Yury Tynyanov, Young Pushkin: A Novel
(translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush (New York: Overlook/Rookery) 2008, 515 pp.
[the Russian original: Юрий Тынянов, Пушкин (М: Издательство «Правда»), 1981]
Introduction
This is a historical novel, treating the life of Russia’s greatest poet from the year of his birth, 1799, to shortly after he graduated from the Lycée school in Tsarskoe Selo in 1817. Tynyanov’s original plan was to cover all of Aleksandr Pushkin’s life, until his death in a duel in 1837, but the author’s health failed. Beginning in 1935, the novel was serialized, but by 1943 Tynyanov was terminally ill with multiple sclerosis; at the end of that year he died at the age of forty-nine, leaving Part One (“Childhood”) and Part Two (“The Lycée”) completed to his exacting standards. What is Part Three as published here (“Youth”) is clearly in rough draft form, lacking the literary polish of the first two parts (more on this later). Even worse, what would be, say, Parts Four and Five—in which we would meet the mature poet, plus his mature literary works—remained a chimera.
As the translators tell us in their introduction, Yury Tynyanov graduated from Petrograd University in 1918, specializing in history and literature. He “proceeded to pursue a stellar career as a prolific literary historian and a highly respected and popular lecturer. Tynyanov was professor of literature at the Petrograd Institute of History of the Arts. By the mid 1920s, alongside Roman Jacobson, Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum, he had become a leading figure of Russian Formalism, the most important of the non-Marxist literary groups that flourished after the Revolution.” In addition to his literary criticism and his novel on Pushkin, Tynyanov is known for two other historical novels, one on the writer and diplomat Aleksandr Griboyedov, and another on Pushkin’s friend and classmate at the Lycée, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, the poet and Decembrist.
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History is full of characters, and Yury Tynyanov wants to give each of them his or her due in the story. This makes for a book that overwhelms the reader with the sheer numbers of people who populate its pages. The translators are to be commended for prefatory materials and end notes that greatly simplify the reader’s task. Some of these notes are translations of the copious end notes in the Russian original. At the beginning the translators provide us: (1) a list of characters, including the Pushkin family and household, the Lycée staff and students, and other persons featured in the book; (2) genealogical family trees of the Pushkins and Hannibals.
The Parents: Sergey Lvovich Pushkin (1767-1848), Nadezhda Osipovna Pushkina (1775-1836)
Often given short shrift in biographies of our poet, his parents are treated in broad terms throughout Tynyanov’s book. Neither is portrayed as a particularly positive character. Nadezhda Osipovna finds early renown as “the beautiful Creole,” grand daughter of the famous general from Africa, Abram Petrovich Hannibal, “the Negro of Peter the Great.” Except for her beauty as a young woman, nothing is distinctive about her. In her appearances throughout the narrative she is shown, largely, abusing her husband or the servants, complaining of one thing or another, and showing little or no love for her first-born son, our poet, Aleksandr. Sergey Lvovich is presented much more expansively.
The action begins in 1799, a month after Aleksandr Pushkin’s birth. Scion of an ancient line of the Russian nobility, Sergey Lvovich, who outlived his famous son by eleven years, is the first character to show up in the book. Along with his brother Vasily, he has served as an officer in the army, which service was a tradition for the Russian gentry. Both Vasily and S.L. have retired “because the Guards lifestyle was quite beyond their means.” S.L. now works as “a clerk at the War Commissariat.” He calls himself “the Major,” although in so doing he apparently is engaged in an act of self-promotion. Something similar occurs with the “hero” of Gogol’s story, “The Nose.”
S.L., it seems, earns little money, but he also works very little. Much later, 250 pages into the book, he is described as “Commissioner of the 7th Class in the Moscow Quartermaster Service,” where he earns “next to nothing.” Tynyanov never describes in any detail what S.L.’s duties consist of. He appears to be holding down one sinecure or another for the whole duration of the novel. This idea of doing a low-paying job and not working much continues what seems a long Russian tradition. Much later, in Soviet times, when the idle gentry as a class no longer existed, people often went by the principle, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”
When I worked as a volunteer for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in the early nineties—shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union—I visited a large number of their offices in Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia. I noticed what was, and probably still is, a dominant trend. The big boss in the office did, essentially, all the work. His assistants and sycophants put in time at the office but did little of substance.
After the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, S.L.—who has lost all his Moscow property in the fires—gets a new job in Warsaw. Once again, we have no idea what sort of work this is, and soon S.L. and Nadezhda Osipovna return to St. Petersburg, where “S.L. did not like to talk about Warsaw.”
Like many of the gentry class at the beginning of the nineteenth century, S.L and his brother Vasily are, essentially, idlers. In her one short appearance in the book that’s what their old mother calls them: idlers. Noblemen were expected to serve the country, either as military officers or in civil service posts. The brothers have done a bit of this, but only as young men. Of course, many of the gentry were landowners and derived their income from landed estates worked by serfs, who were in essence slave laborers. S.L., as well as his wife, are the proprietors of certain much-depleted estates, which garner little profit. When Nadezhda Osipovna’s father dies and leaves her his Mikhailovskoe estate, she expects a thriving manor with lots of ancillary hamlets and lots of serfs, but the hamlets have dried up and the serfs are almost as ephemeral as those of Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls.
The situation with impoverished noble families and heavily mortgaged estates was to come to a head near the end of the century—see, e.g., Anton Chekhov’s play, The Cherry Orchard—but Aleksandr’s parents, S.L. and N.O., are early exemplars of that predicament.
Here’s a quotation that illustrates how casual was the attitude of landowners of the time toward the slaves they possessed: [S.L. and N.O.] “were thinking of selling the serf girl Grushka, who had become lazy and in general was not needed in the house.” Among the many questions that arise in the mind of a reader about Russian realities of the early nineteenth century: exactly how were such sales arranged and did the sellers reap much profit from them?
On the other hand, some house servants, even though owned as property, were essential members of the household. Such is Arina, Aleksandr Pushkin’s beloved nanny, to whom he dedicated poems later in his life. Tynyanov would have us believe that Pushkin viewed Arina as more of a mother to him than his own mother. This veneration of the “serf mammy” earth mother type recalls similar mythologizing of Negro slave mammies in the Old South of the U.S.
Writers of historical novels sometimes need a good imagination, by way of filling in scenes with significant detail. A good example is Tynyanov’s imagining N.O. as newly having taken possession of Mikhailovskoe after her father’s death:
“Mikhailovskoe was boring and eerie in the evenings. The rooms were bare; everywhere there still lingered the faint reek of stale tobacco and wine, and of the old owner of the house—her father whom she had not known and had been frightened of and with whom it was over now for ever. She would wake up in the middle of the night, the rain drumming against the windows, something rustling in the thatched roof as if somebody was tripping over, and then there would be the sudden screech of birds and the howl of a mighty wind, as if some giant bellows were being blown above her. When she lit the candle the windows would be weeping. By dawn the night birds had flown away, and she would shudder to think how close they had been.”
Incidentally. Another thing a historical novelist can do: he can throw in broad hints about the political and social scene of his own time. As any reader of Nadezhda’s Mandelstam’s memoir, Hope Against Hope, will recognize, the scene describing the arrival of an unexpected carriage during the party at the beginning of the book—the visitor turns out to be Pyotr Abramovich Hannibal, N.O.’s uncle—has an eerie resemblance to similar scenes in the Soviet Union of Tynyanov’s time, the thirties of the twentieth century:
“At that moment they heard the rattling of a heavy carriage, bells tinkled, and it stopped directly in front of the gate.
“Sergey Lvovich turned noticeably pale.
“At night time the sound of an approaching carriage [read “motor vehicle” or “elevator” for the Soviet scene, URB], even for those innocently drinking tea, was an unpleasant one. This was how special messengers [read KGB agents making arrests] arrived.”
In 1799, when we first meet him, S.L. has been married to N.O. for two and a half years. He is only thirty-two (Tynyanov tells us on p. 8 that he is twenty-nine, but the figures don’t add up). Still a young man, he is described as already burned out, “a star that had lost its lustre.” Behind him are his best days, those of his military service, when he was “a refined young man and a bel esprit.” He speaks French better than Russian—this was a common thing among the Russian gentry of the 18th and 19th centuries—has read all the latest French romantic novels and also has an interest in Russian literature. Like his brother Vasily, who establishes a reputation as a writer of light verse, S.L. himself dabbles in writing poetry.
The Family History
Most families have scapegraces, baaing black sheep who lurk in the genealogy, but the family of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin seems to have had more than its share. On his mother’s side there is the exotic, if faintly reprehensible thing of the black African ancestor, Pushkin’s great grandfather Abram Hannibal, bought by Peter the Great and made into a gentleman of sorts. Abram’s two sons, Nadezhda Osipovna’s father and uncle, make occasional appearances in the novel.
The tone is set right at the beginning, when a half-drunk Pyotr Abramovich Hannibal (the uncle) crashes the party held by S.L. and N.O. in honor of their newly born son. Pyotr Abramovich and Osip Abramovich (the father) have both served as officers in the artillery. They share a fondness for drink and a predilection for perpetually chaotic lives. Osip Abramovich has disowned his wife and daughter (N.O.) and entered into a bigamist relationship. He is embroiled in an endless lawsuit with the second wife, who shows up at his deathbed and tries (unsuccessfully) to get him to deed Mikhailovskoe to her. The pandemonium of his lifestyle can only end with his death.
Despite its ancient noble lineage, the Pushkin side of the family line has a plethora of equally unpalatable characters. Lev Aleksandrovich Pushkin, S.L.’s father “had been a hot-blooded and ruthless man who had caused the death of his first wife. Growing jealous of the Italian tutor in service with them, he had imprisoned his wife in the cellar, and she had died there in chains on the straw.” At the age of forty, immediately after Tsar Peter III’s murder (1762), he had retired from the service, refusing to recognize the new Tsarina, Catherine the Great. Incarcerated for two years, “after his release he had squandered his fortune in bouts of rage and rancour . . . He liked fast horses, and in the course of his life had ridden whole stables of expensive mounts to death.” Late in his life he went mad.
If that weren’t enough, Aleksandr Pushkin’s paternal grandfather, Aleksandr Petrovich—after whom he was named—had stabbed his pregnant wife to death in a jealous frenzy, “and spent the rest of his life on trial.”
Pushkin’s Uncle, Vasily Lvovich Pushkin (1760-1830)
Vasily Lvovich, the first poet in the Pushkin family, furnishes scenes of comic relief throughout the book. True to the family tradition of muddling up a personal life, he takes up with his wife’s serf girl, Anna. Whereupon his wife leaves him and, eventually, turns for succor to the offices of the Russian Orthodox Church. “Circe [wife’s nickname] was proclaimed innocent and Vasily Lvovich a sinner, which of course he was. The Synod resolved to give his wife a divorce and allow her to marry again. As for the other spouse, he was to be given a seven-year penance, six months of which were to be spent in a monastery, and the rest of the period under the supervision of a spiritual director . . . His cousin Aleksey, however, immediately made fun of the situation . . . claiming that on the first day of the penance V.L. gorged himself on sturgeon.”
This institution of the church penance (epitimie), which returned to Russian life (with the return of God) after the fall of the Soviet Union, is one of the many fascinating things in Tynyanov’s book that we wish we knew more about. As for V.L., he makes light of the penance, and, apparently, never fulfills the requirement to spend time in a monastery. The Pushkin brothers both have a reputation for weathering adversity with alacrity.
The relative and namesake Pushkin, Aleksey Mikhailovich, furnishes humorous counterpoint to V.L. His family background and moral character make our protagonist Pushkins look almost respectable. “Both his father and uncle had been found guilty of forgery and deported to Siberia, and it was later decreed that they should be called ‘the former Pushkins.’” At various points in the book, this son of a former Pushkin becomes almost like a double of V.L., accompanying him everywhere and constantly making him a butt of his jokes. “Meeting V.L. at the theatre and in society, he made a point of tormenting him with insinuations and witticisms, together with an exaggerated demonstration of his friendship and affection.”
After the debacle of his wife’s divorce proceedings and his penance, V.L. redeems himself in social circles by planning a trip to Paris. His trip becomes the talk of the town, “suddenly he became dignified as never before, as if he were strolling not on the Kuznetsky Bridge, but along the Champs-Elysées.” Errors in translation are few, but here the translators seem to assume that there is a bridge involved; there is, rather, a well-known Moscow street named Kuznetsky Bridge. I have not found much else to quibble about with the excellent translation. In the prefatory notes on characters the translators do seem to mix up two of the notorious Orlov brothers. It was Grigory, not Aleksey, who was the lover of Catherine the Great. Both brothers were probably involved in the intrigue that brought down Peter III and swept his wife Catherine to power—but Aleksey was the one directly involved in his murder.
Back to V.L. After he returns from his trip to Paris he goes on blithefully cohabiting with Anna and writing poetry; eventually she bears him two children. He is much sought after in high society, but his cousin, the former Pushkin, spreads a rumor that “V.L. had been expelled from Paris for dissolute behavior—and that while there he had bought a poetry-producing machine that contained a large number of separate lines. Just grasp the handle, give it a turn—and there was a madrigal.”
Later on, in 1812, comes the war. Napoleon invades Russia and takes Moscow, which the Russians burn down around him. Both V.L. and S.L., along with their families, flee the capital city and end up refugees in Nizhny Novgorod, on the Volga River. Throughout the war Aleksandr remains a student in the Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, which is not taken by the French. Although they are left destitute after the great fires, the Pushkin brothers manage to live not badly on the Volga. Having lost nearly everything, V.L. regrets most not the loss of his library, but that of his carriage and dressing gown. He soon becomes a hit in provincial society and goes on enjoying life. His nemesis, the former Pushkin, shows up as well in Nizhny, goes on gambling and carousing, living the same dissipated life as ever and mocking V.L. at every turn.
The perennial question of the book: since the Pushkin brothers never seem to work—nor do they derive much income from landed estates—what in the world do they live on when facing straitened circumstances, such as the removal to Nizhny Novgorod? Could they have turned again for help to their old friend Karamzin, who, we are told in the early pages, has landed estates near Nizhny Novgorod and calls the Pushkins his “Nizhny Novgorod friends”? We don’t know, but we wonder.
Once in a while Tynyanov steps into an ancillary character and gives us his viewpoint on V.L. For example, the headmaster at the Lycée, Malinovsky, sees V.L. as “a feather-brained, peacock-feathered fellow in a frock-coat.” Read the novel as a whole and that description seems accurate. You get a picture of both V.L and his brother S.L. as frivolous types, hardly worthy of being the antecedents of the greatest Russian poet who ever lived.
The Russian Literary Scene
Through his treatment of the poet V.L., Tynyanov presents a broad portrayal of the Russian literary scene in the early nineteenth century. Always a Francophile/liberal whose poetry is not only racy, but also sometimes almost obscene, unpublishable, V.L. continually skips around, embracing the latest literary trends. At one point he gravitates toward the “Archivists,” also called the “Göttingenians” (since they were educated at Göttingen University in Germany). They work in the foreign affairs archives, many of them become diplomats, and they are known to be misogynists. In Part Two a good many of the instructors at the famous Lycée that Aleksandr Pushkin attends will also be graduates of Göttingen University.
The hidebound conservatives in literary matters—V.L.’s sworn enemies—are concerned with preserving ancient traditions in the use of the Russian language. They are led by Admiral A.S. Shishkov (1754-1841), founder of the Symposium of Amateurs [Lovers] of the Russian Word, president of the Russian Academy and for a time Minister of Education. Toward the end of the action in the Tynyanov novel, in 1815, the Arzamas Society of Unknown Literati is founded. Led by the renowned Karamzin, its members include big names in the history of Russian literature: Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Vyazemsky and Vasily Pushkin. Their writings parody the bureaucratic solemnity of the Symposium authors and they have a lot of raucous, irreverent fun. In the final year of his Lycée studies, the young Pushkin is accepted into Arzamas and given the honorary name of Cricket. Much is made of the literary wars, which went on perpetually in the two capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow.
One of the most important figures in Russian historical and literary circles was Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826), whose Letters of a Russian Traveler stands out as a significant work of late eighteenth century Russian literature. Karamzin makes an early appearance in the novel, attending the party thrown by S.L and N.O. in honor of their newborn son. Even then he is already described as “aging” (thirty-four years old). Later on he makes repeated appearances in the book, and is broadly featured in Part Three, when he and his wife are in residence in Tsarskoe Selo, near where young Pushkin is a student. At this point he is preparing for publication his famous many-volumed History of the Russian State (1818-1824).
Of course, a major issue in a biographical novel titled The Young Pushkin is how does the writer himself evolve amidst the literary scene of his time? We now know that Pushkin became a major innovator, responsible almost single-handedly for the rejuvenation of the Russian literary language of his time. Unfortunately, Tynyanov did not live to write about Pushkin as a mature literary force. Here, in Part One, he undertakes what is a difficult task: imagining scenes that describe early intimations of poetry in the mind of Sasha as a child, before the days of the Lycée. Was this the way it really was? Maybe.
“Very often Aleksandr wandered about the rooms oblivious of sounds and people, biting his nails and gazing at everything and everyone around him, Monsieur Roussleau [his tutor], Arina [his beloved nanny], his parents, household objects, with a withdrawn and blank expression. Certain sounds, fragments of shadowy and unreal poems from somewhere, tormented him; he scribbled them down unthinkingly, unaltered, just as they came to him. They were in French, mechanical and meagre, the rhymes coming to him before the lines themselves. He repeated them in his mind, sometimes forgetting a word or two and substituting others; going to sleep at night he voluptuously remembered the half-forgotten rhymes. These verses were not entirely his and not entirely anyone else’s.”
Yes, Russia’s greatest poet of the Russian language began by writing poems in French, which he knew better than Russian. So did most people of the Russian gentry class in his time. Sergey Lvovich, his father—who is presented in this book as far from bright—does, nonetheless, read and declaim Molière in the original. Such was the tenor of the times. You wonder if the rhymes really came to Pushkin before the lines themselves. You suspect that they did, and that the same thing pertained for the man some consider the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, Osip Mandelstam. And if this is so, what does it say about the modern practice of translating Pushkin and Mandelstam into English without rhymes?
Vasily Lvovich is a minor, shadowy figure in the history of Russian poetry, now remembered primarily as Aleksandr Pushkin’s uncle. But the very fact of his being a poet—and a member of the Arzamas Society—played a significant role in the development of the young Pushkin. As for Sergey Lvovich, his library contained French works that proved influential influences on our poet, and young Pushkin soon found the key to highly provocative, even pornographic pamphlets locked away in S.L.’s desk. Beginning at age ten he read books not appropriate for one of that age: Piron, Dorat and the Russian pornographer Barkov. In his father’s library “he read quickly, sporadically, indiscriminately. He was amused when he first saw Voltaire’s portrait; the old man’s head was like a monkey’s and he had big, curved protruding lips and wore a white night-cap. He was a philosopher, a poet and a mischief-maker. He had ridiculed King Frederick and played tricks throughout his life.” That, in fact, is a pretty good description of what Pushkin became: a philosopher, poet and mischief-maker. Voltaire became something of a godfather to the greatest Russian poet of all time.
Want to become a literary critic, specializing in the works of Aleksandr Pushkin? Well, first of all, of course, you’ll need to study the Russian language and Russian culture intensively for many years. But you also need French, and you must have extensive knowledge of French literature of the eighteenth century, for that was what Pushkin weaned himself on. This book by Tynyanov makes one realize how much French history you also need to know, in order to be thoroughly familiar with Pushkin and his times. Take a look at the notes and lists of characters. There are scads of names, literary movements and political trends that you’ll need to study extensively. Know anything about the French Revolution, the Jacobins in France? The word was used widely in Russia, apparently to deride anyone with even vaguely left-wing politics or revolutionary notions. Then there’s Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church, one more language to study. And what about all the fashions, literary and otherwise, adopted from Germany, including the Romantic love of melancholy and the cult of suicide? And much more.
M.M. Speransky (1772-1839) and Tsar Aleksandr I (reigned 1801-1825)
Great reformist minister of state—like a Secretary of State—under Tsar Aleksandr I and the driving force toward establishment of the Lycée school in Tsarskoe Selo, Speransky had a large direct and indirect influence on the fortunes and development of Aleksandr Pushkin. He leaned on the gentry class, the Russian nobility, taxing them heavily and insisting that they prove themselves qualified to hold bureaucratic positions. No more loafers and idlers tolerated in government service. The gentry squires despised him and condescended to him as the son of a priest. For a time Karamzin was one of Speransky’s enemies and ally of the nobles, who persistently petitioned the tsar for relief from his minister’s reforms.
Part Two, “The Lycée,” begins with a long scene filling in the backstory of Mikhail Speransky’s life and describing his relations with the tsar. The Emperor Aleksandr I came to power under quite dubious circumstances in 1801, when his father, Tsar Paul was murdered. Although Aleksandr was not directly involved in the conspiracy, it appears that he knew what was about to happen and did nothing to stop it. This tainted his whole rule with the implication of parricide, and his psyche with guilt. As Tynyanov describes things here, the dowager empress and widow of Paul never forgave her first-born son. She took her two younger sons, the Grand Dukes, under her wing and protected them fiercely, grooming them for the throne.
In Tynyanov’s portrayal, Aleksandr is a weak, indecisive ruler, not really fit to be Tsar of All the Russias. He relishes having someone as active and intelligent as Speransky to run the country for him. At age forty Speransky, “with the sole exception of military affairs, shouldered the responsibility for the entire state. His power was enormous and its boundaries were blurred. He had numerous enemies: the nobility damned him, his subordinates cursed and feared him.” Beginning in 1808, Speransky worked out a plan for reforming the state legislative and administrative system through introduction of an elected State Duma and representative assemblies in local government.
Scenes depicting Aleksandr as Emperor show him as consistently inept and duplicitous. Tynyanov describes how he relies on Speransky for support but abandons him, dismissing him when he thinks the time is ripe. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, Aleksandr is the darling of world politics for a short time, but he never lives up to the promise bestowed upon him. Those in Russia who have liberal aspirations for the country after its great victory soon are disillusioned. After Speransky is gone Aleksandr transfers nearly all power into the hands of the reactionary martinet Arakcheyev. The Tsar spends his time pampering his body and ego, indulging himself in philandering. His only real interest seems to be in military drill, a propensity he inherited from his father, the ill-tempered Paul.
Plenty of other Romanov tsars had the same limited educations and interests, spending most of their time marching soldiers around. These include Paul’s purported father Peter III (another murdered sovereign) and Paul’s other sons. One of these sons was Aleksandr’s brother Nicholas, depicted at age fourteen in one of Tynyanov’s scenes as a rude and surly young man. After Aleksandr died he took over power in 1825 and ruled with an iron fist for thirty years. Here is the reformer Speransky, meeting with friends and making big plans:
“‘We haven’t enough honest, loyal people, just a handful, that’s all,’ Speransky said to Samborsky. ‘The older ones are wallowing in corruption; the young—those who are honest—keep quiet. In the beginning was the Word, but our civil servants still can’t put two words together!’
“It was his favourite topic and complaint. A structure was needed to embrace, comprehend and bring Russia to order. The laws should be impeccably drawn and strictly implemented. The generals who had extended the Empire had not only been unable to create the balance that was the focus of government, but even opposed the concept of order, because they did not understand it. The country needed efficient civil servants from the humblest level. He needed people who would share his views and assist him.”
More of Speransky’s thoughts: “Russian agriculture is inefficient, much land is wasted. The root of the problem lies in the higher classes’ possession of the land. Those who work on the land should own it. Slavery corrupts and devastates. It is an insult to the Russian people that they are considered unable to draw up their own laws.”
The theme of Russia’s destiny runs throughout the book. Surely, thinks the great reformer who periodically pops up in Russian history, there must be a way to overcome Russian inertia, stagnation, and the perpetual corruption and cronyism that runs the country. But then the reformer goes the way of all flesh and nothing, essentially, has changed. Late in the novel the philosopher and military officer Pyotr Chaadayev (1794-1856) makes an appearance as a friend of the young Pushkin. Like so many idealistic young people after the defeat of Napoleon, he has big hopes for Russia.
“Slavery was his idée fixe; in his opinion, slavery was the reason why Russia could never be the most powerful country in Europe, and it was autocracy that stood in the way of the abolition of slavery. There were degrees of slavery, the difference being purely quantitative. But as soon as slavery in all its forms—serfdom and so on—was abolished, Russia would become a great country. He maintained this with absolute conviction, as if it were soon to come about.”
As the novel ends, the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 is on the horizon. Idealistic young military officers, intent on abolishing serfdom and liberalizing the country, make an attempt to prevent the ascension of Nicholas I, and, of course, they fail. The revolutionary spirit throbbed on through the whole nineteenth century and into the twentieth, culminating in the bloodbath of 1917, the Civil War and the founding of the Soviet Union. But people change slowly in their basic mentality. Human venality often trumps everything. Serfdom was abolished but slave mentalities remained. The corruption, the cronyism. Sad fact but true: many of the Russian social problems that Speransky was hoping to solve remain unsolved to this very day. Read Gogol’s Dead Souls. First published in 1842, this great comic novel remains fully relevant to the social and political scene in the Russia of 2023.
The Lycée
Tynyanov devotes all of Part Two of his novel to the school founded at the instigation of Speransky, the school where the great Pushkin was educated. Plans for this school describe it as a special Lycée, “which would bear the name of the Ancient Greek Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle had walked and talked with his students.”
Speransky has the idea of founding an institution totally egalitarian in scope, “A special lycée for all classes.” This dream remains unrealized. Getting admission to the school works, so it turns out, the same old Russian way: you have to know someone of influence who will sponsor you. Nearly all of young Pushkin’s fellow students in the first class are of the nobility. In also typically Russian fashion, no one ever decides exactly what the Lycée is to be as an educational institution, and for what future profession it will prepare its pupils. As the first class, including Pushkin, is about to graduate, “they all began to think about the future awaiting them. Officers were prepared at military schools, scholars at universities; the purpose of the Lycée was unclear. They had never thought about it before. None of them counted on their fathers’ estates.”
The original impetus for the founding of the school was tied in with the potential education of the Grand Dukes.
“The upbringing of the Grand Dukes, one of whom would surely succeed to the throne [as Tsar Aleksandr has no children, URB], was a new and extremely important matter. During their last meeting, as if in passing, the Emperor [Aleksandr] had personally charged him [Speransky] with the task, and had done so in his characteristic manner: as if it were not a mission binding him but merely an optional detail.”
The grandiose hopes in the mind of Speransky, and in the minds of many of the instructors at the school—educated, largely, in the West, especially at Göttingen—envisage the enlightenment of the Russian people and reformation of their morals. In a conversation with Malinovsky, who is soon to be appointed headmaster at the school, Speransky recalls his, Malinovsky’s “ambitious plans: creating public spirit, education without flattery and servility; in short, bringing up a generation of true worth.”
“‘Whom, exactly, are we going to educate, and to what end?’
“‘We shall educate the legislators. Sooner or later this will have to be done to raise the Russian people, to demonstrate their intellect to the world and to make them believe in themselves. According to the Lycée’s founding statute, the young men are to be prepared for important state posts. I believe that soon the most important post will be a deputy in an elected chamber.’”
When the school—officially called the Imperial Aleksandr Lyceum—was opened on October 19, 1811, it soon became clear that the Grand Dukes would not be attending after all. Their mother, Tsar Paul’s widow, refused to allow them out of her hands. Consequently, none of the non-militaristic, egalitarian instincts that Speransky hoped to instill in them were ever instilled. When he became tsar in 1825, Nicholas I continued the hardfisted, military tradition, running the country much the same as Tsar Aleksandr’s most trusted advisor, the martinet Arakcheyev.
Then again, would the Grand Dukes have been educated out of their own reactionary principles even if they had attended the Lycée? Doubtful, given their character faults and the fact that their formative years were already behind them at the time the school was founded. Looking back on the accomplishments of the Lycée today, from a vantage point of two and a half centuries, we can see that some of Speransky’s hopes for its students were realized. A cursory look at notes on each of its early graduates—see the prefatory materials in the translation—reveals that many, if not most of them went into government service, assuming bureaucratic positions, becoming military officers or diplomats. None, however, developed into the sort of grand reformer—like Speransky—who seems to poke his nose into Russian history only once in a blue moon.
As for the grandiose idea of using education to overcome, finally, a thousand years of Russian stagnancy, the founding of the Lycée did little to realize such plans. Tynyanov reveals that in the early nineteenth century education in Russia—mostly of children of the nobility—was in the hands of foreigners, such as the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits ran schools in the Russian capital cities, and at one point Sergey Lvovich considers enrolling his son in a Jesuit school. One marvels how the Jesuits got such a foothold in Orthodox Russia. “In the boarding schools of St. Petersburg Jesuits taught Latin prayers and French religious philosophy to the young [Russian] princes.”
Also surprising is how many educated Russians of the time—Speransky is one—came out of the class of the Russian clergy, educated in seminaries. Many of these seminarians received a higher education abroad. All Göttingenians, we are told, are “of the clergy,” a point of confusion in the translation (p. 241), since it suggests that Russian Orthodox priests were going abroad to study in a German university. A check of the original text reveals that a better translation might be, “grandsons of clergymen.”
Furthermore, to overcome the lethargy of the gentry class and to instill new progressive ideas into those who were to take up important positions in the government bureaucracy, it would take the founding not only of one lycée, but also of countless lycées all over Russia. Then again, at the time the novel is set probably 90% of Russians were peasants, totally uneducated and illiterate. At some point countless new schools would be required to educate the masses. When the Revolution came in 1917, this situation still prevailed. In the new Soviet Union millions of the peasant masses moved from countryside to cities, and general illiteracy was eventually overcome. A wonderful accomplishment, but even with this, even in the heyday of the U.S.S.R. the populace was not exactly enlightened. Peasant mentalities die hard, and Russian minds and mores were still mired in superstition and magic thinking throughout the era of Communism. To what extent such thinking has been overcome even today is a matter of conjecture.
Kunitsyn’s Journal, Martin Piletsky
In presenting his historical materials, Tynyanov applies a number of different literary approaches. In Part Two, Ch. 3, he includes entries from the journal of Aleksandr Kunitsyn (1783-1841), teacher of moral philosophy and law at the Lycée. In annotations we are told that Kunitsyn was dismissed from the school for free thinking in 1821, several years after Pushkin had graduated. In his lectures he was accused of advocating “the abrogation of all human connections, both familial and state” [citation from note in the Russian text].
One of the most progressive of the Lycée instructors, Kunitsyn feels as if he had left enlightened Göttingen only yesterday. Early in his journal notes he speaks of the comet, which, in many Russian minds, presages imminent war with France. He tells of his meetings with other instructors at the school, introducing to us some of the most interesting. There is, e.g., the teacher of German, Gauenschield, “a gloomy-looking Austrian who can hardly speak Russian.” He later proves to be an Austrian spy. There is the French instructor, David de Boudri, one of many impoverished French grandees driven out of their home country by the revolution. He is an honorable man and good teacher, who conceals his original name and connection to his infamous brother, Marat.
Kunitsyn also introduces us to several of the Lycée pupils and adds other vital details. He speaks of the headmaster Malinovsky, who is much under the influence of Speransky. Then, as if a bolt from the blue, comes Speransky’s sudden deposition from power and arrest, which occurred on March 17, 1812. “The reason for Speransky’s fall isn’t clear. Razumovsky [Minister of Education] maintains that the Minister is a Jacobin who aspires to ascend the throne, not noticing a striking contradiction here—he’s either a Jacobin or a monarchist. Many people call Speransky a republican . . . His fall is celebrated like the first victory over the French, and like the death of the cruelest tyrant. But there’s great despondency too.”
The despondency is shared by progressives at the Lycée such as Malinovsky and Kunitsyn, disciples of Speransky who have high hopes that his liberal reforms may some day come to fruition through the offices of young men whom they educate at the new school.
Kunitsyn also speaks of the pupil Pushkin, who “is bright but shy; stubborn, mercurial, frenetically short-tempered yet full of fun.” Later they have a conversation, in which Pushkin asks for a book by Gresset to be sent to him. [Jean-Louis-Baptiste Gresset (1709-1777), French poet and dramatist, known for his humor and irreverent wit, URB]
“‘How did you come to know Gresset?’
“‘I read him in my uncle’s and my father’s libraries.’
“‘And what did you enjoy most of all?’
“‘The Lectern.’
“But the poem is indecent! It must have been his uncle who gave it to him to read. They’ve kept nothing from him, he’s been treated like an equal. He is a complex and witty character, he knows Voltaire, Gresset, Piron and, it seems, all the French satirists.”
Kunitsyn’s journal also introduces one of the most interesting of figures at the Lycée, Martin Piletsky, inspector, spy, and keeper of the boys’ morals. A man of hideous religious obscurantism, Piletsky, oddly enough, has also been educated at enlightened Göttingen. He shares with liberal instructors at the school the idea that Lycée pupils should be sequestered during the time of their studies; attachments to their families and the outside world should be severed, and each should begin his education as a tabula rasa. But progressives like Kunitsyn aim to rid the boys of deleterious influences from their conservative families, whereas Piletsky believes that they should have no attachments, “except to God.”
Martin Piletsky views young Pushkin as spoiled beyond hope by his family background. A “hereditary culprit from a family of scoffers,” one who has read all the licentious and “dangerous” French writers before even arriving at the Lycée, Pushkin is the rotten apple in the barrel; he must be expelled from the school, thinks Piletsky, so as to forestall the spread of his rot to the other boys. For those who champion religious conservatism laughter is always a dangerous enemy, and Pushkin is the number one laugher at the Lycée.
Much of Part Two of the novel describes the struggle of the laugher against the worshipper, ending, finally, when Piletsky goes too far in his oppression of the boys and is forced out. This struggle, of the free-thinking scoffers against the tight-sphinctered true believers, is a constant in Russian history, and continues to this very day. If you’re a Russian living in 2023 try openly mocking Tsar Putin’s righteous war—“special military operation”—in Ukraine, and you’ll quickly pay the price for your apostasy.
In writing about young Pushkin’s years at the Lycée, Tynyanov faces a formidable task. He must mention the most important instructors and students—there are more than just a few—and say enough about each to make him at least something of a rounded character in the novel. Tynyanov, of course, fails frequently in the face of this near-impossible task, but it is remarkable how often he succeeds.
Among the staff at the school we have well-rounded portrayals of Kunitsyn, Boudri (Marat), Gauenschield, Piletsky, and the headmaster Malinovsky. As for the pupils, in addition to Pushkin, those who are portrayed in depth include Pushkin’s friend Danzas (who was to be his second in the duel that ended his life in 1837), other close friends Delvig and Puschchin, Illichevsky (main rival to Pushkin as Lycée poet), Gorchakov (the most brilliant of the students, later to become Foreign Minister of Russia), Korff (antagonist of Pushkin, portrayed consistently in a negative light), and Küchelbecker (poet-Decembrist, who spent most of his life imprisoned or exiled—Tynyanov wrote a separate historical novel just on him).
Part Three: “Youth”
Considering that Part Two treats the years that young Pushkin attended the Lycée, it would be natural to begin a new part only after he graduates and leaves Tsarskoe Selo, but Part Three, at the beginning, describes further developments at the Lycée. Several members of the Arzamas Society, including his uncle Vasily Lvovich, come to visit young Aleksandr; they initiate him into their club with the honorary name of “Cricket.” He is only seventeen but has been writing poetry seriously throughout his student years, and is already proficient as a poet.
Nikolay Karamzin, who hovers in the background for most of the novel, figures prominently in Part Three. He has moved to Tsarskoe Selo with his second wife, Ekaterina Andreyevna, where he prepares his monumental work on Russian history for publication. He must first gain permission from Tsar Aleksandr to publish the work, but the tsar is in no hurry to grant that permission. The situation is complicated when Ekaterina Andreyevna becomes the object of the Emperor’s amorous attention. As throughout the novel, the Emperor is portrayed here as frivolous and indolent, wasting his energies on love affairs while allowing reactionary Arakcheyev to run the country.
Much of the narrative is devoted to the awakening of romantic impulses in young Pushkin. He carries on an affair with a young widow, driving the new headmaster to distraction, but, simultaneously, falls in love with Karamzin’s wife, E.A., thereby becoming, in a roundabout way, a rival of the Emperor himself.
In this, the final section of the novel, Karamzin’s wife E.A. becomes a central character. The illegitimate daughter of Prince Vyazemsky, she, at age 36, is fourteen years younger than her husband, who is 50, already approaching old age in terms of the early nineteenth century. Tynyanov’s descriptions of young Pushkin’s love affairs often verge on melodrama. At times the facts may be somewhat muddled. In one scene Pushkin recites his poem, “Desire,” to Karamzin, leaving the implication that he had brought it to recite to E.A. Yet the dedication of the poem is to the sister of one of his fellow students, Bakunin. Still in his teens, Pushkin, like his fellow Lycée students, in in thrall to the Romantic ideal. In fact, his short life is rife with romantic attachments and affairs.
Here’s how that early effort, dated 1816, reads, in my translation/adaptation:
Desire
My days drag slowly on, with tedium suffused,
Each instant in my sad heart multiplies
The agonies of love unloved, refused,
While rays of madness my dreams mesmerize.
I hold my tongue, my plaint remains unheard,
Pure tears I shed, those tears with solace glitter;
Steeped in despair, my soul can speak no word,
But finds in tears a pleasure bleak and bitter.
Let days fly on, conjoined with clouds above,
Let time, that apparition, fade in murk;
Most dear to me is love unhinged, berserk,
If die I must then let me die in love!
The melodrama: (1) “The young widow had a tender name, Marie. She gave herself unreservedly, trembling with fear and desire.” (2) “Every poem he wrote now was written in the secret hope that it would somehow get into her hands [E.A.’s]. Otherwise he would not be able to write or rewrite a single line. He had finally understood that he couldn’t live a single day without this woman who was old enough to be his mother, that he must see her no matter what, and that the torment he had written about in his poems to Bakunina had been a mere surmise of the real torture that he was experiencing now and that was only just beginning.”
There is much more of this: “Not a word even to himself, he had to bury his passion and his transport deep inside himself . . . he shuddered at the thought that his fate was sealed forever. He didn’t dare visit the Karamzins; it was an open wound . . . the secrecy in this love was agonizing—and it was never-ending, irrevocable, never letting him free even for a moment.” And so on and so on: way too much. Tynyanov overwrites the love business badly. He also makes the unwise decision to establish E.A. as the great love of Pushkin’s life, his entire life. He devotes a lot of energy to “proving” this something that cannot really be proved and that remains rather doubtful.
The woman Pushkin was to marry, Natalya Goncharova, never makes it, of course, into the action of this novel, since, regrettably, Tynyanov did not live to complete his account of Pushkin’s life. “Natalya,” however, seems something of a fatidic name for Pushkin, since Natalyas and Natashas are sprinkled all over the pages of this book. Pushkin’s earliest extant poem—see the note on p. 501—is “To Natalya.” If you want to check out the others here’s a list of pages where various Natalyas—many of them in a romantic context—show up: 96, 247, 264, 299, 322, 336, 379-82.
In Part Three we are shown the young Pushkin already as nearly mature poet. Translations of some of his poems of the time are featured in an appendix added by the translators. Important figures in Russian literary and political history make brief appearances here—Chaadayev, Tolstoy “the American,” the Orlov family and others. But this whole part of the book has a desultory feel, and you cannot help thinking that, in terms of aesthetics, the book might better end with graduation from the Lycée. Here’s what the translators say in their note:
“Where the provisional nature of the text seemed particularly noticeable, in blatant repetitions and contradictions, for example, we have adjusted the text accordingly.” But no amount of finagling with this Part Three, propping things up when sagging, etc., can hide the fact that this section of the book reads like a rough draft. Tynyanov was ill; he could not complete what he had written.
In Part Three we often have summations of the action in scenes, rather than the scenes themselves written, developed. Compare such writing to the wonderful episode that concludes Part Two (372-93), the depiction of the poet Derzhavin in his dotage, trying in vain to find a relative to carry on the family line and family name. From his senescent point of view, Tynyanov writes the famous scene of January 8, 1815, depicted in Repin’s painting on the dust jacket of the book: Derzhavin, emblematic of the Past Era in Russian poetry, sits listening enthralled to young Pushkin, emblematic of the New Era, as he declaims a poem at the Lycée. This would make a strong ending for the entire book.
*
One of Pushkin’s Most Famous Love Poems (Untitled, 1829)
The hills of Georgia lie quiescent, swathed in night;
Tallulah River’s rapids in the gorge below are raging.
I feel at ease with anguish; my melancholy’s bright,
Suffused with you, the anguish is engaging.
So full of you and you alone that sorrow
Seems not the least aggrieved by pain or woes,
My love flames up, will burn still on the morrow,
For love cannot but burn when in love’s throes.
[Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie]
U.R. Bowie, author of Buggy Disquisitions: Insect Critiques of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition
Dactyl Review 