PART II Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker
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Of Pushkin and Pushkinists PART II Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker Chapter 7 Of Pushkin and Pushkinists1 185. Introductions to books and collections about Alexander Pushkin tend to begin, especially when their origin is not Russian, with de rigueur nods to the poet’s massive presence in, and seminal influence on, the native cul ture. Such expository scaffolding falls under the category of preemptive advertising for a figure who, outside his context and more importantly out side his language, has difficulty translating. Thus, from the operas of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to the stylish illustrations and set designs of Benois, Bilibin, and Dobu- zhinsky; from endlessly anthol ogized paintings by Kiprensky and Re- pin to ghosts of allusion in better known works by Dostoevsky and Na- bokov; from the fact that the tsar’s summer residence (Tsarskoe Selo) was renamed after the poet because he once studied on its grounds to the fact that to this day countless school children across the land memorize pages of his verse by heart — all these phenomena point to why, as previous wit nes ses of the myth in the making have attested, Pushkin is “our everything” (Apollon Grigorev) and the indisputable “sun of [Russian] poetry” (V.F. Odoevsky). Yet, for all the Russians across the cultural and political spectrum who view their national poet as the equivalent of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Thomas Jeffer son rolled into one, there are just as many in the English-speaking world who, nodding back in agreement with W.H. Auden, cannot see what all the fuss is about. 1 First appeared as as a historical survey of the Introduction to The Pushkin discipline of Pushkin studies, Handbook (Madison: University of I have left in place most of the Wisconsin Press, 2006), xvii-xlii. formal “scaffolding” relating to NB. since this piece was originally the larger volume. conceived as a frontespiece to The Pushkin Handbook as well RussianPushkin Literature: the Background,Poet, Pushkin Foreground, the Thinker Reading Russian Writers Reading Creative Cognition Themselves and Others In this essay I propose to take a somewhat different tack. For those who already know and appreciate Pushkin, I will not presume to preach to the choir. (In any event, Pushkin does not need us; we need him. Or, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, who has put the source of his own anxious logic on the couch, it is our Russian Shakespeare who has invented our Russian human, and not the other way around.) For those who don’t, I will not send them to Tchaikovky, nor will I try to impress readers with the magnitude of “our everything” by showing how it has inspired other arts and media, thereby talking around and about — but not really to — the one area that is Pushkin’s absolute native realm: Russian poetry. What Pushkin accomplished in twenty short years in Russian poetry was to give his read ers an inner world (its own sort of declaration of independence) that was to keep on giving. That world was not without its codes and formal con straints, in- 186. deed those constraints were a priori absolutely necessary and acknowl- PART II edged as such, and yet it was a world that, once entered, pulled the visitor forward, creating cognition, cognizing creation. At each and every level of this constructed world, from its punctuation, prosody, and stylistic register to its expectations about genre, character, plot, theme, and author ship, it projected the tense hovering of a consciousness becoming ever more aware of itself and of choices that are made somewhere between fixity (the mold) and freedom (the open space of pure desire). It is this Pushkin, the Pushkin that has served as touchstone and launching pad for some of the most painstaking research and brilliant thinking by Russian intellec- tuals over the past two centuries, which I now set out to sketch in the following remarks. Beginning from the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing up to the recent past there have been somewhere between fifty and sixty schol ars (for simplicity’s sake, I speak here of those writing in Russian and no long- er living2) who could be classified as “serious” Pu sh kinists (those devot- ing the majority of their time and energy to Pu shkin studies proper) or as authors (otherwise non-specialists) of important or “serious” mono graphs on the poet. These individuals can in turn be classified into groups based on their epistemological points of departure and scholarly tradi tions — in other words, on their ways of coming at the phenomenon of “Pushkin.” Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries we find the “foundational” Pushkinists: such man uscript compil- ers, editors, and path-breaking biographers as P.V. Annenkov (1813–1887), P.I. Bartenev (1829–1912), Ia.K. Grot (1812–1893), P.A. Efremov 2 For a survey of more the Scholarship) in 1966, see 3 Annenkov’s edition recent Pushkin studies that the contribution by Svetlana of Sochineniia Pushkina, in takes into account work done in Evdokimova and Vladimir Golstein seven volumes, was published Russia and the west since the in The Pushkin Handbook, in 1855–1857. It is often called publication of Pushkin. Itogi i 609–38. the first nauchnoe (“scholarly,” problemy izucheniia (Pushkin: “critical”) edition of the poet in Achievements and Problems in the sense that the editor went to Of Pushkin and Pushkinists (1830– 1907), V.E. Yakushkin (1856–1912), and L.N. Maikov (1839–1900). With in this group Annenkov occupies a special place as editor of the first “critical”3 collected works and author of Materialy dlia biografii A.S. Push- kina (Materials for the Biography of A. S. Pushkin, 1855), the traditional starting point for all those interested in the poet’s life;4 Bartenev, on the other hand, is Annenkov’s foil — an early empiricist whose notion about the hard facts of Pushkin’s life and works came in conflict with his rival’s more narratively integrative and “emplotted” approach.5 Grot is the great literary historian and academician who, among other things, culled important data about Pushkin’s lyceum years.6 Yakushkin made a detailed description of the contents of Pushkin’s working notebooks housed in the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow and compared his findings to those of Annenkov and Bartenev.7 Maikov’s role in this early cast of characters is particularly dis tinguished for the systematic way he arranged manuscripts 187. and traced compositional histories for the first volume (the lyceum verse) Chapter 7 of the first “academic” Pushkin,8 while Efremov is the energetic editor of different late nineteenth and early twentieth century collections of the poet’s works. Another visible turn of the century figure is S.A. Vengerov (1855–1920), whose famous “seminars” produced some of the most out standing Rus sian literature scholars of the Soviet period. Vengerov edited a massively annotated and lavishly illustrated and produced “Sil- ver Age” Pushkin with the help of the premier specialists (A.S. Iskoz [1880–1968], B.L. Mod za levsky [1874–1928], N.O. Lerner [1877–1934], M.O. Gershenzon [1869–1925], P.E. Shchegolev [1877–1931]) and writ- ers (Briusov, Blok) of the day.9 great pains to gather materials, detstvo Pushkina” first appeared 8 Sochineniia Pushkina con sult with still living family in Otech estvennye zapiski 11.2 (1899 — ). This enterprise (pro- members and friends, and so (1853): 1–20; “Aleksandr Sergee- ducing the first serious “academic” on. In fact, however, the title of vich Pushkin. Materialy dlia ego Pushkin) was continued after first genuine “academic” Pushkin, biografii” first appeared in the Maikov’s death by Yakushkin, published under the auspices of newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti P.O. Morozov (1854–1920), and the Impe rial Academy of Sciences, in 1854 (#71, 117, and 119) and N.K. Kozmin (1873–1942), but is associated with the name 1855 (#142, 144, 145); and “Push- for various reasons it eventually L.N. Mai kov. Unfortunately Maikov kin v Iuzhnoi Rossii. Materialy foundered when a new genera- died having overseen only the first dlia ego biografii, sobrannye P. tion of Pushkinists appeared on volume. See note #7 below. Bartenevym. 1820–1823” first the scene after the revolution. 4 Materialy dlia biografii appeared in the newspa per Russ- In addition to being one of the A. S. Pushkina was the first vol- kaia rech’/ Moskovskii vestnik in first genuine experts on Pushkin ume in Annenkov’s Sochineniia 1861 (#85–104). manuscripts, Maikov was also an Pushkina. A second edition of Ma- 6 See Ia.K. Grot, Pushkin, informed and perceptive source terialy appeared once more during ego litseiskie tovarishchi i on the poet’s biography. See his Annenkov’s lifetime, in 1873. See nastavniki (1887) and K. Ia. Grot, Materialy dlia akademicheskogo also his Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkinskii litsei (1811–1817) izdaniia sochinenii A. S. Pushkina Pushkin v Aleksan drovskuiu epo- (1911). (1902) and Pushkin. Biografi- khu 1799–1826 gg. (1874). 7 Iakushkin, “Rukopisi cheskie materialy i istoriko-liter- 5 See Bartenev, O Push- A. S. Pushkina, khraniashchiesia aturnye ocherki (1899). kine (1992) for a collection of v Rumiantsovskom muzee v the scholar’s major pub lications Moskve” (1884). on Pushkin. Bartenev’s “Rod i RussianPushkin Literature: the Background,Poet, Pushkin Foreground, the Thinker Reading Russian Writers Reading Creative Cognition Themselves and Others The first half of the twentieth century is dominated by a group that has been termed the “positivist” Pushkinists: the archivists, textologists, com- mentators, and manuscript editors — most significantly, Modzalevsky and his son Leonid (1902–1948), B.V.