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Pushkin's Saturnine Cupid: The Poetics of Parody in The Tales of Belkin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David M. Bethea  and
Sergei Davydov
David M. Bethea
Affiliation:
Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont
Sergei Davydov
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

The Tales of Belkin have suggested that they are not what they seem—a cycle of simple, diverting stories. Why Pushkin chooses to filter the telling of the Tales through several narrative voices, why he puts “poetic” epigraphs into ironic play with “prosaic” narratives, and why he develops the narratives around a web of allusions to major Western literatures and to Russian literature have led to a lively, expanding discourse among Pushkinists. But why Pushkin frustrates the Russian character who imitates a foreign model, why he takes the poetic models of the epigraphs as points from which to “step down” to prose, and how he sees the parodic debate between foreign and domestic models as a necessary step in the development of Russian prose are unanswered. Moving toward a new reading of “The Coflmmaker,” the asymmetrical story generally considered of only anecdotal interest, our essay addresses these questions.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 8 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1953–59), i, 139–40.

Note 2 See, e.g., A. Grigor'ev's description, in 1862, of “The Coffinmaker” as the “nucleus of naturalism” (“The Development of the Idea of Nationality in Our Literature since the Death of Pushkin,” in Russian Views of Pushkin, ed. and trans. D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell [Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976], p. 48).

Note 3 Nabokov, trans., Eugene Onegin, by A. Pushkin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), HI, 180.

Note 4 Iskoz (Dolinin), “Povesti Belkina,” in Pushkin, ed. S. A. Vengerov (Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron, 1907–15), iv, 184–200. For the thematic and stylistic integrity of the works produced during the Boldino autumn see as well A. L. Bern, “Boldinskaia osen' ” (The Boldino Autumn'), in O Pushkine ('On Pushkin') (Uzhgorod: Pismena [Letters], 1937), pp. 63–103.

Note 5 Vinogradov, “O stile Pushkina,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow: Zhurnal'no-gazetnoe ob“edinenie, 1934), xvi-xviii, 171–91, and Slil' Pushkina (Moscow: OGIZ, 1941); Meijer, ”The Sixth Tale of Belkin,“ in The Tales of Belkin, ed. J. van der Eng (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 110–34. The quotation from Meijer is from p. 134.

Note 6 V. Gippius, “Povesti Belkina,” Literatumyi kritik, 2 (1937), 19–55, and N. Liubovich, ‘“Povesti Belkina’ kak polemicheskii ètap v razvitii pushkinskoi prozy,” Novyi mir, 2 (1937), 260–74.

Note 7 Van der Eng, “Les Récits de Belkin: Analogie des procédés de construction,” in The Tales of Belkin, pp. 9–60.

Note 8 Berkovskii, “O ‘Povestiakh Belkina’: Pushkin 30-kh godov: voprosy narodnosti i realizma,” in Stat'i o literature (Moscow: GIKhl, 1962), pp. 242–356.

Note 9 Gregg, “A Scapegoat for All Seasons: The Unity and Shape of The Tales of Belkin,” Slavic Review, 30 (1971), 753.

Note 10 Pushkin, “The Shot,” The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories, trans. T. Keane (New York: Vintage, 1936), p. 148. Hereafter all references to the Tales are to this edition and are noted parenthetically within the text. The English has been checked against the Complete Works, Academy ed., 17 vols, in 21 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1937–59), and where necessary slight changes introduced to make the translation conform more literally to the original.

Note 11 Silvio was often viewed by nineteenth-century critics as a “demonic figure” in the Byronic tradition. A. Grigor'ev described him as “the last reflection of the Byronic theme in Pushkin's work; of all the heroes in The Tales of Belkin he alone embodies the traits of a 'demonic personality'” (cited in N. Liubovich, p. 270). And Dostoevsky wrote that “Pushkin borrowed this hero from Byron, and out of his character there entered into our literature a whole series of 'evil men,' including Pechorin” (The Diary of a Writer, Feb. 1876; cited in N. O. Lerner, “K genezisu 'Vystrela,' ” Zven'ia, 5 [1935], 126). More recently van der Eng has linked Silvio to “l'homme sans mœurs et sans religion à la Byron” and has compared him to the revengeful Giaour (pp. 13–14).

The Byronic tradition alone, however, does not exhaust Silvio's literary provenance. Apparently, French romanticism too left its mark on him. In Hugo's Hemani the old duke, Don Ruy Gomez de Silva (note the similarity in names), can be seen as a coprototype for the Byronic Silvio. (See Lerner, p. 133, and Berkovskii, pp. 281–83. The premiere of Hernani in February 1830 occasioned one of the great romantic battles: the Tales were written in the fall of that year.) Although de Silva is jealous of the young nobleman Hernani, a rival in love for Doña Sol, he once saves Hernani's life. For this magnanimity Hernani pledges his life—which can be claimed at any time—to the old duke. Not forgetting the young man's words, de Silva only postpones taking revenge until Hernani's wedding day. Before the nuptial night he appears to claim Hernani's pledge. Hernani keeps his word and together with Dona Sol drinks poison. The lovers die in each other's arms, whereupon de Silva kills himself too. Silvio's name (“he was Russian, but bore a foreign name”), his postponed shot, and his well-timed appearance before the honeymooning couple closely resemble the story of de Silva and Hernani. Pushkin's denouement can be seen as a parody of the fifth act of Hugo's play.

Along with the foreign romantic models that Silvio so successfully imitates, there should be mentioned as well one related domestic model, the breterskaia povest‘ (duelist tale) popularized by A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the nineteenth-century romantic prosaist: “The gloomy Silvio … is a tragicomic portrait of the duelists active both in the life and literature of that time” (V. F. Botsianovskii, “K kharakteristike raboty Pushkina nad novym romanom,” in Sertum bibliologicum v chest’ prof. A. I. Malenina [Petersburg: GIZ, 1922], p. 190). Pushkin chooses as epigraph to his story a characteristic sentence from Marlinsky's duelist tale, “An Evening on Bivouac.” For the relationship between “An Evening on Bivouac” and “The Shot” see Vinogradov, “O stile Pushkina,” pp. 188–91, and J. Thomas Shaw, “Pushkin's ‘The Shot,‘” Indiana Slavic Studies, 3 (1963), 124–26.

Note 12 Pushkin's camouflage seems only too transparent: “Had [Silvio] offered to shoot a pear off somebody's forage cap, not a man in our regiment would have hesitated to expose his head to the bullet” (p. 146). Yet we have no record of Pushkin ever speaking about Wilhelm Tell as man or as subject of a play or an opera (Rossini's opera was performed in Paris in 1829, the year before the Tales were written), and neither work was in his library as preserved. The assumed connection between Schiller's play and Pushkin's story is also made in Andrej Kodjak, “O povesti Pushkina, ‘Vystrel,‘ ” Mosty, 15 (1970), 109–212.

Note 13 Evgenii Onegin, iii, 10. See in addition Evgenii Onegin, viii, 5: “And lo! in my garden she / appeared as a provincial miss [baryshnia], / with woeful meditation in her eyes, / with a French book in her hands” (Nabokov, trans., Eugene Onegin, I, 283 ).

Note 14 “Vladimir Nikolayevich in every letter implored her to give herself up to him, to get married secretly, to hide for some time, and then throw themselves at the feet of their parents, who would, without any doubt, be touched at last by the heroic constancy and unhappiness of the lovers, and would assuredly say to them: ‘Children, come to our arms!‘” (p. 162). See Vinogradov, “O stile Pushkina,” pp. 171–75; Liubovich, p. 263; van der Eng, pp. 16–23.

Note 15 M. S. Al'tman, “Bludnaia doch': Pushkin i Dostoevskii,” Slavia, 14 (1937), 407.

Note 16 The relationship between the parable of the Prodigal Son and the plot of “The Stationmaster” is discussed in Iulii Aikhenval'd, Pushkin, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1916), pp. 149–50; M. O. Gershenzon, Mudrost' Pushkina (Moscow: Knigoizdatel'stvo pisatelei v Moskve, 1919), pp. 122–27; Al'tman, pp. 405–15; and, most recently and exhaustively, J. Thomas Shaw, “Pushkin's ‘The Stationmaster’ and the New Testament Parable,” Slavic and East European Journal, 21 (1977), 3–29.

Note 17 Both Silvio and Byron join the Greek insurgents and die, the former in Skulyani in 1821, the latter in Missolonghi in 1824.

Note 18 The emphasis is ours. The Letters of Alexander Pushkin (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), ed. and trans. J. Thomas Shaw, p. 161. As for the phrase “Kyukhelbekery and nauseated”: “Pushkin is here playing on the concluding phrase of an epigram (1818), attributed to Pushkin, and on Kyukhelbeker…. The epigram is said to have been called forth by Zhukovsky's commenting that T was a little nauseated somehow last night; besides Kyukhelbeker came' ” (p. 124, n. 13). The mention made of “my brothers the Negroes” is an “allusion to Pushkin's Abyssinian blood” (p. 176, n. 8).

Note 19 Among the sources, foreign and domestic, providing a fitting scenario for the removal and replacement of Vladimir there have been suggested Nivelle de Chausée's La Fausse Antipathie and Guyot de Merville's Les Epoux réunis (W. Lednicki, “The Snowstorm,” Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Goethe, Turgenev and Sienkiewicz [The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956], pp. 52–54); Karamzin's “Natal'ia, boiarskaia doch‘” and V. Panaev's “Otecheskoe nakazanie” (Gippius, p. 38); and M. Pogodin and A. Vel'tman's “Doch’ matrosa” (Liubovich, pp. 265–66). Here perhaps the plot of Pogodin and Vel'tman's story deserves special mention: … A drunken officer turns up by chance at a church where the wedding of a sailor's daughter is taking place; they await the groom (who happens to have gotten himself drunk); the bride is “neither dead nor alive”; the officer gets married, but on the next day flees from his wife, and only after many years does fate bring them together, and they are reunited. (Liubovich, pp. 265–66)

Note 20 “Masha, Burmin, and Vladimir were … aiming from three different ‘positions’ toward the same goal. But the dice sent Masha and Burmin to Zhadrino, while Vladimir fatally missed … the place particularly ‘magnetized’ by fatum” (Lednicki, p. 38).

Note 21 As it turns out, ironically, the narrator is also one of the earliest to “corrupt” Dunya and set the story of the prodigal father in motion. When he takes leave of the happy family for the first time, he coaxes the girl into a long, elliptical kiss, which summons the following comment: “I can reckon up a great many kisses ‘Since first I chose this occupation,‘ but not one which has left behind such a long, such a pleasant recollection” (p. 191).

Note 22 Pushkin's less than compassionate attitude toward Vyrin has not prevented several generations of critics from viewing “The Stationmaster” as the headwaters of a future Russian Natural School that would embrace the unfortunate and downtrodden. See, e.g., A. Iskoz, “Povesti Belkina,” p. 199, and N. L. Stepanov, Proza Pushkina (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), p. 69. Also telling in this regard is the reaction of Makar Devushkin to the character of Vyrin in Dostoevsky's Poor Folk.

Note 23 Shaw, Letters of Pushkin, p. 439. See also Gippius, p. 35.

Note 24 Possible subtexts for “The Lady Peasant” include, e.g., Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and St. Ronan's Well (1823) (D. Iakubovich, “Reministsentsii iz Val'ter Skotta v 'Povestiakh Belkina,' ” in Pushkin i ego sovremenniki, 37 [1928], 100–18); Voltaire, Le Droit du seigneur (1792) (Gippius, p. 36); W. Irving, “The Student of Salamanca” (1822) (Liubovich, p. 276); Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (B. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of Pushkin's Poetic Style” [1921], in Russian Views of Pushkin, p. 143); A. La Fontaine, “Miniatiurnyi portret” (Vinogradov, “O stile Pushkina,” pp. 177–78); P. Marivaux, “Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard” (1730) (P. A. Katenin, cited in Iakubovich, “Obzor statei i issledovanii o proze Pushkina s 1917 po 1935 g.,” Vremennik pushkinskoi komissii, i [1936], 308); Mme Montolieu, “Le Baron d'Aldestan; ou, Le Pouvoir de l'amour” (M. Speranskii, “ 'Baryshnia-krest'ianka' Pushkina i ‘Urok liubvi’ g-zhi Montol'e,” Sbornik Khar'kovskogo Istorichesko-filologicheskogo obshchestva v pamiat' prof. E. K. Redina, 19 [1910], 125–33); and Karamzin, “Natal'ia, boiarskaia doch'” (M. Al'tman, “Baryshnia-krest'ianka,” Slavia, 10 [1931], 782–92). Most of these works were translated in Moskovskii telegraf and Vestnik Evropy during Pushkin's time, though it is likely that Pushkin himself read them in French.

Note 25 Gregg bases his argument in large part on the “scapegoat”-“scapegrace” opposition, which, in terms of “The Stationmaster,” seems to reward the self-serving Minsky (pp. 748–51). But as Pushkin's ironic reworking of the parable of the Prodigal Son makes clear, it is Dunya's unconventional behavior that is the more spectacularly “rewarded.”

Note 26 See Vinogradov, “O stile Pushkina,” p. 189, and Shaw, “Pushkin's ‘The Shot,‘ ” pp. 124–26.

Note 27 See Berkovskii, pp. 289–92. In Irving's tale the young Count von Altenburg, accompanied by his friend Herman, is on his way to marry the daughter of the Baron von Landshort. (The couple were betrothed without a meeting.) The young men are attacked by robbers in a dense German forest and the count is mortally wounded. With his dying breath he asks his companion to ride to the castle of his bride. On arrival the messenger falls in love at first sight with the “widowed bride” and invents an ingenious scheme. Masterfully “inspectrating” the ghost of the groom, Herman stands in for the dead count, apologizes for being dead, and leaves for his own funeral at the W & uUrzburg Cathedral. He comes back several times at night and eventually elopes with the lovesick bride, who believes in “all the chivalric wonders” and knows “all the tender ballades of the Minnelieders by heart.” Ultimately, however, the repenting couple return, fall at the baron's feet, and—to the great surprise and relief of everyone—Herman reveals that he is no ghost. The baron pardons them forthwith.

Ironically the idea for the substitution was suggested to Herman by the ballad Lenore, with which the bride's father regales his guests. (This “dreadful story, which has since been put into excellent verse, and is read and believed by all the world” was rendered freely into English by W. Scott as “William and Helen” [1796].) Thus in addition to the clear similarities in plot, the parodistic role played by Burger's ballad in “The Specter Bridegroom” is paralleled by the role of Zhukovsky's adaptation of Burger in “The Blizzard.”

Note 28 P. A. Viazemskii, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Biblioteka poeta, Sovetskii pisatel', 1958), p. 177: “Why, dear friends, am I not traveling in Poland! Fate has not carried me far along the highways of Europe (which, truth to tell, is a great pity).” See Vinogradov, “O stile Pushkina,” pp. 184–87.

Note 29 We catch a glimpse of Pushkin's feeling for Bog-danovich in Evgenii Onegin, iii, 29: “To me will Gallicisms remain as dear / as the sins of past youth, / as Bogdanovich's verse” (Nabokov, trans., Eugene Onegin, i, 163).

Note 30 Other juxtapositions of foreign and domestic elements set Prokhorov's Russian kaftan against his daughter's European dress; Yurko's booth with its Doric columns against the native description from Izmaylov: “with his ax and armor of coarse cloth” (p. 180).

Note 31 Scott's gravedigger appears in Chapter xxiv of The Bride of Lammermoor. The relationship between Scott and Pushkin is discussed in Iakubovich, “Reministsentsii iz Val'ter Skotta v ‘Povestiakh Belkina,‘ ” Pushkin i ego sovremenniki, 37 (1928), 111–14.

Note 32 Complete Works, viii, 635. The patronymic is found only in a variant of the text.

Note 33 Pushkin wrote his first poem in 1813; 1830 would be his eighteenth year as a writer.

Note 34 The idea of changing domains is an important one in the four longer tales: Silvio's house after the first duel is changed to the count's house after the second duel; Marya Gavrilovna's house (close to Vladimir) before the blizzard is changed to her new house (close to Burmin) after the blizzard; and Vyrin's stationhouse is changed to Dunya's new house in Petersburg. In “The Lady Peasant” there is no change of domain, but after all masks are dropped in the final cognitio, the hostile houses are unified in marriage.

Note 35 Pushkin's official poetic debut is generally considered to be his reading of “Memories of Tsarskoe Selo” to Derzhavin on 8 Jan. 1815, on the occasion of the qualifying examination to the upper school at the lyceum. In “Table Talk” (Complete Works, xii, 158) Pushkin reminisces, “I recall neither how I finished my reading nor where I fled. Derzhavin was ecstatic; he asked after me, wanted to embrace me…. They looked for me, but I was nowhere to be found.” Derzhavin is reputed to have said, “I am not dead” (V. P. Gaevskii, Sovremennik, No. 8 [1863], p. 370) and “This is the one who will take Derzhavin's place” (F. N. Glinka, Recollections [1873], cited in E. J. Simmons, Pushkin [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937], p. 56. See Evgenii Onegin, vni, 2: “And with a smile the world received her [the Muse]; / initial success gave us wings; / the aged Derzhavin noticed us— / and blessed us while descending to the grave [literally: ‘coffin‘]” (Nabokov, trans., Eugene Onegin, I, 282).

Note 36 Complete Works, I, 156–64. Fonvizin, a representative of prose, goes to examine the state of poetry. Pushkin speaks mockingly of Derzhavin, whose arrival in the underworld is long overdue: “Denis! [Derzhavin] will ever be famous, but why oh why must he live so long?” (p. 163).

Note 37 We learn of Belkin's birthday (assuming he is the same Ivan Petrovich Belkin) only in “The History of the Village of Goryukhino” (Complete Works, viii, 127).