Alexander Pushkin Long Fiction Analysis
Alexander Pushkin’s three major works, Eugene Onegin, Dubrovsky, and The Captain’s Daughter, reflect many dimensions of his literary achievement. They show his ability to adapt Western genres to a Russian context; they demonstrate his stylistic mastery that is simultaneously economical and rich. Finally, in their emotional variety, they chart Pushkin’s attempts to reconcile himself to czarist society and politics.
Each of these three works owes a literary debt. Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, takes its inspiration from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) and Don Juan (1819-1824) but tempers their exuberance with characterization and scene setting from the eighteenth century novel of manners. Dubrovsky is kin to the robber tales of German Romanticism, which paint a heroic picture of an outlaw who is really more a self-willed outcast in opposition to social tyranny than an ordinary brigand. The Captain’s Daughter is a historical novel in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, using the life of an ordinary participant to witness and to interpret some crucial national event. Pushkin’s debt to foreign models is not surprising, because his letters show that he read practically everything, not only what was being produced in Russian but also what was being written in French, German, and English.
Like the greatest writers, Pushkin is a master of styles rather than a master of style. His long fictions are as varied as his whole corpus with its poems, plays, and folktales. Eugene Onegin is a complexly organized poem: There are eight chapters, each composed of at least 40 fourteen-line stanzas (389 stanzas all told), and each stanza follows a rigorous and formal rhyme scheme that disciplines a wealth of characterization, authorial commentary, and social observation into a coherent narrative. Dubrovsky is a quick-paced, dark-spirited, third-person narrative built around a stark contrast of justice and tyranny. The Captain’s Daughter is a more leisured, romantic, first-person story in which youth and honor triumph over various obstacles.
The most interesting thing about Pushkin’s three major long fictional works is the thematic course they chart. They all seek to depict life as led by members of the gentry, that social class that lives with one foot in the urban corridors of power and one in the rural paths of peasant-filled estates. No two of these works offer exactly the same perspective. Eugene Onegin, almost ten years in the writing during a crucial period of Pushkin’s life, is the most complex and ambiguous work. No one emotion sums it up; by turns it is comic, satiric, pathetic, and tragic. Dubrovsky is an angry book, ruthless in its depiction of the petty tyrannies that infect the gentry with devastating effects. The Captain’s Daughter shows murderous rebellion and government blindness but offers some small hope for the individual to steer between these twin disasters. Taking these works in order, the reader can trace Pushkin’s diagnosis of the sickness of Russian society and his prescription for its remedy.
Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin is a unique work. It is a product of the Romantic imagination that delighted in experimenting with literaryconventions; it is a novel in verse, an attempt to mix the lyric insight of poetry with narrative’s opportunity for social observation. Most other nineteenth century novels in verse failed, but Pushkin succeeded in writing both a powerful poem and an important work of fiction. To the Russian reader, sensitive to the nuances of tone and the play of imagery, Eugene Onegin is primarily a narrative poem. To the non-Russian reader who must rely on translation, Eugene Onegin is more accessible as a lyric novel. Once past the first chapter...
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(the least novel-like), in which Pushkin sketches the subtle strains of Negin’s soul as molded by society, the reader of the translation begins an intriguing love story. Novel-like, this love story traces the evolution of a romance from a country estate to a city drawing room: It depicts both the private reveries of the lovers and their passionate, hurtful encounters, and evaluates their relationship as they understand it and as it mirrors the society at large.
Eugene Onegin is a fashionable young man of contemporary St. Petersburg. His wealth and social status allow him to play the game he knows best: the seduction of beautiful women amid the endless round of teas, tête-à-têtes, and palace balls. An unbroken string of romantic conquests, however, makes him bored with life in general. At his uncle’s death, Eugene inherits a country estate and retires to it. Here, he meets Vladimir Lensky, an eighteen-year-old who has all of Onegin’s passionate nature but who has not yet had the chance to indulge it. All of Lensky’s attention is directed toward Olga Larin, whom he loves romantically and for whom he writes poems. Through Lensky, Onegin meets Olga’s sister Tatyana, an introspective and withdrawn girl who is convinced at first sight that Onegin is her destined lover. After several days of self-inflicted torment, knowing love only through novels, Tatyana writes Onegin a letter proclaiming her devotion. Two days later, he responds by lecturing her about the impossibility of anyone impressing his heart. Tatyana’s spirit is crushed, but her love lives on.
Afterward, at Tatyana’s name-day party, Onegin flirts outrageously with Olga, who unthinkingly enjoys his attentions. Vladimir does not enjoy them, suspecting his friend of trying to steal Olga’s affection. He challenges Onegin to a duel that neither especially wants but that both know society demands when there is a woman in dispute. Onegin kills Vladimir and quickly departs on a foreign tour; Olga remains grief-stricken until another suitor replaces Vladimir; Tatyana haunts the house Onegin recently vacated, searching for a clue to his character, until her mother takes her to Moscow for the winter social season and a prospective husband.
When the story continues two years later, Tatyana is the wife of an army general. Onegin, returning to the social round, meets her and immediately falls in love. Making himself an intimate of the general’s circle, Onegin dotes on Tatyana: helping with her cloak, opening doors for her, making constant small talk. Thoroughly infatuated but unsure of her feelings, Onegin writes her several letters professing his love. She grants him an interview at which she confesses that, although she still loves him, she rejects his love because she now has a wife’s duty. She did not marry for love; she married the general only because he was the least unattractive of bad choices, but she is determined to remain faithful to her role. The novel ends as the husband enters to reclaim Tatyana from a thunderstruck Onegin.
The story is told through a series of parallels and contrasts. The quick-paced, dissolute, and spiritually enervating life at St. Petersburg contrasts with the tedious, controlled, and unimaginative life of the country. Tatyana’s letter to Onegin and his reply (chapters 3 and 4) are ironically reversed in his letters to her and the subsequent interview (chapter 8). Tatyana’s notions of sentimental love derive from her reading of eighteenth century novelists in the same degree that Onegin’s spiritual lethargy is an imitation of nineteenth century Romantic angst. Lensky and Olga are more fulsome lovers than Tatyana and Onegin, yet their affection dies more quickly. Eugene dispatches the troublesome jealousy of Lensky with as little conscience as he dispatches the jejune affection of Tatyana.
Complicating the story is the presence of an obtrusive narrator. He has known Onegin, in fact, has shared many of his attitudes. Like Onegin, he has missed the possibility for real passion by playing at too many imitations of it. Like Onegin, the narrator has a sharp eye for the absurdities of those people who live the social pattern without sensing its limitations.
Eugene Onegin is the novel’sprotagonist, but he is not a hero. If anything, he is an early version of the traditional Russian antihero, the “superfluous man.” A superfluous man is one who possesses the creature comforts his society can offer but who does not have any reason to possess them. The ultimate superfluous man is Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, who thinks long and hard at trying to discover a reason that would get him up from the couch. Pushkin’s Onegin is less extreme, but the times and his temperament have combined to drain him of real sensation and passion. Only when Tatyana is out of reach (is it because she is out of reach?) does Onegin think to discover some motivation for participating actively in life, once again taking charge of his existence and seeking to connect with another human soul. Too often Onegin is content to follow the code of his social class: live as lord of the estate but take more notice of neighbors than of management; maintain honor over a trifle even at the expense of a friend’s life; if one’s emotions run too high or too seriously, become a poet as an outlet.
Tatyana is better than Onegin: She lives an imaginative life that is at least honest, although she succumbs in the end to the same social code that grips Onegin. Though superstitious about omens that signal a true love, she is at least anxious to know something about Onegin. Though her visits to his unoccupied house originate in simplistic devotion, they do lead to insights about his character. Though she partakes of St. Petersburg’s fashionable whirl, she keeps aloof enough to remember her domestic commitment. On the outside, Tatyana is a lovely hoyden while Onegin is a work of fashion’s art, but on the inside Tatyana draws two breaths and two heartbeats to every one of Eugene’s.
The ending of the novel, in which Tatyana leaves the interview on her husband’s arm while Onegin stands perplexed, is not a resolution. Though encouraged by friends to complete the story, Pushkin did not. Perhaps the tale ends appropriately as it stands, with the major characters etched in postures that represent their moral choices. Tatyana chooses sacrifice over happiness, and Eugene is doomed to pursue the unpursuable woman. The dramatic ending offers readers none of the traditional comforts by which characters are parceled out some share of contentment.
Dubrovsky
Dubrovsky is, like Eugene Onegin, an unfinished work. Unlike Eugene Onegin, it depicts oppression, violence, and death with only a few mitigating moments in which young love and honorable conduct win a momentary triumph. The story recounts the conversion of a young man, Vladimir Dubrovsky, from landowner to outlaw. Like Onegin, Dubrovsky is a member of the generation born around the end of the nineteenth century, but his family’s relative poverty leaves little of the leisure allowed a young gallant of St. Petersburg. The novel’s theme is political rather than social: the tyranny of the landowning class.
The elderly Andrey Dubrovsky owns a few serfs and the village of Kistenyovka; he is a mild and appreciative master. The neighboring landowner Kirila Troyekurov owns a much larger estate and is known to tyrannize his serfs. Though Dubrovsky and Troyekurov served together in the army and had become friends, two minor disputes over hunting dogs and hunting rights blossom into a full-scale animosity. Unaccustomed to having his will challenged in anything, Troyekurov plots to take over Dubrovsky’s estate by filing a highly technical lawsuit under the guidance of a cunning lawyer. When Troyekurov’s claim prevails, Dubrovsky goes mad at this outrage against justice. Invalided at home, Dubrovsky summons his son Vladimir from army service back to the estate. Vladimir sets to work to regain the estate legally, but before he can accomplish it, Troyekurov drives the elder Dubrovsky into a fatal seizure by riding insolently into the courtyard of the mansion he will soon occupy. On the day of the funeral, Troyekurov sends officers to seize control of the estate and the village before young Vladimir can claim his inheritance.
Galled by this triumph of tyranny, young Vladimir Dubrovsky and his peasants lock the officials in the occupied mansion and set the building afire. Disappearing into the forest, Vladimir’s band begins to terrorize the neighborhood: robbing travelers, seizing the mail, torching manor houses. The only estate to escape attack belongs, oddly enough, to Kirila Troyekurov.
Meanwhile, Troyekurov has hired a French tutor, Deforges, for his daughter Masha. He decides to have fun with the handsome young foreigner by locking him in a room with a hungry bear. Much to the sadistic landlord’s surprise, the tutor pulls a gun from his pocket and shoots the bear. Deforges proves as charming as he does forearmed, and soon Masha is in love with him.
On a festival day, all the neighboring gentry gather for a party at Troyekurov’s estate. One of them arrives late: Anton Pafnutyich, the lawyer who directed the suit against Vladimir and who was recently robbed by him. His story sets the guests to comparing tales about the notorious robber who steals with pomp and grace from only the richest of the local ruling class. Pafnutyich refuses to leave the safety of the estate and stays for the night in Deforges’s room, only to discover that the tutor is actually Vladimir in disguise.
His identity now dangerously compromised, Vladimir plans to leave the estate after confessing his love to Masha, revealing his identity, and securing her promise that she will call for him if she ever needs assistance.
The promise seems superfluous until the next summer, when Troyekurov makes plans to marry Masha to his neighbor, Prince Vereysky. Twice Masha’s age and driven to ennui and dissipation by unrestricted indulgence, Vereysky is a repugnant suitor in Masha’s eyes, but her father insists on the marriage. Masha secures Vladimir’s assistance in case she cannot talk her father out of his determination. She even writes a letter to Vereysky frankly avowing her repugnance, but it simply whets both his appetite and her father’s to exert their authority. Forced to attend the wedding ceremony, Masha expects any minute to be rescued by Vladimir Dubrovsky, but he fails to appear before the priest pronounces the vows over bride and groom. Not until Vereysky’s carriage is homeward bound does Dubrovsky appear; he seizes the Prince and pronounces Masha free, but she insists that like it or not, she is now a wife. Though wounded in the shoulder by a bullet and to the heart by her reply, Dubrovsky withdraws without hurting anyone or stealing a thing. In revenge, the authorities send soldiers to track Dubrovsky down. As they besiege his forest fortress, Dubrovsky escapes into the woods. The robberies and attacks on the local gentry cease, and Dubrovsky is rumored to have gone abroad.
Dubrovsky has all the plot conventions of late eighteenth, early nineteenth century robber fiction. Its hero is young, dashing, handsome, and no ordinary criminal. There is a maiden in distress who is, of course, his beloved. Her distress arises from the tyranny of a cruel parent and a lustful suitor. There is adventure, violence, and death in dark and unexpected places. Characters are little more than cardboard figures, for the emphasis is on a fast moving plot filled with dramatic confrontations of innocence and guile, good and evil.
What is sensational about Dubrovsky is its theme. Pushkin creates a rebellious hero who wins the reader’s sympathy; Vladimir Dubrovsky is after all, like Robin Hood, on the side of justice and true love. In the Russia of Nicholas I, where even verbal dissent quickly caught official notice, such an ennobling of a man in opposition to the political system was an act of heresy. In painting such a stark contrast between the tyranny of Troyekurov and the nobility of Dubrovsky, however, Pushkin seems to have written the story into a corner from which there is no escape. Commonly regarded as unfinished, Dubrovsky may have been abandoned where it stood because the author could think of no satisfactory conclusion. The heroine is cruelly married, the system has asserted an overwhelming power in defense of the local tyrant, and the pillaging by Dubrovsky’s band is but an annoying hangnail on the strong fist of autocracy. Dubrovsky himself, as the manuscript ends, is in a hopeless situation. Like Eugene Onegin at the end of his novel, Vladimir Dubrovsky has lost his beloved to an older military man and has no means to extract any satisfying revenge to compensate for that loss. Pushkin wisely took leave of Onegin at that incomprehensible moment that Tatyana walks away with her husband. Similarly, Pushkin seems instinctively to have left Dubrovsky at that point because he has literally no future worth recounting; he is beaten. Dubrovsky may not be unfinished as much as it is unfinishable.
The Captain’s Daughter
Pushkin’s final fictional work, The Captain’s Daughter, offers thematic resolutions that Dubrovsky could not achieve. The Captain’s Daughter is another tale of a young man of a gentry family who must oppose the system, but the hero of this novel is able to both fight for personal justice and remain (although with difficulty) in harmony with the political and social system. Perhaps by setting his story sixty years in the past, Pushkin was better able to see how an individual could control his own life and yet remain a part of society. The person who maintains his honor may in fact contribute to the betterment of the whole society.
The Captain’s Daughter is set in the days of a peasant uprising, the Pugachov rebellion, which broke out in eastern Russia in the mid-1770’s and was subdued in a few years after great difficulty by the armies of Catherine the Great. This uprising tempered Catherine’s enthusiasm for bringing Western ways and ideas to Russia by showing precisely how fragile was the monarch’s grip on the sprawling Russian landscape. Afterward, the Pugachov rebellion symbolized the autocracy’s nightmare about the dangers that seethed under the surface of Russian civilization, that demanded constant vigilance; it was perhaps the one thing that made the ruling class reluctant to follow Europe’s lead toward parliamentarian and constitutional government. In Nicholas I’s Russia, where memories of the Decembrist coup were always fresh, to write about the Pugachov rebellion was practically to write about contemporary politics.
The Captain’s Daughter tells how Peter Grinyov enters military service. Instead of sending his son Peter to elegant service with a St. Petersburg battalion, the elder Grinyov, who is a believer in the old-fashioned values of sacrifice and hard work, has Peter assigned to a regiment on the eastern frontier of the empire at Orenburg. In disgust, Peter sets off with his faithful serf Savelyich and meets with two adventures along the way: An army veteran gets him drunk and cheats him at pool; a peasant saves Peter and Savelyich when they become lost in a snowstorm, and Peter repays the man with an expensive coat.
At Orenburg, Peter is assigned to a small outlying fort; he is only one of three regular army officers overseeing a ragtag battalion of local men. The second of the three is Shvabrin, a young dandy who has been exiled from St. Petersburg for dueling. The third is the commandant of the fort, Captain Mironov, a somewhat comic figure who occasionally drills his troops in the distinctly unmilitary garb of nightshirt and nightcap. The only society for the three officers is provided by Mironov’s wife, Vasilisa, and his maiden daughter Masha.
Rather quickly, Peter and Shvabrin become rivals for Masha and, in St. Petersburg-like manner, engage in a duel. Peter is seriously wounded, but the injury turns out favorably because his convalescence requires the constant attention of Masha. This intimacy quickly leads the young people to confess their love for each other. Peter writes home for permission to wed Masha but receives a stinging and firm letter of refusal from his father.
As the unhappy lovers ponder their next move, the peasant rebellion led by Yemelyan Pugachov begins, and its main army approaches the mud-and-wood fort. The defenders are quickly overwhelmed. The captain is killed, Shvabrin goes over to the enemy, Masha goes into hiding, and Peter is spared execution because the rebel leader Pugachov is the same peasant to whom Peter generously gave his coat.
Returning to his own fortress at Orenberg, Peter eagerly counsels an attack in order to free Masha, but the commander is reluctant to stir from the city’s safety. When Peter learns that Masha has been discovered and given to Shvabrin, he sets out alone to rescue her. Captured by rebel sentries, Peter is brought before Pugachov. Impressed by Peter’s bravery and honesty, Pugachov decides to let the young man take Masha away. Escaping from the rebel camp, the lovers meet with a Russian detachment. Peter sends Masha to his family estate while he continues to serve against the rebels.
By the uprising’s end, Masha has won the hearts of Peter’s parents so that they no longer object to the marriage. Peter, however, is arrested on the charge of having helped the enemy. Unwilling to explain his movements back and forth between enemy camp and duty post in order to protect Masha, Peter risks court trial. Masha travels to Moscow to beg for mercy from the empress herself. Telling her story to a woman she meets in the palace garden, Masha surprisingly discovers the next day that she had unknowingly spoken to Catherine herself. Catherine grants Peter pardon, and the lovers are free to wed.
In the character of Peter, Pushkin draws a composite of the young Russian of gentry class. Like others, Peter has to reconcile the conflicting claims of his European and Slavic heritages. It is not easy, because both heritages are mixtures of good and bad. The European inheritance has taught him to be an individual and to pursue Masha’s love as a high good, but Europe is also the source of the dandyism and false honor represented by Shvabrin. The Slavic inheritance brings a high demand for loyalty to family and state, but its class structure hinges on oppression and cruelty. Peter tries to bring together the best of each heritage. He is a loyal subject of the empress, but he is sensitive enough to the humanity of the rebel peasants to wish that reform would do away with those conditions that breed revolution.
Pushkin makes in political terms a daring parallel. Peter and Masha each undertake a solitary journey to save the other: Peter goes to Pugachov and Masha goes to Catherine. The monarchs behave remarkably alike: They detect the honesty and honor within the petitioner, which justifies granting mercy to an apparent enemy. For Pushkin to suggest that Pugachov was anything less than a madman or a devil’s henchman or the epitome of betrayal was political heresy. While Peter never condones Pugachov’s taking up arms, he is impressed by the leader’s sincerity and—amid the expected horrors of the war—comparative humaneness.
Masha herself emerges an emblem of Russia. Like her country in the eighteenth century, poised between a Slavic past and a European future, the maidenly Masha is about to determine her future. Wisely, she rejects the superficial Western ways of Shvabrin in favor of the cultured but natural impulses of Peter. Endangered by rebellion, Masha’s future hangs in the balance until she is rescued by the bravery, even foolhardiness, of one who loves her. In turn, she repays love with love, risking public embarrassment to support the proposition that a man can talk to his country’s enemy, even cooperate with him, and still be a patriot.
Peter’s fate offers, then, a hope for autocratic, unchanging Russia. Horrified by the rapine and destruction, Peter is convinced that rebellion is no cure for what ails his country. He is living proof, however, that ideals and manners can change for the better. Peter is less class-conscious than his father; he rejects the cronyism and immoral ways of the aristocratic soldier; he learns to see the humanity of the peasant beneath the rough exterior. Peter escapes the consequences of his new attitudes only because of Catherine’s intervention. Still she does intervene, and she sees what a progressive monarch ought to see: Firm rule is not incompatible with individual integrity and public morality.
Set in the reign of one ironfisted monarch, The Captain’s Daughter speaks to another. It seeks to reassure Nicholas I that certain Western ideals (of love and personal honor) are not incompatible with traditional Russian virtues of obedience and loyalty. It suggests that a ruler can hasten national improvement by recognizing and cooperating with the heartfelt desire of others to improve the country. It reminds the monarch that statecraft is more than minding the jail so the prisoners do not escape. The Captain’s Daughter is Pushkin’s most positive fictional work because it suggests that although love will not overcome or solve all, love—personal and social—has a better chance than whatever is in second place to ameliorate the lot of the individual and consequently the nation.