И время и место

Translation: Pushkin has probably just bumped into Bakunina somewhere on the stairs and is sorting through the impressions created by this passing vision in a black dress, as he describes it in a diary entry of 19 November 1815. “How charming she was! <… > But I have not seen her for eighteen hours – ah! What a situation, what torture – But I was happy for five minutes” (XII, 297). This poet who would write some of the most beautiful love lyrics in any language would need the ballast of lived experience to bring the conventional phrasing, the rhetorical and prosodic expectations, alive. One adjective in a normally fixed phrase would be switched, one line would break away slightly from the corset of meter to the free dance of rhythm, and the reader/listener would immediately sense that here is mature passion, passion informed by the beauty and sorrow of a fully lived life. But change the conceit of the piece from love as an elevated feeling to eros as tease and titillation, and the schoolboy was back again in his element. Here he is, for example, not describing love in an elegy but what it would feel like to be the tobacco in a pretty womans snuffbox in a madrigal:

Ax! если, превращенный в прах,
И в табакерке, в заточеньи,
Я в персты нежные твои попасться мог,
Тогда б в сердечном восхищеньи
Рассыпался на грудь под шелковый платок
И даже… может быть… Но что! мечта пустая.
Не будет этого никак.
Судьба завистливая, злая!
Ах, отчего я не табак!..

(1,45)

[Ah! If I, turned into dust ,
And kept in a snuff-box, in captivity,
Could land on your sweet fingers,
Then in heartfelt rapture
Would I sprinkle out onto your breast under your silk shawl
And even… perhaps… But no! It is a hollow dream
And will in no way happen.
О evil, envious Fate!
Why can’t I be tobacco!..]

At the core of the gradual change that took place in Pushkin over the Lyceum years is the fact that he never seemed to experience what might be seen from the perspective of later generations as linguistic fear. That is crucial. We also must suppose that Shakespeare, despite what little we know about him, was fearless in this way. This did not mean that words always came easily to Pushkin or that he didn’t struggle over drafts of things, which his subsequent notebooks prove beyond a doubt, but simply that he believed his language was equal to the task of saying what it needed to. His fears and anxieties were real, which is also crucial, but they were not strictly linguistic. It was the world that Pushkin looked out on from his “monk’s cell” at the Lyceum, not just the literary world, or (this would come later) the professional world of letters. It is a fine point, but a not insignificant one. This is another way of saying that if Pushkin is Russian literature’s “origin without origins,” which he is, the true beginning of the culture’s modern linguistic consciousness, which he is as well, then it is because what stirred him was not his battles with literary precursors. He knew the tradition was there and he knew it was his task to find a place in it, but his engagement was with other, bigger ghosts: his frail hold on life as a Russian in the early years of the nineteenth century, the fact that he was difficult to love and he knew it, Russian history’s claims to legitimacy against a background of European and more particularly French military and cultural domination, the heroes from the past whose spirits hung about the Cameron Gallery and the monuments to military victories. 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: