6 - Prose fiction

Summary

Narrative experiments

Alexander Pushkin turned to prose fiction in 1827, when he began working on The Blackamoor of Peter the Great. The body of his prose fiction is not large: finished and unfinished works as well as outlines, sketches and variants fit into a single volume of any standard popular edition of his writings. Of about thirty contemplated works, Pushkin completed only four: The Tales of Belkin (1831), 'The Queen of Spades' (1834), 'Kirdzhali' (1834) and The Captain’s Daughter (1836). Of these Kirdzhali', a biography of a brigand subtitled 'a tale', can hardly be called a work of fiction. It is a tale (povest'), only in the idiosyncratic sense Pushkin sometimes gives the word to emphasise the narrative’s supposedly factual nature.

Prompted partly by the growing commercial success that other less talented writers were having with popular prose works, Pushkin turned his creative energies to writing fiction. Here, as in poetry, Pushkin remained committed to the principles he associated with high-quality literature, and while he may have aimed to make money in practice, he approached prose writing with the same spirit of refined experimentation, artistic innovation and irony familiar to readers of his poetry. The most productive analyses so far have identified either unsure experimentation or Pushkin’s attraction to Romantic fragmentation as the causes of his halting results in prose fiction. Paul Debreczeny sees inexperience in Pushkin’s search for effective narrative voices. For Pushkin the central formal challenge of storytelling was how to develop a narrative voice appropriate to his plot.