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Love, Friendship, and Poetic Voice in Aleksandr Pushkin's Lycée Elegies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
In his Materialy dlia biografii A. S. Pushkina, Pavel Annenkov first formulated what is now a critical commonplace: that Aleksandr Pushkin's 1816 elegies marked a turning point in the young poet's work, the rapid first steps toward poetic maturity and individuality.
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- Information
- Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Aleksandr Pushkin 1799-1999 , Summer 1999 , pp. 352 - 370
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999
References
1. P. V. Annenkov, Materialy dlia biografii A. S. Pushkina, vol. 1 of A. S. Pushkin, Sochineniia, ed. P. V. Annenkov, 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1855), 38; cited in Vatsuro, V E., “Litseiskoe tvorchestvo Pushkina,” in Pushkin, A. S., Stikhotvoreniia litseiskikh let, 1813–1817 (St. Petersburg, 1994), 383 Google Scholar; hereafter SLL. Following Annenkov, Pushkinists have long divided the Lycée poetry into two overlapping periods: the “anacreontic and hedonistic” (1813–1815) and the “elegiac” (1815–1817). Besides Vatsuro, I have consulted Blagoi, D. D., Tvorcheskii put’ Pushkina (1813–1826) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1950)Google Scholar; Gorodetskii, B. P., Lirika Pushkina (Moscow-Leningrad, 1962)Google Scholar; Tomashevskii, B., Pushkin, 2 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1956)Google Scholar; Stepanov, N. L., Lirika Pushkina: Ocherki i eliudy, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1974)Google Scholar; Vinogradov, V. V, Stil’ Pushkina (Moscow, 1941)Google Scholar. For an ample bibliography of other material related to the Lycée poetry, see SLL, 692–96.
2. On the elegy in Russia, see Vatsuro, V. E., Lirika pushkinskoi pory: Elegicheskaia shkola (St. Petersburg, 1994)Google Scholar; Fleishman, L. S., “Iz istorii elegii v pushkinskuiu epokhu,” Pushkinskiisbornik (Riga, 1968), 24–53 Google Scholar. Both trace elegy's development from a loosely defined but acutely felt genre based on “mixed feelings” to a mode characteristic of lyric poetry in general. On Pushkin's elegies, see, among others, Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar; Grekhnev, Vsevolod, Mir pushkinskoi liriki (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1994)Google Scholar; Senderovich, Savelii, Aleteia: Elegiia Pushkina “Vospominanie” i problemy ego poetiki (Vienna, 1982)Google Scholar; K. N. Grigor'ian, Pushkinskaia elegiia (Leningrad, 1990)Google Scholar; George J. Gutsche, “The Elegies of Aleksandr Pus˘kin” (Ph.D. diss, University of Wisconsin, 1973).
3. Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put', 127.
4. The name most often assigned to Pushkin's first, “northern” love is E. P. Bakunina, a sister of one of the poet's fellow Lycée students. For a review of the literature, see SLL, 578–79.
5. Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put', 119–20.
6. Zhukovskii, V. A., Stikhotvoreniia, ed. N. V. Izmailov (Leningrad, 1956), 103Google Scholar. See also Pushkin, A. S., Dnevniki. Zapiski, ed. Levkovich, la. L. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 9.Google Scholar
7. The phrase belongs to S. D. Komovskii, cited in Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put', 121.
8. Belinskii, V. G., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 3: 171.Google Scholar
9. Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put', 120.
10. Greenleaf has wittily characterized this attitude, which she detects in Boris Tomashevskii, as “immunological.” Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 87.
11. Tynianov, Iu. N., Pushkin i ego sovremennihi (Moscow, 1969), 129.Google Scholar
12. Gorodetskii, Lirika Pushkina, 124.
13. Tomashevskii follows Pushkin's cyclization of his elegies in the so–called Nikitenko notebook; see Vatsuro, “Litseiskoe,” 402; M. A. Tsiavlovskii, “Istochniki tekstov litseiskikh stikhotvorenii,” SLL, 455–60. On the French elegiac tradition, see Savchenko, S, “Elegiia Lenskogo i frantsuzskaia elegiia,” Pushkin v mirovoi literature (Leningrad, 1926), 65–81 Google Scholar; Mil'china, V. A., “Frantsuzskaia elegiia kontsa XVIII–pervoi chetverti XIX veka,” in Vatsuro, V. E., ed., Frantsuzskaia elegiia XVIII–XIX vekov v perevodakh poetov pushkinskoi pory (Moscow, 1989)Google Scholar; and Vatsuro, Lirika pushkinskoi pory.
14. Tomashevskii, Pushkin, 1: 119.
15. Ibid., 1: 118. S. A. Fomichev questions the hegemony of elegy in Pushkin's late Lycée poetry and argues convincingly that other genres, especially the familiar epistle, held their ground. Fomichev, , Poeziia Pushkina: Tvorcheskaia evoliutsiia (Leningrad, 1986), 34–37 Google Scholar. On the other hand, Vatsuro argues that the elegy asserted its dominance in 1816 and 1817 less by numerical superiority or unity of topic than by the elegiac mood that “colored” other genres, especially the epistle. Vatsuro, “Litseiskoe,” 403.
16. Tomashevskii, Pushkin, 1: 120.
17. Ibid., 1: 123, 120, 96. Compare Blagoi's similar assessment in Tvorcheskii put', 143.
18. Tynianov, Pushkin i ego sovremenniki, 123–24; George J. Gutsche, “Pus˘kin's Revisions of His Lyceum Poems for His First Collection of Poems,” Slavic and East EuropeanJournal 20 (1976): 103–20. This compulsive revision complicates any discussion of Pushkin's Lycée verse, since it precludes any authoritative corpus of texts. These questions have received ample scrutiny but have not yielded any clear solutions. See Tomashevskii, Pushkin, 1: 114–18; and Tsiavlovskii, “Istochniki tekstov litseiskikh stikhotvorenii,” 460–80. Most recently, N. N. Petrunina has offered a detailed critique of both Tsiavlovskii and Tomashevskii. Petrunina, “Iz istorii pervogo sobraniia stikhotvorenii Pushkina,” Russkaia literatura, 1990, no. 4: 137–46.
19. Gorodetskii, Lirika Pushkina, 95.
20. Fomichev, Poeziia Pushkina, 30.
21. Here I follow Jerome McGann in the “considerable effort of sympathetic identification” he exerts to read “the poetry of […] the coeur sensible.” In resisting modernist attempts (he cites T. S. Eliot) to extirpate sentimentalism from the literary tradition, McGann claims “we tend not to ‘read’ this poetry […] because we think we already know it. So we pre-read it instead, if we turn to it at all, or we mine it for information. But the writing as such remains largely unencountered.” McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford, 1996), 4. Vladimir Nabokov, like Eliot an arch–modernist, provides a telling example of such “pre–reading” when he withers “sentiment” with an acerbic dismissal: “'Sentimental’ implies little beyond the shedding of conventional tears over the misadventure of conventional virtue in verse or prose.” Pushkin, Aleksandr, Eugene Onegin, trans, and commentary Nabokov, Vladimir, 4 vols. (Princeton, 1964) 3: 33.Google Scholar
22. See Louise Kaplan, who discusses Rousseau and Hall in tandem as the “inventors” of adolescence. Kaplan, , Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood (New York, 1984), 51–80 Google Scholar. Pushkin seems to have had at least a passing knowledge of Rousseau even in the Lycée: in “Gorodok” (The village, 1815) he pairs him with Nikolai Karamzin among his Parnassian visitors. SLL, 79. My purpose here, however, is not to detect any influence or appropriation of ideas, but to develop a framework based on psychological and philosophical constructions of adolescence in which to understand Pushkin's early poetry.
23. Both Hall and Rousseau explicitly limit their discussion to boys.
24. Muuss, Rolf E., Theories of Adolescence, 5th ed. (New York, 1988), 22–23.Google Scholar
25. Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, Emile, or On Education, trans. Bloom, Allan (New York, 1979), 193.Google ScholarPubMed
26. Stanley Hall, G., Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (New York, 1904), xiii.Google Scholar
27. Kaplan, Adolescence, 19, 135–62.
28. On the generic interaction of epistle and elegy, see Senderovich, Aleteia, 129–38.
29. Zhukovskii, Stikhotvoreniia, 103.
30. Rousseau, Emile, 220.
31. Ibid., 357.
32. See Hagstrum, Jean H., Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago, 1980), 231–32.Google Scholar
33. Besides the poems I will discuss below, also see “Liubov’ odna—vesel'e zhizni khladnoi” (Love alone is the gaiety of cold life, 1816), in which the poet proclaims his failure both as a lover and as a poet, contrasting his sad fate with the true “inheritors of Tibullus and Parny.” SLL, 222–23. On the “motif of the waning creative gift,” see Gorodetskii, who links it to Batiushkov's influence on Pushkin in Lirika Pushkina, 77–78, 142. The theme will reappear in connection to love in Pushkin's 1821 poem “Umolknu skoro ia!” (Soon I will fall silent! PSS, 17 vols., 2: 53).
34. SLL, 195.
35. Ibid.
36. Tomashevskii, Pushkin, 1: 95.
37. SLL, 180.
38. Ibid.
39. SLL, 180–81.
40. Fomichev, Poeziia Pushkina, 34.
41. This elegy has a peculiar textual history. The version I have given here is from Pushkin's “Lycée notebook” and thus the “canonical” version. However, scholars have identified an additional sixteen lines that apparently precede those given here and clearly indicate the loss of an erotic connection. See Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put', 140–42; Gorodetskii, Lirika Pushkina, 150; cf. SLL, 633, whose editors doubt any connection between the texts. Pushkin further shortened the text to eight lines for publication in his 1826 collection.
42. SLL, 194.
43. Compare a similar contrast in “Schastliv, kto v strasti sam sebe” (Happy is he who in his passion, 1816; SLL, 185).
44. The tone here resembles Odes 1.9, in which Horace adopts “his favorite role as the middle–aged commentator—detached, indulgent—on the human comedy; his companion is a young man on the verge of life.” Horace, The Odes, ed. and commentary Kenneth Quinn (New York, 1980), 139–40. The pertinent passage, in Lord Tennyson's schoolboy translation, is: “Why should we fear tomorrow's woe? / Whatever day the Powers above / Have given, rejoice: nor, while the flow / Of joy and golden youth delight / Thy soul— while age avoids thee—slight / The mazy dance—the power of love” (22–27). “See! How Soracte's hoary brow,” in [ Tennyson, Alfred], The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, Christopher, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Harlow, Eng., 1987), 1: 4.Google Scholar
45. Fomichev notes that “the reason for [the hero's] despondence is not disclosed” in “Opiat’ ia vash.” Fomichev, Poeziia Pushkina, 32. By contrast, the editors of SLL see in this poem “the usual elegiac motif of [the poet's] return to his friends after an erotic episode, [a motif] that often (for example, in E.-D. Parny) constitutes the lyrical situation.” SLL, 655. I tend to agree with the latter assessment, but Fomichev's observation is clearly apt given the paucity of erotic details.
46. Johnson, Barbara, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in Warhol, Robyn R. and Herndl, Diane Price, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991), 630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
47. Culler, Jonathan, “Apostrophe,” Diacritics 7, no. 4 (1977): 60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Again, I would stress that epistle and elegy are not wholly separable in the Lycée poetry of Pushkin and his friends. Indeed the two often coexist in a single poem, as in “Opiat’ ia vash,” where elegy holds the dominant position.
48. Compare Sigmund Freud, who characterizes melancholia as “a regression from one type of object–choice to original narcissism.” Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1973), 14: 249.
49. SLL, 241.
50. Gukovskii, G. A., Pushkin i russkie romantiki, ed. Putilov, S. V. (Moscow, 1995), 105.Google Scholar
51. Here I extrapolate from Èmile Benveniste's idea that “The notion of ‘person’ […] is peculiar to I/you, and is lacking in he. […] The ‘third person’ is essentially a ‘nonperson.'” Benveniste, , Problémes de linguistique générale (Paris, 1966), 251, 256.Google Scholar
52. PSS, 17 vols., 5: 547. This passage is from the drafts of the eighth chapter of Evgenii Onegin.
53. For Freud, the melancholic fails to accept a replacement for his erotic object and regresses into narcissism. What is different here is the poet's inability to displace his erotic connection in favor of his friends, or in terms more reminiscent of Rousseau than of Freud, to regain the idyllic innocence of friendship after the genie of sexual love has been released.
54. Compare the imagery for morning in “Moemu Aristarkhu” (To my Aristarchus, 1815): “Uzhe utra iarkoe svetilo / Polia i roshchi ozarilo” (Already the bright luminary of day / Has illuminated the fields and groves, SLL, 136).