Примечания
1 Рыцарь Дон Кихот. М., 1879.
2 История удивительного рыцаря Дон Кихота Ламанчского (по Сервантесу). М., 1895 (переиздано в 1900,1902,1904, 1909 годах).
3 См.: Цареубийство и марта 1801 года: Записки участников и современников. СПб., 1908. С. 58–59.
4 См.: Эйдельман Н.Я. Грань веков. М., 1982. С. 209.
5 См.: Мережковский Д. С. Данте, Наполеон. М., 2000. С. 327.
6 Валишевский К. Сын Великой Екатерины Павел I: Его жизнь, царствование и смерть. СПб., 1914. С. 480, 486, 488.
7 См.: Витязева В.А. Каменный остров. Ар-хитектурно-парковый ансамбль XVIII – начала XX века. Л., 1991. С. 52.
8 Письма Н.М. Карамзина к И.И. Дмитриеву. СПб., 1866. С. 42.
9 Белинский В.Г. Полное собрание сочинений: В 13 т. М., 1955. Т. 9. С. 81.
10 Писарев Д.И. Сочинения: В 4 т. М., 1955. T. 1.С.337.
11 Смирнов И.П. Бытие и творчество. СПб., 1996. С. 135.
12 Пушкин А. С. Полное собрание сочинений: В 17 т. М., 1949. Т. 12. С. 353.
13 Там же. С. 32–33.
14 Там же. Т. 13. С. 222.
15 Материалы для биографии М. Бакунина. М.; Л., 1933. Т. 2. С. 623–624.
16 Бакунин М. Исповедь // Алексеевский равелин. Л., 1990. С. 305.
17 «Не говоря о великости преступления, Вам должно быть очень смешно, Государь, что я один, безымянный, бессильный, шел на брань против Вас, Великого Царя Великого Царства! Теперь я вижу ясно свое безумие, и сам бы смеялся, если бы мне было до смеху, и поневоле вспоминаю одну баснь Ивана Андреевича Крылова… Но тогда ничего не видел, а шел как угорелый на явную гибель» (Там же. С. 280).
18 Герцен А.И. Собрание сочинений: В 30 т. М., 1959. Т. 16. С. 149.
19 «Без связей, без средств, один с своими замыслами посреди чуждой толпы, я имел только одну сподвижницу: веру, и говорил себе, что вера переносит горы, разрушает преграды, побеждает непобедимое и творит невозможное; что одна вера есть уже половина успеха, половина победы: совокупленная с сильной волей, она рождает обстоятельства, рождает людей, собирает, соединяет, сливает массы в одну душу и силу; говорил себе, что, веруя сам в русскую революцию и заставив верить в нее других, европейцев, особливо славян, впоследствии же и русских, я сделаю революцию в России возможной, необходимой» (Бакунин М. Исповедь… С. 294).
20 Салтыков-Щедрин М.Е. Собрание сочинений: В 20 т. М., 1971. Т. 12. С. 250.
21 Там же. С. 251.
22 Розанов В.В. Уединенное. М., 1990. Т. 2.
С. 392-393-
23 Леонтьев К.Н. Полное собрание сочинений и писем. СПб., 2006. Т. 7. Кн. 2. С. 54.
24 Достоевский Ф.М. Полное собрание сочинений: В 30 т. Л., 1976. Т. 15. С. 488.
2 История удивительного рыцаря Дон Кихота Ламанчского (по Сервантесу). М., 1895 (переиздано в 1900,1902,1904, 1909 годах).
3 См.: Цареубийство и марта 1801 года: Записки участников и современников. СПб., 1908. С. 58–59.
4 См.: Эйдельман Н.Я. Грань веков. М., 1982. С. 209.
5 См.: Мережковский Д. С. Данте, Наполеон. М., 2000. С. 327.
6 Валишевский К. Сын Великой Екатерины Павел I: Его жизнь, царствование и смерть. СПб., 1914. С. 480, 486, 488.
7 См.: Витязева В.А. Каменный остров. Ар-хитектурно-парковый ансамбль XVIII – начала XX века. Л., 1991. С. 52.
8 Письма Н.М. Карамзина к И.И. Дмитриеву. СПб., 1866. С. 42.
9 Белинский В.Г. Полное собрание сочинений: В 13 т. М., 1955. Т. 9. С. 81.
10 Писарев Д.И. Сочинения: В 4 т. М., 1955. T. 1.С.337.
11 Смирнов И.П. Бытие и творчество. СПб., 1996. С. 135.
12 Пушкин А. С. Полное собрание сочинений: В 17 т. М., 1949. Т. 12. С. 353.
13 Там же. С. 32–33.
14 Там же. Т. 13. С. 222.
15 Материалы для биографии М. Бакунина. М.; Л., 1933. Т. 2. С. 623–624.
16 Бакунин М. Исповедь // Алексеевский равелин. Л., 1990. С. 305.
17 «Не говоря о великости преступления, Вам должно быть очень смешно, Государь, что я один, безымянный, бессильный, шел на брань против Вас, Великого Царя Великого Царства! Теперь я вижу ясно свое безумие, и сам бы смеялся, если бы мне было до смеху, и поневоле вспоминаю одну баснь Ивана Андреевича Крылова… Но тогда ничего не видел, а шел как угорелый на явную гибель» (Там же. С. 280).
18 Герцен А.И. Собрание сочинений: В 30 т. М., 1959. Т. 16. С. 149.
19 «Без связей, без средств, один с своими замыслами посреди чуждой толпы, я имел только одну сподвижницу: веру, и говорил себе, что вера переносит горы, разрушает преграды, побеждает непобедимое и творит невозможное; что одна вера есть уже половина успеха, половина победы: совокупленная с сильной волей, она рождает обстоятельства, рождает людей, собирает, соединяет, сливает массы в одну душу и силу; говорил себе, что, веруя сам в русскую революцию и заставив верить в нее других, европейцев, особливо славян, впоследствии же и русских, я сделаю революцию в России возможной, необходимой» (Бакунин М. Исповедь… С. 294).
20 Салтыков-Щедрин М.Е. Собрание сочинений: В 20 т. М., 1971. Т. 12. С. 250.
21 Там же. С. 251.
22 Розанов В.В. Уединенное. М., 1990. Т. 2.
С. 392-393-
23 Леонтьев К.Н. Полное собрание сочинений и писем. СПб., 2006. Т. 7. Кн. 2. С. 54.
24 Достоевский Ф.М. Полное собрание сочинений: В 30 т. Л., 1976. Т. 15. С. 488.
David M. Bethea
Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds
Personality and Verbal Play in Pushkin’s Lyceum Verse
Pushkin’s biographers have often pointed out that the Lyceum played a special role in the poet’s psychic development, as a place (and a time) where a troubled youth’s better angels could be appealed to and where lifelong friendships based on shared experience and bonds of trust could be cemented.1 From Annenkov to Lotman to Bin yon, these six years of structure and routine become the “family life” that the young Pushkin did not have at home with Sergei Lvovich and Nadezhda Osipovna: “Nam tselyi mir chuzhbina;/ Otechestvo nam Tsarskoe Selo.” But the Lyceum was crucial to Pushkin’s development in another respect: it was a place that lent itself almost magically to poetical musing. As we learn from the famous opening to chapter 8 of Eugene Onegin:
Before getting started let us recall what the eleven-year-old boy Sasha Pushkin first saw when he and Uncle Vasilii L’vovich entered one of the three imposing wrought-iron gates leading to the Great or Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo on 9 October 1811 (OS). However occluded by two centuries of myth-making, the basic facts speak for themselves: the impressionable boy would have seen an architectural and landscape ensemble dazzling not only by Russian, but indeed by European and world standards. The Catherine Palace, the emperor’s summer residence, was an immense three-story Baroque edifice extending more than a football field in length; when viewed from within, its seemingly endless enfilade of parqueted chambers created the impression of a veritable Versailles-like hall of mirrors without the reflecting glass. In the northeast corner of the building was an archway connecting the Lyceum, whose four floors had housed the grand duchesses prior to marriage in Catherine’s time but now were newly renovated for the school, to the palace. Other visual marvels in the immediate vicinity included, some 500 meters to the north, the Quarenghi-designed Alexander Palace, chastely classical where the Catherine Palace was voluptuously baroque, a gift to her favorite grandson and future tsar by Catherine the Great; the Cameron Gallery, a grand arcade constructed by the Scottish architect Charles Cameron that extended southeast from the western end of the Catherine Palace and was elegantly lined with ionic columns interspersed with the busts of the greats from ancient and modern history; the Chinese Pavilion that was part of an elaborate oriental complex; several royal bathhouses inspired by the luxury of Nero and set on a wedding cake of terraces flowing south from the Great Palace; charming combinations of grottos, marble bridges, greenhouses, chapels, theatres, and reception halls; and of course, no less stunning than the architectural landmarks and designed with them in mind, the vast parks, beautifully carved around swan-festooned lakes with miniature islands and dotted here and there with monuments to Russian military victories, that were in the Dutch style during the time of Elizabeth and in the English style during the time of Catherine II. In short, this aestheti-cized space was alive with history and myth. The parks’ meandering paths and viewing sites were the perfect hideouts for a budding versifier.
In the company of his peers young Sasha Pushkin did not immediately stand out for his poetic craft. Numerous Lyceans tried their hands at verse, and of these Aleksei Illichevskii was considered the most promising to start with. Pushkin had two nicknames: the first, and best known, was “Frenchman,” which he earned because of his excellent command of the language, but which another classmate, Modest Korf, suggests may have had a pejorative coloring given the context (the Napoleonic wars). The second was “Mixture of Monkey and Tiger” (pomes’ obez’iany s tigrom). This latter sobriquet is particularly telling, as it foregrounds both Pushkin’s external features (he calls himself vrai singe in the 1814 “Mon Portrait”) and his love of pranks, on the one hand, and his sharp claws and fierce fighting spirit, on the other. An 1812 character report made by his professors cites many of the traits that made up this strange breed of tiger monkey: his talents are more “brilliant” than “substantial,” his mind “ardent” and “subtle” rather than “profound”; his diligence is “mediocre”; he is “well read” in both French and Russian literature, but his knowledge is “superficial”; he displays “pride” together with “ambition,” which at times causes him to seem “withdrawn”; “heated bursts of irritability, flippancy, and a special kind of witty loquaciousness” are characteristic of him; at the same time his “good nature” is noticeable, as he recognizes his faults.3 In his dealings with others Pushkin often found himself in awkward situations from which to extricate himself required tact; unfortunately, despite his essentially good heart, it was tact that he didn’t have. Close friend Ivan Pushchin says it with the greatest clarity:
As is evident from these character sketches, Pushkin was in need of yet a third nickname: “Sem’ raz otmer’, potom otrezh’” (translation: “Measure Seven Times Then Cut,” or “Look Before You Leap”). How many times in later life he got himself in hot water by saying or doing something on impulse; the examples – insulting the principled Karamzin in a epigram, satirizing the powerful Uvarov as a gold-digger – are legion. At this stage, however, the consequences were less dire and often humorous. For example, one of the senior ladies in waiting to Alexander’s wife, the Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, had a pretty maid, Natasha, and it was not long before Pushkin and his mates became infatuated with her. Once, as the boys were walking in smaller groups through the darkened palace corridor where the ladies’ chambers were located, Pushkin happened to be alone and heard the rustle of a dress nearby. He was certain it was Natasha. Without giving it a thought he rushed up and tried to embrace and kiss her, only to find out as the door suddenly opened that he had in his arms old Princess Varvara Volkonskaia She was insulted, Pushkin mortified. Soon thereafter the tsar himself was informed by the princess’s brother and called the Lyceum’s director, Egor Engelhardt, on the carpet. “What is going to come of this?” complained the sovereign. “Your schoolboys not only steal my ripe apples through the fence and beat the gardener’s watchmen, but now they also pester my wife’s maids of honor.”6 The tsar told Engelhardt to have the boy whipped, but luckily he refused and it eventually blew over. In the wake of the brouhaha an unrepentant Pushkin described the princess in an epigram as “an old monkey” (une vielle guenon).
Yet another episode involved Marie Smith, a young widow who was living in the Engelhardt household and participating in school theatricals. Predictably, Pushkin was smitten with her comeliness and before long wrote her a poem, “To a Young Widow” (K molodoi vdove), in which he urged her to forget the dead, as they will not return, and celebrate life with the living. The verses seemed more than a little irreverent, which was the point. In any event, this lady too was offended, but what made the contretemps particularly awkward was the fact that Marie Smith was pregnant. She expressed her indignation to Egor Antonovich, who himself may not have been indifferent to her, and he censured Pushkin for it. Finally, a misadventure without amorous overtones is the one that has come down in Lyceum lore as the “gogel’-mogel”’ affair of 1814. This time three boys, Pushkin, Pushchin, and Malinovskii, smuggled a bottle of rum into the building with the help of Foma, one of the diad’-ki. They then created a grog-like concoction of eggs, sugar, and alcohol which they heated in the samovar. Muffled laughter and noise could be heard from the hall, which brought Frolov, the on-duty tutor, to the scene to investigate. The conspirators had enough time to toss their wine glasses out the window and disappear to their rooms, but one of them, Aleksandr Tyrkov, was discovered clearly in his cups (1,132–133). Frolov told the director, who then reported it to the Minister of Education, Count Razumovskii, the senior state official in charge of the Lyceum. Razumovskii came in person from St. Petersburg, called the boys out of class and gave them a severe reprimand, with the punishment to follow – two weeks on their knees throughout morning and evening prayer services, placement at the end of the dining table, and a sentence citing their names and a description of their crime in the school’s black book.7 Despite the apparent seriousness of the offense, Pushkin wrote another impromptu ditty, this one taking the hussar Denis Davydov’s rollicking call to wine and women as its model, in which it is not sobriety that is banished but Foma the diad’ka, who was let go for his part in the affair.
So, against this background of Lyceum comradeship and shared experience how did the mercurial schoolboy begin to become, to quote Nabokov, “Russia’s most essential and most European” writer, “the greatest poet of his time (and perhaps of all time, excepting Shakespeare)”?8 Perhaps the first thing that alerts us to the youngster’s potential uniqueness is his receptiveness to the creative impulse, to the way that sound and sense suddenly come together in his consciousness and then are born into (zarozhdenie tvorchestva) something altogether different and mesmerizing.9 Pushkin, let us recall, has forever been associated with “harmonious sounds” (garmonicheskie zvuki, which subsequent scholars have duly linked to the influences of Batiushkov and Zhukovskii) and a free, unfettered intonation (intonatsiia). But even here the freedom with which he is able to say something seems in excess of anything he could have learned from respected older contemporaries. This is how he presents the onset of the rhyming urge in “To My Aristarchus” (Moemu Aristarkhu, 1815):
The second thing we immediately notice, which is tied to the unconstrained quality of his intonation, is the young Pushkin s astonishing genre dexterity, where each genre equals a distinct voice, style, lexicon, poetic structure. This facility with different ways of saying things poetically could be an aspect of the legacy of parlor games and wordplay that the boy absorbed in the presence of his parents (Sergei L’vovich was known in the literary salons of St. Petersburg as a kind of verbal quick-change artist) and their friends. In any event, for his classes and on his own Pushkin tried his hand at all the different types of poem practiced at the time. Madrigal, noël, elegy, friendly epistle, epitaph, Anacreontica, ode, romance, hussar drinking song, epic, love lyric – he fit into each of these effortlessly. It was as though he were trying on a new costume with each one and took delight in cavorting before the mirror.10 His ability to mimic, to ventriloquize the voice zone of the genre, was what separated him from the others.11 In other words, he had the poetic equivalent of perfect pitch. An illustration shows the difference between Pushkin and his mates in this respect. Illichevskii loved to create anagrams, or in his terms, “charade logogriphs,” that acted out a word in the form of a riddle. These puzzles were then included in The Lyceum Sage (Litseiskii mudrets), one of the school’s several journals, which everyone read and in which Pushkin took active part. In one such anagram Illichevskii describes three items without naming them which when combined would decorate a gravesite – something bundled together (kipa = “stack”), a legendary, though faint-hearted warrior (Paris), and a type of food (ris = “rice”). The answer yields kiparis, or “cypress tree.”12 Illichevskii’s riddle is self-contained (there is nothing extraneous to it) and shows beautifully how these bright young students came at language.
But in Pushkin’s wordplay there was invariably a kind of challenge. In 1816 he came up with his own charade entitled “Comparison” (Sravnenie):
Another more elaborate example is the “philosophical ode” entitled “Moustaches” (Usy) of 1816.15 In this humorous send-up of the ultra-serious odic genre Pushkin tries on two voices, one the older Derzhavin’s, the other the hussar officer and war hero Denis Davydov’s. Davydov was renowned for his flamboyantly bushy moustaches, which he was forever twirling. The moustache was the most salient attribute of the hussar; it was as though all the hussar’s legendary daring (udaV) was located in this hirsute outgrowth, as the biblical Samson’s strength was reputed to be in his hair. The poem opens with the voice of Derzhavin warning Davydov, in the phrasing of Derzhavin’s most famous valedictory lines, that the river of time (reka vremen) sweeps everything away in its path. Then, for the next several stanzas, the voice zone of Davydov, though still the addressee, takes over. Now we see the moustache through the eyes of its owner and his personal mythology: it is so long it wraps around his ear; it is sprinkled with rum and wine; glistening with kohl (hair crème), it has never known the razor; in the heat of battle, it helps its owner keep a cool head, as he grabs a saber in one hand and his hairy talisman in the other; and then, when more peaceful times have come, it accompanies the hussar in his conquests of the fair sex, as again one hand caresses the breast of a beauty and the other twirls the moustache. This is all very funny and very much in the spirit of hussar bravado. In the last stanza, however, as expected, there is a turn back to the viewpoint of Derzhavin, who reminds the dashing warrior and lover that his ruddy cheeks will fade, his black curls will turn grey, and – the punch line – old age will pluck out his moustaches. The point here is this is neither Derzhavin nor Davydov talking, although the recording of their voices is virtually perfect. It is Pushkin, the fledgling, who either has no moustache or only the beginning of one. He uses both voices against each other in order to assert his own, which plays behind the scenes and is present in the humor and, equally important, the implicit challenge. I see youth and age, says this voice; I am the confidence that doesn’t take sides and can make a joke out of their claims to ultimate authority.
There is one genre at which Pushkin failed miserably during these apprentice years – the love lyric – and there is good reason. Almost none of the poems he wrote about love as a teenager did he include in his first book of collected verse that appeared in 1826. However well Pushkin masters the conventional phrasing and poetic form, what is “his” cannot not yet stand out in this context. The wit that is already his trademark in his humorous verse can get no foothold in the flood of hot feelings that is adolescence. In his verses to Ekaterina Bakunina, the older sister of a classmate, his language is one-sidedly elegiac:
Thus, and this is my principal argument in these pages, Pushkin is intensely superstitious, but not religious, in a distinctive Russian way. This superstitiousness is a trait that goes perfectly with, precisely because it is so different from, the enlightenment principles, beginning with liberté, égalité, fraternité, that he inherited at the Lyceum. Without the Lyceum Pushkin might have become another rather talented, though frivolous, versifier like his father or uncle. Without superstition (again, the “religion” of poetry, or at least his poetry) he might have become a government official, like Iakovlev, or military officer, like Matiushkin, or Decembrist, like Pushchin. The superstitious person is the card player, the gambler, which Pushkin also started to become at school. He would play cards passionately, and badly, his entire life, many times getting deeper into debt at moments when he needed money most. Superstition is the agnostic’s, not the atheist’s, religion. One follows certain rituals and procedures (recall the scene of fortune-telling that brings on Tatiana’s prophetic dream in Eugene Onegin) just in case they might help, but not because one is certain they will. This is also how poets engage otherworldly forces, now challenging them, now coaxing them, as Pushkin also started doing in earnest at the Lyceum.
I would also argue that it was during these Lyceum years that Pushkin’s verbal role-playing became something more momentous. Now it began to involve what might be called ontological rhymes. His challenges to Derzhavin and Davydov were playful, but they had the potential to become serious, particularly if the object of the challenge was a dead authority figure. Note that Derzhavin would die within a year of his “annointing” Pushkin as his successor. In that period not only did Pushkin ventriloquize Derzhavin’s voice perfectly in Reminiscences at Tsarskoe Selo (Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele, 1814), but he also managed to parody the old man’s odic sputterings in the unpublished Fonvizins Shade (Ten Fonvizina, 1815). In fact, in the latter work the playful schoolboy seemed to give his benefactor a push, claiming that Derzhavin and his fustian rhetoric had outlived their time. All this gave the generational confrontation a “ghost story” quality that appealed to Pushkin’s sense of fate, risk, chance. It was as if the mastery at one level (the first member of the rhyme pair) was so complete that it implied an act of usurpation that carried beyond the poem (the second member of the rhyme pair, i.e., the “other shoe” still waiting to drop). This was happening even as Pushkin was spouting epigrams at any and all who happened to thwart him or assert their authority over him. By taking chances, by not looking before he leapt, Pushkin learned another lesson. He came to understand that his challenges had consequences, not merely in this world, but more importantly, in the next. His acts of language became totemic, mythopoetical, capable of creating plot in life. For the shades of those who had departed (think how many ghosts and shades there are in Pushkin’s poetic world) could not stand to be mocked – there was something blasphemous in this, something that called punishment down on own’s head, which the boy also knew perfectly well. But he could not help himself from mocking, that was how he asserted himself, made a place for himself at the table.
Therefore, when Pushkin says in the poem to Marie Smith that the dead husband is sleeping soundly in the grave and will not return should they take their pleasure in the here and now, he is really whistling in the dark. With superstitious awe he senses that the ghost may well return to punish him because he, the pretender, deserves to be haunted. We can say this because that is precisely the plot of one of Pushkin’s greatest masterpieces, The Stone Guest (Kamennyi gost\ 1830), written thirteen years later on the eve of the poet’s own marriage and telling the story of how Don Juan is dragged off to hell by the statue of the man he has killed and in the presence of the widow he was about to enjoy. The part of the puzzle that is missing is beyond of the page so to speak, somewhere in the future. The poet has set the action in motion by desiring the widow in the first place and mocking the one who has the moral right to her in the second. He can’t help himself but he knows it is wrong. He is Davydov and Derzhavin at the same time. Language is his power,but it is his only power – a distinctly modern concept. In short, Illichevskii’s play with language gives us a riddle plain and simple; Pushkin’s play with language gives us a ghost story that is a secret map to our darkest desires and fears. Pushkin knows that potentially the joke is on Pushkin, and that is why he became the closest thing in Russian to Shakespeare.
The valleys that are “secret, mysterious” (tainstvennye) because they first gave birth to private reverie; the lakes and the swans (swans being a Derzhavinian metaphor for poetry to Pushkin and his Lyceum mates); the Apuleius whose adventure stories and sexual license are much more the attractive forbidden fruit for these teenagers than stern Cicero; the notion of withdrawal into the gardens (“v sadakh”) and into the student cell (kel’ia) that somehow miraculously opens out into an illumination called the Muse – all this is integral to the “blooming” (“ia bezmiatezhno rastsvetal”) of the future poet. In the essay to follow I propose to first give a brief sketch of the young Pushkin against the background of his Lyceum experience and then to examine aspects of his earliest attempts at verse in an effort to catch glimpses of the mature poet in the boy wonder. My point is not to raise the status of the juvenilia, but rather to see the latter as the creative laboratory wherein, regardless of initial artistic success or failure, different genre-specific “voice zones” are crystallizing and a consistent uniting lichnosf is coming into view. Pushkin is not yet “Pushkin,” to be sure, but if we look carefully there are moments when he could be. At the same time, the sense of risk that accompanies the adolescent Pushkin’s many and varied challenges to authority provides a “haunted” quality to his play – there will be consequences for his verbal actions – that will be a hallmark of some of his greatest works.
В те дни, когда в садах Лицея
Я безмятежно расцветал,
Читал охотно Апулея,
А Цицерона не читал,
В те дни в таинственных долинах,
Весной, при кликах лебединых,
Близ вод, сиявших в тишине,
Являться муза стала мне.
Моя студенческая келья
Вдруг озарилась; муза в ней
Открыла пир младых затей,
Воспела детские веселья,
И славу нашей старины,
И сердца трепетные сны.
[In days when I still bloomed serenely
Inside our Lycée garden wall
And read my Apuleius keenly,
But read no Cicero at all —
Those springtime days in secret valleys,
Where swans call and beauty dallies,
Near waters sparkling in the still,
The Muse first came to make me thrill.
My student cell turned incandescent;
And there the Muse spread out for me
A feast of youthful fancies free,
And sang of childhood effervescent,
The glory of our days of old,
The trembling dreams the heart can hold.]2
Before getting started let us recall what the eleven-year-old boy Sasha Pushkin first saw when he and Uncle Vasilii L’vovich entered one of the three imposing wrought-iron gates leading to the Great or Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo on 9 October 1811 (OS). However occluded by two centuries of myth-making, the basic facts speak for themselves: the impressionable boy would have seen an architectural and landscape ensemble dazzling not only by Russian, but indeed by European and world standards. The Catherine Palace, the emperor’s summer residence, was an immense three-story Baroque edifice extending more than a football field in length; when viewed from within, its seemingly endless enfilade of parqueted chambers created the impression of a veritable Versailles-like hall of mirrors without the reflecting glass. In the northeast corner of the building was an archway connecting the Lyceum, whose four floors had housed the grand duchesses prior to marriage in Catherine’s time but now were newly renovated for the school, to the palace. Other visual marvels in the immediate vicinity included, some 500 meters to the north, the Quarenghi-designed Alexander Palace, chastely classical where the Catherine Palace was voluptuously baroque, a gift to her favorite grandson and future tsar by Catherine the Great; the Cameron Gallery, a grand arcade constructed by the Scottish architect Charles Cameron that extended southeast from the western end of the Catherine Palace and was elegantly lined with ionic columns interspersed with the busts of the greats from ancient and modern history; the Chinese Pavilion that was part of an elaborate oriental complex; several royal bathhouses inspired by the luxury of Nero and set on a wedding cake of terraces flowing south from the Great Palace; charming combinations of grottos, marble bridges, greenhouses, chapels, theatres, and reception halls; and of course, no less stunning than the architectural landmarks and designed with them in mind, the vast parks, beautifully carved around swan-festooned lakes with miniature islands and dotted here and there with monuments to Russian military victories, that were in the Dutch style during the time of Elizabeth and in the English style during the time of Catherine II. In short, this aestheti-cized space was alive with history and myth. The parks’ meandering paths and viewing sites were the perfect hideouts for a budding versifier.
In the company of his peers young Sasha Pushkin did not immediately stand out for his poetic craft. Numerous Lyceans tried their hands at verse, and of these Aleksei Illichevskii was considered the most promising to start with. Pushkin had two nicknames: the first, and best known, was “Frenchman,” which he earned because of his excellent command of the language, but which another classmate, Modest Korf, suggests may have had a pejorative coloring given the context (the Napoleonic wars). The second was “Mixture of Monkey and Tiger” (pomes’ obez’iany s tigrom). This latter sobriquet is particularly telling, as it foregrounds both Pushkin’s external features (he calls himself vrai singe in the 1814 “Mon Portrait”) and his love of pranks, on the one hand, and his sharp claws and fierce fighting spirit, on the other. An 1812 character report made by his professors cites many of the traits that made up this strange breed of tiger monkey: his talents are more “brilliant” than “substantial,” his mind “ardent” and “subtle” rather than “profound”; his diligence is “mediocre”; he is “well read” in both French and Russian literature, but his knowledge is “superficial”; he displays “pride” together with “ambition,” which at times causes him to seem “withdrawn”; “heated bursts of irritability, flippancy, and a special kind of witty loquaciousness” are characteristic of him; at the same time his “good nature” is noticeable, as he recognizes his faults.3 In his dealings with others Pushkin often found himself in awkward situations from which to extricate himself required tact; unfortunately, despite his essentially good heart, it was tact that he didn’t have. Close friend Ivan Pushchin says it with the greatest clarity:
From the very beginning Pushkin was more short-tempered than most and therefore did not arouse general sympathy. This is an eccentric person’s lot among people. It wasn’t that he was acting out a role or trying to impress us with special oddities, as happens with some people. But at times it was through inappropriate jokes and awkward witticisms that he put himself in a difficult situation, from which he could then not escape. This would lead to new blunders, which never go unnoticed in schoolboy dealings… In him was a blend of excessive boldness and shyness, both appearing at the wrong times, which by that fact harmed him further. It would happen that we’d both get in a scrape; I’d manage to wiggle out of it, while he could never set it right. The main thing that was lacking in him is what is called tact, that capital which is necessary in relations with comrades, where it is difficult, almost impossible, when involved in totally informal interactions with others, to avoid some unpleasant confrontation brought on by daily life.4And Baron Korf, as precise and unforgiving as Pushchin is generous, has this to say about Pushkin:
Easily enraged, with unbridled African passions (his heritage on his mother’s side), eternally preoccupied, eternally immersed in poetical daydreams, spoiled from childhood by the praise of flatterers that can be found in every circle, Pushkin neither as a schoolboy nor afterwards in society had anything appealing in his deportment… In him was no external or internal religion, no higher moral feelings. He even asserted a kind of bragger’s pride in the supreme cynicism he showed these subjects… and I do not doubt that for the sake of a caustic word he sometimes said even more and worse than he thought and felt.5As harsh as Korf’s appraisal is, there is also much truth in it, and when placed next to Pushchin s it affords us a rather accurate picture of how the adolescent Pushkin must have seemed to both well-wishers and to those he may have antagonized.
As is evident from these character sketches, Pushkin was in need of yet a third nickname: “Sem’ raz otmer’, potom otrezh’” (translation: “Measure Seven Times Then Cut,” or “Look Before You Leap”). How many times in later life he got himself in hot water by saying or doing something on impulse; the examples – insulting the principled Karamzin in a epigram, satirizing the powerful Uvarov as a gold-digger – are legion. At this stage, however, the consequences were less dire and often humorous. For example, one of the senior ladies in waiting to Alexander’s wife, the Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, had a pretty maid, Natasha, and it was not long before Pushkin and his mates became infatuated with her. Once, as the boys were walking in smaller groups through the darkened palace corridor where the ladies’ chambers were located, Pushkin happened to be alone and heard the rustle of a dress nearby. He was certain it was Natasha. Without giving it a thought he rushed up and tried to embrace and kiss her, only to find out as the door suddenly opened that he had in his arms old Princess Varvara Volkonskaia She was insulted, Pushkin mortified. Soon thereafter the tsar himself was informed by the princess’s brother and called the Lyceum’s director, Egor Engelhardt, on the carpet. “What is going to come of this?” complained the sovereign. “Your schoolboys not only steal my ripe apples through the fence and beat the gardener’s watchmen, but now they also pester my wife’s maids of honor.”6 The tsar told Engelhardt to have the boy whipped, but luckily he refused and it eventually blew over. In the wake of the brouhaha an unrepentant Pushkin described the princess in an epigram as “an old monkey” (une vielle guenon).
Yet another episode involved Marie Smith, a young widow who was living in the Engelhardt household and participating in school theatricals. Predictably, Pushkin was smitten with her comeliness and before long wrote her a poem, “To a Young Widow” (K molodoi vdove), in which he urged her to forget the dead, as they will not return, and celebrate life with the living. The verses seemed more than a little irreverent, which was the point. In any event, this lady too was offended, but what made the contretemps particularly awkward was the fact that Marie Smith was pregnant. She expressed her indignation to Egor Antonovich, who himself may not have been indifferent to her, and he censured Pushkin for it. Finally, a misadventure without amorous overtones is the one that has come down in Lyceum lore as the “gogel’-mogel”’ affair of 1814. This time three boys, Pushkin, Pushchin, and Malinovskii, smuggled a bottle of rum into the building with the help of Foma, one of the diad’-ki. They then created a grog-like concoction of eggs, sugar, and alcohol which they heated in the samovar. Muffled laughter and noise could be heard from the hall, which brought Frolov, the on-duty tutor, to the scene to investigate. The conspirators had enough time to toss their wine glasses out the window and disappear to their rooms, but one of them, Aleksandr Tyrkov, was discovered clearly in his cups (1,132–133). Frolov told the director, who then reported it to the Minister of Education, Count Razumovskii, the senior state official in charge of the Lyceum. Razumovskii came in person from St. Petersburg, called the boys out of class and gave them a severe reprimand, with the punishment to follow – two weeks on their knees throughout morning and evening prayer services, placement at the end of the dining table, and a sentence citing their names and a description of their crime in the school’s black book.7 Despite the apparent seriousness of the offense, Pushkin wrote another impromptu ditty, this one taking the hussar Denis Davydov’s rollicking call to wine and women as its model, in which it is not sobriety that is banished but Foma the diad’ka, who was let go for his part in the affair.
So, against this background of Lyceum comradeship and shared experience how did the mercurial schoolboy begin to become, to quote Nabokov, “Russia’s most essential and most European” writer, “the greatest poet of his time (and perhaps of all time, excepting Shakespeare)”?8 Perhaps the first thing that alerts us to the youngster’s potential uniqueness is his receptiveness to the creative impulse, to the way that sound and sense suddenly come together in his consciousness and then are born into (zarozhdenie tvorchestva) something altogether different and mesmerizing.9 Pushkin, let us recall, has forever been associated with “harmonious sounds” (garmonicheskie zvuki, which subsequent scholars have duly linked to the influences of Batiushkov and Zhukovskii) and a free, unfettered intonation (intonatsiia). But even here the freedom with which he is able to say something seems in excess of anything he could have learned from respected older contemporaries. This is how he presents the onset of the rhyming urge in “To My Aristarchus” (Moemu Aristarkhu, 1815):
Сижу ли с добрыми друзьями,
Лежу ль в постеле пуховой,
Брожу ль над тихими водами
В дубраве темной и глухой,
Задумаюсь – взмахну руками,
На рифмах вдруг заговорю…
(1,153)
The process comes over the speaker unbidden, and this very unbidden quality is signaled by the simplicity and parallelism/internal order of the utterance (i.e. it is natural, organic): the three imperfective verbs (“sizhu,” “lezhu,” “brozhu”) followed by three locative constructions denoting uninterrupted activity are then broken into by the three perfective verbs (“zadumaius,” “vzmakhnu,” “zagovoriu”) betokening a change in status. That the initiation of the verbal rush is preceded by a physical gesture (“vzmakhnu rukami”) reinforces the seemingly spontaneous, almost “metabolic” character of the shift to creative activity. And so it will be Pushkins entire poetic career. Examples are too numerous to list here, hence we will limit ourselves to the following excerpt from the great meditative poem,“Osen (Otryvok)” (Autumn [AFragment], 1833):
[I can be sitting with good friends,
Or lying in a feather bed,
Or wandering near quiet waters
In an oak grove dark and deserted,
When I fall to musing, wave my arms,
And suddenly start to speak in rhyme…]
Once again Pushkin aligns the lyrical urge, the need to express the harmony accumulating within, with something physical, concrete – the fingers reaching out for the pen and the pen seeking the paper.
X
…
Душа стесняется лирическим волненьем,
Трепещет и звучит, и ищет, как во сне,
Излиться наконец свободным проявленьем —
…
XI
И мысли в голове волнуются в отваге,
И рифмы легкие навстречу им бегут,
И пальцы просятся к перу, перо к бумаге,
Минута – и стихи свободно потекут.
…
XII
…Куда ж нам плыть?…….
……………………………
……………………………
(III, 321; my emphasis)
X
The soul is overwhelmed by lyrical agitation,
It trembles and sounds aloud, and seeks, as in a dream,
To pour itself out at last in a free display —
…
XI
And thoughts in one’s head surge in brave agitation,
And light rhymes go out to meet them,
And one’s fingers ask for the pen, the pen for paper,
Wait a minute and verses begin to flow freely.
…
XII
.. Where shall we sail?…….
……………………………..
……………………………..
The second thing we immediately notice, which is tied to the unconstrained quality of his intonation, is the young Pushkin s astonishing genre dexterity, where each genre equals a distinct voice, style, lexicon, poetic structure. This facility with different ways of saying things poetically could be an aspect of the legacy of parlor games and wordplay that the boy absorbed in the presence of his parents (Sergei L’vovich was known in the literary salons of St. Petersburg as a kind of verbal quick-change artist) and their friends. In any event, for his classes and on his own Pushkin tried his hand at all the different types of poem practiced at the time. Madrigal, noël, elegy, friendly epistle, epitaph, Anacreontica, ode, romance, hussar drinking song, epic, love lyric – he fit into each of these effortlessly. It was as though he were trying on a new costume with each one and took delight in cavorting before the mirror.10 His ability to mimic, to ventriloquize the voice zone of the genre, was what separated him from the others.11 In other words, he had the poetic equivalent of perfect pitch. An illustration shows the difference between Pushkin and his mates in this respect. Illichevskii loved to create anagrams, or in his terms, “charade logogriphs,” that acted out a word in the form of a riddle. These puzzles were then included in The Lyceum Sage (Litseiskii mudrets), one of the school’s several journals, which everyone read and in which Pushkin took active part. In one such anagram Illichevskii describes three items without naming them which when combined would decorate a gravesite – something bundled together (kipa = “stack”), a legendary, though faint-hearted warrior (Paris), and a type of food (ris = “rice”). The answer yields kiparis, or “cypress tree.”12 Illichevskii’s riddle is self-contained (there is nothing extraneous to it) and shows beautifully how these bright young students came at language.
But in Pushkin’s wordplay there was invariably a kind of challenge. In 1816 he came up with his own charade entitled “Comparison” (Sravnenie):
The solution to this riddle is more racy, more “Pushkinian,” than Illichevskii’s cypress tree. Here Pushkin is referring to an episode from Boileau’s childhood that he would have immediately picked up on.14 Helvetius tells the story that once when very young Boileau fell down, which movement raised his smock and exposed him. At that moment a turkey pecked him several times in the groin, leaving him without his “two periods” and intensely fearful of women his entire life. Thus what the sixteen-year-old Pushkin is telling his listener, “my sweetheart,” is that he is endowed with all the necessary punctuation marks (both the “comma” and the “periods”) to be a good lover. And yet the words for “comma” and “period” are not spelled out; they are simply left as marks on the line. The reader must see them and sound them out to make the rhymes. The riddle is witty, salacious, and a kind of challenge all at the same time.
He хочешь ли узнать, моя драгая,
Какая разница меж Буало и мной?
У Депрео была лишь, [запятая]
А у меня: с, [две точки с запятой]13
Another more elaborate example is the “philosophical ode” entitled “Moustaches” (Usy) of 1816.15 In this humorous send-up of the ultra-serious odic genre Pushkin tries on two voices, one the older Derzhavin’s, the other the hussar officer and war hero Denis Davydov’s. Davydov was renowned for his flamboyantly bushy moustaches, which he was forever twirling. The moustache was the most salient attribute of the hussar; it was as though all the hussar’s legendary daring (udaV) was located in this hirsute outgrowth, as the biblical Samson’s strength was reputed to be in his hair. The poem opens with the voice of Derzhavin warning Davydov, in the phrasing of Derzhavin’s most famous valedictory lines, that the river of time (reka vremen) sweeps everything away in its path. Then, for the next several stanzas, the voice zone of Davydov, though still the addressee, takes over. Now we see the moustache through the eyes of its owner and his personal mythology: it is so long it wraps around his ear; it is sprinkled with rum and wine; glistening with kohl (hair crème), it has never known the razor; in the heat of battle, it helps its owner keep a cool head, as he grabs a saber in one hand and his hairy talisman in the other; and then, when more peaceful times have come, it accompanies the hussar in his conquests of the fair sex, as again one hand caresses the breast of a beauty and the other twirls the moustache. This is all very funny and very much in the spirit of hussar bravado. In the last stanza, however, as expected, there is a turn back to the viewpoint of Derzhavin, who reminds the dashing warrior and lover that his ruddy cheeks will fade, his black curls will turn grey, and – the punch line – old age will pluck out his moustaches. The point here is this is neither Derzhavin nor Davydov talking, although the recording of their voices is virtually perfect. It is Pushkin, the fledgling, who either has no moustache or only the beginning of one. He uses both voices against each other in order to assert his own, which plays behind the scenes and is present in the humor and, equally important, the implicit challenge. I see youth and age, says this voice; I am the confidence that doesn’t take sides and can make a joke out of their claims to ultimate authority.
There is one genre at which Pushkin failed miserably during these apprentice years – the love lyric – and there is good reason. Almost none of the poems he wrote about love as a teenager did he include in his first book of collected verse that appeared in 1826. However well Pushkin masters the conventional phrasing and poetic form, what is “his” cannot not yet stand out in this context. The wit that is already his trademark in his humorous verse can get no foothold in the flood of hot feelings that is adolescence. In his verses to Ekaterina Bakunina, the older sister of a classmate, his language is one-sidedly elegiac:
Итак, я счастлив был, итак, я наслаждался,
Отрадой тихою, восторгом упивался…
И где веселья быстрый день?
Промчался летом сновиденья,
Увяла прелесть наслажденья,
И снова вкруг меня угрюмой скуки тень!
(1,148)
Translation: Pushkin has probably just bumped into Bakunina somewhere on the stairs and is sorting through the impressions created by this passing vision in a black dress, as he describes it in a diary entry of 19 November 1815. “How charming she was! <… > But I have not seen her for eighteen hours – ah! What a situation, what torture – But I was happy for five minutes” (XII, 297). This poet who would write some of the most beautiful love lyrics in any language would need the ballast of lived experience to bring the conventional phrasing, the rhetorical and prosodic expectations, alive. One adjective in a normally fixed phrase would be switched, one line would break away slightly from the corset of meter to the free dance of rhythm, and the reader/listener would immediately sense that here is mature passion, passion informed by the beauty and sorrow of a fully lived life. But change the conceit of the piece from love as an elevated feeling to eros as tease and titillation, and the schoolboy was back again in his element. Here he is, for example, not describing love in an elegy but what it would feel like to be the tobacco in a pretty womans snuffbox in a madrigal:
[And thus, I was happy, and thus, I took pleasure
In quiet bliss, drinking ecstasy to the full…
And where now is the fleeting day’s joy?
It bas flown
It has flown by like a dream,
Pleasure’s charm has faded,
And again I am surrounded by the shadow of gloomy boredom!]
Ax! если, превращенный в прах,
И в табакерке, в заточеньи,
Я в персты нежные твои попасться мог,
Тогда б в сердечном восхищеньи
Рассыпался на грудь под шелковый платок
И даже… может быть… Но что! мечта пустая.
Не будет этого никак.
Судьба завистливая, злая!
Ах, отчего я не табак!..
(1,45)
At the core of the gradual change that took place in Pushkin over the Lyceum years is the fact that he never seemed to experience what might be seen from the perspective of later generations as linguistic fear. That is crucial. We also must suppose that Shakespeare, despite what little we know about him, was fearless in this way. This did not mean that words always came easily to Pushkin or that he didn’t struggle over drafts of things, which his subsequent notebooks prove beyond a doubt, but simply that he believed his language was equal to the task of saying what it needed to. His fears and anxieties were real, which is also crucial, but they were not strictly linguistic. It was the world that Pushkin looked out on from his “monk’s cell” at the Lyceum, not just the literary world, or (this would come later) the professional world of letters. It is a fine point, but a not insignificant one. This is another way of saying that if Pushkin is Russian literature’s “origin without origins,” which he is, the true beginning of the culture’s modern linguistic consciousness, which he is as well, then it is because what stirred him was not his battles with literary precursors. He knew the tradition was there and he knew it was his task to find a place in it, but his engagement was with other, bigger ghosts: his frail hold on life as a Russian in the early years of the nineteenth century, the fact that he was difficult to love and he knew it, Russian history’s claims to legitimacy against a background of European and more particularly French military and cultural domination, the heroes from the past whose spirits hung about the Cameron Gallery and the monuments to military victories. And underlying all this was a burning curiosity and impatience that was colored with superstition but not religious belief per se. Pushkin was not and never would be a confirmed unbeliever; in a world so full of charm and beauty, he could not give himself to any authority – except his poetry – completely, up to and including the ultimate authority of Russian Orthodoxy or its opposite, atheism. As he writes in the 1817 poem, “Unbelief” (Bezverie), the closest thing to a cri de cœur during the Lyceum years, “Mind seeks the Godhead, but the heart does not find it” (Um ishchet bozhestva, a serdtse ne nakhodit) (I, 243). This does not mean that Pushkin is asserting that God does not exist, only that he, his heart, that part of him that feels, cannot find him yet in his young life. And so it would always be. As Pushkin says in a poem written several months before his death:
[Ah! If I, turned into dust <i.e.,tobacco>,
And kept in a snuff-box, in captivity,
Could land on your sweet fingers,
Then in heartfelt rapture
Would I sprinkle out onto your breast under your silk shawl
And even… perhaps… But no! It is a hollow dream
And will in no way happen.
О evil, envious Fate!
Why can’t I be tobacco!..]
Напрасно я бегу к сионским высотам,
Грех алчный гонится за мною по пятам…
Так, ноздри пыльные уткнув в песок сыпучий,
Голодный лев следит оленя бег пахучий.
(III,419)
Note that Pushkin is painfully aware of his sin and its consequences, which presupposes not just an understanding but an acceptance of the difference between right and wrong.
[In vain do I run up to the heights of Zion,
Greedy sin follows fast on my tracks…
Thus, its dusty nostrils stuck into the crumbling sand,
Does the hungry lion follow the scent of the deer.]
Thus, and this is my principal argument in these pages, Pushkin is intensely superstitious, but not religious, in a distinctive Russian way. This superstitiousness is a trait that goes perfectly with, precisely because it is so different from, the enlightenment principles, beginning with liberté, égalité, fraternité, that he inherited at the Lyceum. Without the Lyceum Pushkin might have become another rather talented, though frivolous, versifier like his father or uncle. Without superstition (again, the “religion” of poetry, or at least his poetry) he might have become a government official, like Iakovlev, or military officer, like Matiushkin, or Decembrist, like Pushchin. The superstitious person is the card player, the gambler, which Pushkin also started to become at school. He would play cards passionately, and badly, his entire life, many times getting deeper into debt at moments when he needed money most. Superstition is the agnostic’s, not the atheist’s, religion. One follows certain rituals and procedures (recall the scene of fortune-telling that brings on Tatiana’s prophetic dream in Eugene Onegin) just in case they might help, but not because one is certain they will. This is also how poets engage otherworldly forces, now challenging them, now coaxing them, as Pushkin also started doing in earnest at the Lyceum.
I would also argue that it was during these Lyceum years that Pushkin’s verbal role-playing became something more momentous. Now it began to involve what might be called ontological rhymes. His challenges to Derzhavin and Davydov were playful, but they had the potential to become serious, particularly if the object of the challenge was a dead authority figure. Note that Derzhavin would die within a year of his “annointing” Pushkin as his successor. In that period not only did Pushkin ventriloquize Derzhavin’s voice perfectly in Reminiscences at Tsarskoe Selo (Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele, 1814), but he also managed to parody the old man’s odic sputterings in the unpublished Fonvizins Shade (Ten Fonvizina, 1815). In fact, in the latter work the playful schoolboy seemed to give his benefactor a push, claiming that Derzhavin and his fustian rhetoric had outlived their time. All this gave the generational confrontation a “ghost story” quality that appealed to Pushkin’s sense of fate, risk, chance. It was as if the mastery at one level (the first member of the rhyme pair) was so complete that it implied an act of usurpation that carried beyond the poem (the second member of the rhyme pair, i.e., the “other shoe” still waiting to drop). This was happening even as Pushkin was spouting epigrams at any and all who happened to thwart him or assert their authority over him. By taking chances, by not looking before he leapt, Pushkin learned another lesson. He came to understand that his challenges had consequences, not merely in this world, but more importantly, in the next. His acts of language became totemic, mythopoetical, capable of creating plot in life. For the shades of those who had departed (think how many ghosts and shades there are in Pushkin’s poetic world) could not stand to be mocked – there was something blasphemous in this, something that called punishment down on own’s head, which the boy also knew perfectly well. But he could not help himself from mocking, that was how he asserted himself, made a place for himself at the table.
Therefore, when Pushkin says in the poem to Marie Smith that the dead husband is sleeping soundly in the grave and will not return should they take their pleasure in the here and now, he is really whistling in the dark. With superstitious awe he senses that the ghost may well return to punish him because he, the pretender, deserves to be haunted. We can say this because that is precisely the plot of one of Pushkin’s greatest masterpieces, The Stone Guest (Kamennyi gost\ 1830), written thirteen years later on the eve of the poet’s own marriage and telling the story of how Don Juan is dragged off to hell by the statue of the man he has killed and in the presence of the widow he was about to enjoy. The part of the puzzle that is missing is beyond of the page so to speak, somewhere in the future. The poet has set the action in motion by desiring the widow in the first place and mocking the one who has the moral right to her in the second. He can’t help himself but he knows it is wrong. He is Davydov and Derzhavin at the same time. Language is his power,but it is his only power – a distinctly modern concept. In short, Illichevskii’s play with language gives us a riddle plain and simple; Pushkin’s play with language gives us a ghost story that is a secret map to our darkest desires and fears. Pushkin knows that potentially the joke is on Pushkin, and that is why he became the closest thing in Russian to Shakespeare.
Notes
1 The present essay is adapted from a work in progress (a “creative biography” of Pushkin) by the author and Sergei Davydov (Middlebury College).
2 Пушкин А. С. Полное собрание сочинений: В 17 т. М., 1937–1959. Т. 6. С. 165 (further references to this edition will appear directly in the text accompanied by volume and page numbers); Pushkin A. Eugene Onegin / Trans, by J.E. Falen. Oxford, 1995. P. 185.
3 Грот К.Я. Пушкинский лицей. СПб., 1998. С. 412.
4 Пущин И.И. Записки о Пушкине. Письма. М., 1989. С. 43–44.
5 Cited in: Анненков П.В. Пушкин в Александровскую эпоху. Минск, 1998. С. 43/
6 Вересаев В. Пушкин в жизни / 6-е изд. М., 1936. Т.1. С. 89.
7 Пущин И.И. Указ. соч. С. 46–47.
8 Nabokov V. Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, 1944. P. 29.
9 Recall Pushkin’s famous definition of inspiration (vdokhnovenie), which he often shows in practice in poems like “Poet” (1827): “Inspiration? It is the disposition/orientation of the soul to the most vivid reception of impressions, and consequently, to the rapid grasp of ideas, which aids in the explanation of the former” (XI, 41).
10 «Юный Пушкин-поэт – это младенец, который сразу встал и пошел; так становится на крыло выброшенный из гнезда сильный птенец. Он, может быть, и не „учился" вовсе – просто ему показали, „как надо делать", и он сразу начал так делать» (Непомнящий B.C. Лирика Пушкина как духовная биография. М., 2001. С. 20).
11 «В Лицее ему не стоит видимого труда „перевоплотиться" в Батюшкова (ср., например,„Городок", 1815, и батюшковские „Мои пенаты"), вздыхать в манере Жуковского („Мечтатель", 1815), греметь подобно Державину („Восп. в Ц-С“, 1814)» (Там же. С. 23).
12 Грот К.Я. Указ. соч. С. 333.
13 Пушкин А. С. Полное собрание сочинений: В 20 т. СПб., 1999. Т. 1. С. 246, 735.
14 Там же. С. 735.
15 Там же. С. 170–171.
2 Пушкин А. С. Полное собрание сочинений: В 17 т. М., 1937–1959. Т. 6. С. 165 (further references to this edition will appear directly in the text accompanied by volume and page numbers); Pushkin A. Eugene Onegin / Trans, by J.E. Falen. Oxford, 1995. P. 185.
3 Грот К.Я. Пушкинский лицей. СПб., 1998. С. 412.
4 Пущин И.И. Записки о Пушкине. Письма. М., 1989. С. 43–44.
5 Cited in: Анненков П.В. Пушкин в Александровскую эпоху. Минск, 1998. С. 43/
6 Вересаев В. Пушкин в жизни / 6-е изд. М., 1936. Т.1. С. 89.
7 Пущин И.И. Указ. соч. С. 46–47.
8 Nabokov V. Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, 1944. P. 29.
9 Recall Pushkin’s famous definition of inspiration (vdokhnovenie), which he often shows in practice in poems like “Poet” (1827): “Inspiration? It is the disposition/orientation of the soul to the most vivid reception of impressions, and consequently, to the rapid grasp of ideas, which aids in the explanation of the former” (XI, 41).
10 «Юный Пушкин-поэт – это младенец, который сразу встал и пошел; так становится на крыло выброшенный из гнезда сильный птенец. Он, может быть, и не „учился" вовсе – просто ему показали, „как надо делать", и он сразу начал так делать» (Непомнящий B.C. Лирика Пушкина как духовная биография. М., 2001. С. 20).
11 «В Лицее ему не стоит видимого труда „перевоплотиться" в Батюшкова (ср., например,„Городок", 1815, и батюшковские „Мои пенаты"), вздыхать в манере Жуковского („Мечтатель", 1815), греметь подобно Державину („Восп. в Ц-С“, 1814)» (Там же. С. 23).
12 Грот К.Я. Указ. соч. С. 333.
13 Пушкин А. С. Полное собрание сочинений: В 20 т. СПб., 1999. Т. 1. С. 246, 735.
14 Там же. С. 735.
15 Там же. С. 170–171.
Наталия Мазур, нИкита Охотин
«Зачем кусать нам груди кормилицы нашей?..»
Комментарий к одной пушкинской фразе
Несмотря на едва ли не хрестоматийную известность, пушкинское выражение из письма К.Ф. Рылееву от 25 января 1825 года «Зачем кусать нам груди кормилицы нашей? потому что зубки прорезались?» (XIII, 1351) до сих пор не получило необходимого комментария. Единственная попытка выяснить его происхождение принадлежит В.В. Виноградову, назвавшему этот оборот дантовским2. Однако ученый не дал точной ссылки на Данте, процитировав итальянский источник по «Письму из Рима к издателю „Литературной газеты“» С.П. Шевырева (1830):