elegance and precision that was at last devoid of affectation; and the famous 'broad Russian nature' was combined with the classical virtues of clarity and disciplined moderation. For all his breadth of interest and subject matter, Pushkin was a different temperament from the Shakespeare with whom Russians often compare him. His was not the 'golden uncontrolled enfranchisement' of the Elizabethans but rather the fulfillment of the oft-maligned aristocratic ideal: disinterested curiosity freed from dilettantism; ranging sympathies freed from condescension; and honest self-awareness freed from morbid introspection.
For a poet with natural musicality, it seems appropriate that Pushkin wrote about music and musicians and had so much of his own work adapted for the musical stage.86 There is a kind of compatibility between the grace of his verse and that of the imperial ballet, which by the 1820's had surpassed all others in Europe. During thirty of Pushkin's thirty-eight years thjs^aUet was directed by Charles Didelot, the first of the great Russian impresario- choreo^apHeTsTHe^mkeTplishkin's work, and Pushkin found fresh inspiration for his poetry in one of Didelot's greatest ballerinas, Istomina.87 The verses of Pushkin and the movements of Istomina gave Russians a new confidence that they were capable of surpassing the West not only in primitive combat but also in sophisticated cultural accomplishment.
For all his genius and symbolic importance, however, Pushkin did not affect the path of Russian cultural development as much as many lesser writers.
He exerted, it is true, a vast influence on Russian literature, but almost none on the history of Russian thought, of Russian spiritual cul-
ture. In me mneteenm century ana generally ?? oui own umcs, rvussiau thought and spiritual culture has followed another, non-Pushkinian path.88
Pushkin was a relatively unpolemical writer, a man of shifting interests, tantalizing fragments, and elusive opinions. Yet he gradually developed an outlook that can be characterized as conservative in social and political matters and liberal in the realm of spiritual and creative culture. After a youth of many love affairs and close contact with Decembrists and other romantic reformers, he became a supporter of autocracy in the 1820's and a half- domesticated paterfamilias in the 1830's. He had always shared the aristocratic distaste for the vulgarity and capriciousness of the common horde. He was skeptical about the possibilities of democracy in America, and tended to praise great men-Peter the Great, Lomonosov, and even at times Napoleon-who had disregarded majority opinion in order to lift standards and advance culture. Always a monarchist, he hailed Nicholas I in more cordial terms than he had Alexander I; praised Peter and derided his Ukrainian foe Mazeppa in his Poltava of 1829; and endorsed the crushing of the Polish insurrection of 1830. Increasingly, he felt reverence for continuity and tradition. Violent change of any sort, he came to feel, would bring forth an inescapable revenge of fate-just as uncontrolled excess in poetry produces an imbalance that destroys true art. Pushkin was horrified by the terror of the French Revolution, and inveighed against the unleashed fury of the mob in his own major historical work of the early 1830's, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion.
Yet insofar as revolutionary figures become distinct personalities rather than mere weapons of the impersonal war on tradition, Pushkin treats them with the same relative detachment that is accorded to princes, gypsies, and all humanity in his work. Pugachev as an individual is sympathetic and understandable in Pushkin's History and an idealized figure in his fictional Captain's Daughter. Poles are portrayed objectively in Boris Godunov, as are Crimean Tatars in 'The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.' The crushing of the Decembrists saddened him not because of his sympathy for their programs but because of the foreshortening of imaginative vistas implied in the loss to Russia of gifted poets like Ryleev and Kiichelbecker. In the very year of the Decembrist rebellion, Pushkin identified himself with the neo-classical French poet Andre Chenier, who was guillotined dunh'g™the terror of the French Revolution. Pushkin's Chenier 'sings to freedom at the habitual popular festival of execution, unchanging to the end,' and exclaims just before his death:
thou, sacred Freedom, Immaculate Goddess, thou art not guilty.*
uiuKiuuai ucauvc nccuom must oe preserved it fiuman life is to have any dignity. 'Pushkin defends the viewpoint of a true conservatism, based on the primacy of culture and the spiritual independence of the individual personality and society.'90 Even in the relative security from mob rule and commercial pressures provided by Nicholas I, Pushkin felt 'the primacy of culture' challenged by petty bureaucrats and stifling censorship. The flood and madness which engulfs the poor clerk in 'The Bronze Horseman' are the revenge of fate for the precipitous reforms of Peter, just as the calamities and death which overtake Boris Godunov are revenge for the presumed crimes of an otherwise sympathetic Boris. The optimism of Pushkin's early lyrics becomes more obscured in his later works by a deepening sense of human loneliness amidst an essentially unfeeling nature, and a growing consciousness of the irrational chaotic depths within man himself. His late years were characterized by attempts to deepen his hitherto perfunctory understanding of Christianity, a nostalgia for his youth, and a general movement away from poetry to prose. 'I am,' he said, 'an atheist of happiness. I do not belive in it.'91 He died early in 1837 as a result of wounds incurred in a senseless duel.
The posthumous veneration for Pushkin was, and has remained, extraordinary. His papers were immediately impounded as state property; and Lermontov wrote a poem which vigorously attacked Pushkin's censors and critics, signalizing the transfer of the mantle of poetic pre-eminence to another who was to die unnecessarily and prematurely just four years later. Lermontov was a more brooding and introspective figure than Pushkin. With him, the floodgates of emotionalism were opened and the heroes of European romanticism-Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goethe-came to dominate a poetic culture they had previously only influenced. Goethe's Faust was particularly influential. It was translated by Venevitinov, the original poetic Wunderkind of the twenties, and again in the thirties by Eugene Guber, a Saratov pietist who was a friend both of Pushkin and of Fesler, the occultist of the Alexandrian era.92 Odoevsky calls the hero of his highly romantic and widely read Russian Nights 'the Russian Faust.' The romantic longings and metaphysical preoccupations that were already marked in Lermontov are even further developed in the work of Fedor Tiutchev, who outlived Lermontov by many years, to-become-the-last-great sunfiybr.i3f_the__goJdfiILage of Russian poetry. Beginning with translations from Goethe's Faust in a dehbefately archaic Russian, Tiutchev turned to a world of private fantasy and nocturnal themes that is reminiscent of early, world-weary romantics like Novalis and Tieck.93
This drift toward emotionalism, metaphysics, and obscurity signified the waning of the Pushkinian tradition and a general decline in the popu-
larity of poetry. Growing impatience with the more disciplined and classical art forms of poetry and architecture did not diminish the enthusiasm for art itself, which was still believed to contain the answers to the great questions . of life.fThe idea of art as prophecy can again be traced to Pushkin, whose magnificent poem of 1826, 'The Prophet,' describes how the angel of the; Lord came to him when he was weary and lost in the wilderness 'and my prophetic eyes were awakened like those of a startled eagle.' The angel took away his idle inclinations, placed a living coal of fire where once his 'trembling heart' had been, and bade him arise and speak the word of God to burn 'the hearts of people.'94
The generation of artists that succeeded Pushkin tried to do just that. The way in which philosophic concerns created a new prophetic art is illustrated in the interlocked careers of two towering personalities of the 'marvelous decade': the writer Nicholas Gogol and the painter Alexander Ivanov. The former dramatizes the transition from poetry to prose in rRussian letters; the latter the change from architecture to painting in the visual arts. Though they labored in different art forms and Gogol was far. moresuccesjful, they shared deep common concerns, and forged the first of the many close links that were to develop between prose writers and painters: Tolstoy and Ge, Garshin and Vereshchagin, Chekhov and Levitan.95
