Something about the character of Pushkin's poetry

To be aware of the pleasure that elegant works give us is a necessary need and at the same time one of the highest pleasures of an educated mind. Why is it that people still talk so little about Pushkin? Why do his best works remain unanalyzed 1 , and instead of analyzes and judgments we hear only empty exclamations: “Pushkin is a poet! Pushkin is a true poet! Onegin's poem is excellent! Gypsies is a masterful work!” etc? Why has no one yet attempted to determine the character of his poetry in general, to evaluate its beauties and shortcomings, to show the place that our poet managed to occupy among the first-class poets of his time? Such silence is all the more incomprehensible because here the public can least of all be accused of indifference. - But, maybe they will tell me, who has the right to talk about Pushkin? – Where the enlightened public has found legitimate representatives in literature, few, legislating by general opinion, have the power to pronounce final verdicts on the extraordinary phenomena of the verbal world. But no one’s voice is superfluous to us; Everyone's opinion, if made in good conscience and based on pure conviction, has the right to everyone's attention. I will say more: in our time, every thinking person not only can, but is also obliged to express his way of thinking in front of the public - unless, however, extraneous circumstances prevent this; for only through common cooperation can we achieve what all right-thinking people have long desired, which we still do not yet have, and which, as a result, serves at the same time as a condition for the people’s education, and, consequently, for the people’s well-being: I’m talking about a general opinion. Moreover, everything said before the public is useful simply because it is said: fair - as fair; unfair - like a challenge to objections. But speaking about Pushkin, it is difficult to express one’s opinion decisively; it is difficult to bring to unity all the diversity of his works and to find a general expression for the character of his poetry, which took so many different forms. For, excluding the beauty and originality of the poetic language, what traces of common origin do we find in Ruslan and Lyudmila, in the Caucasian Prisoner, in Onegin, in the Gypsies, etc.? - Not only does each of these poems differ in the peculiarity of the course and manner of presentation (la manière); but some of them also differ in the very nature of poetry, reflecting the poet’s different views on things, so that in translation they could easily be considered the works of not one, but many authors. This light joke, the child of gaiety and wit, which in Ruslan and Lyudmila dresses all objects in brilliant and light colors, is no longer found in other works of our poet; its place in Onegin was taken by a destructive mockery, an echo of heartfelt skepticism, and good-natured gaiety was replaced here by a gloomy coldness, which looks at all objects through a dark veil of doubts, conveys its observations in a caricature, and creates, as it were, only in order to enjoy the destruction of what has been created a minute later. In the Caucasian Prisoner, on the contrary, we do not find either that trust in fate that animates Ruslan, or that contempt for man that we notice in Onegin. Here we see a soul, saddened by betrayals and losses, but not yet betraying itself, not yet losing the freshness of its former feelings, still faithful to its cherished desire - a soul torn apart by fate, but not defeated: the outcome of the struggle still depends on the future. In the poem Gypsy, the character of poetry is also completely special, different from other poems by Pushkin. The same can be said about almost every one of his most important creations. But, carefully examining the works of Pushkin, from Ruslan and Lyudmila to the fifth chapter of Onegin, we find that with all the changes in its direction, his poetry had three periods of development, sharply different from one another. We will try to determine the features and content of each of them, and then we will draw a complete conclusion about Pushkin’s poetry in general. If, according to the character, tone and decoration, akin to the spirit of artificial works of different nations, poetry, like painting, can be divided into schools, then the first period of Pushkin’s poetry, which includes Ruslan and some of the smaller poems, I would call the period of the Italian-French school. The sweetness of Guys, the unconstrained and light wit, tenderness, and purity of finish, characteristic of the character of French poetry in general, were combined here with luxury, with the abundance of life and freedom of Ariost. But let us dwell for a while on that work of our poet, which made the first acquaintance of the Russian public with its favorite. If in his subsequent creations, in almost all the creations of his imagination, Pushkin weaves the individuality of his character and way of thinking, then here he is a purely creative poet. He does not seek to convey to us his special view of the world, fate, life and man; but he simply creates for us a new destiny, a new life, his new world, populating it with new, different creatures, belonging exclusively to his creative imagination. That is why none of his poems has the fullness and completeness that we notice in Ruslan. That’s why every song, every scene, every digression lives uniquely and fully; That’s why each part is so necessarily woven into the composition of the whole creation that nothing can be added or thrown away without completely destroying its harmony. From this, Chernomor, Naina, Golova, Finn, Rogdai, Farlaf, Ratmir, Lyudmila, in a word, each of the persons acting in the poem (excluding, perhaps, one: the hero of the poem himself), received a special character, sharply formed and at the same time deep. Therefore, observing the correspondence of the parts to the whole, the author carefully avoids everything pathetic that could greatly shake the reader’s soul; for a strong feeling is incompatible with a desire for the miraculous and comic, and only gets along with the majestic and wonderful. One charming thing can lure us into the realm of magic; and if, in the midst of captivating impossibility, something touches us in earnest, forcing us to turn to ourselves, then forgive us for believing in the incredible! The wonderful, the ghosts will scatter into nothingness, and the whole world of the unprecedented will collapse, disappear, just as a motley dream is interrupted when something in its creation reminds us of reality. Finn's story, having a different ending, would destroy the action of the whole poem: as in Wiland's Oberon, one - however, one of its best passages - description of the misfortunes of the main character, shaking the soul too much, destroys the charm of the whole, and thus robs him of his main dignity. But the unexpectedness of the denouement, the ugliness of the old witch and the ridiculous position of Finn at once transform the entire previous picture of unhappy love into a caricature, and so masterfully connect the episode with the tone of the whole poem that it already becomes one of its necessary components. In general, one can say about Ruslan and Lyudmila that even if strict criticism finds in them something else that is weak and uncontrolled, then of course they will not find anything superfluous, nothing inappropriate. Chivalry, love, sorcery, feasts, war, mermaids, all the elements of the magical world have come together here into one creation and, despite the diversity of parts, everything in it is harmonious, consistent, whole. The very beginnings of the songs taken by the singer Joanna, while maintaining the same tone throughout, cast over the entire creation one general shade of gaiety and wit. Let us note, by the way, that that one of Pushkin’s poems, in which we least of all encounter strong shocks and depth of feeling, is nevertheless the most perfect of all his works in the proportionality of parts, in the harmony and completeness of invention, in the richness of content, in the orderliness of transitions, in the continuity of the dominant tone, and, finally, in the fidelity, diversity and originality of characters. On the contrary, The Caucasian Captive, less than all the other poems, satisfies the fair demands of art, despite the fact that it is richer than all in the strength and depth of feelings. The Caucasian Prisoner begins the second period of Pushkin's poetry, which can be called an echo of Byron's lyre. If in Ruslan and Lyudmila Pushkin was exclusively a poet, conveying faithfully and purely the suggestions of his imagination; then now he is a poet-philosopher who, in poetry itself, wants to express the doubts of his mind, who gives all objects the general colors of his special view and is often distracted from objects in order to live in the field of thinking. It is no longer wizards with their miracles, not invincible heroes, not enchanted gardens that he represents in Prisoner of the Caucasus, Onegin, and so on. - real life and the man of our time, with their emptiness, insignificance and prose, become the subject of his songs. But he does not seek, like Goethe, to elevate his subject, revealing poetry in ordinary life, and in the man of our time - a complete response to all humanity; and, like Byron, in the whole world he sees one contradiction, one disappointed hope, and almost each of his heroes can be called disappointed. Not only does Pushkin coincide with the singer Gyaura in his view of life and man; he is similar to him in the rest of his poetry: the same method of presentation, the same tone, the same form of the poems, the same vagueness in general and detailed clarity in parts, the same arrangement, and even the characters of the persons for the most part are so similar that at first glance you would consider them to be foreign emigrants who moved from Byron’s world to the works of Pushkin. However, despite such similarities with the British poet, we find in Onegin, in the Gypsies, in the Caucasian Prisoner, etc. so many original beauties that belong exclusively to our poet, such genuine freshness of feelings, such fidelity of descriptions, such subtlety in remarks and naturalness in the course, such originality in language, and, finally, so much national, purely Russian, that even in this period of his poetry one cannot call him a simple imitator. However, it cannot be assumed that Pushkin accidentally coincides with Byron; that, brought up by the same century, and, perhaps, by the same circumstances, they should have converged in the way of thinking and in the spirit of poetry, and, consequently, in its very forms; for among true poets the forms of works are not random, but are also fused with the spirit of the whole, like body and soul in the works of the Creator. It is impossible, I say, to allow this opinion because Pushkin, even where he comes closest to Byron, still retains so much of his specialness, revealing his natural direction, that for those delving into the spirit of both poets it is obvious that Pushkin did not meet Byron by chance, but borrowed from him, or better said, involuntarily submitted to his influence. Byron's Lyre had to resonate in its century, being itself the voice of its century. One of the two opposing trends of our time has reached its expression in it. Is it any wonder that for Pushkin it sounded not in vain? Although, perhaps, he had already yielded too much to her influence, and by retaining more originality, at least in the outer form of his poems, he would have given them even greater dignity. This influence was revealed primarily in the Caucasian Prisoner. Here those similarities with Byron that we noticed above are especially visible; but the arrangement of the poem proves that it was Pushkin’s first experience in works of this kind; for all the descriptions of the Circassians, their way of life, customs, games, etc., which fill the first song, uselessly stop the action, break the thread of Interest and do not fit in with the tone of the whole poem. The poem in general seems to have not one, but two contents, which are not fused together, but appear each separately, entertaining the attention and feelings on two different sides. For what advantages this important drawback is redeemed! What poetry is poured into all the scenes! What freshness, what strength of feelings! What fidelity in living descriptions! None of Pushkin's works presents so many shortcomings and so many beauties. The same, or perhaps even greater similarity with Byron is in the Bakhchisarai Fountain; but here the most skillful performance proves the great maturity of the poet. Harem life also relates to the content of the Bakhchisarai Fountain, just as Circassian life relates to the content of the Caucasian Captive: both form the basis of the picture, and despite how different their meaning is! Everything that happens between Giray, Maria and Zarema is so closely connected with the surrounding objects that the entire story can be called one scene from the life of a harem. All digressions and breaks are connected by one common feeling; everything strives to create one, main impression. In general, the apparent disorder of presentation is an indispensable attribute of the Byronian family; but this disorder is only imaginary, and the discordant presentation of objects is reflected in the soul by a harmonious transition of sensations. To understand this kind of harmony, one must listen to the inner music of feelings, born from the impressions of the objects described, while the objects themselves serve here only as an instrument, as keys striking the strings of the heart. This soulful melody is the main advantage of the Bakhchisarai Fountain. How naturally, harmoniously, oriental bliss, oriental voluptuousness, merged here with the strongest impulses of southern passions! In contrast to the luxurious description of the harem with the gloom of the main incident, the creator of Ruslan is visible, from the immortal world of charms he descended to earth, where, amid the conflict of passions and misfortunes, he has not yet forgotten the feeling of intoxicating voluptuousness. His poetry in the Bakhchisaray Fountain can be compared with the eastern Peri, which, having lost paradise, still retained its unearthly beauty; her appearance is thoughtful and gloomy; through the feigned coldness, a strong excitement of the soul is noticeable; she quickly and silently, like a spirit, like Zarema, flies past us, dressed in a thick cloud, and we are captivated by what we saw, and even more so by what our tuned imagination involuntarily complements the invisible. The tone of the entire poem comes closer to Byron's than any other. For this reason, the poem The Robbers is the furthest away from Byron, despite the fact that the content, scenes, descriptions, everything in it can be called a copy of the Prisoner of Chillon. She is more of a caricature of Byron than an imitation of him. Bonnivard suffers in order to save the soul of his love; and no matter how cruel his torment is, there is some kind of poetry in it that forces us to our fate; meanwhile, a detailed description of the suffering of the captured robbers instills in the soul one disgust, a feeling similar to what the sight of the torment of a criminal condemned to a well-deserved execution would produce. We can decisively say that there is nothing poetic in this poem, excluding the introduction and the beauty of the verses, everywhere and always characteristic of Pushkin. This beauty of poetry is most visible in the Gypsies, where the skill of versification has reached its highest degree of perfection and where art has taken on the appearance of free negligence. Here, every sound seems to flow naturally from the soul and, despite the fact, every verse has received its final treatment, with the exception of maybe two or three of the whole poem: everything is clean, rounded and free. But does the content of the poem correspond to the dignity of its decoration? – We see a nomadic, half-wild people who do not know the laws, despise luxury and enlightenment, and love freedom most of all; but these people are familiar with the feelings characteristic of the most refined community: the memory of former love and longing for the betrayed Mariula fill the whole life of the old Gypsy. But knowing exclusive, eternal love, Gypsies do not know jealousy; They don’t understand Aleko’s feelings. Just think, the author wanted to imagine a golden age where people are fair without knowing the laws; where passions never go beyond the bounds of what is proper; where everything is free, but nothing violates the general harmony, and internal perfection is the result not of difficult education, but of the happy uncorruption of natural perfection. Such a thought could have high poetic merit. But here, unfortunately, the fair sex destroys all the charm, and while the poor Gypsies love sadly and difficultly, their wives, like the free moon, casually shed an equal radiance on all nature. Is such imperfection of women compatible with such perfection of the people? – Either Gypsies do not know eternal, exclusive affection; or they are jealous of their fickle wives, and then revenge and other passions should also not be alien to them; then Aleko can no longer seem strange and incomprehensible to them; then the whole life of Europeans differs from them only in the benefits of education; then, instead of a golden age, they represent simply a half-wild people, unbound by laws, poor, unhappy, like the real Gypsies of Bessarabia; then the whole poem contradicts itself. But maybe we shouldn’t judge Gypsies in general by Zemfira’s father alone; perhaps his character is not the character of his people. But if he is an extraordinary being, who would always and under any circumstances be formed in the same way, and, therefore, always constitutes an exception from his people; then the poet’s goal still remains unsolved. For, when describing the Gypsies, choose from among them exactly the one who contradicts their general character, and present him alone to the reader; leaving others in an unclear distance: - the same as, when describing a person’s character, citing as an example precisely those of his actions that are in disagreement with the description. However, the character of Aleko, the episodes and all the parts taken separately, are so rich in poetic beauty that if it were possible, after reading the poem, to forget its content and retain in the soul the memory of the one pleasure it brought; then it could be called one of Pushkin’s best works. But this is precisely the difference between the feeling of grace and simple pleasure, that it affects us even more in the subsequent minutes of recollection and reporting than at the very moment of the first pleasure. Creatures that are truly poetic live in our imagination; we lose ourselves in them, develop the undeveloped, tell the unsaid and, thus moving into the new world created by the poet, we live more spaciously, more fully and happier than in the old reality. So Gypsy life first attracts our dreams; but at the first attempt to appropriate it to our imagination, it scatters into nothingness, like the fogs of the Arctic Sea, which, taking the form of solid earth, lure a curious traveler to themselves and, before his very eyes, warmed by the rays of the sun, fly away to heaven. But there is a quality in Gypsies that rewards us in some way for the dissonance of the content. This quality is the great originality of the poet. The author of the Review of Literature for 1827 rightly said that in this poem some kind of struggle is noticeable between the ideality of Byron and the picturesque nationality of the Russian poet. Indeed: take the descriptions of Gypsy life separately; look at Zemfira’s father not as a Gypsy, but simply as an old man, without caring what nation he belongs to; delve into the episode about Ovid - and the fullness of the creations, developed to the detail, animated by original poetry, will prove to you that Pushkin already felt the power of an independent talent, free from extraneous influences. All the shortcomings in the Gypsies depend on the contradiction of two discordant aspirations: one original, the other Byronic; therefore, the very imperfection of the poem is for us the key to the poet’s improvement. An even greater desire for an original kind of poetry is revealed in Onegin, although not in his first chapters, where Byron's influence is obvious; not in the image of presentation, which belongs to Don Juan and Beppo, and not in the character of Onegin himself, homogeneous with the character of Childe Harold. But the more the poet moves away from the main character and is forgotten in extraneous descriptions, the more original and national he becomes. The time of Childe-Harold, thank God, has not yet come for our fatherland: young Russia did not participate in the life of Western states, and the people, like people, do not grow old with the experiences of others. A brilliant field is still open for Russian activity; all kinds of arts, all branches of knowledge still remain unassimilated to our fatherland; We have also been given: to hope - what should a disappointed Childe Harold do with us? Let's see what qualities the color of Britain retained and lost when it was transplanted to Russian soil. The favorite dream of the British poet is an extraordinary, lofty creature. It is not poverty, but an excess of internal strength that makes him cold towards the world around him. An immortal thought lives in his heart day and night, absorbs his entire being and poisons all pleasures. But in whatever form it appears: as proud contempt for humanity, or as painful repentance, or as gloomy hopelessness, or as an unquenchable thirst for oblivion - this thought is all-encompassing, eternal - what is it, if not an involuntary, constant desire for the best, a longing for unattainable perfection? There is nothing in common between Childe Harold and a crowd of ordinary people: his sufferings, his dreams, his pleasures are incomprehensible to others; only high mountains and bare cliffs tell him answering secrets, audible to him alone. But precisely because he is different from ordinary People, he can reflect in himself the spirit of his time and serve as a border with the future; for only disagreement connects two different consonances. On the contrary, Onegin is a completely ordinary and insignificant creature. He is also indifferent to everything around him; but it was not bitterness, but the inability to love that made him cold. His youth was also spent in a whirlwind of fun and distraction; but he was not attracted by the boiling of a passionate, insatiable soul, but on the parquet he spent the empty, cold life of a fashionable dandy. He also abandoned the light and the people; but not in order to find space for excited thoughts in solitude, but because he was equally bored everywhere, Among fashionable and ancient halls. He does not live a special life within himself, different from the lives of other people, and he despises humanity only because he does not know how to respect it. There is nothing more ordinary than this kind of people, and there is nothing more poetry in such a character. Here is Childe Harold in our fatherland, and it is honor to the poet that he presented us with someone who is not real; for, as we have already said, this time has not yet come for Russia, and God grant that it never comes. Pushkin himself, it seems, felt the emptiness of his hero, and therefore never tried to briefly introduce his readers to him. He did not give him a specific physiognomy, and not just one person, but he presented a whole class of people in his portrait: Onegin’s description could belong to a thousand different characters. This emptiness of the main character was, perhaps, one of the reasons for the emptiness of the content of the first five chapters of the novel; but the form of the narrative probably also contributed to this. Those who justify it by referring to Byron forget the relationship between the form of Beppo and Don Juan to their content and the characters of the main characters. As for the Onegin poem in general, we have no right to judge the plot of the matter from the beginning, although we can hardly imagine the possibility of anything harmonious, complete and rich in concept with such a beginning. However, who can unravel the limits of what is possible for poets like Pushkin? – they are destined to always surprise their critics. Onegin's shortcomings seem to be Pushkin's last tribute to the British poet. But all the innumerable beauties of the poem: Lensky, Tatyana, Olga, Petersburg, the village, sleep, winter, writing, etc., etc., are the inalienable property of our poet. It was here that he clearly discovered the natural direction of his genius; and these traces of original creation in Gypsies and Onegin, combined with the famous scene from Boris Godunov 3, constitute, without exhausting, the third period of the development of his poetry, which can be called the period of Russian-Pushkin poetry. Its distinctive features are: picturesqueness, some carelessness, some special thoughtfulness, and, finally, something inexpressible, understandable only to the Russian heart; for what can we call the feeling with which the melodies of Russian songs breathe, to which the Russian people most often return, and which can be called the center of their heartfelt life? In this period of development of Pushkin’s poetry, the ability to become lost in surrounding objects and the current moment is especially noticeable. The same ability is the basis of the Russian character: it serves as the beginning of all the virtues and shortcomings of the Russian people; from it comes courage, carelessness, indomitability of momentary desires, generosity, immoderation, passion, understanding, good nature, etc., etc. It seems that there is no need to count all the beauties of Onegin, to anatomize the characters, positions and introductory descriptions in order to prove the superiority of Pushkin’s latest works over the previous ones. There are things that can be felt, but cannot be proven except by writing several volumes of commentary on each page. Tatiana's character is one of the best creations of our poet; we will not talk about him, because he shows himself completely. Why is it not as easy to praise the beautiful as to find faults? – With what delight we would express the incomparability of those pleasures that we have lent to the poet, and which, like semi-precious stones in a simple necklace, shine in the monotonous thread of life of the Russian people! In the mentioned scene from Boris Godunov, Pushkin's maturity is especially revealed. The art with which it presents, in such a tight frame, the character of the century, monastic life, the character of Pimen, the state of affairs and the beginning of the plot; a special, tragically calm feeling that the life and presence of the chronicler inspires in us; a new and striking way through which the poet introduces us to Grishka; finally, the language is inimitable, poetic, true - all this together makes us expect, dare we say, something great from the tragedy. Pushkin was born for drama. He is too versatile, too objective 4 to be a lyricist; in each of his poems there is noticeable an involuntary desire to give a special life to individual parts, a desire that often tends to harm the whole in epic works, but is necessary and precious for the dramatist. It is comforting to notice continuous improvement in the gradual development of a poet; but it is even more comforting to see the strong influence that the poet has on his countrymen. Not many, chosen by fate, were lucky enough to enjoy their love during their lifetime. Pushkin belongs to their number, and this reveals to us another important quality in the character of his poetry: correspondence with his time. It is not enough to be a poet to be popular; you must also be brought up, so to speak, in the center of the life of your people, share the hopes of your fatherland, its aspirations, its losses - in a word, live its life and express it involuntarily, expressing yourself. Let the case be such happiness; But don’t beauty, intelligence, insight, and all those qualities with which a person captivates a person also depend little on us? And are these qualities more essential than the dignity of reflecting the life of one’s people? Everything that has been said so far in the Son of the Fatherland, the Ladies' Magazine, the Bulletin of Europe and the Moscow Telegraph about Ruslan and Lyudmila, the Caucasian Prisoner, the Bakhchisarai Fountain and Onegin, was limited to a simple notification of the publication of the mentioned poems, or had as its main subject something extraneous, such as. romantic poetry, etc.; but we do not yet have actual analyzes of Pushkin’s poems. See 1st No. Moscow. News. 1828. We are not talking about Pushkin’s minor works, which also reveal three periods of development of his poetry. We are forced to use this expression until we have an unambiguous meaning in our language. You might be interested in: