Advent of a culture

Ronald Hingley

Pushkin: A Biography Henri Troyat (George Allen and Unwin £8.95)

Henri Troyat's comprehensive biography of Russia's greatest poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was originally published in French nearly thirty years ago, and this is the first unabridged version of the book to appear in English translation.

The supreme importance of Pushkin to Russians — both as a poet and as a national 'hero — perhaps needs stressing, for his lofty status in his motherland is apt to mystify those who are unable to read him in the original. What is there about this apparent lightweight that makes him loom yet larger than such titans as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov? Even Flaubert, when Turgenev tried to convert him to Pushkinolatry, complained that the master's work was too "flat".

Reading Pushkin in translation, one can easily see how such an impression can arise. Where is all the tingle and electricity; where are the vibrations, the resonances of the incomparable original? Has anyone ever captured them in English? It was certainly a wise decision by Nancy Amphoux (the translator of M. Troyat's work) not to attempt any ambitious re-igniting of Pushkinian fireworks. In dealing with the extensive quotations from his verse, she has played safe by translating into plain unversified English the biographer's own plain French translations from the Russian original.

' Before Pushkin suddenly came along Russia lacked a native literature such as the major Western European countries had long taken for granted as part of their cultural heritage. There had of course been many works meriting study by literary scholars, but there had been nothing to make Russians feel that they had a great author of their own — still less anything qualified to capture the imagination of the world at large. Pushkin's advent marked the end of this situation. No matter that his verse might be untranslatable; for the loss, now, was that of the untutored alien who could not read a Russian writer in the original. Thus did Pushkin boost national morale at the beginning of a century when educated Russians were painfully aware of their country's backwardness — economically and politically as well as culturally.

Harmony, classicism, simplicity — these are the hallmarks of Pushkin's muse, in prose as well as in verse. But what a contrast we find between this extreme order, this love of playful decorum on the one hand and the poet's undisciplined, rumbustious life on the other. On this M. Troyat provides ample material indeed. From the end of his schooldays onwards the wayward, fiery, touchy, weirdly garbed young bard was under almost non-stop surveillance by the Tsarist political police. He helped, in the early 1820s, to inspire the first serious Russian revolutionaries — those later termed Decembrists — with inflammatory verses praising political freedom and advocating the overthrow of tyrants. Not unnaturally, given the conditions of Alexander I's Russia, these breaches of officially imposed peace earned the young rebel exile: first in the exotic south and then to his mother's estate near Pskov.

Exile, though irksome, proved a blessing in disguise to Pushkin. So impetuous a young man might otherwise have shared the fate (imprisonment in Siberia or even hanging) of those conspirators who reacted to Alexander I's premature death by staging an unsuccessful coup in St Petersburg's Senate Square on December 14, 1825. Fortunately Pushkin had not been initiated into this conspiracy, for though many of the mutineers were his personal friends they knew him as the last man in the world to keep a secret, besides which they also wished to protect so valuable a 'cultural asset.

The new Tsar, Nicholas I, sent for Pushkin, freed him from exile and even promised to exempt his writings from the usual cumbrous literary censorship. "I will be your censor," the tall, handsome, immaculate Autocrat told the small, ugly, hypersensitive, travel-stained poet at a famous personal interview which took place in September 1826.

What followed was, for Pushkin, no great improvement on exile. During the eleven years of life remaining to him he was subjected to a campaign of petty harassment stemming ultimately from the Emperor in person and administered by his head of political police, General Benckendorff. The poet was required to report on his movements; to appear properly dressed on ceremonial occasions; to refrain from reading his un published work aloud to his friends. Like some delinquent schoolboy, he was told to explain this, justify that.

Supremely unbureaucratic down to the tips of his eccentrically long finger-nails, Pushkin was temperamentally incapable of conforming with these or any other official requirements. In 1829, for instance, he dashed off to the southern front where Russia was fighting the Turks, attached himself to the army and sportingly launched a one-man civilian cavalry charge against the fleeing enemy. This illicit expedition became known to authority through the Tiflis press, and once again Pushkin was in trouble with the Emperor.

In M. Troyat's version these events are somewhat misrepresented, since he will have it that Nicholas I, and Alexander I before him, were "under the thumb," of their own secret police; than which nothing could be further from the truth.

Interminably gambling, and exchanging insults, involved in more duels than can be counted, sexually promiscuous, subject to the odd bout of pox, constantly in debt, Pushkin squandered his life recklessly and lost it prematurely. He wanted to be so many things as well as a great poet: political conspirator, strident patriot, bon viveur, great lover, pater familias . . . snob, even, for he was always boasting of his illustrious ancestors, who included a Negro protege of Peter the Great.

Typically self-assertive, Pushkin succeeded after much difficulty in marrying Natalie Goncharov — a young woman famous with everyone from the Emperor downwards as the greatest beauty of her age. Alas, this queenly wife did not love the little man, prodigious seducer though he was. Within a few years the marriage brought Pushkin to despair and — after a period devoted to swiving Natalie's ugly sister — to death in a duel with his would-be cuckolder, Baron Georges D'Anthes-Heeckeren: cavalry officer, elegantone and bounder.

One signal achievement of M. Troyat's book, when it first appeared in 1946, was to present two hitherto unknown letters from the Heeckeren family archives. Penned by D'Anthes, the dashing cavalryman who shot Pushkin, they show that the affair between himself and the glowering, undersized poet's devastating wife was no mere mischievous, fashionable passing flirtation — as it had been mistakenly conceived — but a passionate emotional involvement on both sides. Whether it was ever consummated or not we do not know. M. Troyat thinks not, but those interested in the matter will do well to consult Walter Vickery's more recent study, Death of a Poet, in which a less highly spiced but no less enthralling account of Pushkin's end is to be found. Whatever the truth about this, Pushkin perished tragically: a victim of his age and of his own splendidly unregimentable nature.

M. Troyat's book is a mine of information on Pushkin. It is abundantly supplied with source references, but written (well written, be it said) in the somewhat romance manner which involves undocumented 'thoughts' being described as passing, from time to time, through the poet's head. As for the many lengthy plot digests of Pushkin's work, there may for all I know be some readers somewhere on whom they will not pall. Lavishly, indeed lushly written with a superabundance of detail, the book is to that extent un-Pushkinian. But it does not lack pleasures, delights and insights, and can be confidently recommended to anyone with an interest in a remarkable man and his period.

Ronald Hingley's latest book, Joseph Stalin, Man and Legend, is about to be published by Hutchinson.