The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Tatyana sends Onegin a lovesick letter in Chapter 3. He sends her lovesick letters in Chapter 8. He lectures her on the modesty befitting an honorable maiden in Chapter 3 (she listens but is silent). She lectures him on his duties as an honorable man in Chapter 8 (he listens but is silent). No one gets together, each slides by the other, each is in love with the other but not at the same time, and for this reason energy in the novel is stored, not squandered. Such precious, unspent pressure figured high among Pushkin’s ideals for a well-balanced work of art, and he provides several metaphors for containing it. One occurs near the end of Eugene Onegin, in Eight, l: the “magic crystal” [magicheskii kristall] or glass ball for guessing fortunes. The author admits to gazing into this crystal, many years earlier, seeking (in Nabokov’s words)“the farstretchofafree novel.” How can a free thing be sought in a closed, symmetrical structure?

Imagine a kaleidoscope: a tube with a set of mirrors at one end and a slot for the eye at the other. Life’s myriad events, confusions, coincidences, accidents – what Pushkin called, collectively, sluchai [“chance”] – are a heap of brightly colored shards of glass on the novelist’s horizon, the faceted mirrored surface at the end of the tube. The poet-novelist’s task is to rotate the kaleidoscope so that these arbitrary shards, falling out in random heaps, are refracted within the funnel of the novel to form patterns. Pushkin did not write “psychological prose” that claimed access to every irregular, messy nook and cranny of another’s

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consciousness (the pioneer in that realm is Mikhail Lermontov, still a decade away). His complexity lies in his juxtaposition of multiple reflecting surfaces. Pushkin produces consciousness and intelligence in his characters (and pleasure in his readers) by the intersection of many planes. Thus he attends fastidiously to how, when, and by whom story lines are cut off and then resumed, and when the reader is allowed to hook up the various parts. In Eugene Onegin these “stress-lines” of the plot criss-cross with a perfectly controlled poetic stanza. The effect is a sort of glittering visual mesh, suggesting depth but delivering a profusion of edges. Pushkin’s ideals are the classical ones of public honor, duty, fearlessness in facing death, taking risks while young and letting go of one’s fantasies when old.

Pushkin was a born poet who labored hard to learn the art of prose. Although he eventually managed to write lines that didn’t scan, he never abandoned the symmetrical ideal. In his finished prose works of the 1830s (only four were completed out of thirty begun), roundedness – returning to the beginning, but at another level – became his compromise with the linear impulses of accumulation, conversion, and collapse. Delaying the reward, or stripping back a disguise to reveal that we remain what we have always been, could turn an incipient tragedy into a comedy and a mass of quotidian details into a potential poem. Of course Pushkin as prose writer employed so-called “situation rhymes” (the prefiguring and echoing of narrative events), but his poetic nature demanded more: not just the repetition of similar parts but a structural symmetry within the work as a whole, subordinating even free personality to its sway.Boris Godunov (1825) reveals just such a balanced construction, for example, when Grigory Otrepiev wakes up from a dream in scene 5 and then, as Dmitry the Pretender, falls asleep (and falls out of the play) five scenes before the end.11 A “symmetrical situation rhyme” also frames The Captain’s Daughter (1836). In its opening chapters Pyotr Grinyov meets a disguised Pugachov, the false monarch, and later benefits from his mercy; this “chance” happening is fastidiously reproduced in the closing chapters when Masha Mironova, also by chance, meets the disguised Catherine II, the true monarch, enabling the mercy-pardon of Grinyov and the survival of his line.

The primary task of prose writing (as Pushkin practiced it) was to design the maximally efficient action for the characters that would reveal the integrity and symmetry of their motives. In 1822, still exclusively a poet, Pushkin jotted down a few thoughts about prose. “Precision and brevity,” he wrote, “these are the first virtues of prose. Prose demands ideas and more ideas . . . As regards the question, whose prose is best in our literature, the answer is: Karamzin’s. And this, as yet, is no great praise.”12 Eight years later, at his Boldino estate, Pushkin first tried his hand at prose fiction for the literary market, in a set

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