by Viv Groskop
An early brush with Pushkin had put me off even before I knew anything about him. Two years before the skinny-dipping incident and long before anyone had thought to name me Dearest Teeny Tiny Little VIP, I arrived at university to learn Russian, unable to speak a word of the language. This was normal. I was not supposed to know how to speak Russian at this point. I was learning ‘from scratch’ with dozens of other students. Most of us spoke at least two other languages and were used to traditional language teaching. We were expecting vocabulary lists and perhaps a bit of role play. Instead, the first lesson I ever had in Russian featured a video of a parrot squawking the tongue-twister-like words: Priatno poznakomit’sya! (‘Pleased to meet you!’) These words were difficult enough to repeat already, without trying to understand them spoken by a parrot.
I was perturbed by this teaching method. I did not want to learn how to speak like a parrot. I wanted to learn to speak like a Russian. Surely this was like teaching someone English and starting with ‘Pretty Polly’? To this day, I struggle to keep a straight face when I say, ‘Pleased to meet you’ to anyone in Russian, as I feel like squawking in their face, twitching my beak and shedding some feathers, just to show I’m getting it right.
A few weeks after we had graduated from the parrot video, though, we moved on to Pushkin. If I thought the parrot was a bad idea, this was an even worse one. It’s like giving someone a two-week course in English and then saying, ‘And now we’re going to read Othello.’ It’s fairly typical of the teaching of Russian, though. They like to throw you in at the deep end. And they like to make sure you remain completely intimidated by the language for as long as possible. That way, if you pass on to the other side and actually do learn to speak it, you’ll maintain the age-old myth that it’s difficult to learn and pass that on to other people so that the Russian speakers can remain in their own special and secret club. Having to read Pushkin several weeks into a ‘Russian from scratch’ course is a sort of hazing you never recover from. It is specially designed to make you want to haze others so that they will suffer as you have suffered. To quote Pushkin: ‘I want to understand you. I study your obscure language.’ Gulp.
What we were taught in the non-Pushkin lessons was not hugely practical as it was, and we were largely expected to pick up as much vocabulary as possible by ourselves. On one occasion, we had a word test and I scored one mark out of a possible fifty. For someone who had prided herself on her language skills at school, barely dropping a mark for years, this was horrific and shaming. (So much so that, when I was at school, people used to joke that if I got 99 per cent in an exam, it wasn’t because I had got any of the answers wrong, it was simply because I had spelled my own name wrong. Which, knowing my name, was entirely probable.) The one word I did get right, though, was the most important word on the test as far as I was concerned. I turned out to be the only person in the class who knew the word for ‘towel’. I continued to limit my learning to things I found useful or entertaining. Later, in one oral test, I told the examiners my Ukrainian boyfriend’s grandmother had told me I needed fattening up because I had an arse like a sparrow. If I could say things like this, I reasoned, what did I need Pushkin for?
The struggle, though, was deeply humiliating. All the rest of that first academic year of learning Russian, I felt like I was floundering. I never managed to finish the Pushkin poem we were reading (‘The Bronze Horseman’). And I ended the year with the worst results I’d ever had in any test, barely scraping a pass. The day I got the results I was back home at my parents’ house in Somerset. I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. But although I had been brought low, somewhere deep inside I knew I was never going to be defeated again. Looking back, I think my initial frustration with myself at failing to live up to the standards of this ambitious teaching method (‘Week One: learn two words of Russian parrot talk … Week Four: Pushkin’) was one of the reasons I later became obsessed with Russian and with learning it perfectly. That bloody parrot made me even more determined to be properly Russian.
When I initially encountered Eugene Onegin, then, I held it at one remove, still biased by the avian-influenced exam failure and convinced that this was just a stuffy story about aristocratic romance. For students of Russian who first encounter this novel, there’s a joke about the pronunciation: ‘You might need One Gin to get through it. Or you might need two.’ (Oh, how we laughed.) I turned to his work willingly much later, because I wanted more insight into this idea of the Russian soul. And it is widely recognized that Pushkin is the place to go looking for that. Not only is his work seen as the purest expression of the Russian language, he is seen as the person who expresses better than anyone else what it means to be Russian. Plus, to be honest, by avoiding Pushkin, you really are creating more work for yourself with Russians. They will expect you to know about him. And they will regard you as an enemy if you don’t.
The language of Pushkin is a truly wondrous thing and has no need of all the ‘Keep Out, Idiots!’ signs that academics seem to want to erect on this turf. What makes it so special? The same qualities Shakespeare has in English: a mastery of the language that feels rich and exciting; a mix of simple and original expressions that sound as fresh as when they were first written, centuries ago; and a sense of musicality. I like the themes of his work most of all, though: the tragedy of guilt in Boris Godunov, the dangers of greed in The Queen of Spades, the threat of hubris in Ruslan and Ludmila. The most attractive quality is the quiet beauty of his fatalism, which feels very Russian but somehow also very human and universal. From the 1821 poem, ‘I Have Outlasted All Desire’:
I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart,
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.
How could you write lines like this and not be a simply marvellous person?
I sometimes wonder if most of the reason a lot of people hold Russian literature in such awe is because of Pushkin. Seen from afar, his work can seem off-putting to anyone who isn’t an academic or a Russian specialist. Not least because he is widely regarded as completely untranslatable (something which, weirdly, no one seems to say about Shakespeare, who must be a total nightmare to translate). Pushkin is the ultimate Russian literary snob’s author. ‘Oh, you can’t read Russian? Oh well, there’s no point in you reading Pushkin, then. You just wouldn’t get it.’ This makes me sigh and heave a little. If anyone is ever telling you that you can’t ‘get’ something because you lack some kind of intelligence, they are usually telling you something about themselves.
The easy part of Eugene Onegin is the plot, which is genius. Eugene Onegin, a foppish and slightly irritating artistic type, inherits his uncle’s estate. He moves to the country and meets Tatyana, who is a highly impressionable young woman. She falls hopelessly in love with him and writes him a letter in French revealing her love. He more or less laughs at her and casts her aside. Meanwhile, he does another terrible thing. While he’s at a name-day party, he allows himself to get into a situation where he makes his best friend Lensky jealous of the attention he is paying to Lensky’s intended, Tatyana’s sister, Olga. This situation gets out of hand when, really, there was no need (Onegin has no feelings for Olga), and Lensky challenges Onegin to a duel. Lensky is killed. Distraught and guilty, Onegin leaves the country.
Several years later, Onegin returns to St Petersburg from abroad and attends a ball. He finds himself in the company of Tatyana, who has married an older man, a general. Looking at her through more mature eyes, Onegin realizes that he is madly in love with her and declares himself. But, of course, Tatyana is a moral person, and there is no chance. Onegin has ruined both their lives with his idiocy and they can never be happy. Tatyana at least has the comfort of the moral high ground and of knowing that she was right. Onegin has made his bed and he has to lie in it, alone. (I am speaking metaphorically. It doesn’t end with him in bed on his own, crying, although it should do. And I hope no one else goes in his be
d ever again.)
There are echoes here of the fastidiousness that we see about age in Anna Karenina and A Month in the Country. It’s easy to look at Eugene Onegin and think that it’s about an age gap: Onegin is the ‘older man’ who spurns a young girl. In fact, Tatyana is most likely seventeen, possibly eighteen or nineteen. Onegin is twenty-five. She is sometimes represented as a schoolgirl but, in fact, setting her cap at Onegin was an entirely realistic thing to do. He is the one who gets the timing wrong and disregards her. Despite being the older of the two, by the time he is mature enough to know what he should have done, he has missed his chance. This is Eugene Onegin’s message about life: we are foolish and we don’t know what’s good for us until it’s too late. Not only is life difficult and unpredictable but, often, we miss opportunities to grab our greatest chance at happiness. And we have only ourselves to blame. (Sorry. But, as previously stated, I did not guarantee that all these life lessons were going to be cheery. Most of them aren’t, as you will already have worked out.)
Eugene Onegin is known as a classic of Russian literature, an early prototype for the prose novel and the epitome of the theme of the ‘superfluous man’, Russia’s answer to the Byronic hero, a man with wealth and privilege who doesn’t know what to do with his life. It is a strange and difficult piece. I’m sure pedants would argue that you must read it as a text and that seeing it on stage doesn’t count. But, for me, it wasn’t until I saw a Russian production at the Barbican in London that everything changed and I finally understood Pushkin’s message and felt engaged and excited by the story. The theatre was showing a Russian production by Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theatre. My appreciation of this production was very possibly influenced by an accident that occurred in the bar shortly before the performance started. I was at the theatre alone because I was reviewing the play for a radio programme. I arrived relatively early and, being someone who rarely goes to the Barbican, I decided to investigate the eating and drinking offerings of this cultural venue. I soon found a bar that served what looked like the most inventive cocktails, including one that featured a favourite ingredient, lavender. Very possibly, it was a martini bar and so a lavender martini. I ordered this drink. When it arrived, I drank it, and it was delicious. About halfway through drinking it, I thought to myself, ‘This is lovely, but it tastes nothing like lavender.’ It was the wrong drink. I looked at the bartender. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, ‘I know I’ve drunk most of this, but I’ve just realized it’s not what I ordered. I wanted the lavender one.’ He rightly judged that it was not worth arguing with someone who had just drunk half a cocktail far too quickly and made me the lavender one. And so I drank it. (I can’t remember now what the other drink was. They were both equally delicious.) All this is to say that, by the time I sat down to watch Eugene Onegin, I was in an extremely receptive mood. This was an example of someone accidentally being the author of their own good fortune (which is the opposite of what happens in Onegin).
It was a gorgeous production, carefully themed, with all the women wearing white or pastel costumes, the odd minstrel dashing across the stage carrying a balalaika and Tatyana, the heroine of the piece, waltzing with a giant stuffed bear. (At this point, I began to wonder if I had had a third or even a fourth cocktail that I had forgotten about.) It was very long, this play, nearly three and a half hours, but it passed as if I were in a dream. By the end, Russians in the audience were weeping into their furs, applauding wildly, screaming, ‘Bravo!’ and throwing flowers on to the stage, which is entirely normal and low-key behaviour for a Russian theatre audience.
This production used a clever device that helped me to understand that Eugene Onegin’s biggest regret is his lack of self-awareness: he thwarted himself. The play brought this out by having two actors play Onegin on stage at the same time. One depicted him as an arrogant young man; the other, an older actor, could look at his younger self with frustration and self-loathing. It was a powerful depiction of hindsight. Pushkin’s story is one about life’s failure to align with our greatest hopes and dreams. It’s an illustration of wrong time, wrong place. It’s about the tendency we all have to act against our own best interests, not to know what’s good for us. Just as Tolstoy is empathetic about not blaming his characters for behaving as they do, Pushkin lets Onegin off the hook: we all behave in ways which damage us sometimes. We just can’t help it. But maybe watching someone else do it will save us from repeating the error.
Not long after I saw that Vakhtangov Theatre production, I saw the opera Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House, a production directed by Kasper Holten. On this occasion, what struck me most was not so much Tatyana’s passion or Onegin’s mournful regret but the disaster that is Lensky, Onegin’s best friend. The Lensky storyline is a subplot. The real focus is on the love story between Onegin and Tatyana. But, in reality, Onegin’s behaviour towards Lensky is even more offensive and idiotic than his behaviour towards Tatyana. When he loses her, the only person he really hurts is himself. With Lensky, he behaves recklessly and his actions result in Lensky’s death. In this production, at the duel, Lensky is struck down and killed. He then lies there, in full view of the audience, for the entirety of the production, while all the other actors walk around him, ignoring his corpse. I found this extremely poignant (not to mention extremely annoying for the actor in question, who later said that he found it very uncomfortable and difficult to breathe, bless him). Perhaps the strangest part was when Onegin and Tatyana sing regretfully at each other towards the end, never glancing down at Lensky, who is still lying dead near the stalls.
For me this was a metaphor for life. When you get things badly wrong and act against your own best interests, you may well find yourself face to face with the corpse of Lensky at all times. And no matter how much time passes or how much you move on, he’s always lying there, waiting to remind you of what a stupid idiot you are. Onegin truly is his own worst enemy: he kills his best friend and has to drag his ghost around for the rest of his life. And, on top of this, he has laughed in the face of the woman who should have become his wife. This is a wonderful and useful life lesson about taking responsibility and acknowledging when you are being a complete fool. It always reminds me of the line in the film When Harry Met Sally when Carrie Fisher as Marie says: ‘You’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband.’ Eugene Onegin is about spending the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your wife and you have killed your best friend.
I wish there were more opportunities to draw parallels between the works of Pushkin and the screenplays of Nora Ephron. But instead, Pushkin’s reputation just seems to become more obscure and elitist as time goes on. This seems a real shame, as Pushkin the man was a fascinating, appealing and complex character. And, just as with Shakespeare, his work is hilarious, complicated, wise. The question is this: how do you get to all that painlessly? Of all the authors in this book, he’s probably the most difficult to persuade people to read. (His only real competition is Solzhenitsyn, whose work, largely because of its subject matter, is by definition heavy and difficult.) Sadly, for too long, the appreciation of Pushkin has been reserved for pedants and intellectuals, something I partly blame on Vladimir Nabokov, another candidate for the title of ‘greatest Russian writer of all time’ (at least in his own mind). There can be no bigger pedant or intellectual than Nabokov. His 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin, the painstaking work of a lifetime, put off a whole other generation, underlining Pushkin’s reputation as ‘untranslatable’ and unreachable for anyone who isn’t a) Russian or b) an academic.
It’s not surprising that Nabokov undertook to produce the most accurate translation so far of Pushkin’s great work. It’s a huge challenge, and Nabokov wanted to be the one to prove that he was up to it and could do it better than anyone else. He also conceived the project in part as revenge on a previous translation which he judged ‘embarrassing’ (Walter Arndt’s, still widely judged one of the best). This led to what was
dubbed ‘the biggest literary spat of the 1960s’ with Nabokov’s friend the critic Edmund Wilson rising to the defence of poor Walter Arndt, and Nabokov and Wilson falling out irrevocably. Although this spat is an indication of the idiocy surrounding the obsession with how special and important Pushkin is, I love every detail of it, and I am thankful for its existence, as it has given me even more reasons to champion Eugene Onegin and fight back against the demented pedantry that was ignited by this argument.
This literary quarrel is brilliantly catalogued in Alex Beam’s book The Feud. (If you still really cannot face the thought of reading Pushkin, please do read this book instead. It is so entertaining.) Cringing and cracking up by turns, Beam recounts the fight between Wilson and Nabokov over the Onegin translation, a fight which played itself out in the pages of a number of American literary journals. It didn’t have huge global resonance, except perhaps in certain literary circles or in academia. But I do think, one way or another, it became a backdrop to how we think about Russian literature. I can’t help but feel that the fallout from this unedifying dogfight between two intensely intelligent but ridiculously pompous men has subconsciously informed a lot of people’s reactions to Russian literature over the past fifty years. If these two think Pushkin is impossible to understand and are prepared to ditch a lifelong friendship over it, what hope for the rest of us?