Alexander Pushkin's “Scene from Faust”
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Alexander Pushkin’s “Scene from Faust” translated by Alan Shaw Pushkin’s “Scene from Faust” was pub- in Don Juan, becomes an imitator as soon as lished in 1828, twenty years after Goethe he embarks upon drama. In Manfred he im- published the first part of his Faust. Goethe, itated Faust, replacing the crowd scenes and nearing eighty at the time Pushkin’s poem the [witches’] sabbath with others which he appeared, was the undisputed king of considered more elevated; but Faust is among European letters. the greatest creations of the poetic spirit. Pushkin’s relation to Goethe is a matter of some controversy. He didn’t read Ger- Byron knew nothing of Pushkin. Goethe man, but he would have seen translations of could have known of him through mutual Goethe’s lyrics made by his friend and acquaintances like Zhukovsky or the Polish mentor the poet Vasily Zhukovsky. Pushkin poet Adam Mickiewicz, and could have probably read in French the admiring writ- seen German or French translations of some ings of Friedrich Schlegel and Mme. de of his poems, but if he did, there is no Staël that established Goethe’s European record of it. Some have suggested that he reputation. not only read Pushkin’s scene, but that it He obviously knew Faust. In his scene, the actually influenced the second part of Faust. character of Mephistopheles, the Gretchen That seems unlikely. story, and the verse form, all point to Goethe We could read it as either a critique of, or specifically, not just to the Faust legend as a a tribute to Goethe, or Byron, or both. whole. But Pushkin’s Faust is Byronic. He What’s most striking in it, as in so much of su¸ers, not so much from an insatiable Pushkin, is its extreme compression. In this, desire for knowledge and experience, as it anticipates, and even excels, the “little from pure spleen. Or in Pushkin’s plainer tragedies” that Pushkin would write a few terms, skuka, boredom. But a truly monu- years later—Mozart and Salieri, The Miserly mental boredom, a black hole of boredom Knight, The Stone Guest, and A Feast During that devours everything in sight. the Plague. In one of his priceless notes to Byron himself was influenced by Goethe’s Eugene Onegin, Nabokov informs us in Faust, as Pushkin noted, not uncritically passing that “there are those” (he does not (here in Tatiana Wol¸’s translation): say he is one of them) who prefer Pushkin’s little scene to the whole of Goethe’s Faust. English critics disputed Byron’s dramatic The meter and rhyme scheme of this talent; I think they were right. Byron, so translation follow the original, with oc- original in Childe Harold, in The Giaour, and casional use of half rhymes. The New Criterion April 2010 1.