И время и место

The second thing we immediately notice, which is tied to the unconstrained quality of his intonation, is the young Pushkin s astonishing genre dexterity, where each genre equals a distinct voice, style, lexicon, poetic structure. This facility with different ways of saying things poetically could be an aspect of the legacy of parlor games and wordplay that the boy absorbed in the presence of his parents (Sergei L’vovich was known in the literary salons of St. Petersburg as a kind of verbal quick-change artist) and their friends. In any event, for his classes and on his own Pushkin tried his hand at all the different types of poem practiced at the time. Madrigal, noël, elegy, friendly epistle, epitaph, Anacreontica, ode, romance, hussar drinking song, epic, love lyric – he fit into each of these effortlessly. It was as though he were trying on a new costume with each one and took delight in cavorting before the mirror.¹⁰ His ability to mimic, to ventriloquize the voice zone of the genre, was what separated him from the others.¹¹ In other words, he had the poetic equivalent of perfect pitch. An illustration shows the difference between Pushkin and his mates in this respect. Illichevskii loved to create anagrams, or in his terms, “charade logogriphs,” that acted out a word in the form of a riddle. These puzzles were then included in The Lyceum Sage (Litseiskii mudrets), one of the school’s several journals, which everyone read and in which Pushkin took active part. In one such anagram Illichevskii describes three items without naming them which when combined would decorate a gravesite – something bundled together (kipa = “stack”), a legendary, though faint-hearted warrior (Paris), and a type of food (ris = “rice”). The answer yields kiparis, or “cypress tree.”¹² Illichevskii’s riddle is self-contained (there is nothing extraneous to it) and shows beautifully how these bright young students came at language.

But in Pushkin’s wordplay there was invariably a kind of challenge. In 1816 he came up with his own charade entitled “Comparison” (Sravnenie):

He хочешь ли узнать, моя драгая,
Какая разница меж Буало и мной?
У Депрео была лишь, [запятая]
А у меня: с, [две точки с запятой]¹³

The solution to this riddle is more racy, more “Pushkinian,” than Illichevskii’s cypress tree. Here Pushkin is referring to an episode from Boileau’s childhood that he would have immediately picked up on.¹⁴ Helvetius tells the story that once when very young Boileau fell down, which movement raised his smock and exposed him. At that moment a turkey pecked him several times in the groin, leaving him without his “two periods” and intensely fearful of women his entire life. Thus what the sixteen-year-old Pushkin is telling his listener, “my sweetheart,” is that he is endowed with all the necessary punctuation marks (both the “comma” and the “periods”) to be a good lover. And yet the words for “comma” and “period” are not spelled out; they are simply left as marks on the line. The reader must see them and sound them out to make the rhymes. The riddle is witty, salacious, and a kind of challenge all at the same time.