CHAPTER II

THE NEW AGE--PUSHKIN

The value of Russian literature, its peculiar and unique message to the world, would not be sensibly diminished, had everything it produced from the twelfth to the beginning of the nineteenth century perished, with the exception of _The Raid of Prince Igor_. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the accession of Alexander I, the New Age began, and the real dawn of Russian literature broke. It was soon to be followed by a glorious sunrise. The literature which sprang up now and later, was profoundly affected by public events; and public events during this epoch were intimately linked with the events which were happening in Western Europe. It was the epoch of the Napoleonic wars, and Russia played a vital part in that drama. Public opinion, after enthusiasm had been roused by the deeds of Suvorov, was exasperated and humiliated by Napoleon's subsequent victories over Russian arms. But when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, a wave of patriotism swept over the country, and the struggle resulted in an increased sense of unity and nationality. Russia emerged stronger and more solid from the struggle. As far as foreign affairs were concerned, the Emperor Alexander I--on whom everything depended--played his national part well, and he fitly embodied the patriotic movement of the day. At the beginning of his reign he raised great hopes of internal reform which were never fulfilled. He was a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time; a pupil of La Harpe, the Swiss Jacobin, who instilled into him aspirations towards liberty, truth and humanity, which throughout remained his ideals, but which were too vague to lead to anything practical or definite. His reign was thus a series of more or less undefined and fitful struggles to put the crooked straight. He desired to give Russia a constitution, but the attempts he made to do so proved fruitless; and towards the end of his life he is said to have been considerably influenced by Metternich. It is at any rate a fact that during these years reaction once more triumphed.

Nevertheless windows had been opened which could not be shut, and the light which had streamed in produced some remarkable fruits.

When Alexander I came to the throne, the immediate effect of his accession was the ungagging of literature, and the first writer of importance to take advantage of this new state of things was KARAMZIN (1726-1826). In 1802 he started a new review called the _Messenger of Europe_. This was not his _début_. In the reign of Catherine, Karamzin had been brought to Moscow from the provinces, and initiated into German and English literature. In 1789-90 he travelled abroad and visited Switzerland, London and Paris. On his return, he published his impressions in the shape of "Letters of a Russian Traveller" in the _Moscow Journal_, which he founded himself. His ideals were republican; he was an enthusiastic admirer of England and the Swiss, and the reforms of Peter the Great. But his importance in Russian literature lies in his being the first Russian to write unstudied, simple and natural prose, Russian as spoken. He published two sentimental stories in his _Journal_, but the reign of Catherine II which now came to an end (1796) was followed by a period of unmitigated censorship, which lasted throughout the reign of the Emperor Paul, until Alexander I came to the throne. The new review which Karamzin then started differed radically from all preceding Russian reviews in that it dealt with politics and made _belles lettres_ and criticism a permanent feature. As soon as Karamzin had put this review on a firm basis, he devoted himself to historical research, and the fruit of his work in this field was his _History of the Russian Dominion_, in twelve volumes; eight published in 1816, the rest in 1821-1826. The Russian language was, as has been said, like an instrument waiting for a great player to play on it, and to make use of all its possibilities. Karamzin accomplished this, in the domain of prose. He spoke to the Russian heart by speaking Russian, pure and unmarred by stilted and alien conventionalisms.

The publication of Karamzin's history was epoch-making. In the first place, the success of the work was overwhelming. It was the first time in Russian history that a prose work had enjoyed so immense a success. Not only were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian language revealed to the Russians in the style, but the subject-matter came as a surprise. Karamzin, as Pushkin put it, revealed Russia to the Russians, just as Columbus discovered America. He made the dry bones of history live, he wrote a great and glowing prose epic. His influence on his contemporaries was enormous. His work received at once the consecration of a classic, and it inspired Pushkin with his most important if not his finest achievement in dramatic verse (_Boris Godunov_).

The first Russian poet of national importance belongs likewise to this epoch, namely KRYLOV (1769[2]-1844), although he had written a great deal for the stage in the preceding reigns, and continued to write for a long time after the death of Alexander I. Krylov is also a Russian classic, of quite a different kind. The son of an officer of the line, he started by being a clerk in the provincial magistrature. Many of his plays were produced with success, though none of them had any durable qualities. But it was not until 1805 that he found his vocation which was to write fables. The first of these were published in 1806 in the _Moscow Journal_; from that time onward he went on writing fables until he died in 1844.

His early fables were translations from La Fontaine. They imitate La Fontaine's free versification and they are written in iambics of varying length. They were at once successful, and he continued to translate fables from the French, or to adapt from Æsop or other sources. But as time went on, he began to invent fables of his own; and out of the two hundred fables which he left at his death, forty only are inspired by La Fontaine and seven suggested by Æsop: the remainder are original. Krylov's translations of La Fontaine are not so much translations as re-creations. He takes the same subject, and although often following the original in every single incident, he thinks out each _motif_ for himself and re-creates it, so that his translations have the same personal stamp and the same originality as his own inventions.

This is true even when the original is a masterpiece of the highest order, such as La Fontaine's _Deux Pigeons_. You would think the opening lines--

"Deux pigeons s'amoient d'amour tendre, L'un d'eux s'ennuyant au logis Fut assez fou pour entreprendre Un voyage en lointain pays"--

were untranslatable; that nothing could be subtracted from them, and that still less could anything be added; one ray the more, one shade the less, you would think, would certainly impair their nameless grace. But what does Krylov do? He re-creates the situation, expanding La Fontaine's first line into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps on it the impress of his personality and his nationality. Here is a literal translation of the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously trying a third English version.)

"Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother. Neither would eat nor drink without the other; Where you see one, the other's surely near, And every joy they halved and every tear; They never noticed how the time flew by, They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh."

This gives the sense of Krylov's poem word for word, except for what is the most important touch of all in the last line. The trouble is that Krylov has written six lines which are as untranslatable as La Fontaine's four; and he has made them as profoundly Russian as La Fontaine's are French. Nothing could be more Russian than the last line, which it is impossible to translate; because it should run--

"They were sometimes sad, but they never felt _ennui_"--

literally, "it was never _boring_ to them." The difficulty is that the word for _boring_ in Russian, _skuchno_, which occurs with the utmost felicity in contradistinction to _sad_, _grustno_, cannot be rendered in English in its poetical simplicity. There are no six lines more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly poetical in the whole of Russian literature.

Krylov's fables, like La Fontaine's, deal with animals, birds, fishes and men; the Russian peasant plays a large part in them; often they are satirical; nearly always they are bubbling with humour. A writer of fables is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is sometimes to convey pregnant sense, keen mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human foibles, or to express wisdom in the form of wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. But Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in remaining a poet. It has been said that his images are conventional and outworn--that is to say, he uses the machinery of Zephyrs, Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,--and that his conceptions are antiquated. But what splendid use he makes of this machinery! When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is a Zephyr blowing, for instance, as when the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze. Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse he conveys a picture, and more than a picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and the Mole, in the first lines of which he makes you see and hear the eagle and his mate sweeping to the dreaming wood, and swooping down on to the oak-tree. Or again, in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, he gives in a few words the sense of height and space, as if you were looking down from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over the mountains of the Caucasus, sees the end of the earth, the rivers meandering in the plains, the woods, the meadows in all their spring glory, and the angry Caspian Sea, darkling like the wing of a raven in the distance. But his greatest triumph, in this respect, is the fable of the Ass and the Nightingale, in which the verse echoes the very trills of the nightingale, and renders the stillness and the delighted awe of the listeners,--the lovers and the shepherd. Again a convention, if you like, but what a felicitous convention!

The fables are discursive like La Fontaine's, and not brief like Æsop's; but like La Fontaine, Krylov has the gift of summing up a situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect by the sudden evocation of a whole picture in a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable of the Peasants and the River: the peasants go to complain to the river of the conduct of the streams which are continually overflowing and destroying their goods, but when they reach the river, they see half their goods floating on it. "They looked at each other, and shaking their heads," says Krylov, "went home." The two words "went home" in Russian (_poshli domoi_) express their hopelessness more than pages of rhetoric. This is just one of those terse effects such as La Fontaine delights in.

Krylov in his youth lived much among the poor, and his language is peculiarly native, racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the language of the people and of the peasants, and it abounds in humorous turns. He is, moreover, always dramatic, and his fables are for this reason most effective when read aloud or recited. He is dramatic not only in that part of the fable which is narrative, but in the prologue, epilogue, or moral--the author's commentary; he adapts himself to the tone of every separate fable, and becomes himself one of the _dramatis personæ_. Sometimes his fables deal with political events--the French Revolution, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the Congress of Vienna; the education of Alexander I by La Harpe, in the well-known fable of the Lion who sends his son to be educated by the Eagle, of whom he consequently learns how to make nests. Sometimes they deal with internal evils and abuses: the administration of justice, in fables such as that of the peasant who brings a case against the sheep and is found guilty by the fox; the censorship is aimed at in the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing in the cat's claws; the futility of bureaucratic regulations in the fable of the sheep who are devoured by their superfluous watchdogs, or in that of the sheep who are told solemnly and pompously to drag any offending wolf before the nearest magistrate; or, again, in that of the high dignitary who is admitted immediately into paradise because on earth he left his work to be done by his secretaries--for being obviously a fool, had he done his work himself, the result would have been disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they deal merely with human follies and affairs, and the idiosyncrasies of men.

Krylov's fables have that special quality which only permanent classics possess of appealing to different generations, to people of every age, kind and class, for different reasons; so that children can read them simply for the story, and grown-up people for their philosophy; their style pleases the unlettered by its simplicity, and is the envy and despair of the artist in its supreme art. Pushkin calls him "le plus national et le plus populaire de nos poètes" (this was true in Pushkin's day), and said his fables were read by men of letters, merchants, men of the world, servants and children. His work bears the stamp of ageless modernity just as _The Pilgrim's Progress_ or Cicero's letters seem modern. It also has the peculiarly Russian quality of unexaggerated realism. He sees life as it is, and writes down what he sees. It is true that although his style is finished and polished, he only at times reaches the high-water mark of what can be done with the Russian language: his style, always idiomatic, pregnant and natural, is sometimes heavy, and even clumsy; but then he never sets out to be anything more than a fabulist. In this he is supremely successful, and since at the same time he gives us snatches of exquisite poetry, the greater the praise to him. But, when all is said and done, Krylov has the talisman which defies criticism, baffles analysis, and defeats time: namely, charm. His fables achieved an instantaneous popularity, which has never diminished until to-day.

Internal political events proved the next factor in Russian literature; a factor out of which the so-called romantic movement was to grow.

During the Napoleonic wars a great many Russian officers had lived abroad. They came back to Russia after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, teeming with new ideas and new ideals. They took life seriously, and were called by Pushkin the Puritans of the North. Their aim was culture and the public welfare. They were not revolutionaries; on the contrary, they were anxious to co-operate with the Government. They formed for their purpose a society, in imitation of the German _Tugendbund_, called _The Society of Welfare_: its aims were philanthropic, educational, and economic. It consisted chiefly of officers of the Guard, and its headquarters were at St. Petersburg. All this was known and approved of by the Emperor. But when the Government became reactionary, this peaceful progressive movement changed its character. The Society of Welfare was closed in 1821, and its place was taken by two new societies, which, instead of being political, were social and revolutionary. The success of the revolutionary movements in Spain and in Italy encouraged these societies to follow their example.

The death of Alexander I in 1825 forced them to immediate action. The shape it took was the "Decembrist" rising. Constantine, the Emperor's brother, renounced his claim to the throne, and was succeeded by his brother Nicholas. December 14 (O.S.) was fixed for the day on which the Emperor should receive the oath of allegiance of his troops. An organized insurrection took place, which was confined to certain regiments. The Emperor was supported by the majority of the Guards regiments, and the people showed no signs of supporting the rising, which was at once suppressed.

One hundred and twenty-five of the conspirators were condemned. Five of them were hanged, and among them the poet RYLEEV (1795-1826). But although the political results of the movement were nil, the effect of the movement on literature was far-reaching. Philosophy took the place of politics, and liberalism was diverted into the channel of romanticism; but out of this romantic movement came the springtide of Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the soul of the Russian people found adequate expression. And the very fact that politics were excluded from the movement proved, in one sense, a boon to literature: for it gave Russian men of genius the chance to be writers, artists and poets, and prevented them from exhausting their whole energy in being inefficient politicians or unsuccessful revolutionaries. I will dwell on the drawbacks, on the dark side of the medal, presently.

As far as the actual Decembrist movement is concerned, its concrete and direct legacy to literature consists in the work of Ryleev, and its indirect legacy in the most famous comedy of the Russian stage, _Gore ot Uma_, "The Misfortune of being Clever," by GRIBOYEDOV (1795-1829).

Ryleev's life was cut short before his poetical powers had come to maturity. It is idle to speculate what he might have achieved had he lived longer. The work which he left is notable for its pessimism, but still suffers from the old rhetorical conventions of the eighteenth century and the imitation of French models; moreover he looked on literature as a matter of secondary importance. "I am not a poet," he said, "I am a citizen." In spite of this, every now and then there are flashes of intense poetical inspiration in his work; and he struck one or two powerful chords--for instance, in his stanzas on the vision of enslaved Russia, which have a tense strength and fire that remind one of Emily Brontë. He was a poet as well as a citizen, but even had he lived to a prosperous old age and achieved artistic perfection in his work, he could never have won a brighter aureole than that which his death gained him. The poems of his last days in prison breathe a spirit of religious humility, and he died forgiving and praying for his enemies. His name shines in Russian history and Russian literature, as that of a martyr to a high ideal.

Griboyedov, the author of _Gore ot Uma_, a writer of a very different order, although not a Decembrist himself, is a product of that period. His comedy still remains the unsurpassed masterpiece of Russian comedy, and can be compared with Beaumarchais' _Figaro_ and Sheridan's _School for Scandal_.

Griboyedov was a Foreign Office official, and he was murdered when Minister Plenipotentiary at Teheran, on January 30, 1829. He conceived the plot of his play in 1816, and read aloud some scenes in St. Petersburg in 1823-24. They caused a sensation in literary circles, and the play began to circulate rapidly in MSS. Two fragments of the drama were published in one of the almanacs, which then took the place of literary reviews. But beyond this, Griboyedov could neither get his play printed nor acted. Thousands of copies circulated in MSS., but the play was not produced on the stage until 1831, and then much mutilated; and it was not printed until 1833.

_Gore ot Uma_ is written in verse, in iambics of varying length, like Krylov's fables. The unities are preserved. The action takes place in one day and in the same house--that of Famusov, an elderly gentleman of the Moscow upper class holding a Government appointment. He is a widower and has one daughter, Sophia, whose sensibility is greater than her sense; and the play opens on a scene where the father discovers her talking to his secretary, Molchalin, and says he will stand no nonsense. Presently, the friend of Sophia's childhood, Chatsky, arrives after a three years' absence abroad; Chatsky is a young man of independent ideas whose misfortune it is to be clever. He notices that Sophia receives him coldly, and later on he perceives that she is in love with Molchalin,--a wonderfully drawn type, the perfect climber, time-server and place-seeker, and the incarnation of convention,--who does not care a rap for Sophia. Chatsky declaims to Famusov his contempt for modern Moscow, for the slavish worship by society of all that is foreign, for its idolatry of fashion and official rank, its hollowness and its convention. Famusov, the incarnation of respectable conventionality, does not understand one word of what he is saying.

At an evening party given at Famusov's house, Chatsky is determined to find out whom Sophia loves. He decides it is Molchalin, and lets fall a few biting sarcasms about him to Sophia; and Sophia, to pay him back for his sarcasm, lets it be understood by one of the guests that he is mad. The half-spoken hint spreads like lightning; and the spreading of the news is depicted in a series of inimitable scenes. Chatsky enters while the subject is being discussed, and delivers a long tirade on the folly of Moscow society, which only confirms the suspicions of the guests; and he finds when he gets to the end of his speech that he is speaking to an empty room.

In the fourth act we see the guests leaving the house after the party. Chatsky is waiting for his carriage. Sophia appears on the staircase and calls Molchalin. Chatsky, hearing her voice, hides behind a pillar. Liza, Sophia's maid, comes to fetch Molchalin, and knocks at his door. Molchalin comes out, and not knowing that Sophia or Chatsky are within hearing, makes love to Liza and tells her that he only loves Sophia out of duty. Then Sophia appears, having heard everything. Molchalin falls on his knees to her: she is quite inexorable. Chatsky comes forward and begins to speak his mind--when all is interrupted by the arrival of Famusov, who speaks his. Chatsky shakes the dust of the house and of Moscow off his feet, and Sophia is left without Chatsky and without Molchalin.

The _Gore ot Uma_ is a masterpiece of satire rather than a masterpiece of dramatic comedy. That is to say that, as a satire of the Moscow society of the day and of the society of yesterday, and of to-morrow, it is immortal, and forms a complete work: but as a comedy it does not. Almost every scene separately is perfect in itself, but dramatically it does not group itself round one central idea or one mainspring of action. Judged from the point of view of dramatic propriety, the behaviour of the hero is wildly improbable throughout; there is no reason for the spectator to think he should be in love with Sophia; if he is, there is no reason for him to behave as he does; if a man behaved like that, declaiming at an evening party long speeches on the decay of the times, the most frivolous of societies would be justified in thinking him mad.

Pushkin hit on the weak point of the play as a play when he wrote: "In _The Misfortune of being Clever_ the question arises, Who is clever? and the answer is Griboyedov. Chatsky is an honourable young man who has lived for a long time with a clever man (that is to say with Griboyedov), and learnt his clever sarcasms; but to whom does he say them? To Famusov, to the old ladies at the party. This is unforgivable, because the first sign of a clever man is to know at once whom he is dealing with."

But what makes the work a masterpiece is the naturalness of the characters, the dialogue, the comedy of the scenes which represent Moscow society. It is extraordinary that on so small a scale, in four short acts, Griboyedov should have succeeded in giving so complete a picture of Moscow society, and should have given the dialogue, in spite of its being in verse, the stamp of conversational familiarity. The portraits are all full-length portraits, and when the play is produced now, the rendering of each part raises as much discussion in Russia as a revival of one of Sheridan's comedies in England.

As for the style, nearly three-quarters of the play has passed into the Russian language. It is forcible, concise, bitingly sarcastic, it is as neat and dry as W. S. Gilbert, as elegant as La Fontaine, as clear as an icicle, and as clean as the thrust of a sword. But perhaps the crowning merit of this immortal satire is its originality. It is a product of Russian life and Russian genius, and as yet it is without a rival.

Outside the current of politics and political aspirations, there appeared during this same epoch a poet who exercised a considerable influence over Russian literature, and who devoted himself exclusively to poetry. This was BASIL ZHUKOVSKY (1783-1852). He opened the door of Russian literature on the fields of German and English poetry. The first poem he published in 1802 was a translation of Gray's _Elegy_; this, and an imitation of Bürger's _Leonore_, which affected all Slav literatures, brought him fame. Later, he translated Schiller's _Maid of Orleans_, his ballads, some of the lyrics of Uhland, Goethe, Hebbel, and a great quantity of other foreign poems. His translations were faithful, but in spite of this he gave them the stamp of his own dreamy personality. He was made tutor to the Tsarevitch Alexander--afterwards Alexander II,--and for a time his production ceased; but when this task was finished, he braced himself in his old age to translate _The Odyssey_, and this translation appeared in 1848-50. In this work he obeyed the first great law of translation, "Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one." He produced a beautiful work; but he also did what all other translators of Homer have done; he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky, and with it something sentimental, elegiac, and didactic.

Zhukovsky's greatest service to Russian literature consisted in his exploding the superstition that the literature of France was the only literature that counted, and introducing literary Russia to the poets of England and Germany rather than of France. But apart from this, he is the first and best translator in European literature, for what Krylov did with some of La Fontaine's fables, he did for all the literature he touched--he re-created it in Russian, and made it his own. In his translation of Gray's _Elegy_, for instance, he not only translates the poet's meaning into musical verse, but he conveys the intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape, and the poignant accent which makes that poem the natural language of grief. It is characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years after he translated the poem, he visited Stoke Poges, re-read Gray's _Elegy_ there, and made another translation, which is still more faithful than the first.

The Russian language was by this time purified from all outward excrescences, released from the bondage of convention and the pseudo-classical, open to all outside influences, and only waiting, like a ready-tuned instrument, on which Krylov and Zhukovsky had already sounded sweet notes and deep tones, and which Karamzin had proved to be a magnificent vehicle for musical and perspicuous prose, for a poet of genius to come and sound it from its lowest note to the top of its compass, for there was indeed much music and excellent voice to be plucked from it. At the appointed hour the man came. It was PUSHKIN. He arrived at a time when a battle of words was raging between the so-called classical and romantic schools. The pseudo-classical, with all its mythological machinery and conventional apparatus, was totally alien to Russia, and a direct and slavish imitation of the French. On the other hand, the utmost confusion reigned as to what constituted romanticism. To each single writer it meant a different thing: "Enfonçez Racine," and the unities, in one case; or ghosts, ballads, legends, local colour in another; or the defiance of morality and society in another. Zhukovsky, in introducing German romanticism into Russia, paved the way for its death, and for the death of all exotic fashions and models; for he paved the way for Pushkin to render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating models of his own and by founding a national literature.

Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, at Moscow. He was of ancient lineage, and inherited African negro blood on his mother's side, his mother's grandmother being the daughter of Peter the Great's negro, Hannibal. Until he was nine years old, he did not show signs of any unusual precocity; but from then onwards he was seized with a passion for reading which lasted all his life. He read Plutarch's _Lives_, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ in a translation. He then devoured all the French books he found in his father's library. Pushkin was gifted with a photographic memory, which retained what he read immediately and permanently. His first efforts at writing were in French,--comedies, which he performed himself to an audience of his sisters. He went to school in 1812 at the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St. Petersburg. His school career was not brilliant, and his leaving certificate qualifies his achievements as mediocre, even in Russian. But during the six years he spent at the Lyceum, he continued to read voraciously. His favourite poet at this time was Voltaire. He began to write verse, first in French and then in Russian; some of it was printed in 1814 and 1815 in reviews, and in 1815 he declaimed his _Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_ in public at the Lyceum examination, in the presence of Derzhavin the poet.

The poems which he wrote at school afterwards formed part of his collected works. In these poems, consisting for the greater part of anacreontics and epistles, although they are immature, and imitative, partly of contemporary authors such as Derzhavin and Zhukovsky, and partly of the French anacreontic school of poets, such as Voltaire, Gresset and Parny, the sound of a new voice was unmistakable. Indeed, not only his contemporaries, but the foremost representatives of the Russian literature of that day, Derzhavin, Karamzin and Zhukovsky, made no mistake about it. They greeted the first notes of this new lyre with enthusiasm. Zhukovsky used to visit the boy poet at school and read out his verse to him. Derzhavin was enthusiastic over the recitation of his _Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_. Thus fame came to Pushkin as easily as the gift of writing verse. He had lisped in numbers, and as soon as he began to speak in them, his contemporaries immediately recognized and hailed the new voice. He did not wake up and find himself famous like Byron, but he walked into the Hall of Fame as naturally as a young heir steps into his lawful inheritance. If we compare Pushkin's school-boy poetry with Byron's _Hours of Idleness_, it is easy to understand how this came about. In the _Hours of Idleness_ there is, perhaps, only one poem which would hold out hopes of serious promise; and the most discerning critics would have been justified in being careful before venturing to stake any great hopes on so slender a hint. But in Pushkin's early verse, although the subject-matter is borrowed, and the style is still irregular and careless, it is none the less obvious that it flows from the pen of the author without effort or strain; and besides this, certain coins of genuine poetry ring out, bearing the image and superscription of a new mint, the mint of Pushkin.

When the first of his poems to attract the attention of a larger audience, _Ruslan and Ludmila_, was published, in 1820, it was greeted with enthusiasm by the public; but it had already won the suffrages of that circle which counted most, that is to say, the leading men of letters of the day, who had heard it read out in MSS. For as soon as Pushkin left school and stepped into the world, he was received into the literary circle of the day on equal terms. After he had read aloud the first cantos of _Ruslan and Ludmila_ at Zhukovsky's literary evenings, Zhukovsky gave him his portrait with this inscription: "To the pupil, from his defeated master"; and BATYUSHKOV, a poet who, after having been influenced, like Pushkin, by Voltaire and Parny, had gone back to the classics, Horace and Tibullus, and had introduced the classic anacreontic school of poetry into Russia, was astonished to find a young man of the world outplaying him without any trouble on the same lyre, and exclaimed, "Oh! how well the rascal has started writing!"

The publication of _Ruslan and Ludmila_ sealed Pushkin's reputation definitely, as far as the general public was concerned, although some of the professional critics treated the poem with severity. The subject of the poem was a Russian fairy-tale, and the critics blamed the poet for having recourse to what they called Russian folk-lore, which they considered to be unworthy of the poetic muse. One review complained that Pushkin's choice of subject was like introducing a bearded unkempt peasant into a drawing-room, while others blamed him for dealing with national stuff in a flippant spirit. But the curious thing is that, while the critics blamed him for his choice of subject, and his friends and the public defended him for it, quoting all sorts of precedents, the poem has absolutely nothing in common, either in its spirit, style or characterization, with native Russian folk-lore and fairy-tales. Much later on in his career, Pushkin was to show what he could do with Russian folk-lore. But _Ruslan and Ludmila_, which, as far as its form is concerned, has a certain superficial resemblance to Ariosto, is in reality the result of the French influence, under which Pushkin had been ever since his cradle, and which in this poem blazes into the sky like a rocket, and bursts into a shower of sparks, never to return again.

There is no passion in the poem and no irony, but it is young, fresh, full of sensuous, not to say sensual images, interruptions, digressions, and flippant epigrams. Pushkin wondered afterwards that nobody noticed the coldness of the poem; the truth was that the eyes of the public were dazzled by the fresh sensuous images, and their ears were taken captive by the new voice: for the importance of the poem lies in this--that the new voice which the literary pundits had already recognized in the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo was now speaking to the whole world, and all Russia became aware that a young man was among them "with mouth of gold and morning in his eyes." _Ruslan and Ludmila_ has just the same sensuous richness, fresh music and fundamental coldness as Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. After finishing the poem, Pushkin added a magnificent and moving Epilogue, written from the Caucasus in the year of its publication (1820); and when the second edition was published in 1828, he added a Prologue in his finest manner which tells of Russian fairy-land.

After leaving school in 1817, until 1820, Pushkin plunged into the gay life of St. Petersburg. He wanted to be a Hussar, but his father could not afford it. In default he became a Foreign Office official; but he did not take this profession seriously. He consorted with the political youth and young Liberals of the day; he scattered stinging epigrams and satirical epistles broadcast. He sympathized with the Decembrists, but took no part in their conspiracy. He would probably have ended by doing so; but, luckily for Russian literature, he was transferred in 1820 from the Foreign Office to the Chancery of General Inzov in the South of Russia; and from 1820 to 1826 he lived first at Kishinev, then at Odessa, and finally in his own home at Pskov. This enforced banishment was of the greatest possible service to the poet; it took him away from the whirl and distractions of St. Petersburg; it prevented him from being compromised in the drama of the Decembrists; it ripened and matured his poetical genius; it provided him, since it was now that he visited the Caucasus and the Crimea for the first time, with new subject-matter.

During this period he learnt Italian and English, and came under the influence of André Chénier and Byron. André Chénier's influence is strongly felt in a series of lyrics in imitation of the classics; but these lyrics were altogether different from the anacreontics of his boyhood. Byron's influence is first manifested in a long poem _The Prisoner of the Caucasus_. It is Byronic in the temperament of the hero, who talks in the strain of the earlier Childe Harold; he is young, but feels old; tired of life, he seeks for consolation in the loneliness of nature in the Caucasus. He is taken prisoner by mountain tribesmen, and set free by a girl who drowns herself on account of her unrequited love. Pushkin said later that the poem was immature, but that there were verses in it that came from his heart. There is one element in the poem which is by no means immature, and that is the picture of the Caucasus, which is executed with much reality and simplicity. Pushkin annexed the Caucasus to Russian poetry. The Crimea inspired him with another tale, also Byronic in some respects, _The Fountain of Baghchi-Sarai_, which tells of a Tartar Khan and his Christian slave, who is murdered out of jealousy by a former favourite, herself drowned by the orders of the Khan. Here again the descriptions are amazing, and Pushkin draws out a new stop of rich and voluptuous music.

In speaking of the influence of Byron over Pushkin it is necessary to discriminate. Byron helped Pushkin to discover himself; Byron revealed to him his own powers, showed him the way out of the French garden where he had been dwelling, and acted as a guide to fresh woods and pastures new. But what Pushkin took from the new provinces to which the example of Byron led him was entirely different from what Byron sought there. Again, the methods and workmanship of the two poets were radically different. Pushkin is never imitative of Byron; but Byron opened his eyes to a new world, and indeed did for him what Chapman's _Homer_ did for Keats. It frequently happens that when a poet is deeply struck by the work of another poet he feels a desire to write something himself, but something different. Thus Pushkin's mental intercourse with Byron had the effect of bracing the talent of the Russian poet and spurring him on to the conquest of new worlds.

Pushkin's six years' banishment to his own country had the effect of revealing to him the reality and seriousness of his vocation as a poet, and the range and strength of his gifts. It was during this period that besides the works already mentioned he wrote some of his finest lyrics, _The Conversation between the Bookseller and the Poet_--perhaps the most perfect of his shorter poems--it contains four lines to have written which Turgenev said he would have burnt the whole of his works--a larger poem called _The Gypsies_; his dramatic chronicle _Boris Godunov_, and the beginning of his masterpiece _Onegin_; several ballads, including _The Sage Oleg_, and an unfinished romance, the _Robber Brothers_.

Not only is the richness of his output during this period remarkable, but the variety and the high level of art maintained in all the different styles which he attempted and mastered. _The Gypsies_ (1827), which was received with greater favour by the public than any of his poems, either earlier or later, is the story of a disappointed man, Aleko, who leaves the world and takes refuge with gypsies. A tragically ironical situation is the result. The anarchic nature of the Byronic misanthrope brings tragedy into the peaceful life of the people, who are lawless because they need no laws. Aleko loves and marries the gypsy Zemfira, but after a time she tires of him, and loves a young gypsy. Aleko surprises them and kills them both. Then Zemfira's father banishes him from the gypsies' camp. He, too, had been deceived. When his wife Mariula had been untrue and had left him, he had attempted no vengeance, but had brought up her daughter.

"Leave us, proud man," he says to Aleko. "We are a wild people; we have no laws, we torture not, neither do we punish; we have no use for blood or groans; we will not live with a man of blood. Thou wast not made for the wild life. For thyself alone thou claimest licence; we are shy and good-natured; thou art evil-minded and presumptuous. Farewell, and peace be with thee!"

The charm of the poem lies in the descriptions of the gypsy camp and the gypsy life, the snatches of gypsy song, and the characterization of the gypsies, especially of the women. It is not surprising the poem was popular; it breathes a spell, and the reading of it conjures up before one the wandering life, the camp-fire, the soft speech and the song; and makes one long to go off with "the raggle-taggle gypsies O!"

Byron's influence soon gave way to that of Shakespeare, who opened a still larger field of vision to the Russian poet. In 1825 he writes: "Quel homme que ce Shakespeare! Je n'en reviens pas. Comme Byron le tragique est mesquin devant lui! Ce Byron qui n'a jamais conçu qu'un seul caractère et c'est le sien ... ce Byron donc a partagé entre ses personages tel et tel trait de son caractère: son orgeuil à l'un, sa haine à l'autre, sa mélancolie au troisième, etc., et c'est ainsi d'un caractère plein, sombre et énergique, il a fait plusieurs caractères insignifiants; ce n'est pas là de la tragédie. On a encore une manie. Quand on a conçu un caractère, tout ce qu'on lui fait dire, même les choses les plus étranges, en porte essentiellement l'empreinte, comme les pédants et les marins dans les vieux romans de Fielding. Voyez le haineux de Byron ... et là-dessus lisez Shakespeare. Il ne craint jamais de compromettre son personage, il le fait parler avec tout l'abandon de la vie, car il est sûr en temps et lieu, de lui faire trouver le langage de son caractère. Vous me demanderez: votre tragédie est-elle une tragédie de caractère ou de costume? J'ai choisi le genre le plus aisé, mais j'ai tâché de les unir tous deux. J'écris et je pense. La plupart des scènes ne demandent que du raisonnement; quand j'arrive à une scène qui demande de l'inspiration, j'attends ou je passe dessus."

I quote this letter because it throws light, firstly, on Pushkin's matured opinion of Byron, and, secondly, on his methods of work; for, like Leonardo da Vinci, he formed the habit, which he here describes, of leaving unwritten passages where inspiration was needed, until he felt the moment of _bien être_ when inspiration came; and this not only in writing his tragedy, but henceforward in everything that he wrote, as his note-books testify.

The subject-matter of _Boris Godunov_ was based on Karamzin's history: it deals with the dramatic episode of the Russian Perkin Warbeck, the false Demetrius who pretended to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. The play is constructed on the model of Shakespeare's chronicle plays, but in a still more disjointed fashion, without a definite beginning or end: when Mussorgsky made an opera out of it, the action was concentrated into definite acts; for, as it stands, it is not a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had not the power of conceiving and executing a drama which should move round one idea to an inevitable close. He had not the gift of dramatic architectonics, and still less that of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the scenes, whether they be tragic and poetical, or scenes of common life, are as vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive, and they speak a language which is at the same time ancient, living, and convincing.

In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of stage architectonics and stage carpentry, it is not merely meant that he lacked the gift of arranging acts that would suit the stage, or that of imagining stage effects. His whole play is not conceived as a drama; a subject from which a drama might be written is taken, but the drama is left unwritten. We see Boris Godunov on the throne, which he has unlawfully usurped; we know he feels remorse; he tells us so in monologues; we see his soul stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of fire, and we watch the wheel revolve; and that is all the moral and spiritual action that the part contains; he is static and not dynamic, he never has to make up his mind; his will never has to encounter the shock of another will during the whole play. Neither does the chronicle centre round the Pretender. It is true that we see the idea of impersonating the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind; and it is also true that in one scene with his Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically moving in a dramatic situation. She loves him because she thinks he is the son of an anointed King. He loves her too much to deceive her, and tells her the truth. She then says she will have nothing of him; and then he rises from defeat and shame to the height of the situation, becomes great, and, not unlike Browning's Sludge, says: "Although I am an impostor, I am born to be a King all the same; I am one of Nature's Kings; and I defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell every one what I have told you. Nobody will believe you." And Marina is conquered once more by his conduct and bearing.

This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict of two wills and two souls. But there the matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken, and we are shown a series of different patterns, in which the heroine plays no part at all, and in which the hero only makes a momentary appearance. The fact is there is neither hero nor heroine in the play. It is not a play, but a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never attempted. As a chronicle, a series of detached scenes, it is supremely successful. There are certain scenes which attain to sublimity: for instance, that in the cell of the monastery, where the monk is finishing his chronicle; and the monologue in which Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying speech to his son. The verse in these scenes is sealed with the mark of that God-gifted ease and high seriousness, which belong only to the inspired great. They are Shakespearean, not because they imitate Shakespeare, but because they attain to heights of imaginative truth to which Shakespeare rises more often than any other poet; and the language in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitableness, an absence of all conscious effort and of all visible art and artifice, a closeness of utterance combined with a width of suggestion which belong only to the greatest artists, to the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to Dante.

_Boris Godunov_ was not published until January 1, 1831, and passed, with one exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. Like so many great works, it came before its time; and it was not until years afterwards that the merits of this masterpiece were understood and appreciated.

In 1826 Pushkin's banishment to the country came to an end; in that year he was allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St. Petersburg. In 1826 his poems appeared in one volume, and the second canto of _Onegin_ (the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827 _The Gypsies_, and the third canto of _Onegin_; in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth cantos of _Onegin_; in 1829 _Graf Nulin_, an admirably told _Conte_ such as Maupassant might have written, of a deceived husband and a wife who, finding herself in the situation of Lucretia, gives the would-be Tarquin a box on the ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in being unfaithful with some one else--the _Cottage of Kolomna_ is another story in the same vein--and in the same year _Poltava_.

This poem was written in one month, in St. Petersburg. The subject is Mazepa, with whom the daughter of his hereditary enemy, Kochubey, whom he afterwards tortures and kills, falls in love. But it is in reality the epic of Peter the Great.[3] When the poem was published, it disconcerted the critics and the public. It revealed an entirely new phase of Pushkin's style, and it should have widened the popular conception of the poet's powers and versatility. But at the time the public only knew Pushkin through his lyrics and his early tales; _Boris Godunov_ had not yet been published; moreover, the public of that day expected to find in a poem passion and the delineation of the heart's adventures. This stern objective fragment of an epic, falling into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses and cupids, like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan and executed by a god, met with little appreciation. The poet's verse which, so far as the public knew it, had hitherto seemed like a shining and luscious fruit, was exchanged for a concentrated weighty tramp of ringing rhyme, _martelé_ like steel. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a style as concise as that of Pope and as concentrated as that of Browning's dramatic lyrics. The poem is a fit monument to Peter the Great, and the great monarch's impetuous genius and passion for thorough craftsmanship seem to have entered into it.

In 1829 Pushkin made a second journey to the Caucasus, the result of which was a harvest of lyrics. On his return to St. Petersburg he sketched the plan of another epic poem, _Galub_, dealing with the Caucasus, but this remained a fragment.

In 1831 he finished the eighth and last canto of _Onegin_. Originally there were nine cantos, but when the work was published one of the cantos dealing with Onegin's travels was left out as being irrelevant. Pushkin had worked at this poem since 1823. It was Byron's _Beppo_ which gave him the idea of writing a poem on modern life; but here again, he made of the idea something quite different from any of Byron's work. _Onegin_ is a novel. Eugene Onegin is the name of the hero. It is, moreover, the first Russian novel; and as a novel it has never been surpassed. It is as real as Tolstoy, as finished in workmanship and construction as Turgenev. It is a realistic novel; not realistic in the sense that Zola's work was mis-called realistic, but realistic in the sense that Miss Austen is realistic. The hero is the average man about St. Petersburg; his father, a worthy public servant, lives honourably on debts and gives three balls a year. Onegin is brought up, not too strictly, by "Monsieur l'Abbé"; he goes out in the world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in French, and able to dance the Mazurka.

Onegin can touch on every subject, can hold his tongue when the conversation becomes too serious, and make epigrams. He knows enough Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk about Juvenal, and put "Vale!" at the end of his letters, and he can remember two lines of the _Æneid_. He is severe on Homer and Theocritus, but has read Adam Smith. The only art in which he is proficient is the _ars amandi_ as taught by Ovid. He is a patron of the ballet; he goes to balls; he eats beef-steaks and _paté de foie gras_. In spite of all this--perhaps because of it--he suffers from spleen, like Childe Harold, the author says. His father dies, leaving a lot of debts behind him, but a dying uncle summons him to the country; and when he gets there he finds his uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the estate. In the country, he is just as much bored as he was in St. Petersburg. A new neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a young man fresh from Germany, an enthusiast and a poet, and full of Kant, Schiller, and the German writers. Lensky introduces Onegin to the neighbouring family, by name Larin, consisting of a widow and two daughters. Lensky is in love with the younger daughter, Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face, as Onegin says, like the foolish moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less pretty; shy and dreamy, she conceals under her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut character and a strong will.

Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen's heroines; as alive as Fielding's Sophia Western, and as charming as any of George Meredith's women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. Turgenev, with all his magic, and Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours of life, never created a truer, more radiant, and more typically Russian woman. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman; that is to say, of all that is best in Russia; and it is a type taken straight from life, and not from fairy-land--a type that exists as much to-day as it did in the days of Pushkin. She is the first of that long gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky have given us, and which are the most precious jewels of Russian literature, because they reflect the crowning glory of Russian life. Tatiana falls in love with Onegin at first sight. She writes to him and confesses her love, and in all the love poetry of the world there is nothing more touching and more simple than this confession. It is perfect. If Pushkin had written this and this alone, his place among poets would be unique and different from that of all other poets.

Possibly some people may think that there are finer achievements in the love poetry of the world; but nothing is so futile and so impertinent as giving marks to the great poets, as if they were passing an examination. If a thing is as good as possible in itself, what is the use of saying that it is less good or better than something else, which is as good as possible in itself also. Nevertheless, placed beside any of the great confessions of love in poetry--Francesca's story in the _Inferno_, Romeo and Juliet's leavetaking, Phèdre's declaration, Don Juan Tenorio's letter--the beauty of Tatiana's confession would not be diminished by the juxtaposition. Of the rest of Pushkin's work at its best and highest, of the finest passages of _Boris Godunov_, for instance, you can say: This is magnificent, but there are dramatic passages in other works of other poets on the same lines and as fine; but in Tatiana's letter Pushkin has created something unique, which has no parallel, because only a Russian could have written it, and of Russians, only he. It is a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a blackbird's song.

Onegin tells Tatiana he is not worthy of her, that he is not made for love and marriage; that he would cease to love her at once; that he feels for her like a brother, or perhaps a little more tenderly. It then falls out that Onegin, by flirting with Olga at a ball, makes Lensky jealous. They fight a duel, and Lensky is killed. Onegin is obliged to leave the neighbourhood, and spends years in travel. Tatiana remains true to her first love; but she is taken by her relatives to Moscow, and consents at last under their pressure to marry a rich man of great position. In St. Petersburg, Onegin meets her again. Tatiana has become a great lady, but all her old charm is there. Onegin now falls violently in love with her; but she, although she frankly confesses that she still loves him, tells him that it is too late; she has married another, and she means to remain true to him. And there the story ends.

_Onegin_ is, perhaps, Pushkin's most characteristic work; it is undoubtedly the best known and the most popular; like _Hamlet_, it is all quotations. Pushkin in his _Onegin_ succeeded in doing what Shelley urged Byron to do--to create something new and in accordance with the spirit of the age, which should at the same time be beautiful. He did more than this. He succeeded in creating for Russia a poem that was purely national, and in giving his country a classic, a model both in construction, matter, form, and inspiration for future generations. Perhaps the greatest quality of this poem is its vividness. Pushkin himself speaks, in taking leave, of having seen the unfettered march of his novel in a magic prism. This is just the impression that the poem gives; the scenes are as clear as the shapes in a crystal; nothing is blurred; there are no hesitating notes, nothing _à peu près_; every stroke comes off; the nail is hit on the head every time, only so easily that you do not notice the strokes, and all labour escapes notice. Apart from this the poem is amusing; it arrests the attention as a story, and it delights the intelligence with its wit, its digressions, and its brilliance. It is as witty as Don Juan and as consummately expressed as Pope; and when the occasion demands it, the style passes in easy transition to serious or tender tones. _Onegin_ has been compared to Byron's _Don Juan_. There is this likeness, that both poems deal with contemporary life, and in both poems the poets pass from grave to gay, from severe to lively, and often interrupt the narrative to apostrophize the reader. But there the likeness ends. On the other hand, there is a vast difference. _Onegin_ contains no adventures. It is a story of everyday life. Moreover, it is an organic whole: so well constructed that it fits into a stage libretto--Tchaikovsky made an opera out of it--without difficulty. There is another difference--a difference which applies to Pushkin and Byron in general. There is no unevenness in Pushkin; his work, as far as craft is concerned, is always on the same high level. You can admire the whole, or cut off any single passage and it will still remain admirable; whereas Byron must be taken as a whole or not at all--the reason being that Pushkin was an impeccable artist in form and expression, and that Byron was not.

In the winter of 1832 Pushkin sought a new field, the field of historical research; and by the beginning of 1833 he had not only collected all the materials for a history of Pugachev, the Cossack who headed a rising in the reign of Catherine II; but his literary activity was so great that he had also written the rough sketch of a long story in prose dealing with the same subject, _The Captain's Daughter_, another prose story of considerable length, _Dubrovsky_, and portions of a drama, _Rusalka_, The Water Nymph, which was never finished. Besides _Boris Godunov_ and the _Rusalka_, Pushkin wrote a certain number of dramatic scenes, or short dramas in one or more scenes. Of these, one, _The Feast in the Time of Plague_, is taken from the English of John Wilson (_The City of the Plague_), with original additions. In _Mozart and Salieri_ we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can. The story is based on the unfounded anecdote that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri out of envy. This dramatic and beautifully written episode has been set to music as it stands by Rimsky-Korsakov.

_The Covetous Knight_, which bears the superscription, "From the tragi-comedy of Chenstone"--an unknown English original--tells of the conflict between a Harpagon and his son: the delineation of the miser's imaginative passion for his treasures is, both in conception and execution, in Pushkin's finest manner. This scene has been recently set to music by Rakhmaninov. _The Guest of Stone_, the story of Don Juan and the _statua gentilissima del gran Commendatore_, makes Don Juan life. A scene from _Faust_ between Faust and Mephistopheles is original and not of great interest; _Angelo_ is the story of _Measure for Measure_ told as a narrative with two scenes in dialogue. _Rusalka_, The Water Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the sham province of national legend, and it is tantalizing that this poetic fragment remained a fragment.

Pushkin's prose is in some respects as remarkable as his verse. Here, too, he proved a pioneer. _Dubrovsky_ is the story of a young officer whose father is ousted, like Naboth, from his small estate by his neighbour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, becomes a highway robber so as to revenge himself, and introduces himself into the family of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes his revenge because he falls in love with his enemy's daughter. In this extremely vivid story he anticipates Gogol in his lifelike pictures of country life. _The Captain's Daughter_ is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev has nothing stagey or melodramatic about him, nothing of Harrison Ainsworth. Of his shorter stories, such as _The Blizzard_, _The Pistol Shot_, _The Lady-Peasant_, the most entertaining, and certainly the most popular, is _The Queen of Spades_, which was so admirably translated by Mérimée, and formed the subject of one of Tchaikovsky's most successful operas. As an artistic work _The Egyptian Nights_, written in 1828, is the most interesting, and ranks among Pushkin's masterpieces. It tells of an Italian _improvisatore_ who, at a party in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on Cleopatra and her lovers. The story is written to lead up to this poem, which gives a gorgeous picture of the pagan world, and is another example of Pushkin's miraculous power of assimilation. Pushkin's prose has the same limpidity and ease as his verse; the characters have the same vitality and reality as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, and had he lived longer he might have become a great novelist. As it is, he furnished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made in 1832) with the subject of two of his masterpieces--_Dead Souls_ and _The Revisor_.

The province of Russian folk-lore and legend from which Pushkin took the idea of _Rusalka_ was to furnish him with a great deal of rich material. It was in 1831 that in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he wrote his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian popular style, _The Tale of Tsar Saltan_. Up till now he had written only a few ballads in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a brilliant success as a _pastiche_; but it was a _pastiche_ and not quite the real thing, as cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of epigram here and there, which indeed makes it delightful reading. He followed it by another in the comic vein, _The Tale of the Pope and his Man Balda_, and by two more _Märchen_, _The Dead Tsaritsa_ and _The Golden Cock_; but it was not until two years later that he wrote his masterpiece in this vein, _The Story of the Fisherman and the Fish_. It is the same story as Grimm's tale of the Fisherman's wife who wished to be King, Emperor, and then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting ambition. The tale is written in unrhymed rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines; all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such as might have been handed down by oral tradition in some obscure village out of the remotest past; it has the real _Volkston_; the good-nature and simplicity and unobtrusive humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects of all these stories were told to Pushkin by his nurse, Anna Rodionovna, who also furnished him with the subject of his ballad, _The Bridegroom_. In Pushkin's note-books there are seven fairy-tales taken down hurriedly from the words of his nurse; and most likely all that he wrote dealing with the life of the people came from the same source. Pushkin called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, and said that he was indebted to her for counteracting the effects of his first French education.

In 1833 he finished a poem called _The Brazen Horseman_, the story of a man who loses his beloved in the great floods in St. Petersburg in 1834, and going mad, imagines that he is pursued by Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains a magnificent description of St. Petersburg. During the last years of his life, he was engaged in collecting materials for a history of Peter the Great. His power of production had never run dry from the moment he left school, although his actual work was interrupted from time to time by distractions and the society of his friends.

All the important larger works of Pushkin have now been mentioned; but during the whole course of his career he was always pouring out a stream of lyrics and occasional pieces, many of which are among the most beautiful things he wrote. His variety and the width of his range are astonishing. Some of them have a grace and perfection such as we find in the Greek anthology; others--"Recollections," for instance, in which in the sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pass before him the blotted scroll of his past deeds, which he is powerless with all the tears in the world to wash out--have the intensity of Shakespeare's sonnets. This poem, for instance, has the same depth of feeling as "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry," or "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Or he will write an elegy as tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture of a sledge in a snow-storm, and give you the plunge of the bewildered horses, the whirling demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the quiet spaces of snow, in intoxicating rhythms which E. A. Poe would have envied; or again he will write a description of the Caucasus in eleven short lines, close in expression and vast in suggestion, such as "The Monastery on Kazbek"; or he will bring before you the smell of the autumn morning, and the hoofs ringing out on the half-frozen earth; or he will write a patriotic poem, such as _To the Slanderers of Russia_, fraught with patriotic indignation without being offensive; in this poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of Russia: "Will not," he says, "from Perm to the Caucasus, from Finland's chill rocks to the flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to the unshaken walls of China, glistening with its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise?" Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance and as humble in spirit as one of the old Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as Musset and as playful as Heine: he will translate you the spirit of Horace and the spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure the restraint of André Chénier, and the impetuous gallop of Byron.

Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin's poems is the poem which expresses his view of life in the elegy--

"As bitter as stale aftermath of wine Is the remembrance of delirious days; But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs The past more sorely, as my days decline. My path is dark. The future lies in wait, A gathering ocean of anxiety, But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create, That is my prayer; to live and not to die! I know that ecstasy shall still lie there In sorrow and adversity and care. Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine, Be moved to tears by musings that are mine; And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."

But the greatest of his short poems is probably "The Prophet." This is a tremendous poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin only attained once. It is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression; the syllables ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a silver clarion. It is, as it were, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language. Nothing finer as sound could ever be compounded with Russian vowels and consonants; nothing could be more perfectly planned, or present, in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the imagination. Even a rough prose translation will give some idea of the imaginative splendour of the poem--

"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the crossing of the ways: And he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips, the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and the voice of God called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and go forth over the sea and over the land and set light with My word to the hearts of the people.'"

In 1837 came the catastrophe which brought about Pushkin's death. It was caused by the clash of evil tongues engaged in frivolous gossip, and Pushkin's own susceptible and violent temperament. A guardsman, Heckeren-Dantes, had been flirting with his wife. Pushkin received an anonymous letter, and being wrongly convinced that Heckeren-Dantes was the author of it, wrote him a violent letter which made a duel inevitable. A duel was fought on the 27th of February, 1837, and Pushkin was mortally wounded. Such was his frenzy of rage that, after lying wounded and unconscious in the snow, on regaining consciousness, he insisted on going on with the duel, and fired another shot, giving a great cry of joy when he saw that he had wounded his adversary. It was only a slight wound in the hand. It was not until he reached home that his anger passed away. He died on the 29th of February, after forty-five hours of excruciating suffering, heroically borne; he forgave his enemies; he wished no one to avenge him; he received the last sacraments; and he expressed feelings of loyalty and gratitude to his sovereign. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old.

Pushkin's career falls naturally into two divisions: his life until he was thirty, and his life after he was thirty. Pushkin began his career with liberal aspirations, and he disappointed some in the loyalty to the throne, the Church, the autocracy, and the established order of things which he manifested later; in turning to religion; in remaining in the Government service; in writing patriotic poems; in holding the position of Gentleman of the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in fact, what is called a reactionary. But it would be a mistake to imagine that Pushkin was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause of liberty for a handful of silver and a riband to stick in his coat. The liberal aspirations of Pushkin's youth were the very air that the whole of the aristocratic youth of that day breathed. Pushkin could not escape being influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel then, than he was a reactionary afterwards, when again the very air which the whole of educated society breathed was conservative and nationalistic. It may be a pity that it was so; but so it was. There was no liberal atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and the radical effervescence of the Decembrists was destroyed by the Decembrists' premature action. It is no good making a revolution if you have nothing to make it with. The Decembrists were in the same position as the educated élite of one regiment at Versailles would have been, had it attempted to destroy the French monarchy in the days of Louis XIV. The Decembrists by their premature action put the clock of Russian political progress back for years. The result was that men of impulse, aspiration, talent and originality had in the reign of Nicholas to seek an outlet for their feelings elsewhere than in politics, because politics then were simply non-existent.

But apart from this, even if the opportunities had been there, it may be doubted whether Pushkin would have taken them. He was not born with a passion to reform the world. He was neither a rebel nor a reformer; neither a liberal nor a conservative; he was a democrat in his love for the whole of the Russian people; he was a patriot in his love of his country. He resembled Goethe rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or Byron; although, in his love of his country and in every other respect, his fiery temperament both in itself and in its expression was far removed from Goethe's Olympian calm. He was like Goethe in his attitude towards society, and the attitude of the social and official world towards him resembles the attitude of Weimar towards Goethe.

During the first part of his career he gave himself up to pleasure, passion, and self-indulgence; after he was thirty he turned his mind to more serious things. It would not be exact to say he _became_ deeply religious, because he was religious by nature, and he soon discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism; but in spite of this he was a victim of _amour-propre_; and he wavered between contempt of the society around him and a petty resentment against it which took the shape of scathing and sometimes cruel epigrams. It was this dangerous _amour-propre_, the fact of his being not only passion's slave, but petty passion's slave, which made him a victim of frivolous gossip and led to the final catastrophe.

"In Pushkin," says Soloviev, the philosopher, "according to his own testimony there were two different and separate beings: the inspired priest of Apollo, and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children of the world." It was the first Pushkin--the inspired priest--who predominated in the latter part of his life; but who was unable to expel altogether the second Pushkin, the frivolous _Weltkind_, who was prone to be exasperated by the society in which he lived, and when exasperated was dangerous. There is one fact, however, which accounts for much. The more serious Pushkin's turn of thought grew, the more objective, purer, and stronger his work became, the less it was appreciated; for the public which delighted in the comparatively inferior work of his youth was not yet ready for his more mature work. What pleased the public were the dazzling colours, the sensuous and sometimes libidinous images of his early poems; the romantic atmosphere; especially anything that was artificial in them. They had not yet eyes to appreciate the noble lines, nor ears to appreciate the simpler and more majestic harmonies of his later work. Thus it was that they passed _Boris Godunov_ by, and were disappointed in the later cantos of _Onegin_. This was, of course, discouraging. Nevertheless, it is laughable to rank Pushkin amongst the misunderstood, among the Shelleys, the Millets, of Literature and Art; or to talk of his sad fate. To talk of him as one of the victims of literature is merely to depreciate him.

He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus, which gave him inspiration: to his own country home, which gave him leisure. He was censored. Yes: but the Emperor undertook to do the work himself. Had he lived in England, society--as was proved in the case of Byron--would have been a far severer censor of his morals and the extravagance of his youth, than the Russian Government. Besides which, he won instantaneous fame, and in the society in which he moved he was surrounded by a band not only of devoted but distinguished admirers, amongst whom were some of the highest names in Russian literature--Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol.

Pushkin is Russia's national poet, the Peter the Great of poetry, who out of foreign material created something new, national and Russian, and left imperishable models for future generations. The chief characteristic of his genius is its universality. There appeared to be nothing he could not understand nor assimilate. And it is just this all-embracing humanity--Dostoyevsky calls him +pananthrôpos+--this capacity for understanding everything and everybody, which makes him so profoundly Russian. He is a poet of everyday life: a realistic poet, and above all things a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as an epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief and produce a noble fragment, he cannot set crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians the beauty of their landscape and the poetry of their people; and they, with ears full of pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and romantic stage properties, did not understand what he was doing: but they understood later. For a time he fought against the stream, and all in vain; and then he gave himself up to the great current, which took him all too soon to the open sea.

He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional; and all his life he was still learning to become more and more intimate with the savour and smell of the people's language. Like Peter the Great, he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and his whole energies in craftsmanship. He was a great artist; his style is perspicuous, plastic, and pure; there is never a blurred outline, never a smear, never a halting phrase or a hesitating note. His concrete images are, as it were, transparent, like Donne's description of the woman whose

"... pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought, That you might almost think her body thought."

His diction is the inseparable skin of the thought. You seem to hear him thinking. He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated spontaneity. His soul was sincere, noble, and open; he was frivolous, a child of the world and of his century; but if he was worldly, he was human; he was a citizen as well as a child of the world; and it is that which makes him the greatest of Russian poets.

His career was unromantic; he was rooted to the earth; an aristocrat by birth, an official by profession, a lover of society by taste. At the same time, he sought and served beauty, strenuously and faithfully; he was perhaps too faithful a servant of Apollo; too exclusive a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find none of the piteous cries, no beauty of soaring and bleeding wings as in Shelley, nor the sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no tempest of defiant challenge, no lightnings of divine derision, as in Byron; his is neither the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that "brave soldier in the war of the liberation of humanity," nor the agonized passion of a suffering Catullus. He never descended into Hell. Every great man is either an artist or a fighter; and often poets of genius, Byron and Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently fighters than they are artists. Pushkin was an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what makes even his love-poems cold in comparison with those of other poets. Although he was the first to make notable what was called the romantic movement; and although at the beginning of his career he handled romantic subjects in a more or less romantic way, he was fundamentally a classicist--a classicist as much in the common-sense and realism and solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form. And he soon cast aside even the vehicles and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively followed reality. "He strove with none, for none was worth his strife." And when his artistic ideals were misunderstood and depreciated, he retired into himself and wrote to please himself only; but in the inner court of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired he created imperishable things; for he loved nature, he loved art, he loved his country, and he expressed that love in matchless song.

For years, Russian criticism was either neglectful of his work or unjust towards it; for his serene music and harmonious design left the generations which came after him, who were tossed on a tempest of social problems and political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin's memorial at Moscow, the homage which he paid to the dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of the whole of Russia. His work is beyond the reach of critics, whether favourable or unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of his countrymen, and chiefly upon the lips of the young.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Not 1763, as generally stated in his biographies.

[3] The poem was originally called _Mazepa_: Pushkin changed the title so as not to clash with Byron. It is interesting to see what Pushkin says of Byron's poem. In his notes there is the following passage--

"Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire's history of Charles XII. He was struck solely by the picture of a man bound to a wild horse and borne over the steppes. A poetical picture of course; but see what he did with it. What a living creation! What a broad brush! But do not expect to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual gloomy Byronic hero. Byron was not thinking of him. He presented a series of pictures, one more striking than the other. Had his pen come across the story of the seduced daughter and the father's execution, it is improbable that anyone else would have dared to touch the subject."