The seething core lyric of the Stone Island cycle, poem 3, ‘Imitation of the Italian’, which retells the story of Judas’s suicide and entry into hell following his betrayal of Christ, constitutes the intersection of the cycle’s two separate axes – the point at which all its varied moods and ideas converge. Here, secular and spiritual allegiances and motivations overlap, in a turbulent admixture of despair and love, pride and humiliation. Judas, who doubles as disciple and traitor, is reminiscent of Pushkin’s ventriloquistic role-playing in the other poems of the cycle: in poem 1 as the poet Pindemonte conflated with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in 2 as Ephraim the Syrian, in 4 as Jesus, and in 5 as the poet Thomas Gray mediated through Vasily Zhukhovsky’s translation of the ‘Elegy written in a Country Church-yard’.
[1] From Pindemonte (1836)
The title of this first poem of the Stone Island cycle is a stratagem to lull the censor, though the name of the Italian Romantic poet Ippolito Pindemonte (1753–1828) looks to have been chosen for the resemblance of his work to that of Thomas Gray (see note to poem 5, ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’). Pushkin has written an original poem.
9 words, words, words: Hamlet is a crucial intertext, this quotation marking out the private, inviolate world upon which the poet/poem insists, a defence for survival against the harsh real world of state coercion in which Pushkin lived. The mood returns in the cycle’s concluding poem 5.
[2] ‘The desert fathers and unblemished women’ (1836)
In this opening poem of the ‘Easter Triptych’, Pushkin tries on the mask of the fourth-century Saint Ephraim the Syrian, introducing (in the first seven lines in translation) and then presenting (in the last seven lines) the latter’s well-known Lenten prayer in his own modernised wording. But he slips in significant changes from its original text. In the second line of the prayer (line 9 of the poem in translation), he adds the words ‘That hidden serpent’ to introduce ‘lust for authority’, jarringly conjuring up the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In line 11 (in translation) he omits the words ‘your servant’ after ‘let me’. In lines 13 and 14 he changes Saint Ephraim’s order of desirable attributes, placing self-warning ‘chastity’ in emphatic last place instead of ‘love’. Much as he values the qualities set out in the prayer, Pushkin cannot suppress his true spirit – not one of humility but of firm earthly desires.
[3] Imitation of the Italian (1836)
This central poem of the ‘Easter Triptych’, a demonic parody of Judas’s betrayal and entry into hell and Christ’s Resurrection, is a condensed and transformative ten-line version of a sonnet on Judas by Francesco Gianni (1760–1822) that Pushkin read in a French translation published in 1835. Gillespie sees Pushkin’s treatment of Judas as audaciously involving his own preoccupations, ‘questions of poetic responsibility, the ethics of the poetic calling […]’ (Gillespie, p. 75). She goes on to observe (p. 76):
There are two possible ways in which Judas can be viewed in this poem. On the one hand, he is a traitor and speculator who sells out to the secular authorities; on the other hand, he is the artist of his own fate who accepts full responsibility for his deeds. This ambiguity lies at the heart of Pushkin’s cycle and of Pushkin’s interrogation of his own poetic actions; it also captures his ambivalent discomfort and guilty admiration of the Decembrist rebels’ self-sacrifice […] in which he himself did not share. The nagging question implicit throughout the Stone Island cycle is whether, given the limitations of Pushkin’s current situation, his strategy of ambitious imitation is a valid and honourable mode of poetic self-expression – a legitimate means of veiled protest – or the equivalent of surrender to the powers that be, the damning equivalent of complicity, obedience, betrayal?
1 dropped down from his tree: Three of the five Decembrists hanged in July 1826 had to be hanged again. Their ropes were rumoured to have broken. (See Introduction under ‘Life’ on the Decembrist uprising.)
[4] Secular Power (1836)
The setting of this third poem of the ‘Easter Triptych’ was prompted by an incident that had taken place on the latest Good Friday in St Petersburg; an image of Christ taken down from the Cross had been exhibited in Kazan Cathedral, but strictly guarded from the public by armed sentries.
Against a summary, in exalted language, of the events of the Crucifixion, with the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene standing in mourning at the foot of the Cross (lines 1–6) comes the shocking actuality of the armed sentries preventing the people’s access to the holy image (lines 7–10). Then, in what David M. Bethea has called ‘as close as Pushkin’s normally subtle and understated pen can come to an Old Testament Jeremiad’ (Bethea, p. 156), a scornful voice ridicules those who have assumed unwarranted power over a higher, spiritual authority.
3 the life-giving tree: Gillespie (pp. 67 and 72) points out that Pushkin’s word drevo (a tree or structure made of wood) links this poem, in an associative way characteristic of this poem cycle, with the cycle’s core, poem 3, ‘Imitation of the Italian’: in line 1 of that poem the same word refers to the tree from which Judas hanged himself, and here in ‘Secular Power’ to the Cross. The word thus can refer to both an instrument of torture and a source of ‘eternal life’, Pushkin seeing his own position as poet-martyr and poet-prophet.
5 Stood […] two […] women: Pushkin originally wrote: ‘Stood, pale, two weak women’ but deleted the adjectives without further amendment and not intending a hemistich.
[5] ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’ (1836)
Vasily Zhukovsky’s translation (1802) of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) set a popular trend in Russian poetry. But Pushkin’s poem has a personal weight beyond that tradition. It was written four months after he attended his mother’s funeral and selected his own burial place next to hers. Pushkin’s anguished antipathy to the social life of the capital fuels the first section of the poem, which breaks off before continuing in the elegiac mode and ending in the Romantic fragmentary manner.
27 A broad oak stands: Throughout Pushkin’s poetry an ancient tree or trees represent/s security, venerable durability and freedom; examples in this book are the ‘spacious, singing groves’ in ‘The Poet’ (1827), the ‘palm on Zion’ (line 11) in ‘Madonna’ (1830), the lone oak on the island of Buyan in The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1830), and the ‘Three pine-trees’ (line 27) in ‘… I see again’ (1835).
‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’ (1836)
A parody of Gavrila Derzhavin’s translation of the last poem of Horace’s third book of Odes, which provided Pushkin with a metrical model. Some authoritative opinion places it as the final poem in the Stone Island cycle (see the above headnote on the cycle). Pushkin follows Derzhavin’s alternately rhyming alexandrines but shortens the final line of each stanza, making his poem more informal and personal than Derzhavin’s; this metre is kept in the present translation. Pushkin retains only a few isolated phrases from Derzhavin. He enumerates not only his own achievements but also their national significance, and instead of a grand ode in praise of the Russian Empire he represents it by naming some of its most humble outlying peoples.
Epigraph: Exegi monumentum: The first two words of Horace’s poem, to be followed by ‘aere perennius’, its whole first line translating as: ‘I have made a monument more durable than bronze.’
1 not with hands: Echoing Mark 14:58: ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands […] I will build another made without hands.’ Pushkin uses the word nerukotvornyy (‘not made by [human] hands’), from the recent Russian Synodal translation of the New Testament (for more on Russian literary use of this word, see Wachtel, p. 355).
2 The people’s path to it will not be overgrown: Not because it will be worn bare by use but because it will be spiritual not physical.
4 Alexander’s Column: The Alexander Column in Palace Square, the tallest structure in St Petersburg, was built between 1830 and 1834 in commemoration of Alexander I and victory ove
r Napoleon in 1812. Pushkin left the capital to avoid attending the unveiling ceremonies in 1834 (Wachtel, p. 356).
11 Kalmuck of the steppes: A Mongol subgroup in Russia who migrated from north-west China to the north Caucasus in the seventeenth century.
12 Tungùs: An ethnolinguistic group native to Siberia and North-East Asia.
13–16 Long will […] lenience: These lines contain generalised references to Pushkin’s early political poems, including ‘Liberty: An Ode’ (1817) and ‘To Chaadayev’ (1818).
II
NARRATIVE POEMS (POEMY)
The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1823)
Epigraph: Saadi: Saadi of Shiraz (1210–91), one of the great Persian poets.
2 The amber: A hookah made of amber.
21–2 Issue his edicts to the Pole […] blood: Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was constant cross-border conflict between Poles and Crimean Tatars on the southern edge of the Russian Empire.
25 treacherous Genoa’s machinations: An anachronism on Pushkin’s part; these belonged to an earlier historical period – by the time of the tale, set in the eighteenth century, Genoese settlements in the Crimea had proceeded more peaceably.
32 giaour: A Turkish word applied to non-Muslims. Byron uses the term as a title for one of his eastern tales (The Giaour, 1813).
242 To the most merciful divine …: A line left unrhymed by Pushkin. The continuous dotted lines that follow on the next two lines and elsewhere (not included in the line numbering) are Pushkin’s – his touch of Romantic mystery, a unique feature of this poem.
245–50 I hear the song […] gentle light: Pushkin’s relish in the Crimean landscape he glimpsed on his way to southern exile in 1820 surfaces here, as again in the conclusion to the poem.
299–301 holy symbol of the cross […] Is native to your very soul: See lines 392–4.
418 Mariya’s time had come below: i.e. in the mortal world below heaven.
420 To peace eternal she was called: As one reviewer perceptively pointed out on first publication: ‘If [Pushkin] had given us the shy beauty under the dagger of the frenzied Georgian, he would have destroyed our enjoyment of the whole poem. Indignation would have driven out all other feelings aroused by it’ (Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland), 16 March 1824; in Vatsuro and Fomichev, p. 211).
529 Salgir: The longest river in the Crimean peninsula, flowing into the Sea of Azov near Simferopol.
546 Ayu-Dag: A historic Crimean summit, a laccolith, near Yalta, which Pushkin would have seen from the Tatar village of Gurzuf on the Black Sea coast on his way south a year before starting to write this poem.
The Gypsies (1824)
2 Bessarabia: Successively colonised by the Greeks, Romans, Genoese and Ottomans, this territory bordering the north-west of the Black Sea – today divided between Moldova, Ukraine and Romania – was ceded to Russia in 1812 on the conclusion of the second of the many Russo-Turkish wars.
41 the mound: Ancient burial mounds (kurgàny; singular: kurgan) are found in large numbers on the southern Russian steppes. They have nothing to do with the humbler and more modern graves that also feature in the poem.
46 Aleko is his name: Also a form of Pushkin’s given name. Pronounced Alyèko.
64 couch of bliss: Pushkin’s diction here, ‘lòzhe nyègi’, as also occasionally elsewhere in the poem, was thought too archaically poetic by some contemporary critics. But Pushkin may be characterising the philosophical old man.
85–94 doleful […] abandoned […] melancholy […] oppressed […] obsessed […]: The narrative describing Aleko and his own utterances brings in a Byronic-Romantic stylistic register in marked contrast to the poem’s concrete realism up to this point.
95–110 God’s little bird knows neither […] Over the dark blue sea: Pushkin changes from iambic to trochaic tetrameter, his favourite ‘folk’ metre, which he uses in most of his fairy tales (skazki). This translation renders the contrast from iambic tetrameter in trochaic trimeter.
135–207 ZEMFIRA: Tell me, my love […] A smoke-filled tent for all his stage: Pushkin added this section, including the passage on Ovid in exile, after he had made a fair copy of what had at first been the whole poem including the epilogue.
166–9 I have heard tell, an emperor […] his strange name: The emperor Augustus banished Ovid, in his fifties, to Tomis on the western shore of the Black Sea, to the south of Bessarabia, apparently because of an unfortunate coincidence between Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and adultery scandals in the imperial family. The old man’s account of Ovid’s exile chimes with the latter’s own in the collection of elegiac verse Tristia (Sorrows), written during his exile (and which Pushkin had read in French translation three years earlier).
237 The old man warms in springtime sun: Having completed the poem, Pushkin drafted a passage to precede this line, including a thirty-nine-line diatribe against the ‘depravity of civilisation’, addressed by Aleko to his newborn son, but abandoned it in rough draft.
241–64 Old husband, dread husband […] Grizzled old fright!: The words and rhythm of Zemfira’s song are based on a Moldavian folksong. Pushkin’s words, along with much else from The Gypsies, feature in Bizet’s Carmen (see Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’).
273 the Kagul: A tributary of the Danube, to which a Russian victory on this river in 1770 paved the way for Russian entry.
348 the Moskàl: Pushkin uses the contemptuous Slavic, especially Polish, term for ‘Muscovite’.
350 Akkerman: Turkish fortress on the mouth of the Dniester; it became Russian at the beginning of the war of 1806–12 with Turkey.
351 the Budzhak plain: A large plain in the south of Bessarabia.
361 Maryula: Pushkin consistently has ‘Mariula’ (four syllables), but in the present translation it takes three forms – also Mariyule and Mariyula – to suit the metre, and as one varies the form of a loved person’s name.
447 and 450 I hate you, despise you […] die for my love: Here Pushkin’s verse has verbal echoes of Zemfira’s song; in this translation, metrical (anapaestic) echoes are added. The theme ‘I die loving’ is a stock-in-trade of early Russian Romantic verse, and concludes Pushkin’s poem ‘Desire’, written when he was seventeen.
472 Proud man: Pushkin first wrote ‘violent man’ (‘buynyy chelovyèk’). His amendment gets to the heart of the difference between Aleko and the gypsies.
473–6 We are untamed […] We cannot live with murderers: The old man’s argument has rigorous logic: gypsies have no laws, and so do not exact punishment; yet, wild and lawless though they are, they cannot accept murder or associate with murderers: it is law-based ‘civilisation’ that produces violence.
494 Trailing its wounded wing: One of Pushkin’s sketches of gypsy tents in his working notebook is rather suggestive of the shape of a trailing wing.
502–5 where war’s alarm […] Stamboul: See note to line 2 above.
522 worn and tattered tents: Pushkin repeats his adjective for ‘worn and tattered’ (iz(ò)drannye) from the opening of the poem, as he does the words for ‘noisy throng’ in lines 483–4 (‘roaming band […] in noisy flight’ in the present translation).
527 There is no refuge from the Fates: Pushkin’s friend Pyotr Vyazemsky found this concluding line ‘too Greek for its context. You would think that these words come from a chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy’, and he pointed to the contrasting ‘epigrammatic’ style of Zemfira’s expiry at line 450: ‘… die for my love …’ (Vatsuro and Fomichev, p. 322). However, it would seem to fit the meaning of the poem more closely than he saw (see Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’ for some questions it poses).
The Bridegroom (1825)
25–8 He glances […] thunderstruck: In these dynamic lines, Pushkin’s ratio of verbs to other parts of speech is almost 1:1, as compared with 1:3 in this translation.
117–20 I’d lost […] all I heard: Pushkin’s onomatopoeia is unmatchable in translation. No less than six s and six sh sounds
create the soughing of a dense wood: ‘S tropìnki sbìlas’ ya: v glushì / Nye slyshno bylo ni dushì, / I sosny lish’ da yeli / Vershìnami shumèli.’
137 clop clop clop: In one of his notes to Eugene Onegin, Pushkin defends his use of Russian words like top (for the sound of horses’ hooves) against reviewers’ objections, citing their use in Russian folk literature. ‘These are native Russian words,’ he writes. ‘One should not interfere with the freedom of our rich and beautiful language.’
143–4 and 151–2 Pushkin substantially repeats the final couplet of each of these stanzas with the rhyme-words golubìtsa, ‘pure creature’, and devìtsa, ‘maiden’, the last line of each stanza consisting of the weighty double noun ‘Krasàvitsa devìtsa’, ‘Beauty-maiden’.
167–8 The villain […] right hand: In the original, consecutive a, u and r sounds create a savage and sinister expression of the killer’s relish: ‘Zlodey devìtsu gùbit, / Yey pràvu rùku rùbit.’ The exact phrase ‘pravu ruku’, ‘right hand’, has already been heard in a subliminal pre-echo in line 150; it has had to be incompletely retained in the present translation, ‘on his right’.
Count Nulin (1825)
Selected Poetry (Penguin) Page 28