"In thy commandment, Lord, I read My neighbours" goods I must not covet, But ask me not to rise above it When tender hopes for licence plead: I do not wish to harm my fellow, I never grudge him house or folk: Nor will his cattle e"er provoke My envy--though in hordes they bellow: His wife or ox I never seek, Of a.s.ses I am un.o.bservant: But if his youthfullest maid-servant Is pretty! Lord, there I am weak."
He was not given to brooding over disappointment, nor was there any self-centredness about him. Only once, on his twenty-eighth birthday, does he show himself obsessed with the problems of existence:
"Casual present, gift so aimless, Life, why art thou given to me?
As by secret judgment nameless, Why is death-doom pa.s.sed on thee?
Who with hostile power inspired Called me out of nothingness, My poor heart with pa.s.sion fired, Doubt upon my mind did press?
Aimless is my whole existence, Vague my mind, emotions thin.
With monotonous persistence Life out-tires me with its din."
He was, _par excellence_, the singer of _this_ world, reflecting it with a photographic exactness. Gogol called it _reality turned into a pearl of creation_, which is about the best and most concise definition we could require.
As a result of this Byronic obsession Pushkin was sent to Odessa to join the staff of the Governor. But the atmosphere of rect.i.tude and cold officialdom bored him: trying his best was no good here: he was sent into the depths of the country to do easy and interesting reconnaissance work, to investigate the causes and results of the locust plague. The following is his official report:--
"The locust was flitting and flitting: And sitting And sitting sat, ravage committing, At last the place quitting."
About this time he wrote to a friend a letter which was intercepted. It ran as follows:--
"I am reading the Bible. The Holy Ghost sometimes soothes me, but I prefer Goethe and Shakespeare. There is an Englishman here, a clever atheist, who overturns the theory of immortality--I am having lessons from him...."
The reading public got to know of it and devoured it ... officially it led to his banishment to the estate of his parents. His father bullied him so that he begged to be sent to a fortress. Jukvski intervened and his parents left him to the care of his nurse, and he had two years of quiet, learning more and more of the old folklore. He wrote six long fairy tales of the school of _Ruslan and Ludmla_. He wrote the long historical poem _Poltava_, the novel in verse, _Evgeni Onyegin_, the historical drama in blank verse, _Bors G.o.dunv_, the story in verse, _The Bronze Hors.e.m.e.n_, and dozens of shorter poems. He abandoned Byron for Shakespeare.
"Shakespeare," he wrote about this time--"what a man! I am overwhelmed.
What a nonent.i.ty Byron is with his travesty of tragedy, as compared to Shakespeare." We can trace this influence in _Bors G.o.dunv_.
Shakespeare helped him to develop his power of realism: even his wonderland becomes a matter of course--Russia.
_Evgeni Onyegin_ swept the country off its feet. Society suddenly saw the greatness of the simple beauty of Russia, the dignified, lovable Russian woman: in the hero he reflects his own education, tastes and manners: it is the first work of a consciously psychological a.n.a.lysis in Russian literature.
The typical man of society is bored with life because he does not know what real life is: he "hastened to live and hurried to feel" on too narrow a scale. His first blow is the realisation of the fact that the thoughtful girl of seventeen, whose love he neglected early in life, rejects his pa.s.sion when she, married, is shining and dignified in society life. Then only, being honestly told by her that she still loves him, but is going to remain true to her husband, he flies from the capital, tortured by his first deep heart pain. Here the story ends. At the beginning he kills a romantic poet, Lensky, in a duel, a man of whom he is genuinely fond, but to whose _fiancee_, Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face like the foolish moon, he pays court out of sheer devilry. The elder sister, Tatiana, shy and dreamy, and yet clean-cut in character and iron-willed, is the girl who has given her heart to Onyegin and afterwards rejects him. She is as real as Diana Middleton or Sophia Western, as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman, taken straight from life, the crowning glory of Russian life. Mr Baring puts her confession of love on a level with Romeo and Juliet"s leave-taking as one of the absolutely perfect things in the literature of the world.
It is, he says, a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a blackbird"s song. It is Pushkin"s most characteristic work. It is certainly the best-known and most popular. It is all--like _Hamlet_--quotations! Pushkin himself speaks as having seen the unfettered march of the novel in a magic prism. The scenes are clear, the nail is. .h.i.t on the head every time, all the labour escapes notice.
It arrests the attention as a story, it is amusing; it delights the intelligence. It is simply a story of everyday life executed perfectly by a master spirit.
""Onyegin, I was younger then, and better-looking, I suppose; and I loved you....
For me, Onyegin, all that wealth, That showy tinsel of Court life, All my successes in the world, My well-appointed house and b.a.l.l.s ...
For me, are nought!--I gladly would Give up these rags, this masquerade, And all this brilliancy and din, For a few books, a garden wild, Our weather-beaten house, so poor-- Those very places where I met With you, Onyegin, that first time; And for the churchyard of our village, Where now a cross and shady trees Stand on the grave of my poor nurse.
And happiness was possible then!
It was so near!""
The girl beseeches him to leave her.
""I love you"" (she goes on): ""Why should I hide the truth from you?
But I am given to another, And true to him I shall remain.""
Pushkin"s own opinion of the work is shown in the dedication:
"Accept these motley chapters" run, Pages half mirth, half sadness blending, Idealistic, unpretending: The casual fruit of leisure, fun, Insomnia, light inspirations In youthful and unripened years My mind"s dispa.s.sioned observations, My heart"s grave notes on human cares."
In form the novel is like _Childe Harold_. But the descriptions, the irony, and humour are truly Russian.
As an example of all three in one these may suffice:
"For forty years he nagged with his housekeeper, looked out of the window and squashed flies."
"Once upon a time the head of a secret team of gamblers, now he was a kind and simple father of a bachelor"s numerous brood, living the life of a true philosopher: planting cabbages, breeding ducks and geese and teaching his youngsters the A B C."
All the characters use genuine everyday speech, and yet the realistic subjects are magically turned into poetry. "One can be a serious man and yet think of the beauty of one"s nails."
An example of his descriptive power may be found in this stanza on Moscow:
"O"er the snow-humps the sleigh is dashing, Alongside in the streets are flashing Shops, convents, palaces, mean shacks, Peasantry, country-wives, cozacks, Gardens of kitchen-stuff and flowers, Street-boys, lamps, chemists, fashion-stores, Churches, stone lions at house doors, Sentries, sleighs, balconies, old towers, Merchants, Tartars that sell old clo"
And on the crosses many a crow."
As you can see even from these few extracts, the realism in _Onyegin_ is the realism of Jane Austen--meticulous, correct, amazingly sketched in.
He imitated the Koran, blending sensuality with religious enthusiasm and even the element of nonsense in a way that is inimitably reminiscent of the Eastern Law.
Equally brilliant are his _Imitations of Dante_ ... the Divine Comedy lives again for us in Pushkin"s rendering: again, in _The Journeying of Caesar_, we seem to be reading the Latin cla.s.sics themselves. But his prose-work as a whole is perhaps below his poetry, though Baring does not think so. Unfortunately in England it is on these very prose works that we have for the most part to rely, because so few of his poems are translated.
He was not born with a pa.s.sion to reform the world: he was neither Liberal nor Conservative: he was a democrat in his love for the Russian people, a patriot in his love of his country.
There seem to have been in him, however, two distinct spirits, as in so many other Russians--the inspired priest of Apollo and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children of the world. The former characteristic predominated, but the people, his readers, preferred his latter mood; they like the dazzling colours, the sensuousness of his early poems--they could not appreciate the n.o.bler, simpler and more majestic harmonies of _Bors G.o.dunv_ and _Onyegin_.
It is this two-sidedness that makes for his all-embracing humanity--Dostoievsky called him [Greek: pa?a?d??p??]--this capacity for understanding everybody which makes him so profoundly Russian. He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional and, like Peter the Great, spent his whole life in apprenticeship and all his energies in craftsmanship. He is completely the artist and never the fighter, which explains the coldness of much of his work.
He was no innovator of forms in his verse: he was content to follow the accepted types; nor did he ever fly too high ... he does not try to unlock the gates of the Unknown: the old iambic introduced by Lomonsov was good enough for him. Only in _Bors G.o.dunv_ does he break out into an imitation of Shakespearean form: the play is rather like _Henry VIII._ in its plan: it is a succession of isolated scenes, not a coherent drama; there is no definite beginning or end.
On the other hand his scenes, taken by themselves, tragic or comic, are as vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters all live and are convincing.
As a chronicle it is completely successful. There are scenes so inspired as to be really in spirit Shakespearean, an absence of all conscious effort and visible artifice which only the greatest artists can attain to.
As there are no innovations, so are there no mannerisms: metaphors and similes are few and apt. Of Peter the Great we read:
" ... His eyes Are shining: features awe-inspiring: His movements swift: handsome, untiring, He is like Heaven"s thunderstorm."
Wholesome, breezy, clear-cut, genuine, free and honest--those are the adjectives to apply to his art. Unfortunately it is impossible to convey in English the ring and beauty of his original work.
While he was at home the Decembrists" revolt took place, 14th December 1824. He was absent from all his old friends and was naturally concerned about them. He pet.i.tioned the Government, signing a pledge never to join any secret society, to give him his liberty. One morning a field-yeger appeared, gave him time to put on his greatcoat and take his money, enter the sledge and dash to Petrograd. After travelling two hundred miles he was brought before the young Emperor and the following conversation took place:--
"Pushkin, I hope thou art pleased with thy return. Wouldst thou take part in the 14th December if thou wert here?"
"By all means, Sovereign. All my friends were in it. My absence alone has saved me."
"Well, thou hast played the fool sufficiently long. I hope thou wilt be sensible in the future, and we shall not quarrel. Send me all thy ma.n.u.scripts. I shall be thy censor myself."