By Bergotte
To understand Russian literature is, in the end, to understand Pushkin — which is to say that it cannot be fully done from the outside. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin is the writer whom every Russian author who followed him claimed as a father, a standard, and an impossibility: the source from which a whole tradition flows and against which it perpetually measures its own distance. But Pushkin is not merely a national monument. He is a writer of such lightness, such precision, such unillusioned tenderness toward human weakness, that his work carries a vision of the human condition as clear and as honest as anything the nineteenth century produced. He understood, before the great Russian novelists who learned from him, that life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be met — that what matters is not the discovery of meaning but the quality of attention brought to the search.
The Russian Sun
The comparison is Gogol’s, made in grief after Pushkin’s death in 1837: Russia’s sun has set. It was not hyperbole. Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799, into a family of old nobility on his father’s side and, on his mother’s side, into a lineage that included Abram Gannibal, the African-born godson of Peter the Great — a fact Pushkin was proud of and returned to throughout his life, most directly in the unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great. He was educated at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the elite school outside St Petersburg where he began writing seriously and where his genius was recognised by everyone including, generously, his older contemporaries. He published his first poem at fifteen. By his mid-twenties he was the most celebrated writer in Russia, and he remained so for the rest of his short life.
That life was turbulent in the way that lives lived at maximum intensity tend to be. He was exiled twice by the tsarist government — first to southern Russia and the Caucasus for verses deemed politically subversive, then to his family estate at Mikhailovskoye for two years of rural isolation that proved, as enforced solitudes sometimes do, enormously productive. He was under police surveillance for much of his adult life, his correspondence read, his movements monitored. He married the famous beauty Natalya Goncharova in 1831, had four children, accumulated debts that haunted him, and was killed in a duel in January 1837 at the age of thirty-seven, defending his wife’s honour against a French officer named Georges d’Anthès. He died two days after the duel, in considerable pain, having refused the last rites of the Church until friends persuaded him to accept them. Tens of thousands of people came to see his body. The tsar, alarmed by the scale of public grief, had him buried quietly at night, outside St Petersburg, before the crowd could gather.
He left behind a body of work — poetry, novels in verse, prose fiction, plays, fairy tales, critical essays, an enormous correspondence — that established the modern Russian literary language almost single-handedly. Dostoevsky said that all Russians come from Pushkin. Tolstoy wept reading him. Chekhov kept his portrait on the wall. The claim made about Shakespeare — that he invented the human as literature understands it — has been made about Pushkin in the Russian context, and it is not an empty claim.
The Problem of Translation
Before anything else, an honesty is required. Pushkin is the writer who suffers most catastrophically in translation, and this creates a genuine problem for any essay written in English about his achievement. The qualities that make him supreme in Russian — the extraordinary compression of his verse, the lightness of touch, the way a single line can contain irony and tenderness and melancholy simultaneously without any of them cancelling the others, the music that is inseparable from the meaning — are precisely the qualities that translation destroys or distorts. Nabokov spent years producing a hyper-literal translation of Eugene Onegin with thousands of pages of commentary, on the explicit grounds that a beautiful translation would be a lie: better to give the reader the bones and explain what flesh had covered them. Others have tried verse translations of varying fidelity and beauty. None has fully solved the problem.
This matters because Pushkin’s vision of the human condition is not separable from his style. He does not state his themes and then illustrate them. The themes are the style — the irony that never tips into cynicism, the emotion that never tips into sentimentality, the wit that is always in the service of truth rather than in flight from it. A reader who knows only the translations knows something real about Pushkin but misses the quality that made him the sun. With that caveat registered, and with the earnest recommendation that any reader who can should approach him in Russian, or at least through the most faithful available approximations, here is what he was doing and why it matters.
Onegin and the Problem of the Superfluous Man
Eugene Onegin, written between 1823 and 1831 and published in serial instalments, is a novel in verse — a form Pushkin invented for it and that has never been successfully replicated — and it is the central work in the Russian literary tradition in something like the way Don Quixote is central to the European novel: the origin point from which everything else takes its bearings. It gave Russian literature its first great anti-hero, its first serious examination of the gap between romantic self-image and actual feeling, and the figure that would be elaborated and re-elaborated throughout the nineteenth century: the superfluous man.
Onegin is young, wealthy, bored, intelligent, and incapable of genuine feeling — or rather, incapable of recognising genuine feeling when it arrives, because his education in romantic posture has given him all the vocabulary of feeling without any of the substance. He receives the love of Tatyana — one of the great characters of Russian literature, a country girl of profound inner life who writes him a letter of passionate declaration that is one of the most nakedly honest documents of desire in all of fiction — and he rejects it. Not cruelly, exactly. He lectures her, gently and condescendingly, on the impropriety of her behaviour and the impossibility of his own feelings. He is wrong about both. Years later, when Tatyana has become a great society lady and Onegin has finally understood what he lost, he writes to her in his turn, and she rejects him in her turn — not cruelly either, but with a finality that carries all the weight of the years between them. She still loves him, she tells him. And she will not leave her husband.
The symmetry is mathematical and merciless. Onegin missed his moment of real life because he was too armoured in ironic detachment to recognise it. By the time the armour is off, the moment is gone. This is Pushkin’s diagnosis of a particular kind of nineteenth-century masculine pathology — the man formed by Romantic literature to expect grand passion and therefore unable to recognise ordinary love when it stands before him — but it is also something more universal: the observation that the self-consciousness that makes us interesting to ourselves is often precisely what prevents us from living.
Tatyana is the moral centre of the poem and has always been understood as such. What makes her extraordinary is not that she is virtuous in the conventional sense — her letter is scandalously direct, her feeling undisguised — but that she is consistent. She knows what she wants, she says what she wants, she accepts the consequence of not getting it, and she does not pretend otherwise at any point. Her famous final refusal of Onegin — But I am given to another / And will be faithful to him forever — is not resignation or martyrdom. It is integrity: the refusal to build a happiness on a betrayal, even when the happiness would be real. Pushkin gives her the poem’s moral authority without making her a saint. She is a woman who has been genuinely hurt and who has genuinely grown, and the two things are connected.
The Tales of Belkin
The prose fiction is where Pushkin most directly addresses the question of what ordinary human life looks like when stripped of romantic inflation. The Tales of Belkin, published in 1831 under a fictional editorial persona, are five short stories of such concentrated economy that they read like thought experiments in narrative form — each one taking a conventional Romantic scenario and deflating it, gently but completely, by insisting on the way things actually happen rather than the way fiction has taught us to expect them to happen.
The Stationmaster is the one that cuts deepest. It is the story of a humble post-station keeper whose daughter Dunya is seduced and taken away to St Petersburg by a passing hussar. The stationmaster, whose walls are decorated with pictures illustrating the parable of the Prodigal Son — images of suffering and redemption he has arranged in advance of his own anticipated grief, as if the narrative frames through which we understand our lives can be chosen from a cultural menu — makes two unsuccessful journeys to St Petersburg to reclaim her. By the time the narrator returns to the station years later, the stationmaster is dead of grief and drink. The story seems, at this point, to be the tragedy the pictures on the wall predicted: the fallen daughter, the ruined father, the hussar’s callousness. But then the narrator meets Dunya herself, visiting her father’s grave with her children, a lady in a fine carriage. She is not ruined. She is prosperous, apparently loved, the hussar having married her. She weeps at the grave.
Pushkin will not say whether this constitutes a happy ending. The father is still dead. Dunya’s prosperity does not restore him. The pictures on the wall told one story and life told another, and the gap between them is where the actual human experience lived — unlegible through the available narrative templates, neither the tragedy the Prodigal Son story predicted nor the romance the hussar’s arrival seemed to promise. Pushkin is interested in that gap, in the space between the stories we have been given to understand our lives and the lives themselves, which are always more complicated, more ambiguous, and more resistant to interpretation than the stories allow.
Mozart and Salieri
The short dramatic works — the four Little Tragedies written in the extraordinary creative autumn of 1830 at Boldino, when Pushkin was quarantined on his estate by a cholera epidemic and produced some of the best work of his career — are the most formally compressed of his explorations of the human condition, each one isolating a single psychological knot and tying it as tight as it will go.
Mozart and Salieri is the one that has travelled furthest, partly through Shaffer’s Amadeus, which borrowed its central premise. But Pushkin’s version is sharper and stranger than any theatrical adaptation. Salieri is not simply envious. He is a man who has devoted his life to the proposition that genius is earned — that patient, disciplined, sacrificial labour is the proper route to artistic greatness — and who has been undone by the discovery that Mozart, careless and effortless and apparently unconscious of his own genius, produces work that Salieri’s decades of effort cannot approach. The crisis is theological as much as personal: if talent is arbitrary, if it is distributed without regard to merit or devotion, then the universe is unjust at its foundations, and Salieri’s entire life has been premised on a lie.
He poisons Mozart. Or he believes he does — Pushkin, typically, leaves enough ambiguity that the poisoning may be partly fantasised. What he cannot escape is the question that torments him at the end: would a true genius, as he asks, be capable of crime? He has committed what he believes is a great act for the sake of justice, and the question of whether it was great or merely murderous is one he cannot answer. The play ends not in resolution but in the reverberance of an unanswerable question, which is where Pushkin’s most serious work always ends.
The Captain’s Daughter and the Claims of History
The Captain’s Daughter, published in 1836, the year before Pushkin’s death, is his only completed novel in prose and the work in which his vision of history as the ground of individual fate is most fully expressed. Set during the Pugachev Rebellion of the 1770s — the peasant uprising that briefly threatened to overthrow Catherine the Great — it follows the young officer Pyotr Grinyov through a series of encounters with Pugachev himself that are simultaneously adventures, moral tests, and meditations on the relationship between personal loyalty and historical force.
Pugachev is the novel’s greatest creation: a charismatic, violent, doomed rebel leader who treats Grinyov with unexpected generosity because Grinyov once gave him a hare-skin coat when he was cold and lost in a blizzard. The coat — this small, unheroic act of ordinary human kindness, offered to a stranger before his identity was known — becomes the pivot on which the novel turns. Pugachev spares Grinyov, helps him, eventually releases him, not for political reasons or strategic ones but because of a coat, because of a human gesture made in a snowstorm. History — the great impersonal force of rebellion and suppression — is momentarily deflected by a private act of decency.
This is Pushkin’s most direct statement of what the individual can do in the face of historical enormity: not stop it, not redirect it, but humanise it, one encounter at a time, through the accumulation of small, unremarkable, genuine acts of consideration. Grinyov is not a hero in the conventional sense. He is honest and loyal and not very clever, and these modest virtues, practised consistently, turn out to be sufficient — sufficient to survive, to protect the people he loves, to maintain his integrity through a period that destroyed greater and more ambitious men.
The Lyric Voice
The poems are the heart of it, and the heart resists the essay form. But something must be said. Pushkin wrote lyric poetry of such range — from the erotic to the political to the metaphysical to the comic to the quietly devastated — that it constitutes, taken as a whole, a complete map of the emotional life. The love poems are not like other love poems: they do not idealise, they do not plead, they do not punish the beloved for the pain of loving. The most famous of them, the poem known in English as I loved you, is a farewell to a love that is over, and what distinguishes it is the purity of its wish for the beloved’s future happiness — uncorrupted by self-pity or bitterness, the feeling acknowledged and released with equal completeness. It is one of the shortest great poems in the language. Eight lines, in Russian. Everything in it is true.
The late poem I have erected a monument not made by hands — written months before the duel, with the air of a man putting his affairs in order — makes the claim that Ovid made and Shakespeare made: that the poems will outlast the poet, that the work is the monument, that what was true in the writing will remain true after the writer is gone. But Pushkin’s version of the claim has an unusual quality of detachment, almost of relief. He is not fighting death or arguing with it. He is simply noting, with the equanimity of someone who has made his peace with an opponent he knows he will not defeat, that some things persist. The voice. The feeling. The eight lines that say everything.
What Pushkin Gives
What Pushkin gives the human condition argument is something that the writers who learned from him — who were in many ways greater in scope, more ambitious in their philosophical reach, more willing to go to extremes — could not quite give: a sense of proportion. He understood, with a clarity that never hardens into cynicism and never softens into sentimentality, that most of life is neither tragedy nor triumph but the middle state — the ordinary days, the ordinary feelings, the ordinary losses that are nonetheless the whole of what we have. He did not romanticise this or deplore it. He looked at it steadily and found it, on balance, enough.
This is not a small thing. Most of the great tradition errs in one direction or the other: toward the grand, the metaphysical, the extreme of suffering or the extreme of joy. Pushkin stays in the middle, where most of us actually live, and illuminates it with a precision and a tenderness that makes it feel, for the duration of the reading, not merely tolerable but genuinely and specifically beautiful.
The duel was stupid. He knew it was stupid. He went anyway — for reasons of honour, of social pressure, of the particular masculine vanity that even the most intelligent men cannot always resist. He died at thirty-seven with most of what he might have done still ahead of him. The work that exists is, somehow, complete. It feels complete. It has the quality of something that could not have been added to without being diluted, and the loss of what was not written is mourned differently from the loss of, say, Keats or Schubert — mourned, but with a sense that what was left is not a fragment but a whole, and that the whole is sufficient.
The sun set at thirty-seven and the light has not gone out.
Sources and Further Reading
Pushkin, Alexander. Eugene Onegin. Translated by James Falen. Oxford World’s Classics, 1995.
Pushkin, Alexander. Eugene Onegin. Translated with commentary by Vladimir Nabokov. 4 vols. Bollingen Series. Princeton University Press, 1964.
Pushkin, Alexander. The Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings. Translated by Ronald Wilks. Penguin Classics, 1998.
Pushkin, Alexander. The Captain’s Daughter. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. Everyman’s Library, 2012.
Pushkin, Alexander. The Little Tragedies. Translated by Nancy Anderson. Yale University Press, 2000.
Pushkin, Alexander. Selected Poems. Translated by D. M. Thomas. Penguin Classics, 1983.
Binyon, T. J. Pushkin: A Biography. HarperCollins, 2002.
Troyat, Henri. Pushkin. Translated by Nancy Amphoux. Doubleday, 1970.
Briggs, A. D. P. Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study. Croom Helm, 1983.
Bethea, David M. Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet. University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible.” New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “Pushkin.” Speech delivered at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial, Moscow, June 1880. In A Writer’s Diary, vol. 2. Translated by Kenneth Lantz. Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Mirsky, D. S. Pushkin. Dutton, 1963.
Discover more from My World of Interiors
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
My World of Interiors 