The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

of five very short stories, Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1830), linked by a common fictive editor. The style is laconic and spare; verbs outnumber adjectives. Its fourth tale, “The Stationmaster,” will suggest how Pushkin moves a Sentimentalistplot – the subtext is “Poor Liza” – into precise, fast-paced prose.

Like Karamzin’s story, “The Stationmaster” is a flashback told by an outsider. But unlike Karamzin’s emotionally implicated narrator, Pushkin’s author is drily reportorial. At no point do we know which way the story will go: “folds,” slices, gaps, and overlappings in the narrative hide the end from view. The high-spirited, low-born heroine, Dunya, is seduced to the city by the dashing, smooth-talking officer Minsky. Her father the stationmaster (civil servant fourteenth class) is convinced that she is ruined – for how could she not be ruined? – and he trudges off to Petersburg to fetch her home. His worldview is reproduced in the woodcuts of the Parable of the Prodigal Son that hang on the walls of his station; quite naturally he sees himself as the magnanimous, all-forgiving father of that edifying tale. But Pushkin never allows a story to be seen from one perspective alone. Minsky won’t give her up, and Dunya prefers not to come home. As it turns out, Minsky marries his Dunya, and her life with him is incomparably better than continuing to serve her father in that shabby station. The risk she took on impulse was the type of risk worth taking by the young; the timing was right, and not every prodigal act need have prodigal-son consequences. The embittered father dies of drink and the story ends on Dunya’s visit to his grave, some years later, accompanied by servants, an elegant carriage, and three little children in tow. She is deeply sorry (we are given to believe), but not at all repentant. Dunya’s escape with Minsky was a gamble against the odds of the seduce-and-abandon plot.

Pushkin loves to reward impulsively na¨ıve actionswith good luck.Attimes he does it “just so,” with comedic simplicity, allowing his characters to be smarter (and luckier) than the plots they inherited from some earlier literary tradition – and that we think will trap or punish them. Usually, before the happy ending can be rounded off, unconventional heroines like Dunya must admit that their selfish behavior caused others pain, even if they do not regret their act.

The remaining four Belkin Tales work playful variations on cliche´d plots of European Romanticism, with a subtle admixture of the poet’s own anxiety about his social status and rank.13 The delight and fantasy of each tale is how honorable or “healthy” behavior – usually young people of marriageable age trying to get together – so easily triumphs over obstacles of class or parental resistance. Thus we have a Romeo and Juliet story that ends happily, a dueling tale in which no one is killed, a stalled courtship where it turns out the boy and girl have been married to each other all along. There is a powerful core of pure, Shakespearean festive comedy in Pushkin. This comedy shares little with the

108 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

didactic social comedy of Fonvizin or Knyazhnin from the 1770s–80s, although girl and boy get together in those scenarios too. Eighteenth-century comedy leaves its trace throughout the Belkin Tales (and throughout Pushkin’s prose) in different, more decorative ways – in the secondary characters, for example, who are often quite “unRussian”: the sassy maid as go-between for her mistress (a French soubrette), the ignorant or immoral provincial tutor. But there are no Sofyas or Milons in the leading roles. In Pushkin, positive characters exercise real initiative. They make choices and take risks. They must, of course, have an inborn sense of honor and loyalty, but they act in their own interests and according to their own na¨ıve appetites. Only then will fate be on their side. Plots are rounded and people come home.