9 - Pushkin's Letters in French

Summary

The letters written by members of the Russian literary world of the first half of the nineteenth century are worthy of attention in their own right. They were read in literary circles on the same footing as works of art and, like works of art, were discussed and evaluated. The following lines from a letter written by the statesman and future historian Aleksandr Turgenev to the poet Petr Viazemskii in 1819 clearly illustrate the point:

I received your letter of 1 May […] Zhukovskii liked the letter very much and he wanted to take it from me, but that would have meant taking it away from immortality, because I keep your letters, so that in time, under a free sky, I may be able to publish them to the world.

(Ostaf'evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh 1899–1913: vol. 1, p. 232)

The writing of a letter to a friend by the early nineteenth-century man of letters was ‘an “act” of literature’, as Nikolai Stepanov has put it (Stepanov 2007: 33). At a time when the Russian literary language was coming into being, the letter afforded writers an opportunity for experimentation. Writers’ drafts of letters attest to the significance of the epistolary genre, demonstrating meticulous, persistent labour, and in this respect the drafts of Pushkin's letters are exceptionally revealing. Pushkin often devoted as much effort to the writing of a letter as he did to the creation of a work of art: in one of his draft letters, written in October 1824, for example, there are as many as fifteen versions of a single phrase (Kazanskii 1937; Levkovich 1979). In his poem of 1820 ‘To My Inkwell’ (‘K moei chernil'nitse’) he calls his correspondence ‘postal prose’ (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 2, p. 184). Thus for Pushkin, Evgenii Maimin has observed, ‘letters, besides having a direct purpose, are always to some extent a school for learning about style. A way of writing, a free and unconstrained form of language, is evolving in them’ (Maimin 1962: 78). Fortunately, a large number of Pushkin's letters (more than 780 of them) have come down to us, about one fifth of which (163) were written in French.