Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

To be fair, Pushkin’s strangeness is not something felt only by foreigners. Russian commentators have remarked it too. Those of pro-Western sympathies have considered it a sign of Pushkin’s unique status as a truly civilized person in a society of shameful backwardness; for nationalists, on the other hand, it has been a signal tragedy, a symbol of the alienation of intellectuals from the ‘Russian people’. The philosopher Gustav Shpet, a late follower of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles (the movement that arose in the 1830s in order to lament the harm that had been done to Russian culture by Westernization), saw Pushkin as ‘an accident’. His writing was ‘precisely his writing, the writing of a genius who did not emerge from the Russian national spirit’. But whatever their feelings about Pushkin’s expression (or not) of the ‘national spirit’, Russians universally acknowledge him as a master of the language. It is worth pausing a moment to consider why.

All Pushkin’s writings, from his warmly intimate and at times shockingly immediate letters, to his most considered, reserved, and formal lyric poems, particularly exemplify two characteristics that have a peculiar weight in Russian literary culture, even if they are by no means unique to that culture. The first is an intense sensitivity to stylistic register, to the connotations of words. This sensitivity homes in particularly on the opposition between words derived from Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of Russian Orthodoxy, and those of native Russian origin. Zlatyi and zolotoi are translatable only as ‘golden’, mladyi and molodoi only as ‘young’, yet the words are as different in terms of their associations as the English words ‘leathern’ and ‘leather’, ‘burthern’ and ‘burden’. Pushkin’s poetry is peculiarly sophisticated in its blending of these and other stylistic levels. It is also subtle in its exploitation of formal features – metre, assonance, and alliteration. An extraordinary level of stylistic density is offset by a level of compression that exploits to the full the resources offered by Russian grammar, which allows a good deal more ellipsis (the omission of words that a reader can be expected to supply by inference) than is ordinarily possible in English. Pushkin’s poetry works both with and against the norms of literary Russian. It shares the adventurous playfulness of all good writing in the language, yet at the same time keeps a tight hold upon the rhetorical expansion that is natural to a literary tradition where creative repetition, the so-called ‘weaving of words’, is actively sought rather than avoided – as it tends to be avoided in mandarinic British or American usage, as opposed to Irish, African, or British or American vernacular, English. This sense of working against linguistic norms is one reason why the Russian critic and theorist Roman Jakobson asserted that modern readers wanting to understand Pushkin ‘must wholly abandon ordinary aesthetic criteria’.

One could, then, say of Pushkin, as the playwright Sheridan did of Horace: ‘To give the literal meaning, it should be in verse’. But metrical paraphrases of Pushkin are rather apt to sound like the work of some justly forgotten nineteenth-century poetaster:

The woods have doff’d their garb of purply gold;

The faded fields with silver frost are steaming;

Through the pale clouds the sun, reluctant gleaming,

Behind the circling hills his disk hath roll’d.