The Bronze Horseman, a masterpiece

[Part 1]

Some weeks ago, Gunadasa Amarasekera and I were discussing the nature of narrative poetry, its inherent strengths and limitations, and we independently settled on Alexander Pushkin's poem 'The Bronze Horseman' as one which exemplified in complex and fascinating ways the distinctiveness of this genre. In the next two columns, I wish to share with you my understanding of and views on this narrative poem and why I think it should be regarded as an outstanding work of verbal art.

Pushkin, to be sure, does not enjoy in Sri Lanka the same kind of visibility as say Wordsworth or T.S. Eliot or Yeats. This is indeed unfortunate, because he is a supremely accomplished poet who repays close study. Given the way literary reputations are made in the English-speaking world, the relative neglect of Pushkin as a poet should no come as a surprise.

Alexander Pushkin enjoys a very high reputation in Russia. Indeed, he is regarded as Russia's greatest national poet. His work, his style, his poetic craft, his vision have had a profound impact on Russian writers who came after him. The works of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky display abundant traces of his influence .As John Bayley, a former professor at Oxford, who is the author of one of the most perceptive books on Pushkin, made the following comment.

Scope

'The bulk and scope of Pushkin's studies befits the author whom Russians will always put in a class by himself. For the great novels which to the world at large are the real Russian contribution to world literature, and one unequalled elsewhere, are for Pushkin's countrymen a secondary development of his primary genius; without Pushkin, they say, no Turgenev, no Dostoevsky, no Tolstoy....'

Bayley goes on to make the justifiable assertion that had Pushkin's genius and his talent been other than they were, it is almost certain that Russian literature would have become what it most certainly is not - provincial. '

Dostoevsky was a great admirer of Pushkin's writings. He said that, 'Pushkin died in the full bloom of his creative power and no doubt he carried with him into his grave some great secret. And now we, with him no longer among us, and endeavoring to solve it.' His admiration from Pushkin is well reflected in the following statement of his. 'In European letters there were geniuses of immense creative magnitude - Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller.

But please point to even one of these geniuses who possessed such a universal susceptibility as Pushkin.' Dostoevsky was adamant in his belief that Pushkin reflected the universal ideas, poetic images, of other nations in which their genius is incarnated.' What Dostoevsky is saying is that while Shakespeare's Italians appear to be Englishmen, Pushkin's A Stone Guest appears to be presenting Span as if a Spaniard had written it.

D.M. Thomas, a distinguished British novelist and writer, who has made a beautiful translation of Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman and a number of other works, advances a similar notion. He points out vividly how Pushkin's writings live in the creations of later Russian writers.'

Eugene Onegin, the superfluous man, went on living and growing in Turgenev's novels, and, more sinisterly, in Dostoevsky; Tatiana moved on also, into Turgenev, and into Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The mysterious Petersburg of The Bronze Horseman goes on glittering and shimmering in Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Bely, Akhmatova; the humble hero of that poem stumbles in through Russian realism, beginning with Gogol (Pushkin, indeed, literally gave Gogol the ideas for Dead Souls and The Inspector General).

The blizzard in his poem Demons blows still in Dostoevsky's the Devils, Blok's The Twelve and Akhmatova's poem Without a Hero, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.' Thomas goes on to assert that it is less a question of influence than of a still-living force, a wind that hasn't blown itself out, a continuing miracle of loaves and fishes.

Alexander Pushkin is not an unknown entity in Sri Lanka; some of his work has been translated into Sinhala, although at times in truncated form. However, his real strengths as a poet have not been, in my view, adequately explored and commented on.

Some decades ago, I gave a lecture on Pushkin's poetry at an event organized by Gunasena Vithana).

That is why I decided to devote the next two columns to a discussion of his brilliant narrative poem The Bronze Horseman. Pushkin was born on May 26th 1799 in Moscow; his parents lead the life of the minor aristocracy at the time. His indubitable literary talents were evident from his school days. At 18 he left school and was offered a position in the foreign office. He spent the next three, while leading a dissolute life, writing light and erotic verse.

He was associated with certain revolutionary movements which led to his falling of from grace and eventually to exile. During this period he wrote The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. Gradually his work began to take a more serious tone and he began to work on two of his most well-known works the Gypsies and Eugene Onegin.

Historical play

In 1824 he returned to his parents and spent the next two years working on his celebrated historical play Boris Godunov, and also to continue working on his narrative poem Eugene Onegin. With the collapse of the Decembrists revolt in 1825 and the emergence of a news Tsar, Pushkin was able to re-gain his freedom. He spent the next three years moving restlessly back and forth between Moscow and .Petersburg. During this period he wrote his epic poem Poltava. In 1831 he completed his experimentalist Little Tragedies, The Tales of Belkin in prose. The same year he got married to Natalia. His life was, to be sure, unwaveringly full of anxieties and hardships, he was constantly in debt and he had to confront the implacable wrath of his enemies. And his philandering did not help matters either. There was a perceptible slackening of his creativity. However, he was able to write two prose works, The Captain's Daughter and The Queen of Spades.

He also composed folk poems including the Golden Cockerel. In 1836, Pushkin was provoked to challenge one of his admirers of his wife to a duel, and was mortally wounded; this was, of course, not the first time he engaged in perilous duels. He died at the relatively young age of thirty eight in 1837.

Alexander Pushkin is, as I stated earlier, regarded by Russians as their greatest national poet. Apart from poetry, he wrote plays, short stories, novels and folk poems, and he excelled in all these different departments of literary creativity.

However, it is as a poet, I think, that he gained the widest reputation. And hence it is on his poetry that I wish to focus on in this column. A problem that non-Russian speakers have in evaluating his work is that we have to rely on translations. However good the translations ( the prose translation of Eugene Onegin by Nabokov and the verse translation by Charles Johnston and the verse rendering of The Bronze Horseman by D.M. Thomas are very good), they do not capture the full flavor of the original. Russian literary critics tell us that the life of Pushkin's poetry is inseparably linked to the structure and phonetic power of the Russian language, and translations cannot do full justice to that conjunction. Hence, it has to be admitted that the judgments of non-Russian readers are at best partial - partial in both senses of the word.

Contention

There are a number of facets of Pushkin's writings that I find wholly attractive. I wish to identify ten of them. First, it is my contention that he was able to combine the animating powers of romanticism, realism and classicism in interesting ways. It is often said - not without a certain measure of justification - that Pushkin was a romantic poet and that he was greatly indebted to Lord Byron. The Byron connection is clearly there, but it can be easily exaggerated. Apart from a strong streak of romanticism, there is also the influence of realism. In poems such as Eugene Onegin and The Bronze Horseman, one sees clearly how touches of realistic detail add immensely to the narrative. In addition, there is the vital presence of classicism in his writings; his sense of harmony, disciplined elegance, lucidity, it seems to me, grow out of his attraction to classicism.

Consequently, it can be justifiably maintained that Pushkin successfully blended romanticism, realism and classicism. The presence of classicism in Pushkin's writing is at times ignored by literary critics and hence it is important that we heed the advice of the celebrated Oxford don Sir Maurice Bowra.

'Pushkin is in fact a classical writer.....Pushkin's Russian was largely confined to the language of educated people and conformed almost inevitably to the standards of elegance which the eighteenth century had sanctified....of course, he made many inventions and greatly enriched the language of poetry, but he remains a classical poet in the finish, his neatness, his balance, his restraint.' Similarly, Turgenev spoke of Pushkin's 'classical sense of proportion and harmony.' Second, Pushkin was able to bring about a successful union between indigenous Russian traditions and European art traditions. It is often said that Pushkin is the father of modern Russian literature and that he is the originator of modern Russian literary language. I wish to argue that he was able to undertake this pioneering work by effecting a fruitful blending of native Russian and European literary traditions. When one reads works such as Eugene Onegin, Boris Godunov and The Bronze Horseman one perceives clearly this achieved amalgamation and how it works to the befit of the literary works of Pushkin. In this regard, the following observation of Edmund Wilson is apposite.

Founding father

'He is in the peculiar position of being regarded as the founding father, while his own oeuvre resembles that of a genius born into a high culture and taking his place in it, not embodying it. He seems both the original Russian writer and the representation of Eliot's concept of a cultural tradition. For his genius enabled him to marry Russia and the Russian language to the whole tradition of European and classical culture. And in this he sets a precedent; no great Russian writer who follows him is definitively national.' Third, he was able to combine harmoniously and productively, the strengths of simplicity and complexity, lightness of touch and weight of profound thinking. As one critic remarked, 'more than any other writer in the history of Russian literature (Lermontov is perhaps his only rival), Pushkin possessed that facility of genius, the ability to make most complex exercises appear easy.'

Pushkin can be faulted for many things, but thinness of texture is not one of them. However, he was able to present a density of texture through a deceptively surface simplicity.

This critic went on to say that no better illustration of this remarkable talent exists than in Eugene Onegin, in which the intricately structures 14-line stanzas flow and captivate our imagination with complete ease and naturalness. He believes that in this, as in other respects, the comparison of Pushkin's verse with Mozart's music is wholly appropriate. This intersection of simplicity and complexity is to be found in his shorter poems as well. I will explain this later.

Fourth, Pushkin played off wit and intelligence against flights of imagination in interesting ways. He had an analytical mind, probing intellect that blended harmoniously with his powerful imagination to produce poetry of the highest order. Tolstoy once observed that Pushkin possessed 'a more highly developed feeling for beauty than anyone else.' Coming from Tolstoy, this is high praise indeed! This feeling for beauty, I contend, represents a mixture of the analytical powers, sharpness of mind and the unsurpassed imagination that he was gifted with.

Creativity

This feature of Pushkin's creativity has an aristocratic feel to it. D.J,Richards was right when he said that, 'This amalgam of a classical sense of form, a light touch, a sparkling wit, and a highly developed aesthetic sense, which together with his self-confidence make Pushkin a truly aristocratic writer, also mark the poet off from the subsequent nineteenth and twentieth-century literary tradition.' He goes on to proclaim that Pushkin, who can be regarded as perhaps the last of the great European aristocratic poets, belongs to a past era in a way that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky do not.

Fourth, there in Pushkin's writings a most interesting interplay of ideas and viewpoints when it comes to the question of nation. As I stated earlier, he enjoys an iconic status as the greatest national poet of Russia. He commands such a high esteem not only because he fashioned vigorous language medium but also because he was able to capture what is generally regarded as the national spirit. The following statement by Gogol reflects this basic conviction.

'The countryside, soul, language, and characters of Russia are reflected in him with the unity and the spotless perfection with which a landscape is reflected through the convex surface of a kens....from the very first he was a national pet because the true expression of national spirit rests not in the description of peasant costume, but in the very spirit of the people.' He was able to grasp and project this spirit of the Russian people with remarkable power and candor. This explains his unchallenged recognition as the Russian national poet.

While Pushkin was deeply enamored of Russian life and its concomitant spirit, he was also attracted to the European high traditions of art and literature. From his young days, he was subject to French influences and he wrote as elegantly in French as in Russian. As Richards has accurately pointed out, despite the indubitable French influence to which he was subject from his childhood, Pushkin heard the Russian language and saw Russian life with sense of clarity and empathy that has scarcely been surpassed. In a paradoxical way, his attachment to, and his immersion in, the French tradition may have helped him to observe Russian from a more productive perspective.

Attitude

Pushkin's attitude to Russian, as indeed his attitude most things, was complex and multi-faceted. He was deeply attached to, and had affection for, the history, culture, traditions, destiny of the Russian people.

At the same time, the critically independent mind he was, he ventured was to critique certain important facets of Russian life.

Once in a letter to a friend, Pushkin made the following comment.' Of course I despise my country from head to toe, but I am irritated when the foreigner shares my view. How can you, who are free to go wherever you like, stay in Russia? If the Tsar grants me freedom, I won't stay a month. We live in miserable times, but when I imagine London, railways, steamships, English journals, or the theatres and brothels of Paris, my remote Mikhailovskoye induces in me a sense of melancholy and rage.' It is evident that his attitude to the Tsar and the state was ambivalent and fissured.

Fifth, there is a pronounced compression, a calculated conciseness, in his work that I find compellingly endearing. That impulse grows out of his classical bent of mind. Many critics have sought to draw parallels between Lord Byron and Alexander Pushkin. It is indeed true that he was inspired by Byron; however, while Byron's work is marked by a sense of diffusion and digression, Pushkin's writings, for the most part, display a preference for compression and cohesion. This is partly the reason why Pushkin is so difficult to translate. Edmund Wilson was perceptive when he said that Pushkin is difficult to translate for the same reason that Dante is difficult; this is because they say so much in so few words, so lucidly yet so concisely. He remarked that, 'it would require a translator himself a poet of the first order to reproduce Pushkin's peculiar combination of intensity, compression, and perfect ease.'

Sixth, there is a certain joy, gaiety, innocence and openness to Pushkin's work that Russian readers find extremely appealing. This is, of course, not to suggest that his writings are totally free of darker aspects of human experience. However, he was able to transcend those in his search for sunshine.

This is partly due to the fact that in his poetry as well as prose, he sought to evoke the beauties of a past age when simplicity and contentment marked human life. As one critic astutely observed, 'Russians turn to him for conformation of their hopes and for support in their sorrows, since he provides a joyful counter to both the harsh reality of Russian life and the Russian tendency to indulge in glooms speculations.' It is interesting to observe in this regard that Yuri Zhivago, the protagonist of Pasternak's novel, while avoiding the brutalities of the Russian civil war, sought to revive his faith in life by re-reading Pushkin; his innocence, openness, hopefulness were a constant source of inspiration to Zhivago.

Seventh, Alexander Pushkin had a remarkable ability to use diverse literary forms very deftly to secure his privileged ends. He displayed his unquestionable literary talents in narrative poems that blended history and romance, the historical plays, novels, folk tales in verse.

His Eugene Onegin, which he described as a novel in verse, was triumphantly successful; many others who tried their hand at this newly minted form failed in their attempts. His narrative poems, Eugene Onegin and The Bronze Horseman display simultaneously a formal fixity and an inviting openness; this interplay drives the narrative discourse in interesting ways. (I will discuss the significance of these two important narrative poems later.)

Eighth, there is in Pushkin's poetry an interplay between attachment and detachment, personality and impersonality, particularity and universality, literality and figurality, innovativeness and conventionality that serves to lend vigor to the poetic texture.

For example when we examine his poetic language, Russian critics tell us that he was at once deeply attached to his chosen words - there was total identity with them - while distancing himself from them and achieving a critical detachment. Only the poets with extraordinary poetic talent and self-confidence can undertake this task effectively.

To be continued