7 - Bestuzhev-Marlinsky's interchange with the tribesman

Summary

A dagger in experienced hands is as good as an axe, a bayonet or a sword.

Bestuzhev-Marlinsky

After being exiled for participation in the Decembrist revolt, the belletrist and critic Alexander Bestuzhev embarked on a second literary career as Marlinsky, the pseudonym under which he gained fame as a writer in the Caucasus. No longer widely read today even in Russia, he enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his lifetime. To be sure, he had detractors. In a review of 1840 Belinsky castigated his romantic excesses and declined to plow through a new edition of his collected works. Discriminating men of letters such as Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharev and Tolstoy also came to judge Bestuzhev-Marlinsky unreadable: they associated him with puerile adventure stories, while granting, however, that they had loved him during boyhood and adolescence. But the derogatory judgments of Belinsky and the literati in their maturity represented a minority opinion.

Mikhail Semevsky evoked the prevailing, less sophisticated climate in an article in National Annals in 1860. Semevsky recalled the time when the public at large did not know the identity masked by Bestuzhev's nom de plume:

Marlinsky! Marlinsky! Thirty years ago that name was being repeated with enthusiasm by virtually all the men and women readers of Russia's books and journals. As a person of the period put it: “They saw in him the Pushkin of prose. One of his novellas was the most reliable lure to attract subscribers for a journal or purchasers for an almanac”. Who at the time did not read Marlinsky's brilliant stories, novellas and novels? Who did not find them enrapturing and thoroughly engrossing? His similes were learned by heart, he was copied, his works sold like hotcakes, and his biography – his life – attracted the interest of the mass of men and women readers.