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Pushkin's Tragic Visions, 1824-1830 Maksim Hanukai Submitted In Pushkin’s Tragic Visions, 1824-1830 Maksim Hanukai Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Maksim Hanukai All rights reserved ABSTRACT Pushkin’s Tragic Visions, 1824-1830 Maksim Hanukai This dissertation traces the development of Alexander Pushkin’s sense of the tragic in the context of Russian and European Romanticism. Pushkin was a self-proclaimed skeptic in matters of literature: though deeply influenced by Romantic poets and theorists, he never subscribed to any one school or creed, experimenting in a range of genres to express his changing tragic vision. Many of his works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama; and yet, they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. My study explains Pushkin’s idiosyncratic approach to tragedy by re-situating his works within their literary, historical, and philosophical contexts. In my readings of The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, and The Little Tragedies, I connect Pushkin’s works to those of a range of European writers, including Shakespeare, Racine, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, the Marquis de Sade, and Hugo; and I examine such topics as tragedy and the tragic, the sublime and the grotesque, the relationship between literature and history, irony and tragic ritual. While I ground my work in traditional Russian philology, I use recent Western scholarship to help frame my study theoretically. In particular, I aim to contribute to the ongoing debate between scholars who claim that Romanticism marked “the death of tragedy” and those who see the change less as a death than as a redefinition. Table of Contents Note on Transliteration and Translation ii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Tragedy in the Balkans 11 Chapter Two: History as Irony 55 Chapter Three: Sublime and Grotesque 105 Afterword 163 Bibliography 167 Note on Transliteration and Translation Within the text I use the transliteration system of the Library of Congress, except in the case of some name endings (e.g., Viazemsky instead of Viazemskii) and names which are familiar to English speakers under a different form (e.g., Yuri instead of Iurii). The Library of Congress system is retained throughout in the Bibliography and footnotes. When quoting from a published translation, I retain the translator’s original spelling. Quotations from Russian texts are generally provided in both the original Cyrillic and in English. In some instances, as when I am quoting from Pushkin’s drafts, I add standard punctuation marks to my translation when there are none in the original. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own. ii To my parents iii Introduction Romanticism begins with the awareness that something was lost in the collapse of a prior order. Whether this is the innate nobility of natural man, the creative vigor of the naïve poet, or the philosopher’s faith in the eventual triumph of reason, Romanticism measures itself by the distance separating it from an unattainable ideal, which it projects as a source of nostalgia into the past and into the future as an object of infinite longing. Torn between hope and despair, a deeply felt sense of alienation and a yearning for unity, Romanticism cultivates a vision of life that is profoundly tragic. In the words of August W. Schlegel, one of the most clear-eyed theorists of Romanticism in Germany: “When the soul, resting as it were under the willows of exile, breathes out its longing for its distant home, what else but melancholy can be the key-note of its songs?”1 It may come as a surprise then that for some modern critics the birth of Romanticism also spelled “the death of tragedy.” In his influential 1961 book by that title, George Steiner makes the unexpected claim that the Romantic vision of life is fundamentally non-tragic. Drawing a distinction between what he calls “absolute” and “tempered” tragedy, Steiner concludes that the bleak metaphysical pessimism expressed in the tragedies of Sophocles, Marlowe, and Racine is manifestly at odds with the hopeful redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. Steiner ties the decline of tragedy to the modern process of democratization and disenchantment that upturned traditional religious beliefs and social hierarchies. Crucially, he contends that Romantic drama evades the problem of divine judgment. Whereas absolute tragedy presents the fall of public figures who have overstepped the boundaries set for them by the gods, Romantic tragic drama shows man engaged in a heroic battle for inner freedom in the face of necessity, a battle from which he emerges, if not triumphant, at least reconciled with the surrounding order. The dialectic vision of Romanticism ensures that guilt gives way to grace and crime leads not to punishment 1 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (Gloucester, UK: Dodo Press, 2007), 10. 1 but to redemption. While in absolute tragedy, “the gates of hell stand open and damnation is real,” in the poetics of Romanticism, Steiner insists, “the Scrooges turn golden.”2 In many respects Steiner’s thesis owes more to his own normative understanding of tragedy than to that of the authors treated in his book; taken to its logical limits, it would exclude not only most Romantic drama but also the Oresteia and King Lear. A number of scholars have written convincing critiques of Steiner’s study. Jeffrey Cox, for example, suggests that the Romantics were less interested in reviving old forms of tragedy than in discovering a new tragic vision: “What happens when man finds that he has destroyed the closed world of the traditional order, but that he is unable to break through to the open world of the Romantic imagination?” he asks. “Is there not, in this moment between the fall of the enclosed but meaningful order of the past and the creation of a new Romantic order, occasion for a peculiarly modern tragedy?”3 The very processes that led to the decline of traditional tragedy, Cox suggests, may have set the stage for an entirely new sense of the tragic. Indeed, as critics from Murray Krieger to Rita Felski have observed, the very idea of the tragic is a relatively new “thought pattern” forged in the crucible of Romanticism. A philosophical concept introduced by Schiller, the tragic, Felski writes, “drifts free of the genre of tragedy and acquires a general theoretical salience and metaphorical power as a prism through which to grasp the antinomies of the human condition.”4 The Romantic sense 2 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 129. See also George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,‘ Reconsidered,” ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 3 Jeffrey N. Cox, “Romantic Redefinitions of the Tragic,” Romantic Drama, ed. Gerald Gillespie (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1994), 154. See also Jeffrey N. Cox, In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987). 4 Rita Felski, ed., Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 2-3. Other studies that have influenced my thinking on the distinction between tragedy and the tragic include: Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” Glyph 4 (1978); William Storm, After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Glenn Most, “Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic,” Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society, ed. Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Terry 2 of the tragic is neither premised on the same philosophical ideals nor bound by the same aesthetic conventions as traditional tragedy. Perhaps, Cox suggests, it would be better to speak not of the death of tragedy but of its redefinition. While such an approach has found widespread critical support, it, too, I believe, introduces a number of problems. Modern critics like to point out that the traditional understanding of tragedy is largely based on the works of a single playwright, Sophocles, whose Oedipus Rex and Antigone were held up as models by Aristotle and Hegel, respectively. But isn’t something analogous taking place in current discussions of Romantic tragic drama? Cox’s book-length study of the genre surveys the works of a wide range of playwrights from England, Germany, and France; and yet, his understanding of Romantic tragic drama as a struggle between free will and necessity is clearly inspired by the works of a single author, Schiller. The same is true of most other studies of tragedy in the Romantic period, which are more often than not studies of Schiller’s (admittedly influential) concept of the tragic. But what does the latter have in common with the tragic writings of Alessandro Manzoni, Alfred de Musset, or George Büchner (playwrights who were inspired by Schiller but ultimately went their separate ways)? What about Pushkin, whose Boris Godunov Steiner singles out (I believe, incorrectly) as one of the few examples of “absolute tragedy” in the Romantic period? A second problem is that studies of the tragic in the Romantic period are still primarily concerned with the drama and do not take into account the wealth of tragic writing in other genres, such as narrative poetry and prose fiction. This seems strange, given that a number of critics have made a point of the fact that, in the Romantic period, the tragic was in some ways liberated from the genre of tragedy.
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