would be punished and punish others. As soon as a challenge was issued, strict codes governed the response, whether or not the aggrieved party felt personal outrage. Failing to issue a challenge when provoked was also dishonorable. If a gentleman was insulted by a person who then refused to accept a challenge to a duel, or if a challenge that should have been issued for some reason was not, one means for the insulted party to restore his honor was to commit suicide, or at least to attempt it. In Tolstoy’s
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refuses to be maneuvered by a military code he despises. Perhaps Vronsky, pressing his revolver to his chest and pulling the trigger, was in despair at losing Anna; but for certain he was desperate to restore his honor.
To duel and gamble meant to assert one’s individual initiative and thus to act, and feel, more free – even though, paradoxically, the outcome was utterly out of one’s control. Staking everything on a single bullet (or card) opened a person to arbitrariness and fate. Pushkin participated passionately in both duels of honor and games of chance. He favored high-stakes games and tended to lose heavily (his known losses at cards amount to 80,000 rubles, his wins to a mere 7,000); he had a reputation for playing honestly and for paying his large debts “conscientiously, even when his opponents cheated.”8 In Pushkin’s most famous short story, “The Queen of Spades” (1833), the cautious hero Germann ends up in a madhouse after he fails to win on three cards (three, seven, ace) that he had been promised, in a dream, would yield him a fortune. He played them as per the instructions – but at the last moment, inexplicably, the ace turns into a Queen of Spades. Germann’s error had not been gambling. It was his
“Chance, in Pushkin’s view, was the servant of the greater thing that he called fate.”9 This seeming paradox lies at the heartof Pushkin’s creative art and personal worldview (the poet was morbidly superstitious); it unites spontaneity and constraint in a fashion peculiar to this poet. Symmetry, often of dazzling complexity, governs his worlds. Events are balanced and circular; for all the easy banter, nothing is forgotten and no escape is possible from the choices and accidents that each hero must answer for. Exemplary here is Pushkin’s novel in verse,
Representing the poetic aspect is, first of all, the Onegin stanza itself, the novel’s structural “paragraph.” As tightly coiled as the novel is garrulous and expansive, this stanza is remarkably flexible: a fourteen-line verse unit in iambic tetrameter, with a regular scheme of feminine and masculine rhymes, arranged in three differently rhymed quatrains (first alternating, then pair, finally “ring”
construction) followed by a rhyming couplet (AbAb CCdd EffE gg).10 Pushkin invented the stanza in May 1823, intrigued by Byron’s verse narratives and most likely also inspired by the freely rhymed salacious verse of the seventeenth-century French fabulist La Fontaine. With several notable interruptions, eight chapters (over 5,000 lines) of these sturdy, intricately rhymed stanzas propel the plot of
The poeticality of
Tatyana sends Onegin a lovesick letter in Chapter 3. He sends her lovesick letters in Chapter 8. He lectures her on the modesty befitting an honorable maiden in Chapter 3 (she listens but is silent). She lectures him on his duties as an honorable man in Chapter 8 (he listens but is silent). No one gets together, each slides by the other, each is in love with the other but not at the same time, and for this reason energy in the novel is stored, not squandered. Such precious, unspent pressure figured high among Pushkin’s ideals for a well-balanced work of art, and he provides several metaphors for containing it. One occurs near the end of
Imagine a kaleidoscope: a tube with a set of mirrors at one end and a slot for the eye at the other. Life’s myriad events, confusions, coincidences, accidents – what Pushkin called, collectively,
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consciousness (the pioneer in that realm is Mikhail Lermontov, still a decade away). His complexity lies in his juxtaposition of multiple reflecting surfaces. Pushkin produces consciousness and intelligence in his characters (and pleasure in his readers) by the intersection of many planes. Thus he attends fastidiously to how, when, and by whom story lines are cut off and then resumed, and when the reader is allowed to hook up the various parts. In
Pushkin was a born poet who labored hard to learn the art of prose. Although he eventually managed to write lines that didn’t scan, he never abandoned the symmetrical ideal. In his finished prose works of the 1830s (only four were completed out of thirty begun), roundedness – returning to the beginning, but at another level – became his compromise with the linear impulses of accumulation, conversion, and collapse. Delaying the reward, or stripping back a disguise to reveal that we remain what we have always been, could turn an incipient tragedy into a comedy and a mass of quotidian details into a potential poem. Of course Pushkin as prose writer employed so-called “situation rhymes” (the prefiguring and echoing of narrative events), but his poetic nature demanded more: not just the repetition of similar parts but a structural symmetry within the work as a whole, subordinating even free personality to its sway.