Novels, Tales, Journeys

Reality is not banality, as Pushkin constantly shows us. There is nothing documentary about The Captain’s Daughter; on the contrary, it has elements of the folktale about it—mysterious appearances, interventions, coincidences. It is composed of two intertwining stories: the love story of Grinyov and Masha, and the story of Grinyov’s complex relations with the rebel Pugachev (their private conversations are some of the most extraordinary moments in the book). Grinyov’s fate is determined, not by some all-ruling historical inevitability, nor by his personal will, but by two chance meetings: his own with the wayfarer at the beginning, and Masha’s with a little white dog and its owner at the end.

“Pushkin is the golden section of Russian literature,” wrote Sinyavsky. “Having thrust it forcefully into the future, he himself fell back and now plays in it the role of an eternally flowering past to which it returns to be rejuvenated.” Tolstoy gave an example of that rejuvenation in a letter describing the beginning of his work on Anna Karenina. His wife, he says, had taken down a volume of Pushkin’s prose from the shelf to show to their son and had left it on the table.

The other day, after my work, I picked up this volume of Pushkin and as always (for the seventh time, I think) read it from cover to cover, unable to tear myself away, as if I were reading it for the first time. More than that, it was as if it dispelled all my doubts. Never have I admired Pushkin so much, nor anyone else for that matter. The Shot, Egyptian Nights, The Captain’s Daughter!!! There was also the fragment, “The guests were arriving at the dacha.” Despite myself, not knowing where or what it would lead to, I imagined characters and events, which I developed, then naturally modified, and suddenly it all came together so well, so solidly, that it turned into a novel…

Reading Pushkin’s prose will not make great novelists of us all, but we can certainly share Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for the incomparable works, both finished and fragmentary, collected in this book.

RICHARD PEVEAR

*1 Sinyavsky wrote the book as letters to his wife while he was serving a seven-year sentence in a Soviet labor camp, and published it in 1975 under his pseudonym, Abram Tertz, after his release and forced emigration. An English translation by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava Yastremski was published by Yale University Press in 1994.

*2 The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, edited and translated by J. Thomas Shaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 237.

*3 A History of Russian Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 124.

*4 The Critical Prose of Alexander Pushkin, edited and translated by Carl R. Proffer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 80.

*5 D. S. Mirsky, Pushkin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), p. 212.

*6 Letters, pp. 188–189.

*7 Pushkin, pp. 177–178.

*8 Introduction to Alexander Pushkin, The Collected Stories, translated by Paul Debreczeny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. xvi.

The Moor of Peter the Great

By Peter’s iron will

Russia was transformed.

YAZYKOV1

CHAPTER ONE

I am in Paris:

I have begun to live, not just to breathe.

DMITRIEV, Diary of a Traveler2

Among the young men sent abroad by Peter the Great to acquire the knowledge necessary for the reformed state was his godson, the moor Ibrahim. He studied at the military school in Paris,3 graduated as a captain of artillery, distinguished himself in the Spanish war,4 and returned, gravely wounded, to Paris. The emperor, in the midst of his immense labors, never ceased to ask after his favorite and always received flattering reports of his progress and conduct. Peter was very pleased with him and repeatedly called him back to Russia, but Ibrahim was in no hurry. He excused himself on various pretexts—now his wound, now his wish to improve his knowledge, now his lack of money—and Peter condescended to his requests, begged him to look after his health, thanked him for his zeal for learning, and, though extremely thrifty in his own expenses, did not spare his purse for him, supplementing the money with fatherly advice and cautionary admonishments.