SOURCE: "Introduction," in Alexander Pushkin: Complete Prose Fiction, Stanford University Press, 1983, pp. 1-7.

[In the following essay, Debreczeny places Pushkin's prose within the context of European-influenced Russian fiction and suggests that even Pushkin's incomplete prose fragments were influential.]

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, widely acknowledged the progenitor of modern Russian literature, was born in 1799 and died of a wound received in a duel in 1837. His greatest achievement was in poetry—lyrical, epic, dramatic—and he did not turn to prose in a serious way until the end of the 1820's, but the fiction he wrote in the last decade of his life was to have a tremendous impact on the subsequent development of Russian prose.

The art of prose writing in Russia could not boast of great accomplishments at the time Pushkin entered on the scene. Its healthiest tradition—an earthy realism in the adventure story of the seventeenth century—had left only faint traces on later picaresque novels, such as V. T. Narezhnyi's Russian Gil Blas (1814). The age of neoclassicism produced some works of fiction—most notably Ernest's Letters to Doravra (1766) by F. A. Emin and The Fair Cook (1770) by M. D. Chulkov—but on the whole treated fiction as an inferior genre. The prose narrative as a serious kind of literature did not come into its own until the advent of sentimentalism in the late eighteenth century. The most widely renowned cultivator of the new sensibility, N. M. Karamzin, was to be acknowledged by Pushkin in 1822 as the best Russian prose writer up to that time. Indeed some of Karamzin's stories—especially "Poor Liza" and "Natalia the Boyar's Daughter" (both dated 1792)—were to evoke echoes in Pushkin's own prose works.

The 1820's saw sentimentalism grow into romanticism. This trend was most clearly manifested in the stories of A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, among which "An Evening on Bivouac" (1823) and "An Evening at a Caucasian Watering Place in 1824" (1830) were to provoke the strongest reaction from Pushkin. E. T. A. Hoffmann's influence was reflected, above all, in the tales of Antonii Pogorelskii (A. A. Perovskii), collected in the volume The Double (1828). Walter Scott found his most ardent Russian follower in M. N. Zagoskin, whose Iurii Miloslavskii (1829) and Roslavlev (1831) bore the distinction of being the first Russian historical novels. The picaresque tradition, on the other hand, spawned such satirical-didactic novels of manners as the most popular work of the late 1820's, Ivan Vyzhigin (1829) by F. V. Bulgarin.

With the appearance of new writers and trends and with the growth of readership in the 1820's and early 1830's, prose fiction became increasingly popular. The royalties Bulgarin received from Vyzhigin were impressive. But the quality of this fiction, in a style that ranged from the romantics' florid rhetoric to Bulgarin's trivial verbosity parading as wit, was generally low. At least some of Pushkin's work in prose was a response to the banal trends of the time.

The few fictional fragments and outlines Pushkin jotted down before 1827 represented only occasional spurts of inspiration. There is some evidence, however, that between 1821 and 1825 he filled several copybooks with nonfictional sketches of his life and times. Since these sketches contained politically incriminating details about him and his friends, he destroyed most of them after the December 1825 uprising. But the few that survived, salvaged either by friends or by Pushkin himself, are important to the historian because they demonstrate that Pushkin's fiction—as it eventually emerged in the last decade of his life—had developed primarily from nonfictional prose.

This circumstance had a bearing on Pushkin's understanding of prose in the 1820's. At that time prose appeared to him as an antithesis to poetry, a mode of writing shorn of embellishments and deprived of histrionic gestures. Whereas poetry was all ornament and pleasant form, he wrote, prose represented pure content, tolerating no decorative frills and demanding "thoughts and thoughts, without which magniloquent phrases serve no purpose" (from the sketch "On Russian Prose"). Prose was "humble," compared with contentious, turbulent poetry, but there was also something flat-footed about it, something unimaginative, to which one "stooped," like Belkin of A History of the Village of Goriukhino, when poetic inspiration was lacking.

Most of Pushkin's statements characterizing prose in this way were made in the 1820's, either before he had seriously tried his hand at fiction writing or when he was just beginning to. In these statements no clear line was drawn between the prose of fiction and expository prose. At the end of the decade, however, as he became a practitioner of the trade, he came to differentiate between fiction and other kinds of prose, and increasingly appreciated prose's potential for varied applications. His realization of this rich potential was a gradual and painful one, achieved through several failures and false starts. And though he modified his original concept of prose over the years, the idea of a mode of writing that eschewed all poetic gestures remained attractive to him. His development as a fiction writer was largely the result of the tension between his original concept of prose and its later modifications.

Pushkin's first serious attempt at writing fiction—The Blackamoor of Peter the Great—reflects the view of prose he held in the 1820's. It is narrated in a detached, omniscient manner, most unusual for the period. Jane Austen had developed a similar authorial stance in the preceding decades, but Pushkin was probably not familiar with her works. Balzac and Stendhal had not yet published the novels that were to make their fame. In the fiction popular at the time—most notably in the works of Walter Scott and Washington Irving—authors played elaborate games in order to disguise or reveal their identity, and narrators emerged as distinct personalities. Given these conventions of the period, it was a bold undertaking on the part of Pushkin to begin his career as a prose writer with an impersonal narrative—of a kind that anticipated the development of fiction writing in the second half of the nineteenth century.

What mattered most, as Pushkin sought a new manner of writing, was not just the question of whether the author was hidden from the reader or revealed to him, whether he spoke in the first person or the third, but the question of whether he would be courageous enough to write as an intelligent chronicler whose attitudes would be subtle and implicit, without clownish masks and false assumptions. In The Blackamoor he projects the image of an author who does not have to pretend—for the sake of a joke with the reader or for any other reason—that he possesses only half the truth about his characters. Unencumbered by a play-acting narrator's jocular or sentimental postures, he can reveal his characters' feelings in their full complexity. His narrator knows that human affairs are beset with both passion and compromise, and he does not feel obliged to apologize for this knowledge.

Such a mode of narration, however, presented enormous technical difficulties, with which Pushkin was as yet unable to cope. Several successful scenes notwithstanding, The Blackamoor demonstrates that Pushkin the prose writer had not yet mastered dialogue (Ibrahim the central hero, hardly speaks at all), or point of view (which shifts from one character to another in a kaleidoscopic fashion), or atmosphere (which at times changes too rapidly from pathetic to comic). These technical difficulties—arising precisely from the pioneering nature of Pushkin's venture—were probably the reason why he abandoned his project.

Still, far from being discouraged by his experience with The Blackamoor, in the following years Pushkin endeavored to apply an omniscient mode of narration to the psychological novel—an even more formidable task. The two fragments remaining of his efforts—"The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha" and "In the Corner of a Small Square"—were promising indeed: so much so that they subsequently influenced Lev Tolstoi in writing his Anna Karenina (1877). Once more, however, the technical difficulties—especially the task of expanding rapid synopsis into vivid scene—were so enormous that the two fragments remained fragments.

Pushkin's difficulty in all these early unfinished works—including an experiment with the epistolary form entitled A Novel in Letters—was that he insisted on treating complex material, though he had not found the right key, the right narrative point of view, the right technique for the new genres he was experimenting with. In order to find a solution, he had to lower his sights.

The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin signaled a retreat toward simpler subject matter, to be presented by simpler narrators, much more in keeping with the conventions of the time. Ascribing his stories to fictitious narrators, Pushkin was openly following the example of Walter Scott's Tales of My Landlord (1816-19) and such collections by Washington Irving as Tales of a Traveller (1824). Pushkin's Belkin is an essentially uneducated man, who has heard the tales he is presenting from people of his own kind; and his biography is given by an uncultured neighbor and introduced by a pompous, self-important "Publisher." The resulting volume amounts to a parodic anthology of early-nineteenth-century prose writing, both Russian and Western. The themes carry with them a range of style, from the Karamzinite early sentimental through the Byronic to the Hoffmannesque. On the other hand, writing in this satirical vein was not merely Pushkin's vengeance on contemporary prose writing, whose standards he had tried but had not succeeded in surpassing. Parodying contemporary trends, he provided himself with an opportunity for stylistic exercise, and the deeper he delved into his exercises the more interest he developed in them.

At least two of the stories included in the volume—"The Blizzard" and "The Squire's Daughter"—are entirely comic, verging on the absurd. "The Undertaker," with its gleeful treatment of the macabre, has a touch of the grotesque to it. "The Shot"—still a parody, in this instance of the monomaniacal Byronic hero—represents a great technical achievement with its skillful manipulation of three different narrators' respective points of view. The crowning achievement of the volume, however, is "The Stationmaster," in which symbolic images—the pictures depicting the parable of the Prodigal Son—play an important role, far more important than Pushkin had originally thought poetic devices should play in a prose tale. In this instance Pushkin transcended parody to create an original masterpiece.

In The Tales Belkin appears only as collector and recorder of stories; but in A History of the Village of Goriukhino he is the actual narrator. Ludicrous as he may appear, writing the history of a mere village in the officious tones of an empire's historian, what he tells us is not altogether funny: his naïve, laughable presentation of events turns into a moving description of the plight of the Russian feudal peasant.

A fictitious narrator is employed in Roslavlev, too, but this time with less success. Perhaps the reason Pushkin left this projected novel unfinished is that its narrator, who starts out as a "lady" author intent on defending the "shade" of her late friend, soon loses her identity and instead of whitewashing her friend's memory, provides a fascinating, but at the same time unflattering, portrait of a complex woman—a portrait that a detached omniscient narrator might just as well have drawn.

Having written several pieces in compliance with the conventions of his time—or in mockery of those conventions—Pushkin once more attempted to create a detached third-person narrator in Dubrovskii. What initially drew him to the subject was an interest in the causes of social unrest—much pressed on his mind by the turbulent times in which he lived. The account of the two landowners' litigation and of the subsequent riot of Dubrovskii's peasants does indeed add up to a narrative of social significance. The characters of Troekurov and Andrei Dubrovskii, as well as of their servants and hirelings, are skillfully drawn, with the aid of vivid scenes and dialogues. But Pushkin, evidently hoping to combine a serious study of social processes with popular appeal, added to his narrative a conventional love intrigue, using timeworn clichés and stereotypes. The incongruity between the original social theme and the traditional love-plot might have contributed to his decision not to complete the work.

A triumph of detached narration, The Queen of Spades stands at the peak of Pushkin's achievement as a prose writer. Its three main characters—all negative—are surrounded by an intricate system of images, signifying winter and night, doom and madness, chaos and destruction. In this story Pushkin succeeds in drawing the kind of complex characters that eluded his firm grasp in the early fragments. The Queen of Spades also demonstrates how far he had revised his earlier concept of prose writing: instead of presenting bare thoughts with no decorative frills, here he conveys the meaning through a system of symbols worthy of epic poetry.

Although the narrative mode used in The Queen of Spades proved fully successful, Pushkin was not about to limit his range to it. For one thing, he remained attracted to the spare, unadorned quality of expository prose, even though he had changed his tactics in fiction. The result of this attraction is A History of Pugachev—a historical study outstanding not only by the standards of Pushkin's own time, but also by those of modern scholarship. But it is far more than a serious scholarly work, based strictly on evidence and drawing far-reaching conclusions: it is a triumph for the prose stylist as well. Its chief stylistic characteristic is that Pushkin not only quotes from sources directly, but allows the language of witnesses and documents to inform the narrator's own diction, with emphasis on carefully selected vivid expressions. It represents Pushkin's ideal of objectivity. The narrator's tone, to be sure, is consistent enough to bring coherence to the diverse sources, but his personality is so inconspicuous that his function is reduced simply to conveying "thoughts and thoughts" as befits "stern prose."

Nor did the success of The Queen of Spades lead Pushkin to relinquish the device of the imaginary narrator altogether. Turning history into fiction in The Captain's Daughter, he pretended to present a first-person account of the Pugachev Rebellion by one of its survivors. This technique enabled him, on the one hand, to eliminate some details of Pugachev's cruelty and lack of personal loyalty, which were objectively described in the History. Seen through the eyes of an impressionable young man, Pugachev acquires a romantic halo in the novel—which is one aspect of the fascinating process we are allowed to watch of Pushkin's turning a factual account into a vivid fictional representation. The naïve narrator's presence, on the other hand, allowed Pushkin to suffuse the narrative with a gentle irony, undercutting the two warring camps' conflicting fanaticisms. The tone of the novel, it would seem, oscillates between the mildly comic and the mildly sentimental; but one jarring event—the execution of Captain Mironov, his wife, and his comrade-in-arms, Ivan Ignatich—disturbs the general atmosphere. The critic's judgment of the novel's aesthetic qualities depends largely on whether he considers that scene of unmitigated cruelty properly integrated into the general texture of the work.

A History of Pugachev fulfilled Pushkin's expectations of objective, unadorned prose writing, and The Captain's Daughter followed the tradition of The Tales of Belkin. But the tradition of the early fragments, continued in The Queen of Spades, was not abandoned either. Several of the unfinished works of Pushkin's last years indicate that he was deeply involved in an attempt to create psychological fiction, narrated by an all-seeing, detached, intelligent observer. Egyptian Nights, considered along with "We Were Spending the Evening at Princess D.'s Dacha," is the most promising of these late fragments. Not only does it pick up the theme begun in "The Guests Were Arriving" and "In the Corner," of the psychological complexities of a certain social type contemporary to Pushkin, but it also introduces the question of the artist's relation to society. The Italian improvisatore, humiliatingly dependent on his audience's whims, and the aristocratic poet Charskii, torn between his social position and his vocation as a poet, both seem to be equally close to Pushkin's heart. Exploring his dual theme, Pushkin goes beyond the kind of poetic representation he made full use of in The Queen of Spades, to introduce verse into the very texture of prose.

Although many of Pushkin's prose projects remained unfinished, the extant fragments displayed such depth and variety that few of his successors in Russian fiction were able to escape their influence. And his completed masterpieces rank among the best not only in Russian, but in world literature of the nineteenth century.