not towards Dostoyevsky
or Tolstoy, but much further, to the 20th century writers, it is a
shortcut to Zoshchenko or even to the Nabokov of “Pale Fire”!
But this review should not lead us too far
astray.
Both “Queen of Spades” and the “Captain’s
daughter” are simply very entertaining stories which gave me much pleasure and
the occasional laugh.
And let’s not worry too much about Pushkin
either.
His legacy shines bright enough. It shines
from a time when artists like Pushkin were not free yet, who were not
enfranchised yet, but whose talent was so vibrant, that despite everything,
nearly 200 years later we still feel the vibes.
