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Pushkin's Novelistic Prose: A Dead End?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard Gregg
Richard Gregg*
Affiliation:
Department of Russian, Vassar College
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Extract

You praise the firm restraint with which they write–

I'm with you there of course:

They use the snaffle and curb all right,

But where's the bloody horse?

–Roy Campbell

Mon defaut a moi a toujours été la sécheresse, je faisais des squelettes.

–Prospère Merimée

Aleksandr Pushkin's cult for simple, unadorned prose is a critical commonplace that needs no further documentation. Weaned on those masters of French classicism (Jean de La Bruyère, Montesquieu, and, above all, Voltaire) for whom brevity was the soul of wit and concision no crime, he practiced from the beginning, “Naden'ka,” to the end, “Kirdzhali“ and The Captain's Daughter, a narrative style conspicuous for its uncommon bareness. That the virtues which he valued most highly in prose, namely, tochnost', kratkost', and nagaia prostata are, with rare exceptions, at one with his practice has been noted many times.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1998

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References

Epigraph: Romans et nouvelles de Prosper Merimee, ed. Maurice Parturier (Paris, 1967), 2:vii.

1. Sochineniia D. I. Fonvizina, ed. A. I. Vedenskii (St. Petersburg, 1893), 389. All translations from the Russian are my own.

2. Zhikharev, S. P., Zapiski sovremennika, ed. Eikhenbaum, B. M. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1955), 333.Google Scholar

3. Narezhnyi, V. T., Rossiiskii Zhilhlas, ili Pokhozhdeniia Kniazia Gavrily Simonovicha Chistiakova (Petrozavodsk, 1983), 5.Google Scholar

4. Shishkov, A. S., quoted in Tynianov, Iu. N., Pushkin i ego sovremenniki (Moscow, 1969), 30 Google Scholar. Throughout, my ellipses are in brackets; ellipses present in the original appear without brackets.

5. E.g., Lezhnev, A. Z., who called Pushkin's belletristic prose an “enormous experiment” (Pushkin's Prose, trans. Reeder, Roberta [Ann Arbor, 1983], 20).Google Scholar

6. Citing a passage from the diary of I. I. Dmitriev, V. V. Vinogradov makes the same point. Quoting with approval an observation of Iu. N. Tynianov, Vinogradov goes on to argue that Pushkin's prose nonetheless differs from that of his predecessors by virtue of the “neutrality” (neilral'nost') of the authorial persona. Interesting in itself, this apençu, based on a single paragraph from Puteshestvie v Arzrum, is not, it seems to me, altogether persuasive (V. V. Vinogradov, Stil’ Pushkina [Moscow, 1941], 530–31).

7. “Chto kasaetsia do sloga, to chem on prosche, tem budet luchshe” (Pushkin's letter to V. A. Durov, 16 June 1835, Letter 1072, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [hereafter PSS], 16 vols, in 20 and suppl. [Moscow and Leningrad, 1937–59], 16: 35).

8. Victor Terras makes a somewhat similar point when he suggests that Pushkin's prose “rarely escapes the magic circle of romantic irony.” Although my attention was drawn to Terras's short (five-page) article only after I had completed my own, the present inquiry could be seen as a more detailed and systematic “fleshing out” of Terras's insight ( Victor, Terras, “Pushkin's Prose Fiction in a Historical Context,” in Bethea, David, ed., Pushkin Today [Bloomington, 1993], 217 Google Scholar).

9. Letter to A. A. Bestuzhev, end of May beginning of June 1825, Letter 175, PSS, 13: 180 (emphasis in the original).

10. It is possible that in the given context the word boltovnia means something more than chatter and suggests antipoetic, “prosaic” prose in general. Far from being mutually exclusive, the two ideas complement and reinforce each other.

11. Henry Fielding was, to my knowledge, the first to draw an explicit parallel between the two narrative genres, when in the well-known preface to Joseph Andrews he called the novel a “comic epic in prose.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel later called the novel a “bourgeois epic” (quoted by Stepanov, N. L. in Proza Pushhina [Moscow, 1962], 189 Google Scholar). In our century, Lukacs identified the novel as “the epic of an age in which […] the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem” ( Georgy, Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Bostock, Anna [Cambridge, Mass., 1971], 56 Google Scholar).

12. Thus, in the authoritative opinion of Dorothy Van Ghent, a wide variety of “discursive methods” is one of the distinguishing features of the novel as fictional genre (The English Novel: Form and Fiction [New York, 1953], 3). Quoting Martin Price, Irving Howe goes even further, when he argues that “gratuitous” or “irrelevant” details are a constituent element of the novel (A Critic's Notebook, ed. Nicholas Howe [New York, 1994], 143–51). Before Howe, Price, and Van Ghent, Virginia Woolf said much the same thing when she declared that the novel needs “odd, irrelevant noises” and even “nonsense” (A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf [New York, 1954], 136, 140).

13. In the nineteenth century a censorious note sometimes creeps into these comments. Thus, P. A. Viazemskii noted that the Pushkinian narrative is “always lively, but deliberate [obdumannyi] and calm, perhaps too calm. One has the impression that Pushkin kept guard over himself; with self-imposed sobriety he fended oft the slightest suspicion of the use of intoxicating verse” (quoted by Stepanov, Proza Pushkina, 241). N. A. Polevoi and, later, M. N. Katkov found Pushkin's prose “dry” (Lezhnev, Pushkin's Prose, 150).

14. I have deliberately limited myself here to purely stylistic criteria. The whole question of the claimed nonviability of Pushkin's novelistic prose could be considered from an altogether different angle, namely, the emergence of what Lidiia Ginzburg has called “psychological prose,” i.e., prose that seeks to parse and analyze the changeability, the complexities, and the contradictions of human consciousness by viewing it from the “inside ”—an approach which, it could be argued, made the kind of objective, “documentary” prose advocated by Pushkin all but impossible. Provocative as this approach may be, its use would not only take this inquiry far beyond its present confines, but encroach on an area already expertly covered by Ginzburg, in On Psychological Prose, trans. Rosengrant, Judson (Princeton, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. PSS, 8 (1): 37.

16. PSS, 8 (1): 9.

17. PSS, 8(1): 178.

18. Gukovskii, G. A., Pushkin iproblemy realisticheskogo stilia (Moscow, 1957), 335–36Google Scholar; Lezhnev, Pushkin's Prose, 241; Stepanov, Proza Pushkina, 254; Vinogradov, Stil#x0027; Pushkina, 523.

19. Quoted by Stepanov, Proza Pushkina, 241.

20. An illuminating sampling of Pushkin's prose compared with that of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries was drawn by Lezhnev, Pushkin's Prose, 42–45.

21. PSS, 8(1): 291.

22. PSS, 6: 97–98.

23. PSS, 8 (1): 182.

24. PSS, 2 (1): 373.

25. PSS, 8 (1): 206.

26. PSS, 6: 70–71.

27. PSS, 8 (1): 287.

28. PSS, 6: 70–71.

29. PSS, 8 (1): 10.

30. PSS, 8 (1): 265.

31. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, vol. 3 of Works of Joseph Conrad (London, 1921), x (emphasis in the original).

32. PSS, 12: 9.

33. The single exception to this “rule” is the two-page description of the ball (assambleia) in chapter 3 of The Moor of Peter the Great, the earliest of Pushkin's major novelistic efforts (PSS, 8 [1]: 16—17). As if purging his prose from such excesses, he indulged in no such lengthy descriptions in either Dubrovskii or The Captain's Daughter.

34. An interesting illustration of how acutely this Zeitgeist was felt by writers of the period is offered by D. V. Grigorovich. As a young writer he had shown his friend Fedor Dostoevskii, a “physiological sketch,” in which a coin accidentally falls to the ground. “'Ne to, ne to!’ razdrazhenno zagovoril Dostoevskii, ‘sovsem ne to! Nado by skazat': piatak upal na mostovuiu zvenia i podprygivaia!” ( A., Dolinin, ed., Dostoevskii v vospominaniakh sovremennikov [Moscow, 1964], 1: 130 Google Scholar). Another example is provided by young Lev Tolstoi's complaint that Alphonse de Lamartine's simile “comme des perles tombant dans un bassin d'argent” to describe drops falling from an oar, would have been improved “ezheli Lamartin […] skazal mne kakogo tsveta byli eti kapli, kak oni padali i stekali po mokromu derevu vesla, kakie malen'kie kruzhki proizvodili oni padaia v vodu” (quoted by Kathryn, Feuer, Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace [Ithaca, 1996], 19 Google Scholar).

35. Although the events in Dubrovskii allegedly occurred recently (“several years ago “), this tale of an unbridled tyrant in a lawless age, a marauding band of “virtuous” brigands, and a noble but penurious youth seeking the hand of the tyrant's beautiful daughter, is more redolent of a historical novel than a novel about contemporary Russia. That Pushkin had, for a while, an eighteenth-century setting in mind is clear from an earlier version, where the tyrant is described as coming of age in the year when Catherine the Great connived at her husband's murder, namely, 1762.

36. PSS, 8 (1): 367.

37. In “The Lady Peasant” Pushkin expatiates admiringly on the “individualite” of Russia's provincial baryshni, whom he compares favorably to the monotonously similar young ladies bred in city surroundings (PSS, 8 [1]: 111).

38. PSS, 8 (1): 8.

39. PSS, 8 (1): 162.

40. PSS, 8 (1): 281.

41. PSS, 8 (1): 112.

42. PSS, 8 (1): 232.

43. PSS, 8 (1): 98.

44. An apparent exception to this “rule” might appear to be the two-page conversation at the Rzhevskii's dinner table in chapter 4 of The Moor of Peter the Great (PSS, 8 [l]: 20–22). Actually the dialogue, turning as it does on the crucial issue of the “old” versus the “new” Russia, is anything but idle chatter.

45. PSS, 6: 156–57.

46. PSS, 6: 58–59.

47. PSS, 6: 59.

48. PSS, 6: 52–53.

49. PSS, 8 (l): 299–308. The fact that three of these nine pages are devoted to matters other than Grinev's courtship underscores the meagerness of the account.

50. PSS, 8 (1): 6.

51. PSS, 8 (1): 7.

52. It is true that in chapter 2 we are told that the child “was being brought up in the remote provinces,” but this laconic statement poses as many questions as it answers.

53. For brief descriptions of some of these “explanations,” see Paul Debreczeny, The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin's Prose Fiction (Stanford, 1983), 54–163 passim. Debreczeny's own explanation leans heavily—and often perceptively—on Pushkin's chronic inability to find an adequate narrative point of view.

54. Quoted by V. F. Pereverzev, “Pushkin v bor'be s plutovskom romane,” Pushkin: Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii 1 (1956): 179.

55. Indicative of this guardedness is the recurrent use of the word charming to describe the effect produced by the novel. Used by P. A. Viazemskii, P. la. Chaadaev, A. I. Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol', V. A. Sollogub, Fedor Dostoevskii, and P. V. Annenkov, this word clearly implies limitations as well as virtues. “Charming” is not the word a serious critic would use to describe (say) Crime and Punishment or War and Peace. My source here is a small anthology of critical appreciations of The Captain's Daughter in Kapitanskaia dochka, ed. Iu. Oksman (Moscow, 1964), 209–25.

56. In this respect it is noteworthy that no critical study devoted to the Russian novel with which I am acquainted—namely, Melchoir de Vogue's Le Roman Russe, F. D. Reeve's Aspects of the Russian Novel, Henry Gifford's The Russian Novel: From Pushkin to Pasternak, an identically entitled volume of essays edited by John Garrard, Richard Freeborn's The Rise of the Russian Novel, and Jean Bonamour's Le Roman Russe—makes more than passing mention of The Captain's Daughter. Certainly as far as “world literature” is concerned its appearance in 1836 was a nonevent.

57. Tolstoi, L. N., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Chertkov, V. G. (Moscow, 1937), 46: 187–88.Google Scholar

58. Tolstoi's lumping could of course be construed as further support for the argument advanced here. In classifying The Captain's Daughter as a povest' he was tacitly acknowledging that Pushkin had failed to develop an authentically novelistic prose style.

59. Quoted by Eikhenbaum, B. M., “Put’ Pushkina k proze,” Pushkinskii sbornik pamiati Professora S. A. Vengerova (Moscow, 1923), 70.Google Scholar

60. The only possible exception to this generalization is the prose of Hero of Our Time, which clearly bears the imprint of Pushkin's influence. But composed as it is of five separate segments (two novellas, two short stories, one sketch), the work is not in the traditional sense a novel at all. And its brisk, terse prose, devoid of boltovnia, clearly affiliates it with the bystraia povest', not with the novel.

61. As noted earlier, Tolstoi was not the only nineteenth-century man of letters to express reservations about Pushkin's prose. In our own century Paul Debreczeny, while emphasizing Pushkin's difficulties with a viable narrative viewpoint, has conceded that “great speed of narration” may also have contributed to thwarting the completion of his early prose projects (The Other Pushkin, 49, 51). Victor Terras has expressed similar ideas even more recently ( “Pushkin's Prose Fiction “).

62. The most notorious instance of such “political” interference was the official displeasure aroused by D. S. Mirskii's article, “Problema Pushkina” (Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 16–18 [1934]), which suggested that during the last years of his life the poet had allied himself with the tsarist establishment. Mirskii was forced to recant; and it was widely thought that the episode was one of the factors leading to his arrest and imprisonment.

63. E. g., Stepanov, who called Pushkin the osnovopolozhnik of Russian belletristic prose (Proza Pushkina, 293). Before Stepanov, U. Fokht had used both osnovopolozhnik and rodonachal'nik to describe Pushkin's role in the evolution of Russian prose (U. Fokht, “Proza Pushkina v razvitii russkoi literatury,” A. S. Pushkin—Rodonachal'nik novoi Russkoi literatury, ed. V. la. Kirpotin and D. D. Blagoi [Moscow and Leningrad, 1941]). Vinogradov (StiV Pushkina, 618) used the somewhat more ambiguous word kernel (zerno) to define that same seminal role.

64. It is true that when Eikhenbaum, quoted by Lezhnev (Pushkin's Prose, 20) declared that Pushkin as a practitioner of prose was not a “pioneer” but a “culminator,” he was drawing close to such an acknowledgement. A somewhat similar sounding formulation is to be found in Eikhenbaum's study of Lermontov's prose, when he remarked in passing that Pushkin did not find a “solution to those stylistic problems posed by [Russian] prose in the thirties” ( Eikhenbaum, B. M., Lermontov: Opyt istoricheskoi literaturnoi otsenki [Leningrad, 1924], 136 Google Scholar). In neither case however does he propound, much less develop, the notion that Pushkin's prose was inherently nonviable. The fact that Eikhenbaum expressed these reservations early in the Soviet period, when the hagiographical strain in Pushkin criticism was less pronounced, is also to be noted.

65. Thus, Sidiakov argued that as a writer of narrative prose Pushkin was “ahead of his time” (operezhal svoe vremia), a fact that made it impossible for him to influence his contemporaries ( Sidiakov, L. S., Khudozhestvennaia proza Pushkina [Riga, 1973], 6 Google Scholar). More recently, Sazonova, S. S. reached the same conclusion (Pushkin o sovremennoi proze i ee zadachakh [Riga, 1976], 25 Google Scholar). Neither scholar considered the possibility that Pushkin's prose, modeled as it was on the French neoclassical writers—Voltaire in particular— looks backward not forward. A quite different approach was adopted by Chicherin. Arguing that The Moor of Peter the Great, Duhrovskii, and The Captain's Daughter were written in a prose with close affinities to the povest', Chicherin contrasted that style with the more detailed, more circumstantial, more analytic—and hence more authentically novelistic—style that he claimed to find in such unfinished works as “The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha,” “We Spent the Evening at the Dacha of Princess D.,” and “In the Corner of a Small Square.” It is fragments like these, Chicherin argued, that prefigure the more capacious and expansive narrative styles developed by Pushkin's celebrated novelistic successors. Ingeniously argued, this theory is based on too little evidence to be entirely convincing. Nor does it explain why these allegedly “prophetic” fragments were never completed, whereas The Captain's Daughter, cast in a supposedly less novelistic style, was ( Chicherin, A. V., Idei istil' [Moscow, 1965], 92–142Google Scholar passim). Eikhenbaum's theories have already been discussed. For Stepanov's rosy speculations, see Proza Pushkina, 20.

66. Lezhnev, Pushkin's Prose, 186.

67. “Brevis esse laboro, / Obscurus fio” (Ars Poetica), II. 25–26.

68. Erich, Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Trask, Willard R. (Princeton, 1953), 3–23 passim.Google Scholar