Novels, Tales, Journeys

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.