The Icon and the Axe

Pushkin was a relatively unpolemical writer, a man of shifting interests, tantalizing fragments, and elusive opinions. Yet he gradually developed an outlook that can be characterized as conservative in social and political matters and liberal in the realm of spiritual and creative culture. After a youth of many love affairs and close contact with Decembrists and other romantic reformers, he became a supporter of autocracy in the 1820's and a half-domesticated paterfamilias in the 1830's. He had always shared the aristocratic distaste for the vulgarity and capriciousness of the common horde. He was skeptical about the possibilities of democracy in America, and tended to praise great men-Peter the Great, Lomonosov, and even at times Napoleon-who had disregarded majority opinion in order to lift standards and advance culture. Always a monarchist, he hailed Nicholas I in more cordial terms than he had Alexander I; praised Peter and derided his Ukrainian foe Mazeppa in his Poltava of 1829; and endorsed the crushing of the Polish insurrection of 1830. Increasingly, he felt reverence for continuity and tradition. Violent change of any sort, he came to feel, would bring forth an inescapable revenge of fate-just as uncontrolled excess in poetry produces an imbalance that destroys true art. Pushkin was horrified by the terror of the French Revolution, and inveighed against the unleashed fury of the mob in his own major historical work of the early 1830's, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion.

Yet insofar as revolutionary figures become distinct personalities rather than mere weapons of the impersonal war on tradition, Pushkin treats them with the same relative detachment that is accorded to princes, gypsies, and all humanity in his work. Pugachev as an individual is sympathetic and understandable in Pushkin's History and an idealized figure in his fictional Captain's Daughter. Poles are portrayed objectively in Boris Godunov, as are Crimean Tatars in "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai." The crushing of the Decembrists saddened him not because of his sympathy for their programs but because of the foreshortening of imaginative vistas implied in the loss to Russia of gifted poets like Ryleev and Kiichelbecker. In the very year of the Decembrist rebellion, Pushkin identified himself with the neo-classical French poet Andre Chenier, who was guillotined dunh"g™the terror of the French Revolution. Pushkin's Chenier "sings to freedom at the habitual popular festival of execution, unchanging to the end," and exclaims just before his death:

thou, sacred Freedom, Immaculate Goddess, thou art not guilty.*

uiuKiuuai ucauvc nccuom must oe preserved it fiuman life is to have any dignity. "Pushkin defends the viewpoint of a true conservatism, based on the primacy of culture and the spiritual independence of the individual personality and society."90 Even in the relative security from mob rule and commercial pressures provided by Nicholas I, Pushkin felt "the primacy of culture" challenged by petty bureaucrats and stifling censorship. The flood and madness which engulfs the poor clerk in "The Bronze Horseman" are the revenge of fate for the precipitous reforms of Peter, just as the calamities and death which overtake Boris Godunov are revenge for the presumed crimes of an otherwise sympathetic Boris. The optimism of Pushkin's early lyrics becomes more obscured in his later works by a deepening sense of human loneliness amidst an essentially unfeeling nature, and a growing consciousness of the irrational chaotic depths within man himself. His late years were characterized by attempts to deepen his hitherto perfunctory understanding of Christianity, a nostalgia for his youth, and a general movement away from poetry to prose. "I am," he said, "an atheist of happiness. I do not belive in it."91 He died early in 1837 as a result of wounds incurred in a senseless duel.