Married Life, 1831–6
To the Slanderers of Russia (1831)
This ode was written during the Polish revolt of 1830–31 against Russian rule. It is addressed to the liberal members of the French Chamber of Deputies and all those in the Western and American press, and in liberal circles in Russia itself, who were vociferously condemning the uncompromising Russian military action that would result in high casualties on both sides. The poem made Pushkin unpopular in liberal circles in Russia for what was seen as his uncritical pro-government stance, especially by those who didn’t believe he really meant it but was toadying to Tsar Nicholas I for his own advantage. However, he was actually completely sincere (see below).
The original is in hexameters and tetrameters.
3 the Lithuanian state: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map in 1795, and a sovereign Polish state ceased to exist until 1918. Pushkin is referring to Poland partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria.
6 An old domestic difference: In a letter to Prince Vyazemsky (1 June 1831) at the height of the revolt, Pushkin referred to Russian suppression of it as a ‘family affair, an age-old, hereditary quarrel’, and no concern of other peoples ‘to bark and bellow about’.
8–16 War among these people […] The bloody chronicle: During the Time of Troubles following the death of Boris Godunov in 1605, the Poles had held Moscow and a number of western Russian cities before they were thrown back and Mikhail Romanov was elected tsar in 1613. In the seventeenth century, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been for a time the most powerful polity in Europe; the last quarter of the eighteenth century had seen war between the two countries and Russia had taken part in the three Partitions of Poland.
19 Praga: An eastern suburb of Warsaw, the scene of a rising in 1794 which saw heavy fighting and the deaths of many civilians.
23–6 our capital / In flames […] You could only tremble: Reference is not only to Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 but also to events of two hundred years earlier (see note to lines 8–16).
32 the Bogatyr: Warrior-champion of Russian legend, here a personification of Russia.
33 his old Ismailian bayonet: Reference to Aleksandr Suvorov’s capture of the Turkish fortress of Ismail in 1790.
37 Perm to Tauris: Perm is a city at the foot of the Ural Mountains, a traditional boundary between Europe and Asia. Tauris is the name given to Crimea in Classical Antiquity.
38 Colchis: Graeco-Roman name of a polity on the south-eastern coast of the Black Sea – one of the hottest regions in the Russian Empire.
My Pedigree (1831)
This indignant poem raises a personal gripe to satirical socio-political comment – somewhat stretched at times, but broadly in accordance with most of the known facts about the poet’s ancestors. In August 1830 an inveterate enemy of Pushkin, the journalist and government spy Faddey Bulgarin, who popularised the authoritarian policies of Alexander I and Nicholas I (see Introduction under ‘Life’), published a satirical letter referring to Pushkin’s mother as a ‘Mulatto’. Always intensely conscious of his identifiable lineage going back to the early seventeenth century, Pushkin found the term highly insulting and might well have called out his antagonist had he seen him as a social equal. Instead, he wrote this poem. He regarded the newly ennobled as upstarts, and he was proud to see himself as a genuine self-made bourgeois, not relying on his superior family history on both sides. (Information on Pushkin’s ancestors given in the following notes is mostly from Wachtel, pp. 220–23.)
First published in full in Annenkov, 1857.
2 burst out laughing: Reflecting Pushkin’s own response to the spectacle of a poet known for his pride in forebears of mid-ranking nobility but who himself neither dressed, behaved nor lived like an aristocrat.
5 assessor. ‘Collegiate Assessor’ was the eighth in the Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great, at which level hereditary nobility began to be conferred.
21–2 Desert […] Austrian cavalry: The ‘deserter’ from the Austrian cavalry was the grandfather of General P. A. Kleinmikhel (1793–1869), a favourite of Nicholas I.
25 My forebear Racha: A Prussian émigré nobleman who arrived in Russia in the thirteenth century.
26 Alexander Nevsky: A celebrated early Russian ruler (1221–63) whose defeat of invading German and Estonian armies on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242 was a turning point in Russian history; he was canonised in 1547.
27–8 Ivan […] his descendants: Some of these served in the Oprichnina, the much-feared repressive special army of the first tsar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547–84).
30–32 More than one of them won glory […] Nizhny-Novgorodian. The only one of these Pushkins to be historically identified is the patriot Gavrila Pushkin, comrade in arms of the Nizhny-Novgorodian Kuzma Minin, who drove the Poles out of the country in 1612; he features as a younger character and a political opportunist in Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov (1825).
37 We Pushkins signed: Some half-dozen Pushkins (two of whom, according to Pushkin, simply made their marks as illiterates) are recorded among the signatories of the election document which established the Romanov Dynasty in 1613. the martyr’s son: The first Romanov tsar, Mikhail (r. 1613–45), whose father was imprisoned by successively Boris Godunov and the Poles occupying Russia (see note to lines 8–16 of ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, 1831).
41–4 Stubbornness […] executed him: A Fyodor Pushkin was executed by Peter the Great for conspiracy in 1697.
47 Dolgoruky: Yakov F. Dolgoruky (1639–1720), of an illustrious family claiming descent from Rurik, founder of the first Russian state; a friend and associate of Peter the Great. Legendary for his boldness, he once publicly tore up an edict issued by Peter, who tolerated the act.
49–54 My grandfather […] in solitary: Lev A. Pushkin (1723–90) was Pushkin’s maternal grandfather, an artillery officer. After the palace coup of 1762 which deposed Peter III, he was in fact sentenced only to house arrest for two years, and for a non-political offence.
53 the Orlovs: Grigory Orlov was a lover of Catherine the Great and leader of the coup which installed her as empress.
62 Musin: The Musin-Pushkin branch of the family retained their wealth and standing.
post scriptum: Written a few months later than the rest of the poem.
65 Fiddlyarin: Pushkin uses a current nickname for Faddey Bulgarin based on the word figlyar, meaning ‘charlatan’ or ‘trickster’.
66–8 Claims my black forebear Hannibal / Passed […] some old salt: The anecdote was maliciously made up by Bulgarin.
69 that great captain: Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725).
73 my great-grandfather: Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696?–1781). See Introduction under ‘Life’.
77–9 that Gannibal […] Navarino’s fall: Pushkin’s great-uncle Ivan Gannibal (1735–1801), a naval officer and hero of the decisive battle of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 that saw the capture of the Turkish fort of Navarino (now Pylos in Greece).
84 Bourgeois Street: Meshchanskaya (meaning ‘bourgeois’) Street, famous for its brothels.
For the Album of Princess Anna Abamelek (1832)
Pushkin first saw the addressee, of the renowned Lazarev family, founders of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, Moscow, as an adorable child when he was a schoolboy. Later he knew her as a gifted young beauty fluent in English, French and German, who wrote poetry and translated some of his poems into French and English (Ketchian, pp. 130–31).
The original is in iambic tetrameters; this translation retains the rhyme scheme. First published in 1840.
2 made a fuss of: Pushkin makes a verb, nyanchit’, from the noun nyanka (nanny) and the latter word appears in the last line of the original (l. 6 of the translation), and in the middle of the poem (l. 4 in the translation) he echoes its sound in one of the commonest of words, nyne, ‘now’.
The Beauty (1832)
Inscribed in the album of Countess Yelena Za
vadovskaya, whose marmoreal beauty is identified with ‘the Cleopatra of the Neva’ in Eugene Onegin (VIII.16). This poem departs from the album convention of a direct addressee, being a meditation on the qualities of the subject.
The original consists of two eight-line stanzas of iambic tetrameters.
Autumn (A fragment) (1833)
This poem was written on the family estate of Boldino in one of Pushkin’s famously creative autumns. Here he puts ottava rima to more serious use than in the narrative poem A Little House in Kolomna (1830); in the original the present poem is in hexameters, the earlier being in the lighter pentameter metre. In ‘Autumn’, formal and informal language and tone are perfectly blended. In content the poem would appear to be satisfyingly finished, but the last, uncompleted line carries a strong dose of doubt and wistfulness about the poet’s personal future and fate.
First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.
Epigraph: Taken from Gavrila Derzhavin’s poem about life in the countryside, ‘To Eugene: Life at Zvanka’ (1807).
7 the winter crops: Planted in the autumn and in the first stages of growth below the surface of the earth through the winter.
23 Armidas: Decorously literary use of the name of the beautiful sorceress Armida in La Gerusalemme liberata (‘Jerusalem Delivered’, 1591) by Torquato Tasso (1544–95).
31 fruit liqueur and blinis: Served at the Russian Shrovetide festival marking the end of winter.
43 In a consumptive girl: Pushkin borrows an image from a poem by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69) from the collection Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) that had caused critical controversy in Paris in 1829; in a review of Sainte-Beuve’s poetry published in 1831, he had quoted some words of medical content: ‘his muse coughs up blood’.
80–81 Between stanzas X and XI, Pushkin drafted an extra one listing an abundance of his past ‘fancy’s fruits’ – steel-clad knights, gloomy sultans, corsairs, dwarves, bogatyrs (warrior-champions), captive princesses, ‘sleek-templed, bare-shouldered beauties’ – that he excluded from the final poem.
85–8 So a ship sleeps […] cuts the waves: These four lines seem to distil a long passage describing a ship’s crew setting sail in Sainte-Beuve’s poem ‘Le Calme’ (1829), which Pushkin knew.
89 She sails. But where are we to sail? …: In rough draft, Pushkin began this last stanza with six lines listing prospective (all landbound) places to visit: the Caucasus, ‘the burning Moldavian plains’, Scotland, Switzerland, ‘the brilliant snows of Normandy’. It is easy to imagine Pushkin’s geographical and cultural yearnings, prevented as he was all his life from visiting foreign countries. This last line might be taken on a deeper symbolic level, as expressing his frustration and despair at the limitations imposed on citizens’ lives in Russia (see also note to lines 3 and 5 of ‘The Prisoner’, 1822).
‘It’s time, my love, it’s time’ (1834)
Pushkin wrote these lines, taken to be addressed to his wife, at a time of deep frustration after not being allowed to resign from his humiliating court post and live permanently in the country and write. They are only the beginning of what was first intended as a longer poem; on his manuscript page Pushkin left a plan, never realised, for a continuation on ‘moving to the country – fields, garden, peasants, books; work on poetry – family, love etc. – religion, death’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 733, note). The eight lines he wrote, elevated but spontaneous alexandrine couplets, are among his best-loved poems. He treated the context and themes of ‘religion, death’ two years later in the Stone Island cycle.
First published in 1886.
6 Long have I dreamt of Eden: Here Pushkin has a whole line which reads literally: ‘Long have I dreamt of an enviable lot –’. The rest of the translation closely follows Pushkin’s words and word order.
[From Anacreon:] A fragment (1835)
Pushkin translated this and two other poems by the ancient Greek lyric poet Anacreon, through an unknown translation, on the same day, 6 January 1835, intending to incorporate them in a prose piece on ‘Roman life’ he never completed. Like Lomonosov and Derzhavin before him, he renders Anacreon in rhyme, here in trochaic ottava rima tetrameter.
First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.
4 klobuk: A tall flat-topped hat, familiar as the headgear of Russian Orthodox priests.
‘… I see again / That corner of the earth’ (1835)
Written at Mikhaylovskoye in the penultimate autumn of Pushkin’s life, nine years after his two-year exile on the estate. The previous day, 25 September 1835, he had written to his wife describing his return there and finding that a new generation of pine-trees had sprouted up beside the familiar time-honoured ones, giving him the same feeling of irritation he experienced at the sight of young guards officers at balls where he no longer danced. In this poem written on the following day, he shed his irritation to produce a meditative poem in the mode of Wordsworth; he had recently sampled The Excursion (1814) in English. True to his classical temperament, he cut lengthy draft passages on his younger self expressing feelings of persecution and alienation.
This poem reflects Pushkin’s interest in lyrical use of blank verse in his final years as he came to see rhyme as being among the superfluous ‘embellishments’ and ‘artificiality’ of contemporary verse when the stylistic ideal he now sought was the bare directness of the poets of Classical Antiquity.
First published in The Contemporary, 1837.
‘The ready power of suffering’ (1835)
Pushkin began this poem in 1831, and by the time he completed it in 1835 its subject may have changed. The emotional situation, the return of the experience of love, is reminiscent of ‘To ***’ (1825), and one draft reuses the second line of that poem, ‘You passed before my eyes’. However, this later poem has no addressee direct or implied.
The original is in iambic tetrameters. First published in Annenkov, 1855.
The Stone Island Cycle
The following six poems have come to be seen as constituting the ‘Stone Island cycle’, though the case for including the last in the group is controversial and in this book the set will be taken to exclude it. The six poems were all written between 5 June and 21 August 1836 on a family holiday on Kamenny Ostrov (Stone Island) near St Petersburg in Pushkin’s last summer, a time of great personal stress for him. In the five-poem cycle Pushkin chooses various settings and personae in a poetically parodic way which frees him to express his own thoughts and values without being held to account for them. The three central poems of this group have come to be thought of as constituting an inner cycle, an ‘Easter Triptych’, in which Pushkin makes metaphorical use of the Gospel story to reflect upon the meaning of his own life, his poetic calling and his future death.
Pushkin made no attempt to have any of these poems published, and their full meaning first began to emerge only in the 1950s. The poet’s numbering of four of them to indicate their sequence is ambiguous, and the pattern has had to be pieced together from the evidence, by Alyssa Dinega Gillespie and others (Gillespie, pp. 39–83). Gillespie’s bold and original reading of the cycle is a good example of what modern criticism can find in Pushkin, aided by the record of his life, and informs these notes throughout. Bracketed numerals before individual poem titles given below indicate Gillespie’s suggested sequence.
Whether or not Pushkin came to hold Christian belief has been debated. Gillespie cites two balanced views: (1) that he was never a truly ‘Christian poet’ but remained poised in a ‘half-pagan, half-Christian obeisance to beauty and creation, human and divine’; and (2) that the ‘divine Providence’ he worshipped in his late poems ‘merges with the poetic gift whose call Pushkin had always heeded – the poetic gift that was itself his fate, bestowed upon him from heaven’ (Irina Surat and Sergei Davydov, cited in Gillespie, p. 41).
In the originals, the five poems of the Stone Island cycle are all in hexameter alexandrine couplets, Pushkin’s habitual metre for the philosophical mode. The present translatio
ns of three poems keep the original rhymed metre but in pentameters. The more flexible medium of blank verse pentameters was chosen for the translations of the complex content of the poems ‘Imitation of the Italian’ and ‘Secular Power’.
‘From Pindemonte’ and ‘When, alone with my thoughts’ were first published in Annenkov, 1855; ‘The desert fathers and unblemished women’ in The Contemporary, 1837; ‘Imitation of the Italian’ and ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’ in Zhukovsky, 1841; and ‘Secular Power’ in full in Herzen, 1856.
Gillespie (p. 72) offers this analysis of the structure of the Stone Island cycle:
At the two far edges of the cycle, poems 1 (‘From Pindemonte’) and 5 (‘When, alone with my thoughts …’) reject public existence and publicly audible speech in favour of privacy, silence and peace; while poems 2 (‘The desert fathers …’) and 4 (‘Secular Power’) express Pushkin’s simultaneous reverence for Christianity and reluctance to make himself over in Christ’s image – he prefers to maintain his pride and independence even at the possible cost of his own salvation. […] This overview indicates that the architectural design of the Stone Island cycle is best thought of as cruciform rather than either linear (as interpretations that foreground the Christian calendar suggest) or circular. Thus, we can think of the above two pairs of poems as two separate axes of the cycle: poems 1 and 5 consider the problem of public vs. private identity from a secular point of view and span the emotional distance between umileniye (tender emotion) and unyniye (despondency), between fantasy and oblivion; poem 1 begins with a rejection of social striving and ends in solitary fantasy and ecstasy before the beauties of art and nature, while poem 5 surveys the futility of life before going on to posit a less dark vision of posthumous oblivion. Poems 2 and 4 consider the same problem of public vs. private identity from a religious point of view, ranging in response from humility to anger, submission to resistance. All four of the cycle’s outer lyrics contemplate death and position the poet as a reader, an imitator, or a ventriloquist as a means to self-preservation of sorts.
Selected Poetry (Penguin) Page 27