An Outline of Russian Literature Part 2

Not only is the richness of his output during this period remarkable, but the variety and the high level of art maintained in all the different styles which he attempted and mastered. _The Gypsies_ (1827), which was received with greater favour by the public than any of his poems, either earlier or later, is the story of a disappointed man, Aleko, who leaves the world and takes refuge with gypsies. A tragically ironical situation is the result. The anarchic nature of the Byronic misanthrope brings tragedy into the peaceful life of the people, who are lawless because they need no laws. Aleko loves and marries the gypsy Zemfira, but after a time she tires of him, and loves a young gypsy. Aleko surprises them and kills them both. Then Zemfira's father banishes him from the gypsies' camp. He, too, had been deceived. When his wife Mariula had been untrue and had left him, he had attempted no vengeance, but had brought up her daughter.

"Leave us, proud man," he says to Aleko. "We are a wild people; we have no laws, we torture not, neither do we punish; we have no use for blood or groans; we will not live with a man of blood. Thou wast not made for the wild life. For thyself alone thou claimest licence; we are shy and good-natured; thou art evil-minded and presumptuous.

Farewell, and peace be with thee!"

The charm of the poem lies in the descriptions of the gypsy camp and the gypsy life, the s.n.a.t.c.hes of gypsy song, and the characterization of the gypsies, especially of the women. It is not surprising the poem was popular; it breathes a spell, and the reading of it conjures up before one the wandering life, the camp-fire, the soft speech and the song; and makes one long to go off with "the raggle-taggle gypsies O!"

Byron's influence soon gave way to that of Shakespeare, who opened a still larger field of vision to the Russian poet. In 1825 he writes: "Quel homme que ce Shakespeare! Je n'en reviens pas. Comme Byron le tragique est mesquin devant lui! Ce Byron qui n'a jamais concu qu'un seul caractere et c'est le sien ... ce Byron donc a partage entre ses personages tel et tel trait de son caractere: son orgeuil a l'un, sa haine a l'autre, sa melancolie au troisieme, etc., et c'est ainsi d'un caractere plein, sombre et energique, il a fait plusieurs caracteres insignifiants; ce n'est pas la de la tragedie. On a encore une manie.

Quand on a concu un caractere, tout ce qu'on lui fait dire, meme les choses les plus etranges, en porte essentiellement l'empreinte, comme les pedants et les marins dans les vieux romans de Fielding. Voyez le haineux de Byron ... et la-dessus lisez Shakespeare. Il ne craint jamais de compromettre son personage, il le fait parler avec tout l'abandon de la vie, car il est sur en temps et lieu, de lui faire trouver le langage de son caractere. Vous me demanderez: votre tragedie est-elle une tragedie de caractere ou de costume? J'ai choisi le genre le plus aise, mais j'ai tache de les unir tous deux. J'ecris et je pense. La plupart des scenes ne demandent que du raisonnement; quand j'arrive a une scene qui demande de l'inspiration, j'attends ou je pa.s.se dessus."

I quote this letter because it throws light, firstly, on Pushkin's matured opinion of Byron, and, secondly, on his methods of work; for, like Leonardo da Vinci, he formed the habit, which he here describes, of leaving unwritten pa.s.sages where inspiration was needed, until he felt the moment of _bien etre_ when inspiration came; and this not only in writing his tragedy, but henceforward in everything that he wrote, as his note-books testify.

The subject-matter of _Boris G.o.dunov_ was based on Karamzin's history: it deals with the dramatic episode of the Russian Perkin Warbeck, the false Demetrius who pretended to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. The play is constructed on the model of Shakespeare's chronicle plays, but in a still more disjointed fashion, without a definite beginning or end: when Mussorgsky made an opera out of it, the action was concentrated into definite acts; for, as it stands, it is not a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had not the power of conceiving and executing a drama which should move round one idea to an inevitable close. He had not the gift of dramatic architectonics, and still less that of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the scenes, whether they be tragic and poetical, or scenes of common life, are as vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive, and they speak a language which is at the same time ancient, living, and convincing.

In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of stage architectonics and stage carpentry, it is not merely meant that he lacked the gift of arranging acts that would suit the stage, or that of imagining stage effects. His whole play is not conceived as a drama; a subject from which a drama might be written is taken, but the drama is left unwritten. We see Boris G.o.dunov on the throne, which he has unlawfully usurped; we know he feels remorse; he tells us so in monologues; we see his soul stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of fire, and we watch the wheel revolve; and that is all the moral and spiritual action that the part contains; he is static and not dynamic, he never has to make up his mind; his will never has to encounter the shock of another will during the whole play. Neither does the chronicle centre round the Pretender. It is true that we see the idea of impersonating the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind; and it is also true that in one scene with his Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically moving in a dramatic situation. She loves him because she thinks he is the son of an anointed King. He loves her too much to deceive her, and tells her the truth. She then says she will have nothing of him; and then he rises from defeat and shame to the height of the situation, becomes great, and, not unlike Browning's Sludge, says: "Although I am an impostor, I am born to be a King all the same; I am one of Nature's Kings; and I defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell every one what I have told you. n.o.body will believe you." And Marina is conquered once more by his conduct and bearing.

This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict of two wills and two souls. But there the matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken, and we are shown a series of different patterns, in which the heroine plays no part at all, and in which the hero only makes a momentary appearance. The fact is there is neither hero nor heroine in the play.

It is not a play, but a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never attempted. As a chronicle, a series of detached scenes, it is supremely successful. There are certain scenes which attain to sublimity: for instance, that in the cell of the monastery, where the monk is finishing his chronicle; and the monologue in which Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying speech to his son. The verse in these scenes is sealed with the mark of that G.o.d-gifted ease and high seriousness, which belong only to the inspired great. They are Shakespearean, not because they imitate Shakespeare, but because they attain to heights of imaginative truth to which Shakespeare rises more often than any other poet; and the language in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitableness, an absence of all conscious effort and of all visible art and artifice, a closeness of utterance combined with a width of suggestion which belong only to the greatest artists, to the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to Dante.

_Boris G.o.dunov_ was not published until January 1, 1831, and pa.s.sed, with one exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. Like so many great works, it came before its time; and it was not until years afterwards that the merits of this masterpiece were understood and appreciated.

In 1826 Pushkin's banishment to the country came to an end; in that year he was allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St. Petersburg. In 1826 his poems appeared in one volume, and the second canto of _Onegin_ (the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827 _The Gypsies_, and the third canto of _Onegin_; in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth cantos of _Onegin_; in 1829 _Graf Nulin_, an admirably told _Conte_ such as Maupa.s.sant might have written, of a deceived husband and a wife who, finding herself in the situation of Lucretia, gives the would-be Tarquin a box on the ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in being unfaithful with some one else--the _Cottage of Kolomna_ is another story in the same vein--and in the same year _Poltava_.

This poem was written in one month, in St. Petersburg. The subject is Mazepa, with whom the daughter of his hereditary enemy, Kochubey, whom he afterwards tortures and kills, falls in love. But it is in reality the epic of Peter the Great.[3] When the poem was published, it disconcerted the critics and the public. It revealed an entirely new phase of Pushkin's style, and it should have widened the popular conception of the poet's powers and versatility. But at the time the public only knew Pushkin through his lyrics and his early tales; _Boris G.o.dunov_ had not yet been published; moreover, the public of that day expected to find in a poem pa.s.sion and the delineation of the heart's adventures. This stern objective fragment of an epic, falling into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses and cupids, like a bas-relief conceived by a t.i.tan and executed by a G.o.d, met with little appreciation. The poet's verse which, so far as the public knew it, had hitherto seemed like a shining and luscious fruit, was exchanged for a concentrated weighty tramp of ringing rhyme, _martele_ like steel. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a style as concise as that of Pope and as concentrated as that of Browning's dramatic lyrics. The poem is a fit monument to Peter the Great, and the great monarch's impetuous genius and pa.s.sion for thorough craftsmanship seem to have entered into it.

In 1829 Pushkin made a second journey to the Caucasus, the result of which was a harvest of lyrics. On his return to St. Petersburg he sketched the plan of another epic poem, _Galub_, dealing with the Caucasus, but this remained a fragment.

In 1831 he finished the eighth and last canto of _Onegin_. Originally there were nine cantos, but when the work was published one of the cantos dealing with Onegin's travels was left out as being irrelevant.

Pushkin had worked at this poem since 1823. It was Byron's _Beppo_ which gave him the idea of writing a poem on modern life; but here again, he made of the idea something quite different from any of Byron's work. _Onegin_ is a novel. Eugene Onegin is the name of the hero. It is, moreover, the first Russian novel; and as a novel it has never been surpa.s.sed. It is as real as Tolstoy, as finished in workmanship and construction as Turgenev. It is a realistic novel; not realistic in the sense that Zola's work was mis-called realistic, but realistic in the sense that Miss Austen is realistic. The hero is the average man about St. Petersburg; his father, a worthy public servant, lives honourably on debts and gives three b.a.l.l.s a year. Onegin is brought up, not too strictly, by "Monsieur l'Abbe"; he goes out in the world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in French, and able to dance the Mazurka.

Onegin can touch on every subject, can hold his tongue when the conversation becomes too serious, and make epigrams. He knows enough Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk about Juvenal, and put "Vale!"

at the end of his letters, and he can remember two lines of the _aeneid_. He is severe on Homer and Theocritus, but has read Adam Smith. The only art in which he is proficient is the _ars amandi_ as taught by Ovid. He is a patron of the ballet; he goes to b.a.l.l.s; he eats beef-steaks and _pate de foie gras_. In spite of all this--perhaps because of it--he suffers from spleen, like Childe Harold, the author says. His father dies, leaving a lot of debts behind him, but a dying uncle summons him to the country; and when he gets there he finds his uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the estate. In the country, he is just as much bored as he was in St.

Petersburg. A new neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a young man fresh from Germany, an enthusiast and a poet, and full of Kant, Schiller, and the German writers. Lensky introduces Onegin to the neighbouring family, by name Larin, consisting of a widow and two daughters. Lensky is in love with the younger daughter, Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face, as Onegin says, like the foolish moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less pretty; shy and dreamy, she conceals under her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut character and a strong will.

Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen's heroines; as alive as Fielding's Sophia Western, and as charming as any of George Meredith's women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. Turgenev, with all his magic, and Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours of life, never created a truer, more radiant, and more typically Russian woman. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman; that is to say, of all that is best in Russia; and it is a type taken straight from life, and not from fairy-land--a type that exists as much to-day as it did in the days of Pushkin. She is the first of that long gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky have given us, and which are the most precious jewels of Russian literature, because they reflect the crowning glory of Russian life.

Tatiana falls in love with Onegin at first sight. She writes to him and confesses her love, and in all the love poetry of the world there is nothing more touching and more simple than this confession. It is perfect. If Pushkin had written this and this alone, his place among poets would be unique and different from that of all other poets.

Possibly some people may think that there are finer achievements in the love poetry of the world; but nothing is so futile and so impertinent as giving marks to the great poets, as if they were pa.s.sing an examination. If a thing is as good as possible in itself, what is the use of saying that it is less good or better than something else, which is as good as possible in itself also.

Nevertheless, placed beside any of the great confessions of love in poetry--Francesca's story in the _Inferno_, Romeo and Juliet's leavetaking, Phedre's declaration, Don Juan Tenorio's letter--the beauty of Tatiana's confession would not be diminished by the juxtaposition. Of the rest of Pushkin's work at its best and highest, of the finest pa.s.sages of _Boris G.o.dunov_, for instance, you can say: This is magnificent, but there are dramatic pa.s.sages in other works of other poets on the same lines and as fine; but in Tatiana's letter Pushkin has created something unique, which has no parallel, because only a Russian could have written it, and of Russians, only he. It is a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a blackbird's song.

Onegin tells Tatiana he is not worthy of her, that he is not made for love and marriage; that he would cease to love her at once; that he feels for her like a brother, or perhaps a little more tenderly. It then falls out that Onegin, by flirting with Olga at a ball, makes Lensky jealous. They fight a duel, and Lensky is killed. Onegin is obliged to leave the neighbourhood, and spends years in travel.

Tatiana remains true to her first love; but she is taken by her relatives to Moscow, and consents at last under their pressure to marry a rich man of great position. In St. Petersburg, Onegin meets her again. Tatiana has become a great lady, but all her old charm is there. Onegin now falls violently in love with her; but she, although she frankly confesses that she still loves him, tells him that it is too late; she has married another, and she means to remain true to him. And there the story ends.

_Onegin_ is, perhaps, Pushkin's most characteristic work; it is undoubtedly the best known and the most popular; like _Hamlet_, it is all quotations. Pushkin in his _Onegin_ succeeded in doing what Sh.e.l.ley urged Byron to do--to create something new and in accordance with the spirit of the age, which should at the same time be beautiful. He did more than this. He succeeded in creating for Russia a poem that was purely national, and in giving his country a cla.s.sic, a model both in construction, matter, form, and inspiration for future generations. Perhaps the greatest quality of this poem is its vividness. Pushkin himself speaks, in taking leave, of having seen the unfettered march of his novel in a magic prism. This is just the impression that the poem gives; the scenes are as clear as the shapes in a crystal; nothing is blurred; there are no hesitating notes, nothing _a peu pres_; every stroke comes off; the nail is. .h.i.t on the head every time, only so easily that you do not notice the strokes, and all labour escapes notice. Apart from this the poem is amusing; it arrests the attention as a story, and it delights the intelligence with its wit, its digressions, and its brilliance. It is as witty as Don Juan and as consummately expressed as Pope; and when the occasion demands it, the style pa.s.ses in easy transition to serious or tender tones. _Onegin_ has been compared to Byron's _Don Juan_. There is this likeness, that both poems deal with contemporary life, and in both poems the poets pa.s.s from grave to gay, from severe to lively, and often interrupt the narrative to apostrophize the reader. But there the likeness ends. On the other hand, there is a vast difference.

_Onegin_ contains no adventures. It is a story of everyday life.

Moreover, it is an organic whole: so well constructed that it fits into a stage libretto--Tchaikovsky made an opera out of it--without difficulty. There is another difference--a difference which applies to Pushkin and Byron in general. There is no unevenness in Pushkin; his work, as far as craft is concerned, is always on the same high level.

You can admire the whole, or cut off any single pa.s.sage and it will still remain admirable; whereas Byron must be taken as a whole or not at all--the reason being that Pushkin was an impeccable artist in form and expression, and that Byron was not.

In the winter of 1832 Pushkin sought a new field, the field of historical research; and by the beginning of 1833 he had not only collected all the materials for a history of Pugachev, the Cossack who headed a rising in the reign of Catherine II; but his literary activity was so great that he had also written the rough sketch of a long story in prose dealing with the same subject, _The Captain's Daughter_, another prose story of considerable length, _Dubrovsky_, and portions of a drama, _Rusalka_, The Water Nymph, which was never finished. Besides _Boris G.o.dunov_ and the _Rusalka_, Pushkin wrote a certain number of dramatic scenes, or short dramas in one or more scenes. Of these, one, _The Feast in the Time of Plague_, is taken from the English of John Wilson (_The City of the Plague_), with original additions. In _Mozart and Salieri_ we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can. The story is based on the unfounded anecdote that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri out of envy. This dramatic and beautifully written episode has been set to music as it stands by Rimsky-Korsakov.

_The Covetous Knight_, which bears the superscription, "From the tragi-comedy of Chenstone"--an unknown English original--tells of the conflict between a Harpagon and his son: the delineation of the miser's imaginative pa.s.sion for his treasures is, both in conception and execution, in Pushkin's finest manner. This scene has been recently set to music by Rakhmaninov. _The Guest of Stone_, the story of Don Juan and the _statua gentilissima del gran Commendatore_, makes Don Juan life. A scene from _Faust_ between Faust and Mephistopheles is original and not of great interest; _Angelo_ is the story of _Measure for Measure_ told as a narrative with two scenes in dialogue.

_Rusalka_, The Water Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the sham province of national legend, and it is tantalizing that this poetic fragment remained a fragment.

Pushkin's prose is in some respects as remarkable as his verse. Here, too, he proved a pioneer. _Dubrovsky_ is the story of a young officer whose father is ousted, like Naboth, from his small estate by his neighbour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, becomes a highway robber so as to revenge himself, and introduces himself into the family of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes his revenge because he falls in love with his enemy's daughter. In this extremely vivid story he antic.i.p.ates Gogol in his lifelike pictures of country life. _The Captain's Daughter_ is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev has nothing stagey or melodramatic about him, nothing of Harrison Ainsworth. Of his shorter stories, such as _The Blizzard_, _The Pistol Shot_, _The Lady-Peasant_, the most entertaining, and certainly the most popular, is _The Queen of Spades_, which was so admirably translated by Merimee, and formed the subject of one of Tchaikovsky's most successful operas. As an artistic work _The Egyptian Nights_, written in 1828, is the most interesting, and ranks among Pushkin's masterpieces. It tells of an Italian _improvisatore_ who, at a party in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on Cleopatra and her lovers. The story is written to lead up to this poem, which gives a gorgeous picture of the pagan world, and is another example of Pushkin's miraculous power of a.s.similation. Pushkin's prose has the same limpidity and ease as his verse; the characters have the same vitality and reality as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, and had he lived longer he might have become a great novelist. As it is, he furnished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made in 1832) with the subject of two of his masterpieces--_Dead Souls_ and _The Revisor_.

The province of Russian folk-lore and legend from which Pushkin took the idea of _Rusalka_ was to furnish him with a great deal of rich material. It was in 1831 that in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he wrote his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian popular style, _The Tale of Tsar Saltan_. Up till now he had written only a few ballads in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a brilliant success as a _pastiche_; but it was a _pastiche_ and not quite the real thing, as cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of epigram here and there, which indeed makes it delightful reading. He followed it by another in the comic vein, _The Tale of the Pope and his Man Balda_, and by two more _Marchen_, _The Dead Tsaritsa_ and _The Golden c.o.c.k_; but it was not until two years later that he wrote his masterpiece in this vein, _The Story of the Fisherman and the Fish_. It is the same story as Grimm's tale of the Fisherman's wife who wished to be King, Emperor, and then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting ambition. The tale is written in unrhymed rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines; all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such as might have been handed down by oral tradition in some obscure village out of the remotest past; it has the real _Volkston_; the good-nature and simplicity and un.o.btrusive humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects of all these stories were told to Pushkin by his nurse, Anna Rodionovna, who also furnished him with the subject of his ballad, _The Bridegroom_. In Pushkin's note-books there are seven fairy-tales taken down hurriedly from the words of his nurse; and most likely all that he wrote dealing with the life of the people came from the same source. Pushkin called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, and said that he was indebted to her for counteracting the effects of his first French education.

In 1833 he finished a poem called _The Brazen Horseman_, the story of a man who loses his beloved in the great floods in St. Petersburg in 1834, and going mad, imagines that he is pursued by Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains a magnificent description of St. Petersburg. During the last years of his life, he was engaged in collecting materials for a history of Peter the Great.

His power of production had never run dry from the moment he left school, although his actual work was interrupted from time to time by distractions and the society of his friends.

All the important larger works of Pushkin have now been mentioned; but during the whole course of his career he was always pouring out a stream of lyrics and occasional pieces, many of which are among the most beautiful things he wrote. His variety and the width of his range are astonishing. Some of them have a grace and perfection such as we find in the Greek anthology; others--"Recollections," for instance, in which in the sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pa.s.s before him the blotted scroll of his past deeds, which he is powerless with all the tears in the world to wash out--have the intensity of Shakespeare's sonnets. This poem, for instance, has the same depth of feeling as "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry," or "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Or he will write an elegy as tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture of a sledge in a snow-storm, and give you the plunge of the bewildered horses, the whirling demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the quiet s.p.a.ces of snow, in intoxicating rhythms which E. A. Poe would have envied; or again he will write a description of the Caucasus in eleven short lines, close in expression and vast in suggestion, such as "The Monastery on Kazbek"; or he will bring before you the smell of the autumn morning, and the hoofs ringing out on the half-frozen earth; or he will write a patriotic poem, such as _To the Slanderers of Russia_, fraught with patriotic indignation without being offensive; in this poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of Russia: "Will not,"

he says, "from Perm to the Caucasus, from Finland's chill rocks to the flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to the unshaken walls of China, glistening with its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise?"

Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance and as humble in spirit as one of the old Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as Musset and as playful as Heine: he will translate you the spirit of Horace and the spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure the restraint of Andre Chenier, and the impetuous gallop of Byron.

Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin's poems is the poem which expresses his view of life in the elegy--

"As bitter as stale aftermath of wine Is the remembrance of delirious days; But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs The past more sorely, as my days decline.

My path is dark. The future lies in wait, A gathering ocean of anxiety, But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create, That is my prayer; to live and not to die!

I know that ecstasy shall still lie there In sorrow and adversity and care.

Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine, Be moved to tears by musings that are mine; And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."

But the greatest of his short poems is probably "The Prophet." This is a tremendous poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin only attained once. It is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression; the syllables ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a silver clarion.

It is, as it were, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.

Nothing finer as sound could ever be compounded with Russian vowels and consonants; nothing could be more perfectly planned, or present, in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the imagination. Even a rough prose translation will give some idea of the imaginative splendour of the poem--

"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the crossing of the ways: And he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips, the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and the voice of G.o.d called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and go forth over the sea and over the land and set light with My word to the hearts of the people.'"

In 1837 came the catastrophe which brought about Pushkin's death. It was caused by the clash of evil tongues engaged in frivolous gossip, and Pushkin's own susceptible and violent temperament. A guardsman, Heckeren-Dantes, had been flirting with his wife. Pushkin received an anonymous letter, and being wrongly convinced that Heckeren-Dantes was the author of it, wrote him a violent letter which made a duel inevitable. A duel was fought on the 27th of February, 1837, and Pushkin was mortally wounded. Such was his frenzy of rage that, after lying wounded and unconscious in the snow, on regaining consciousness, he insisted on going on with the duel, and fired another shot, giving a great cry of joy when he saw that he had wounded his adversary. It was only a slight wound in the hand. It was not until he reached home that his anger pa.s.sed away. He died on the 29th of February, after forty-five hours of excruciating suffering, heroically borne; he forgave his enemies; he wished no one to avenge him; he received the last sacraments; and he expressed feelings of loyalty and grat.i.tude to his sovereign. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old.

Pushkin's career falls naturally into two divisions: his life until he was thirty, and his life after he was thirty. Pushkin began his career with liberal aspirations, and he disappointed some in the loyalty to the throne, the Church, the autocracy, and the established order of things which he manifested later; in turning to religion; in remaining in the Government service; in writing patriotic poems; in holding the position of Gentleman of the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in fact, what is called a reactionary. But it would be a mistake to imagine that Pushkin was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause of liberty for a handful of silver and a riband to stick in his coat. The liberal aspirations of Pushkin's youth were the very air that the whole of the aristocratic youth of that day breathed. Pushkin could not escape being influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel then, than he was a reactionary afterwards, when again the very air which the whole of educated society breathed was conservative and nationalistic. It may be a pity that it was so; but so it was. There was no liberal atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and the radical effervescence of the Decembrists was destroyed by the Decembrists' premature action.

It is no good making a revolution if you have nothing to make it with.

The Decembrists were in the same position as the educated elite of one regiment at Versailles would have been, had it attempted to destroy the French monarchy in the days of Louis XIV. The Decembrists by their premature action put the clock of Russian political progress back for years. The result was that men of impulse, aspiration, talent and originality had in the reign of Nicholas to seek an outlet for their feelings elsewhere than in politics, because politics then were simply non-existent.

But apart from this, even if the opportunities had been there, it may be doubted whether Pushkin would have taken them. He was not born with a pa.s.sion to reform the world. He was neither a rebel nor a reformer; neither a liberal nor a conservative; he was a democrat in his love for the whole of the Russian people; he was a patriot in his love of his country. He resembled Goethe rather than Socrates, or Sh.e.l.ley, or Byron; although, in his love of his country and in every other respect, his fiery temperament both in itself and in its expression was far removed from Goethe's Olympian calm. He was like Goethe in his att.i.tude towards society, and the att.i.tude of the social and official world towards him resembles the att.i.tude of Weimar towards Goethe.

During the first part of his career he gave himself up to pleasure, pa.s.sion, and self-indulgence; after he was thirty he turned his mind to more serious things. It would not be exact to say he _became_ deeply religious, because he was religious by nature, and he soon discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism; but in spite of this he was a victim of _amour-propre_; and he wavered between contempt of the society around him and a petty resentment against it which took the shape of scathing and sometimes cruel epigrams. It was this dangerous _amour-propre_, the fact of his being not only pa.s.sion's slave, but petty pa.s.sion's slave, which made him a victim of frivolous gossip and led to the final catastrophe.

"In Pushkin," says Soloviev, the philosopher, "according to his own testimony there were two different and separate beings: the inspired priest of Apollo, and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children of the world." It was the first Pushkin--the inspired priest--who predominated in the latter part of his life; but who was unable to expel altogether the second Pushkin, the frivolous _Weltkind_, who was p.r.o.ne to be exasperated by the society in which he lived, and when exasperated was dangerous. There is one fact, however, which accounts for much. The more serious Pushkin's turn of thought grew, the more objective, purer, and stronger his work became, the less it was appreciated; for the public which delighted in the comparatively inferior work of his youth was not yet ready for his more mature work.

What pleased the public were the dazzling colours, the sensuous and sometimes libidinous images of his early poems; the romantic atmosphere; especially anything that was artificial in them. They had not yet eyes to appreciate the n.o.ble lines, nor ears to appreciate the simpler and more majestic harmonies of his later work. Thus it was that they pa.s.sed _Boris G.o.dunov_ by, and were disappointed in the later cantos of _Onegin_. This was, of course, discouraging.

Nevertheless, it is laughable to rank Pushkin amongst the misunderstood, among the Sh.e.l.leys, the Millets, of Literature and Art; or to talk of his sad fate. To talk of him as one of the victims of literature is merely to depreciate him.

He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus, which gave him inspiration: to his own country home, which gave him leisure. He was censored. Yes: but the Emperor undertook to do the work himself. Had he lived in England, society--as was proved in the case of Byron--would have been a far severer censor of his morals and the extravagance of his youth, than the Russian Government. Besides which, he won instantaneous fame, and in the society in which he moved he was surrounded by a band not only of devoted but distinguished admirers, amongst whom were some of the highest names in Russian literature--Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol.

Pushkin is Russia's national poet, the Peter the Great of poetry, who out of foreign material created something new, national and Russian, and left imperishable models for future generations. The chief characteristic of his genius is its universality. There appeared to be nothing he could not understand nor a.s.similate. And it is just this all-embracing humanity--Dostoyevsky calls him pa??????p??--this capacity for understanding everything and everybody, which makes him so profoundly Russian. He is a poet of everyday life: a realistic poet, and above all things a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as an epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief and produce a n.o.ble fragment, he cannot set crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians the beauty of their landscape and the poetry of their people; and they, with ears full of pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and romantic stage properties, did not understand what he was doing: but they understood later. For a time he fought against the stream, and all in vain; and then he gave himself up to the great current, which took him all too soon to the open sea.

He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional; and all his life he was still learning to become more and more intimate with the savour and smell of the people's language. Like Peter the Great, he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and his whole energies in craftsmanship. He was a great artist; his style is perspicuous, plastic, and pure; there is never a blurred outline, never a smear, never a halting phrase or a hesitating note. His concrete images are, as it were, transparent, like Donne's description of the woman whose

"... pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought, That you might almost think her body thought."

His diction is the inseparable skin of the thought. You seem to hear him thinking. He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated spontaneity. His soul was sincere, n.o.ble, and open; he was frivolous, a child of the world and of his century; but if he was worldly, he was human; he was a citizen as well as a child of the world; and it is that which makes him the greatest of Russian poets.