Novels, Tales, Journeys

Belkin seems to have occurred to Pushkin after the tales were written, in connection with their publication. For one thing, the disguise enabled him to elude Benckendorf’s censorship. Mirsky suggests that he may also have wanted an alias because the tales were experimental and he was not sure how they would be received. If so, his uncertainty proved justified. “The stories met with no success,” Mirsky continues. “When they appeared without Pushkin’s name the critics paid no attention to them, and when his authorship was divulged, like good critics, they declared that the stories were not worthy of their author and that they marked a grievous decline in his talent.”^*7 Their artistic perfection went unnoticed, as did their originality in the development of Russian fiction.

Once Belkin appeared, however, he took on his own life in Pushkin’s imagination, resulting in The History of the Village of Goryukhino. It consists of two parts. The first is a superbly comic rendering of Belkin’s (and Pushkin’s) development as a writer, from his initial poetic ambitions to his eventual decision to “descend into prose,” as he puts it himself. The unfinished second part is the history of Goryukhino proper—an equally comic parody of historiography and, behind that, a biting satire on rural life and the evils of serfdom.

Pushkin’s own “descent into prose” continued throughout his last years. The unfinished works, fragments, and sketches we have included in this collection show not only the breadth of his literary culture but also his conscious experimentation with different formal possibilities: the society novel; the epistolary novel; a Russian variation on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s best-selling novel Pelham, published in 1828; a tale set in Roman times; the blending of prose and poetry in Egyptian Nights. There is the finished story Kirdjali, a briskly narrated and completely unromantic account of the doings of a Bulgarian bandit during the Greek war of independence in 1821. And in contrast to it there is the unfinished Roslavlev, narrated by a woman, saturated with literary references and polemics, portraying the French culture of the Russian aristocracy as it was confronted with Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, a social satire which suddenly takes a dark turn just as it breaks off…(Tolstoy was to play on some of the same ironies thirty years later in War and Peace.) Pushkin wrote Roslavlev in response to the historical novel of the same name published in 1831 by Mikhail Zagoskin. Zagoskin’s first novel, Yuri Miloslavsky, published in 1829, was widely acclaimed and made of him the Russian Walter Scott that Pushkin might have become a year earlier if he had not abandoned The Moor of Peter the Great. In his Roslavlev, Zagoskin made some obvious allusions to Evgeny Onegin, borrowing certain names from Pushkin’s novel in verse and playing variations on the characters’ fates. Pushkin’s narrator, who is Roslavlev’s sister, sets out to correct Zagoskin’s factual and sentimental misrepresentations.

Dubrovsky, the longest of Pushkin’s unfinished works, is an adventure novel with an honest gentleman robber as hero. As such it is often compared to Scott’s Rob Roy or the tales of Robin Hood. But its portrayal of rural life in eighteenth-century Russia, the relations of landowners and peasants, the connivance of government officials with the rich, has nothing romantic about it, and the quickness and terseness of its prose is the opposite of Scott’s leisurely narration. It is an example of the inclusiveness of Pushkin’s manner, by turns comic, parodic, melodramatic, grimly realistic, and warmly human—what John Bayley has nicely termed his “power of polyphonic suggestion.”^*8

Pushkin’s two most important works of fiction, The Queen of Spades (1834) and The Captain’s Daughter (1836), form a final artistic contrast—the one tense, minimal in detail, impersonal, plot-driven; the other, his only finished novel, a more leisurely memoir, moved by seeming chance, told in the first person. The Queen of Spades is a city story, a Petersburg story; The Captain’s Daughter takes us back to the provinces and as far as the military outposts in the southern Ural region of Orenburg. The two also contrast sharply in their play on fate and chance, darkness and light.