The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Captain’s Daughter (1836). In its opening chapters Pyotr Grinyov meets a disguised Pugachov, the false monarch, and later benefits from his mercy; this “chance” happening is fastidiously reproduced in the closing chapters when Masha Mironova, also by chance, meets the disguised Catherine II, the true monarch, enabling the mercy-pardon of Grinyov and the survival of his line.

The primary task of prose writing (as Pushkin practiced it) was to design the maximally efficient action for the characters that would reveal the integrity and symmetry of their motives. In 1822, still exclusively a poet, Pushkin jotted down a few thoughts about prose. “Precision and brevity,” he wrote, “these are the first virtues of prose. Prose demands ideas and more ideas . . . As regards the question, whose prose is best in our literature, the answer is: Karamzin’s. And this, as yet, is no great praise.”12 Eight years later, at his Boldino estate, Pushkin first tried his hand at prose fiction for the literary market, in a set

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of five very short stories, Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1830), linked by a common fictive editor. The style is laconic and spare; verbs outnumber adjectives. Its fourth tale, “The Stationmaster,” will suggest how Pushkin moves a Sentimentalistplot – the subtext is “Poor Liza” – into precise, fast-paced prose.

Like Karamzin’s story, “The Stationmaster” is a flashback told by an outsider. But unlike Karamzin’s emotionally implicated narrator, Pushkin’s author is drily reportorial. At no point do we know which way the story will go: “folds,” slices, gaps, and overlappings in the narrative hide the end from view. The high-spirited, low-born heroine, Dunya, is seduced to the city by the dashing, smooth-talking officer Minsky. Her father the stationmaster (civil servant fourteenth class) is convinced that she is ruined – for how could she not be ruined? – and he trudges off to Petersburg to fetch her home. His worldview is reproduced in the woodcuts of the Parable of the Prodigal Son that hang on the walls of his station; quite naturally he sees himself as the magnanimous, all-forgiving father of that edifying tale. But Pushkin never allows a story to be seen from one perspective alone. Minsky won’t give her up, and Dunya prefers not to come home. As it turns out, Minsky marries his Dunya, and her life with him is incomparably better than continuing to serve her father in that shabby station. The risk she took on impulse was the type of risk worth taking by the young; the timing was right, and not every prodigal act need have prodigal-son consequences. The embittered father dies of drink and the story ends on Dunya’s visit to his grave, some years later, accompanied by servants, an elegant carriage, and three little children in tow. She is deeply sorry (we are given to believe), but not at all repentant. Dunya’s escape with Minsky was a gamble against the odds of the seduce-and-abandon plot.

Pushkin loves to reward impulsively na??ve actionswith good luck.Attimes he does it “just so,” with comedic simplicity, allowing his characters to be smarter (and luckier) than the plots they inherited from some earlier literary tradition – and that we think will trap or punish them. Usually, before the happy ending can be rounded off, unconventional heroines like Dunya must admit that their selfish behavior caused others pain, even if they do not regret their act.

The remaining four Belkin Tales work playful variations on cliche?d plots of European Romanticism, with a subtle admixture of the poet’s own anxiety about his social status and rank.13 The delight and fantasy of each tale is how honorable or “healthy” behavior – usually young people of marriageable age trying to get together – so easily triumphs over obstacles of class or parental resistance. Thus we have a Romeo and Juliet story that ends happily, a dueling tale in which no one is killed, a stalled courtship where it turns out the boy and girl have been married to each other all along. There is a powerful core of pure, Shakespearean festive comedy in Pushkin. This comedy shares little with the

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didactic social comedy of Fonvizin or Knyazhnin from the 1770s–80s, although girl and boy get together in those scenarios too. Eighteenth-century comedy leaves its trace throughout the Belkin Tales (and throughout Pushkin’s prose) in different, more decorative ways – in the secondary characters, for example, who are often quite “unRussian”: the sassy maid as go-between for her mistress (a French soubrette), the ignorant or immoral provincial tutor. But there are no Sofyas or Milons in the leading roles. In Pushkin, positive characters exercise real initiative. They make choices and take risks. They must, of course, have an inborn sense of honor and loyalty, but they act in their own interests and according to their own na??ve appetites. Only then will fate be on their side. Plots are rounded and people come home.

As we shall see, Gogolian time-space has a different shape altogether. Although also comic, it cannot support anything like a wholesome appetite or a circular, homecoming plot. Honor is not relevant to it, although rules most definitely are. Gogol is Russia’s first Kafka, her supreme chronicler of bureaucracies and the insecurities of social life as it registers on the shy and the neurotic.Heis the patron saintof heroes who linearly bolt outofa narrative and disappear. Before we move to Gogol’s realm of Russian Romanticism, however, a few words are in order on the legacy of the first Belkin Tale, “The Shot.” It links Pushkin’s troubled consideration of the duel of honor in Eugene Onegin – the hero’s failure to prevent his best friend’s death – with a long Russian literary tradition of botched, parodied, or “estranged” duels. In each, the duel ends up testing some other sort of honorableness, some value deeper than a passing insult or a set of societal codes.

Duels

As love is displaced and misses its mark in Eugene Onegin, so are bullets displaced and (mercifully) go astray in “The Shot.” The narrative structure of this tiny story is so ingeniously layered and jointed that we forgive its banal, fantastical plot. The gothic hero Silvio, insulted at a ball, calls out his rival, a handsome and wealthy count. Obsessively jealous and infuriated by his opponent’s casu-alness at the duel, Silvio postpones his shot; the count graciously allows him to redeem it at any time. For several years Silvio plots his vengeance, awaiting a chance to test the courage of his opponent when the latter has something he fears to lose. A re-run of the duel finally occurs, in front of the count’s new wife. We slowly realize that Silvio can never satisfy his honor because the issue is not an isolated insult but the count’s whole personality, a blend of courage, self-respect, noble rank, and moral superiority. Such people are beyond testing. We discern a link between this Belkin Tale – a “little comedy,” since no one is

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killed in either duel – and Mozart and Salieri, one of the four “Little Tragedies” that Pushkin wrote during the same Boldino autumn, 1830. Salieri too cannot abide the natural superiority (in this case the musical genius) of his junior colleague and rival. His envy of Mozart is not triggered by any single “insult,” nor can it be answered by any single ritualized gesture. Both the confrontation and the insult are cosmic, so the desire to duel (combat between two men, equally armed) is replaced by the need to murder. When the duel becomes a test that goes beyond answering for an isolated deed, no manuals on dueling etiquette will help. The very existence of the superior rival constitutes the insult. This rival is unreachable, living on another plane. The envier can only look ridiculous (and knows he looks ridiculous) when he tries to “settle scores” with this more highly endowed being – regardless of the outcome of their duel.

The most subtle variant on the Silvio model in Russian literature after Pushkin is the duel between Pechorin and Grushnitsky in the “Princess Mary” segment of Lermontov’s novel Hero of Our Time (1840). Grigory Pechorin is a Byronic hero, one degree more burnt out and malicious than his close literary relative, Eugene Onegin. Pechorin’s friend Grushnitsky – a crooked shadow of himself, the double in the mirror he tries to avoid – is a fop, a conceited fool, a bad loser, far more juvenile and melodramatic than Onegin’s na??ve friend Lensky (perhaps because Grushnitsky is available to us only through Pechorin’s diary). On a Caucasus mountain cliff, the two men duel over an innocent maiden’s honor. But neither really cares about the maiden. At stake is their own honor, fatally mixed with injured pride. The duel has been rigged by Grushnitsky’s cronies, and Pechorin, knowing this, nevertheless faces his opponent’s bullet, survives the shot and secures his own honor. Pechorin then exposes