Nicholas Richardson on Pushkin
The Complection of Russian Literature: A Cento Andrew Field (Allen Lane The Penguin Press £3.50) Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary John 13ayley (CUP £4.60) Pushkin on Literature edited by Tatiana Wolff (Methuen £7.50) Mr Field's aim is nothing if not ambitious. He sets out to provoke a radical reappraisal of Russian literature, to communicate through the criticism of Russian writers by their peers, something of this literature's texture and feel. In practice the results are bizarre, a sort of heteroclite antihistory. Of course dissonance may provoke discovery, and there is a certain shocking pleasure in watching, say, Mr Field taking his hatchet to Dostoievsky (at least, all Dostoievsky after Crime and Punishment, although he allows Karamazov to be "not without merit "). Turgenev got his before: the Goncharov version of Turgenev's alleged theft of his material, interesting enough, but followed by a second article showing Turgenev's debt to Balzac, so that the reader gets the impression the wretched man was a sort of literary kleptomaniac. (It's a pity Mr Field did not gun for Tolstoy as well, then he would have had the three most quarrelsome figures of the period in the biag). These excursions have some interest. Much of the remainder of the criticism does not. It wobbles between the anecdotal (Zinaida Gippius on Blok or Chukovsky on Mandelstam), the impressionistic, and the apparently irrelevant. Perhaps Mr Field is right to include a consideration neither of Pushkin's more important works, nor of Tolstoy's, but between its major omissions and minor inclusions the Cento communicates less the feel of Russian literature than the echo of Pushkin's famous boutade that "we have a literature of sorts but no criticism."
But Mr Field is surely right to see a continulty in Russian literature, if only because the Russians themselves show so obsessive a concern with their literary tradition and its detailed structure. Only You must connect, nineteenth-century realism must come either from Pushkin or Gogol (not both), Chekhov's theatre must be a development of Turgenev's even if both were unsatisfactory to a critic like Meyerhold, precisely on the grounds that both authors were "unable to attach their Plays to Russia's true repertoire." It is tempting to see this attitude, and the complementary preoccupation with the Russianness of Russian literature, as reasons for Pushkin's immense stature and popularity in his own country. It is not just that he was in some sort the " onlie begetter," not that he could be seen as, say, Blok saw him, as the archetypal radical, still less that his life—which so often means his death—could be so seen.
One of the major virtues of John Bayley's quite excellent book is to emphasize Pushkin's extraordinary technical range and virtuosity. As Mr Bayley points out, what is in the best sense disturbing about Pushkin is less that he was the first great Russian author than that his mastery of a wide variety of forms, from lyrical to heroic poetry, quasi-Shakespearian tragedy, the novel in verse, the Gothic tale, realistic prose novellas, was so complete that he appears not as an innovator but as the product of an already sophisticated culture; with the result that almost anything in subsequent Russian literature can, if needs be, be traced back to him.
In this sense he was very much a writer's writer, and much of the best Pushkin criticism — one thinks of Akhmatova among others — has been by other writers. He was also extremely well-read, both in his contemporaries and, as Tatiana Wolff shows, in European literature as a whole. He had a dazzling ability to adapt, collate and transcend his sources (here Mr Bayley's book is extremely valuable). He also had a quite unexpected objectivity. Both may be the result of the ' distancing ' Mr Bayley describes, Pushkin's ability to stand back from his subject as from his sources, so that the work of a man whose temperament was impulsive and whose life stormy remains curiously anonymous, curiously free of personal allusion.
So to the great Pushkin enigma: the contrast between his position in Russian literature, and his comparative neglect in the West — Merimte always excepted. Russian poetry as a whole has never had its Melchior de Vogtie, and this lacuna is compounded by the problem of translation. This is something which the very excellence of Mr Bayley's book paradoxically underlines.
His close and acute study of Pushkin's work, his infectious delight in the complexity and felicity of Pushkin's style cannot convince. At best, for the reader with no Russian, it may induce a certain suspension of disbelief — until he reads Mr Bayley's accurate but entirely unexciting translation. Take, for example, the famous scene in Ruslan, reminiscent of Edouard et Caroline, in which Lyudmilla is trying on Chernomor's hat, and contrast the movement of the Russian verse, from the initial heavy polysyllables to the almost onomatopoeic dance rhythm of the last two lines: something the translation can never hope to convey. Add to this the difficulties inherent in traWeting or even transferring the Onegin ganza into its English equivalent (and here I think Mr Bayley is too charitable to the English versions of the poem : has he never tried to read them aloud?).
The result is to create something like a credibility gap, and this is perhaps why there are moments when Mr Bayley seems to protest too much, when the dazzling series of references and asides (and most are fascinating, from the analogies to Chaucer to the influence, not so much of the — inevitable — Byron, as of Sterne, on Onegin: but Mr Bayley should put Louis XI back where he belongs, in Quentin Durward) seem a triflle strained. Pushkin was a European poet and a very well read one; but can this really justify the references to Perkin Warbeck or Suetonius or Dombey?
Belinsky said Pushkin was a great poet precisely because "he did not succumb to reflection." Which is one reason for finding Pushkin on Literature disappointing. Pushkin's own style was terse and often engagingly flip, his critical judgements are incisive even when rather odd, like his preference for Lemontey over Hume or Alphonse Karr over Balzac. But as a critic he was not particularly interested in theory, and even less inclined to theorize about his own work. Indeed his more entertaining letters were severely practical — " Fouche Oeuvres dram. de Schiller, Schlegal, Don Juan (Canto 6 and following) the new Wal. Scott . . . Wine, wine, rum (12 bottles), mustard, fleur d'oranges, a suitcase. Limburg cheese. . . ." In the second place he suffers from his own eminence, so that much of his criticism in these letters deals with predecessors or contemporaries either unknown or forgotten. But their very obscurity can at least indicate the merits of .,a genius who may not have found his English public, but has certainly, in the Commentary, found his critic.
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