Russian literature. A short introduction

natural homeland.

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Chapter 6

‘And don’t dispute with fools’

Men, women, and society

For you, my enchantresses, Only for you, my beauties . . .

(Pushkin, dedication to Ruslan and Ludmilla, 1820)

It would be hard to choose a better example of the difficulties raised by translating Pushkin than the final phrase of ‘Monument’. In English, it sounds perfectly banal, like a phrase from a guide to ‘making friends and influencing people’. Once again, register plays a part: the Russian word glupets has a folksy resonance that would make ‘And do not squabble with the daft’ in some ways a more adequate rendering. Even so, modern readers are likely to wonder at the combination of apparently incompatible themes in these last two lines. What connection could there be between a dignified command to a poet’s muse to ‘be obedient to the command of God’ and an apparently trivial piece of savoir vivre? (To be sure, the phrase bears some relation to a supposed quotation from the Koran jotted down in a draft of Evgeny Onegin, ‘Don’t quarrel with a fool’, but since the person citing the quotation was Evgeny himself, and it was preceded with a bare-faced piece of flippancy, ‘There’s plenty of common sense in the Koran’, the sacred text was reduced here to nothing more than a conduct book.)

Yet the rough draft of ‘Monument’ indicates that ‘And don’t dispute with fools’ was firmly in Pushkin’s head from the start of composition. It

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is the only line in the final three stanzas that was set down straight away in the form that it has in the final text. And the view of the poet as associated not only with the transcendent world of religious and mystical appearance, but also with the banalities of high society, comes up again and again in Pushkin’s later poetry. ‘The Poet’ (1827), for example, is structured round an opposition between ‘the concerns of the empty-headed monde’ (that is, of high society) and ‘the divine word’ (that is, of poetic inspiration), an opposition spanned by the poet himself, who lives alternately in each domain. Appealing to the Romantic myth of artists as socially isolated, Pushkin also invokes another and contradictory myth of the artist as honnete homme, well-spoken man of the world. This myth had been introduced to Russian culture in the late eighteenth century by Nikolay Karamzin, who had asserted, in a famous article, ‘Why Russia Has So Few Literary Talents’ (1802), that without proper access to polite society it was hard for a writer to educate his taste, however learned he might be.

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia, the reading of literature was an obligatory polite accomplishment for both men and women; indeed, writing itself was perceived as an agreeable social skill. Large numbers of women in the aristocracy and gentry kept an al’bom, a mixture of a scrap- book and a commonplace book, in which friends inscribed flattering verses (madrigaly), metrical tokens of love and friendship, and comic rhymes, next to sketched portraits and water-colour landscapes. Magazines and manuals gave models of appropriate pieces for albums (not having something ready to contribute when asked would have looked gauche). In such circumstances, the writing of poetry became an extension of polite conversation, a kind of refined game. Social convention demanded that verse offerings should in the main come from men and be addressed to women, and that the former should offer the latter flowery recognition of their beauty, intelligence, wit, and taste. For Karamzin, who had eulogized women’s percipience and spiritual profundity in his Epistle to

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Women (1796), the language of upper-class women should have been the model for Russian culture: in ‘Why Russia Has So Few Literary Talents’, he referred to ‘those charming women [ . . . ] on whose conversation we might hope to eavesdrop in order to embellish a novel with genteel and felicitous expressions’.

Women, then, were perceived as ideal readers – at least of certain kinds of literary material – and as exponents of the brilliant conversation which prose writers sought to imitate in their novels. The particular place in which this perception was enacted was the zala or the gostinaya, the saloon or drawing-room in a private house or apartment. Throughout the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, it was customary for prominent figures in society, many of them women, to keep open house on one day a week. Writers and musicians would be invited to perform their works in front of the visitors, who might include other artists and distinguished foreigners as well as members of the Russian social elite. One of the most famous such ‘salons’ (as they came to be known in the late nineteenth century) took place in the Moscow house of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya during the early 1820s: Pushkin was among the writers who attended, and who penned respectful tributes in the hostess’s album.

It is important, though, not to exaggerate the significance of the salon as a literary institution (as opposed to an instrument of polite culture more broadly, a place where men might acquire ‘that particular tenderness of spirit and taste that many hold to be the especial gift of women’, in the phrase used by a conduct book translated into Russian in 1765). In early nineteenth-century Russia, as opposed to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, mixed company was not the place for heavyweight literary discussion (such as might take place between men when on their own), but rather for light-hearted banter and flirtatious verbal fencing. Artists would perform pieces likely to be successful in such a setting (witty and brilliant, rather than profound). Though salon

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15. Pushkin declaiming his verses to the ‘Green Lamp’ literary society. This kind of all-male gathering was the preferred forum for serious new work throughout the salon era.

hostesses themselves sometimes treated the company to their own compositions (as in the case of Volkonskaya), for the most part the female contribution consisted of marriageable young women showing off their accomplishments as singers or players on the pianoforte (as in Jane Austen’s fictional drawing-rooms). Once Romanticism had brought to Russia the idea of art as a sacred activity that should be received in reverence and mute sympathy by readers, viewers, or listeners, participation in the salon became increasingly irksome to artists. When irritated by persistent requests to perform a party piece in Volkonskaya’s salon, Pushkin is alleged to have responded with a recitation of ‘The Poet and the Mob’, his assault on the stupidity of readerly expectation. (The accuracy of this story is questionable, since Volkonskaya left Russia in 1828, and the poem also dates from that year, but the fact that the anecdote had currency is an indicator of prevailing attitudes.) And in A Double Life (1846), a novella by mid-nineteenth-century Russia’s most talented female Romantic poet, Karolina Pavlova, poets give recitals in the heroine’s mother’s drawing-room to an artistically ignorant public who