Pushkin's New Dress
The Complete Prose Tales of Pushkin. Trans- lated by Gillon R. Aitken. (Barrie and Rockliff, 42s.)
THIS new version presents Pushkin's entire prose fiction, excluding certain short fragments, in rationally edited form. The rendering, slightly stiff and lapsing at times into `translationese,' is harmoniously adjusted to the poet's own some- what stilted prose diction. And since Pushkin's poetry eludes successful translation, it is argu- able that this effective version of his prose makes him just about as available to the English- reading public as he can ever hope to be.
Pushkin's prose cannot, of course, compete with his verse in literary importance, and many of these items may impress readers as trifles— as they often impressed Pushkin's own genera- tion. The material is `romantic,' being concerned with such topics as highwaymen with hearts of gold; innocent young women, brought up on French novels, who pine away on country estates (all near cousins to Pushkin's more famous poetical heroine Tatyana); their fathers —indulgent, crotchety or eccentric, as the case may be; ardent and adventurous youths; mis- taken identity; disguise, coincidence, duelling, gambling and the like.
Pushkin garnishes these themes with a delicate irony which imparts its own special charm. A Mozart in his verse, he seems in prose more of a Donizetti, veering between the melodrama of Lucia and the playfulness of Don Pasquale; or so one might write if one were that kind of reviewer. Pushkin's fiction is partly important because he did so much to lubricate the lan- guage of Russian prose, an impressive but creaking instrument when he took it over. `Our literature,' as he points out in Roslarlev, `is no older than Lomonosov, and still extremely limited. It offers us, of course, several excellent poets, but one cannot ask of every reader an exclusive passion for verse.'
Pushkin's own prose did as much as anyone's to change that situation. It was a thematic in- spiration, too, though altogether too much fuss has been made of his Hermann (in The Queen of Spades) as the forerunner of Gogol's and Dostoievsky's fantastic St Petersburg heroes; and also of The Station Inspector as inaugurating the cult of the 'little man' in nineteenth-century Russian literature. To such familiar themes must be added Pushkin's cultivation of the eccentric landowner, as in Dubrovsky, the best of his more neglected prose works. Here we find a
little joke characteristic of the Russian squire- archy: that of locking up unsuspecting guests in a room with a bear carefully tethered in such a way that it can half maul them. This may be said (by those who like to see their literature as an organic growth) to have spawned a whole shoal of progeny among the great landowner- pranksters of later Russian literature, forever ducking the local priest in the pond or indulging in similar japes to while away the tedium of rural life.
Pushkin had a way of leaving his work un- finished, which was especially regrettable in the case of Dubrorsky and The Moor of Peter the Great, the latter revealing his talent for the his- torical novel, also displayed in the more familiar Captain's Daughter. This last-mentioned work was fortunately brought to completion, as was The Queen of Spades, his greatest prose masterpiece, and also The Tales of Belkin. These tales have a slightly unhappy record as the in- spiration of some of the more dubious pages in Russian criticism of Pushkin. On foreign soil they have degenerated to the position of set book in courses on the Russian language, a role for which they would be better equipped if their language were less archaic. But this and the other nine items in Mr Aitken's collection all come across effectively in their new dress.
RONALD HING LEY
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